Tag: Iran

Howl

My goodness, these people talk like cretins

Imagine being Pete Hegseth … a Princeton- and Harvard-educated … idiot—standing there insisting that the recent attack on Iranian nuclear facilities was “the most complex and secretive military operation in history.”

… “Midnight Hammer” … wasn’t the most complex or secretive military operation of the past ten months—surely that laurel goes to the Israelis and the “Grim Beeper” caper—much less the whole of human history. 

… my goodness, these people talk like cretins. Trump himself is, of course, all superlatives all the time, the sort of man who was born to sell fake Rolexes out of the trunk of a Nissan Altima and would be a tedious barstool blowhard if only he had the decency to drink. When a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst suggested that the Iran mission may have amounted to less than we all hoped, Karoline Leavitt—who is the White House press secretary in large part because she lacks the intellectual sophistication to turn the letters around on “Wheel of Fortune”—raged that the report was the work of a “loser.” Nobody bothered to ask her why it is that Donald Trump, supposedly an executive for the ages, has had so many losers working under him, often in senior security and intelligence roles: John Bolton, Rex Tillerson, Gen. John Kelly, Gen. Mark Milley, Gen. James Mattis, Gen. H.R. McMaster, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, etc. 

…

Trump is out there insisting that he is the greatest president since George Washington—and maybe greater than Washington, too. Eisenhower, who at the apex of his military career outranked George Washington (Washington died a three-star general; his posthumous promotion to his current statutorily unsurpassable rank came in 1976), knew that he would lie in state after his death and insisted that he did so in his regular army uniform, in an $80 standard-issue soldier’s coffin, with a minimum of decoration … (Specifically, only his Army and Navy distinguished-service medals and the Legion of Merit.) Who doubts that Donald Trump will be entombed in whatever Tutankhamun would have dreamed up if he’d had Liberace to consult? 

Kevin D. Williamson, at the top of his game.

Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime

The Trump administration found yesterday that Harvard University’s failure to address antisemitism on campus violated civil rights law. In a letter to Harvard’s president, Alan M. Garber, officials from four government agencies said the university’s “commitment to racial hierarchies” had “enabled antisemitism to fester.”

The Free Press

Does anybody doubt that if Harvard had suppressed anti-Zionist, anti-Israel or antisemitic sentiments, the Trump administration would have found that Harvard violated free speech rights?

This isn’t about antisemitism; Trump just wants to wound or destroy Harvard for the perverse pleasure of the sans-culottes.

Hocus-Pocus

Republicans are waving a $3.8 trillion magic wand over their tax-and-spending megabill, declaring that their extensions of expiring tax cuts have no effect on the federal budget. The unprecedented maneuver is a crucial part of the GOP plan to squeeze permanent tax cuts through Congress on a simple-majority vote in the coming days. Republicans are expected to endorse the accounting move in a procedural vote early Monday. (Source: wsj.com)

John Ellis News Items

Deporting those nasty Christians

Christianity Today reports that the Trump Administration is targeting Iranian Christian migrants for deportation:

…

If deported back to  their country of origin, Iranian Christians face severe persecution at the hands of Iran’s radical Islamist theocracy. That persecution has actually intensified in recent years, and includes criminalization of the promotion Christianity, and severe punishments for Christians considered to be “apostates” from Islam. This persecution makes Iranian Christians obvious candidates for asylum or refugee status (for which applicants are eligible based on persecution on the basis of religion, among other possible criteria). At the very least, those who have filed such applications must not be deported until those applications have gotten proper consideration.

I’m old enough to remember a time when conservative Republicans saw themselves as defending Christians against radical Islamism. Today, a GOP administration wants to deport Christians to persecution by a radical Islamist regime. The only people Trump considers worthy of refugee status  seem to be white Afrikaner South Africans. While they may have a plausible case (and I don’t oppose admitting them), that of Iranian Christians – and many other severely oppressed groups – is much stronger.

…

People who genuinely oppose socialism and radical Islamism would not close the doors against those regime’s victims. Doing so is both unjust and harmful to the US economy (to which these immigrants contribute) and to America’s struggle in the international war of ideas against these regimes. It’s hard to credibly tell people we are better than these brutal despots when we callously deport their victims back to them, thereby facilitating the very oppression we claim to oppose.

Ilya Somin (hyperlink added).

The entrepreneur’s new clothes

These days, Donald Trump (the man who “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program) and Jeff Bezos (the man whose second nuptials raised the bar for vulgar displays of wealth and celebrity connection) are kindred spirits:

Bezos is a man of extraordinary, awe-inspiring accomplishment. He has changed the way many of us live. But what he seems to be after these days isn’t so much respect as its quicker, lesser cousin — envy. That’s the braggart’s quarry. That’s what Trump wants, too. And it’s pursued not through substantive works but through superficial theater (military parade, anyone?), which is another of the braggart’s tells.

