Author: readerjohn
I am a retired lawyer and an Orthodox Christian, living in a collapsing civilization, the modern West.
There are things I'll miss when it's gone. There are others I won't. I tend to write about both.
Friday 11/18/16
Thursday 11/17/16
Wednesday 11/16/16
The Trump Doctrine?
I’ve been pretty cool toward Patrick J. Buchanan lately as he was way too hot for Donald Trump. But now he focuses on one of the few Trump “policies” that was articulated fairly consistently and which, standing alone, I found appealing:
The opportunity is at hand for Trump to reconfigure U.S. foreign policy to the world we now inhabit, and to the vital interests of the United States.
What should Trump say?
As our Cold War presidents from Truman to Reagan avoided World War III, I intend to avert Cold War II. We do not regard Russia or the Russian people as enemies of the United States, and we will work with President Putin to ease the tensions that have arisen between us.
For our part, NATO expansion is over, and U.S. forces will not be deployed in any former republic of the Soviet Union.
While Article 5 of NATO imposes an obligation to regard an attack upon any one of 28 nations as an attack on us all, in our Constitution, Congress, not some treaty dating back to before most Americans were even born, decides whether we go to war.
The compulsive interventionism of recent decades is history. How nations govern themselves is their own business. While, as JFK said, we prefer democracies and republics to autocrats and dictators, we will base our attitude toward other nations upon their attitude toward us.
No other nation’s internal affairs are a vital interest of ours.
Europeans have to be awakened to reality. We are not going to be forever committed to fighting their wars. They are going to have to defend themselves, and that transition begins now.
In Syria and Iraq, our enemies are al-Qaida and ISIS. We have no intention of bringing down the Assad regime, as that would open the door to Islamic terrorists. We have learned from Iraq and Libya.
Then Trump should move expeditiously to lay out and fix the broad outlines of his foreign policy, which entails rebuilding our military while beginning the cancellation of war guarantees that have no connection to U.S. vital interests. We cannot continue to bankrupt ourselves to fight other countries’ wars or pay other countries’ bills.
The ideal time for such a declaration, a Trump Doctrine, is when the president-elect presents his secretaries of state and defense.
I cannot imagine a “Secretary of State John Bolton” (shudder!) executing such a “Doctrine,” and only his lack of foreign policy credentials lets me imagine pugilistic Rudy Giuliani doing so.
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Tuesday 11/15/16
Monday 11/14/16
Saturday 11/12/16
Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen has died. WSJ. NYT (which is fascinating and calls him “the master of erotic despair”).
When he was young and fresh, I was too busy with other things, and as yet insufficiently attuned to poetry, to take note of his artistry. Maybe that’s why he was starving in 1971. I came to appreciate him within the last decade or so.
Catchy, upbeat and danceable he wasn’t. Neither am I. He was deep, somber, insightful.
Everyone praises “Hallelujah,” but my co-favorite (along with Suzanne, which Judy Collins made gorgeous) is Anthem, if only for the refrain:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
I care not a whit that the world is without Michael Jackson, David Bowie and Prince. But I’ll miss Leonard Cohen. I bought his latest album immediately upon learning of his death.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Veteran’s Day 2016
Tertiary Things
Today, Tipsy’s all tertiary and too lazy to label items.
To this point, note this story from 2014, about John Podesta’s outfit:
A top liberal group has temporarily abandoned plans for a new project designed to court white working class voters after it could not marshal the necessary financial support for the project, according to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.
The Center for American Progress planned to roll out a new effort last year called the Bobby Kennedy Project. However, insufficient funding for the project forced the group to postpone its launch until 2016.
The stated need for the project suggests potential pitfalls for Democrats in its eventual delay: In a midterm election year expected to heavily favor Republicans, CAP has apparently abandoned, for the time being, an effort to reach out to a constituency that it acknowledges could determine the viability of the Democrats’ voting coalition going forward.
Of course. Because the kind of people who fund the Democratic Party care more about gay marriage than they do about the Rust Belt. And now they know what that means.
Liberals focused on backlash to civil rights, and not at all on the Democratic Party’s decades-long retreat from the politics of organized labor and working people, and its concurrent embrace of metropolitan social liberalism and neoliberal financial capitalism. Seven million American men have dropped out of the workforce, and the liberal candidate was offering a few wonky tweaks to health care and paid maternity leave. Trump was right to call his supporters the forgotten men. The leading exponents of liberalism perform their politics as a self-admiring monologue about their moral superiority. If liberals noticed working-class people in rural Indiana, it’s only because they might have said something wrong on their “egg account” on Twitter or gave the wrong answer to a local news crew. Time to get the outrage mob to make them a national spectacle and possibly deprive them of their livelihood. Why is this form of liberalism surprised that people doubt the beneficence of its ministrations?
On Tuesday, America rejected a patrician and elected a tribune. Let us hope we see some genuinely Gracchian reforms, and let us hope they work this time. Because if not, I fear that, though I might not, my children will one day see a Caesar cross the Potomac.
(Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, concluding America now looks like Rome before the fall of the Republic)
Too bad for Democrats there are zero electoral votes in the State of Denial.
I have disagreed with President Obama on most things, while avoiding, by my lights at least, Obama Derangement Syndrome. The election of an African-American President was historic in a good sense, for reasons I’ll not attempt to enumerate.
My biggest regret about his presidency is its worst-ever records on religious freedom in the United States — bigger even than the Affordable Care Act, though the ACA might give a real run for the money if I weren’t on Medicare.
But I have always appreciated his gracious and irenic tone, and the absence of personal scandal. No known mistresses. No profiteering. Just an occasional glimpse of a cigarette, and not even that for a long time now.
The video in this story is a good example of his tone.
The blogosphere is teeming with post-election reflections. I’ve had to toss some out as I found others still better.
I see little point, for instance, in repeating Glenn Greenwald’s litany of what was wrong with Hillary as a candidate. She’s dead politically. It’s gone. Nothing to see here. Move along now.
I have several friends made disconsolate by Trump’s victory.
All I can think is they must have talked themselves into thinking Hillary would be at least okay, which was more than I could do. I went into the election assuming I would awaken November 9 to news of which unacceptable major party candidate was elected. Only because I believed the polls that Hillary would win did Trump’s strong showing lure me into hour-after-hour after incredulous results-monitoring.
To my disconsolate friends, without singling anyone out, I say “take heart!” America didn’t elect Donald Trump because he was a pussy-grabbing, naked-beauty-pageant-contestant-ogling misogynist and serial adulterer.
They elected him for some other reason, such as to avoid the candidate who considered their type “deplorable.” I haven’t quite sorted that out yet.
The dangers of which I warned remain, but there are silver linings for anyone with values like mine. I feel like a target has been removed from my back (I was going to say “yellow star from my sleeve,” but I’m not going to melodramatically go that far) and I’m now just in the mass of people who face the Trumpesque dangers together, without feeling singled out.
At least temporarily, I’m not going back to remind myself of all the potential downside because it’s totally out of my hands now. I didn’t expect to be happy after the election.
And with credit to President Obama for nominating someone as moderate as Judge Garland, I look forward to a new, more conservative, Supreme Court nominee from Trump’s list of 21.
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
