Everything here today is political in a fairly direct sense. Politics isn’t all I think about, but I tend to save up the more important things (i.e., what we conventionally call “religion”) for Sunday posts.
Politics Generally
Orbán and Soros
Let’s be honest: the most evil things in modern history were carried out by people who hated Christianity. Don’t be afraid to call your enemies by their name. You can play it safe, but they will never show mercy. Consider for example George Soros, as you call him here. In Hungary, we call him: Gyuri bácsi, which means Uncle Georgie. The wealthiest and one of the most talented Hungarians on Earth! Just a hint: Be careful with talented Hungarians! I know George Soros very well. He is my opponent. He believes in none of the things that we do. And he has an army at his service: money, NGOs, universities, research institutions and half the bureaucracy in Brussels. He uses this army to force his will on his opponents, like us Hungarians. He thinks that values dear to all of us led to the horrors of the twentieth century. But the case is exactly the opposite. Our values save us from repeating history’s mistakes. The horrors of Nazism and Communism happened because some Western States in continental Europe abandoned their Christian values. And today’s progressives are planning to do the same. They want to give up on western values, and create a New World, a Post Western World. Who is going to stop them if we don’t?
I’m a fence-straddler on Viktor Orbán. I’d like to think that illiberal democracy (which is how Orbán described Hungary a few years ago) could exist and persist as democratic. Among all his fanboys in the U.S., though, I see none who I’d trust with my vote, if only because they come across as empty suits whereas Orbán seems to have some depth. For the U.S., liberal democracy seems like the only alternative, and I can only hope that it’s still viable.
I made it a point to dig into George Soros a few years back, and I reject the idea that he is consciously malign. He is simply fundamentally an adherent of a respectable “open society” philosophy that rose to prominence as a response to the horrors of WW II; heck, he even named his foundation after that philosophy. That doesn’t mean, though, that I agree with him or with such expenditures as those for electing permissive, progressive prosecutors.
After I wrote the preceding, I ran across two articles on Soros that I haven’t read, and may never read, that appear pretty thorough. (I should note, should you think the first title antisemitic, that the Tablet is a Jewish publication):
- George Soros – Politics of a Jewish Billionaire – Tablet Magazine
- The Sanctification of George Soros – Tablet Magazine
(Of course, there’s always Psalm 146:3, too).
The Dead Consensus vs Ahmarism in Three Sentences
The Dead Consensus has no theory of power.
The Ahmarists have no theory of martyrdom.
A Christian political philosophy has to have both if it is going to be actually Christian.
Jake Meador, The Dead Consensus vs Ahmarism in Three Sentences
Fond hopes
Could it come about that with Dobbs’ reversal of Roe v. Wade, the parties could become normal again, the “abortion distortion factor” in politics having been laid to rest?
I would like that very much, because while I’ve had an extremely strong presumption against voting for Democrats since they became the party homogenously in favor of every imaginable or unimaginable abortion, I haven’t found the Republicans very palatable, either.
IRS
The raid of MAL is another escalation in the weaponization of federal agencies against the Regime’s political opponents, while people like Hunter Biden get treated with kid gloves. Now the Regime is getting another 87k IRS agents to wield against its adversaries? Banana Republic.
This is one of the more perverse bits of paranoid pandering by Governor DeSantis. The IRS has been abused politically and bizarrely (why did they think that 69% of families who adopted children one year needed auditing?), but their daily functioning at their basic job has been wretched for years and years.
I dealt with their incompetence through much of my legal practice. I literally delayed my retirement by months waiting for IRS tax clearances for a deceased couple, as the agency repeatedly lost the income tax returns we filed. (When we finally closed the estate, 37 years to the day after my last law school examination, I strolled down the hall, signed an affidavit relinquishing my law license, and left the office for good.)
I deal with it still. A nonprofit I’m currently involved with keeps getting letters falsely claiming that it failed to file its informational returns nearly a half-decade ago.
The IRS needs enough funding to do its job properly, which I hope it prioritizes that over political shenanigans.
An effective heuristic
I stumbled onto Ann Coulter’s Substack a week or so ago, and I’ve now had my decadesworth of her.
Coulter, whip-smart and sexy (according to other guys’ tastes), snapped on 9/11, when her friend Barbara Olsen fell victim to the terrorist attack. There are certainly worse causes for turning from whip-smart and sexy into unhinged and repellent, but that doesn’t mean I need to support her efforts. I’ll not only not be upgrading to a paid subscription, but dropping my free one.
A year ago I wrote: “Wondering how to decide what to read? Here’s a simple but effective heuristic to cut down the choices significantly. Ask yourself one question: Does this writer make bank when we hate one another? And if the answer is yes, don’t read that writer.” The same rule applies to TV, radio, podcasts. If their clicks and ratings and ad revenues go up when we hate one another, flee them like the plague they are.