Boasts aren’t deeds. They’re often TikTok-friendly, Instagram-ready substitutes. Somehow, we’ve cultivated a culture that invites such camouflage and elevates the people who don it most shamelessly, even if the less impressionable among us can see it as a sign that the emperor — or entrepreneur — has no clothes.

Frank Bruni

Well, when you put it that way …

“When a court concludes that the Executive Branch has acted unlawfully,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who authored the majority opinion, wrote, “the answer is not for the court to exceed its power, too.”

The Morning Dispatch

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.

Saturday, 6/28/25

The Blind Men and the Iranian Elephant

SourceAssessment
Leaked DIA ReportStrikes delayed Iran’s bomb development only “a few months”; facilities not fully destroyed; 400 kg of highly enriched uranium still intact.
President Trump & OfficialsInsist on “total obliteration” of targets; intelligence from Israeli operatives on the ground confirms destruction.
CIA StatementConfirms “severe damage” to Iran’s nuclear program, requiring years to rebuild.
David Albright (Independent)Satellite images show ventilation shafts and tunnels hit; centrifuge enrichment effectively destroyed; rebuilding will take a long time.
IAEA Director General“Very significant damage” expected; key question remains about location of enriched uranium.
Olli Heinonen (IAEA former chief inspector)Possibility remains for a small secret enrichment facility; threat persists.

(Summary of Was Iran’s Nuclear Program ‘Obliterated’—or Just Set Back a Few Months?).

To some extent, this feels like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. Some of the experts are describing impediments to Iran’s bomb development, others how long it would take to rebuild the damaged facilities. Those are not the same question.

Pete Hegseth on the Iran Mission

Everyone with eyes knows this mission was a success! And if you doubt, here are a number of quotes from people brave enough to see what was REALLY there and not just what so-called INTELLIGENCE shows. This is also what I’m like when my loved ones come out of surgery. I don’t need to see the patient. I just want to hear statements from True Patriots about how he’s probably doing. That’s enough for me. If you weren’t FAKE NEWS, it would be enough for you.

Now, thanks to Donald Trump, we are on the historic, unprecedented verge of a thing that we used to have before he tore up the treaty! Where’s the praise? Where’s the adulation?

Alexandra Petri’s Fake News satire of Pete Hegseth’s presser with the fake news after the Iran bombing (bold and hyperlink added).

It seems to me that there’s been too little coverage of (a) the efficacy of the 2015 JCPOA until (b) Trump pulled us out of it in 2018 and the Iran nuclear program shot back up again. Kudos to Petri for alluding to it.

What Bibi got right

Especially over the past 10 months, Netanyahu has impressively followed through on his aim to remake the face of the Middle East. He’s degraded Hamas and Hezbollah, two of the vilest terror regimes on the planet. He has made the Iranian theocracy look pathetic and decrepit. Israel has demonstrated its vast military and intelligence supremacy over its enemies, establishing total freedom of the skies over much of Iran. It has shown that its agents can penetrate enemy organizations and find and kill their militant leaders. Netanyahu’s actions have contributed to the toppling of the Assad regime in Syria and have helped the legitimate Lebanese government regain control of its own territory. The Axis of Terror is in shambles.

This includes the Israeli-U.S. assault on Iran’ s nuclear program. We don’t yet know how much damage that assault has done. An early Pentagon report found that the attacks set the Iranian project back only a few months, which was picked up big-time on one side of the internet. But several other reports, including one from the Institute for Science and International Security, found that the attack “effectively destroyed” Iran’s enrichment program.

We may know in time what the bombings accomplished. In the meantime, we do know that Israel and the United States have the will and capacity to attack Iran anytime and anyplace. We do know that if Iran reconstitutes its nuclear program, Israel and America have the capacity to deliver a much more devastating and regime-threatening blow. We also know that Iran and its proxies have made some insanely self-destructive miscalculations since Oct. 7, 2023, and they must know that, too. These are ominous omens for the theocrats in Tehran.

…

For decades, both Israel and the United States were willing to tolerate the noose [i.e., the growing threat from Iran]. Dismantling it seemed too hard and risky. That changed on Oct. 7. Israel learned, to its shock and dismay, that it lacked the capacity to anticipate and prevent murderous attacks. Suddenly the looming noose began to appear intolerable. Netanyahu, and the Israeli public generally, decided to respond to Oct. 7 not with the limited retribution campaign that many of us outside observers were supporting, but by attempting to dismantle the whole noose, including Hezbollah and the future possibility of Iranian nukes, and that now looks like the right call.