(I dropped a half-dozen or so other free Substacks while I was there, but none besides Coulter failed the Jacobs heuristic.)
All things Trumpy
Witch Hunt?
It is true that the FBI departed from standard protocols when it investigated Hillary Clinton. The famous James Comey press conference detailing both Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified information and the FBI’s decision not to recommend charges and the Comey letter announcing the re-opening of the investigation weeks before the election were well outside the norm …
The DOJ should stick to protocol. But it’s worth noting that protocol includes handing the Trump team a copy of the search warrant itself. It doesn’t contain as much information as the warrant application, but it does identify the key criminal statutes at issue and the items sought to be searched or seized. Trump can choose to release that document at any time.
Until Trump stops the generalized grousing and releases the search warrant, I’m assuming that the DOJ is not out of bounds.
But that doesn’t mean we can be smug when the raid has “civil war” trending on Twitter:
David Ashwell (@RedFury21) replying to @DamonLinker on Twitter on August 9 about the Mar a Lago raid:
We have an old saying in the law: fiat justitia ruat caelum. Let justice be done, though the heavens fall. The question before us is whether, indeed, we are the nation of laws and not men that our founders envisioned. Trump is not above the law.
Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) fires back:
Enjoy living through the experience of the heavens falling on your noble head.
The Rule of Law is for Chumps
Unusually strong Damon Linker Substack Wednesday, including the Twitter exchange quoted elsewhere in this posting:
Confidence or trust in American institutions is at historic lows. Trump’s political rise was a manifestation of that lack of trust—and, as a master demagogue, his very presence on the political scene continually drives those numbers lower.
He accomplishes this by refusing to play along with the atmospherics of high-minded politics. No one is given the benefit of the doubt unless they personally ingratiate themselves to him. No Democrat (like Attorney General Merrick Garland) could possibly be trying to do the right thing. There’s always a baser motive to point to, always an interpretation of events that suggests an effort to cloak a power-grab in exalted language. Law (and its enforcement) is indistinguishable from politics. The effort to pretend otherwise is just another (more deceptive) act of self-aggrandizement.
All of which means that for the better part of a decade now, Trump has been teaching his party that “the rule of law” is for saps, suckers, and chumps—and its voters have learned their lessons well.
America is Already Failing the Trump Test
Literally Nazis
[W]e have always been able to count on the armed forces of the United States as the apolitical and steady defenders of the American nation.
Trump wanted to change that and turn the military into his own praetorian guard. In an except from a forthcoming book, the journalists Susan Glasser and Peter Baker reveal an exchange between Trump and his then-chief of staff, John Kelly:
“You fucking generals, why can’t you be like the German generals?”
“Which generals?” Kelly asked.
“The German generals in World War II,” Trump responded.
“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly said.
Trump refused to believe Kelly: “No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,” he replied. “In his version of history,” Glasser and Baker write, “the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military.”
Let us leave aside the problem that Donald Trump might be the most intellectually limited and willfully ignorant man ever to sit in the Oval Office. Still, we must ask: Nazis?
Tom Nichols, The President Who Wanted Nazi Generals
Fight for what another day?
“I’m not sure that Dick (Cheney) ever taught Liz about the aphorism ‘live to fight another day.” This insightful comment perfectly encapsulates the best-case argument against Cheney.
It’s also dead wrong.
The recommendation “live to fight another day,” raises the question: Fight … for what? She could serve in Congress for decades longer and never do as much to preserve our constitutional order as she has serving as the key Republican on the January 6 committee.
Cliff Smith, Cheney’s Choice. The perfect subtitle of this story is “She has opted to do her job, rather than just have her job. That matters.”
A lot of what’s wrong in Washington arises from elevating retention of office over upholding the laws and constitution.
“The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play; and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness ….” (G.K. Chesterton)
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 
“Could it come about that … the parties could become normal again?”
Well, that would be nice. But perhaps the best thing about Dobbs is that it returns the issue of abortion to the political branches, where it belongs. And that means that the abortion issue becomes more political, not less. And I can’t see the Democrats becoming less stridently and uniformly pro-abortion in an environment in which a right that they hold sacred is subject to the give-and-take of politics.
What I think that we traditional Christians need to remember is that the Church was created in an polity in which abortion and child exposure were commonplace, legal, and widely accepted; and yet Christians did not see it as their writ to change the laws and prohibit these practices. Their only response was to rescue and care for the children at risk. The early Church saw no requirement that her teachings should be made a matter of law; neither, perhaps, should we.
Your third paragraph may be the blueprint for “crisis pregnancy centers” in the new Dobbs reality.