David Brooks, not a Netanyahu fan. (bold added, shared link)

The Trump Doctrine

The closest I ever came to a clear understanding of his contradictory and sometimes incoherent policies was in 2018, at a lunch in the White House with one of his closest aides. We were discussing an article I had published a few years earlier in this magazine, about Obama’s foreign policy, and I said that I thought it might be premature to discern a Trump equivalent. The official responded, “There’s definitely a Trump Doctrine.”

I asked him to describe it. He said, “The Trump Doctrine is ‘We’re America, Bitch.’ That’s the Trump Doctrine.”

The official continued, “Obama apologized to everyone for everything. He felt bad about everything.” Trump, he said, “doesn’t feel like he has to apologize for anything America does.” Another White House official explained it this way: “The president believes that we’re America, and people can take it or leave it.”

Jeffrey Goldberg

This comes as no surprise to me

I have a theory of why Trump bombed Iran’s nuclear facilities. I had it even before he bombed them. I even wrote a very brief description of the theory.

But Carlos Lozada scooped me:

There’s a question President Trump likes to ask people around him when he’s facing a major challenge or considering a big decision. It’s not “Why did this happen?” or “What are my options?” or anything so straightforward as “How does this affect American interests?” It’s a more impressionistic question; any answer might sound equally authoritative, even if only one answer is preferred.

“How’s it playing?”

Trump posed it soon after Israel launched its first attacks against Iran. The president “asked an ally how the Israeli strikes were ‘playing,’” The Times reported. “He said that ‘everyone’ was telling him he needed to get more involved.”

Carlos Lozada

Good populism, vicious populism

The Republican Party, rather than embracing the best aspects of populism, has taken on its vices: anti-intellectualism, anti-institutionalism and anti-elitism; feeding off negative emotions like anger, grievances and vengeance; and a propensity to believe and to spread conspiracy theories. Populism often looks for scapegoats, frequently blaming immigrants and those who are ethnically and culturally different. Populists are also historically attracted to demagogues and authoritarian personalities.

Peter Wehner, What Has Happened to My Party Haunts Me

We seem to have turned a corner

Dishheads know I’ve been trying to get a grip on the queer and trans extremists who have run amok with the remnants of the gay rights movement these past few years. But as I watched the transqueers respond to the resounding election defeat with unreconstructed defiance, doubling down on gender extremism, and hurting acceptance of gay men, lesbians, and sane trans people, I felt I had no choice but to try to make a noise that could reach further than Substack, and get through the wall of disinformation that the MSM and queer and trans groups have been perpetrating.

I sent the essay to the NYT as a formality, never expecting it to be accepted. But they did. I expected the editing process to be like the woke-checking at New York Magazine, and I’d have to fight for every sentence. But the process, while it certainly wasn’t without its moments (they did try to water it down a lot), and took a good while to get into the paper, was fine. Even better: they allowed me to say my piece and write at length.

So I spent yesterday in a defensive crouch expecting an avalanche of hate and outrage.

Surprise! I’ve been inundated with thanks and encouragement from my fellow gays and lesbians. NYT readers’ comments were overwhelmingly positive — especially the reader-selected ones. I was stopped in the street in Ptown and congratulated, not yelled at. Old friends, major gay donors, mere acquaintances clogged my mailbox to say things along the lines of: THANK GOD SOMEONE SAID THIS AT LAST. Here’s a text I got from a friend:

I’ve had conversations with a dozen friends today about the trans movement and our unquestioning obedience to it, many of whom had never really considered it before at all and were various degrees of horrified. Thank you for helping make this a conversation we can have, it’s helping.

And that is really the goal: to get a conversation started that should have been happening years ago; to tell gay men and lesbians that something truly dangerous is going on they may not know about; to encourage them to look at it more deeply; and to distinguish clearly between these gender extremists and the gay and lesbian rights movement — so we don’t all get tarnished with the intolerance and incoherence of the gender nutters.

It’s a start. All of which is to say: please speak up if you are hesitating. There is far less support for these crazy experiments on kids and ideological extremism than might appear. Face down the bullies. And face up to the facts. And rescue our cause from those who will otherwise destroy it with overreach.

Andrew Sullivan on Substack

Nobody is above the law

No one disputes that the Executive has a duty to follow the law. But the Judiciary does not have unbridled authority to enforce this obligation—in fact, sometimes the law prohibits the Judiciary from doing so. . . . Observing the limits on judicial authority . . . is required by a judge’s oath to follow the law.

Justice [Ketanji Brown] Jackson [in dissent] skips over that part. Because analyzing the governing statute involves boring “legalese,” she seeks to answer “a far more basic question of enormous practical significance: May a federal court in the United States of America order the Executive to follow the law?” In other words, it is unnecessary to consider whether Congress has constrained the Judiciary; what matters is how the Judiciary may constrain the Executive. Justice Jackson would do well to heed her own admonition: “[E]veryone, from the President on down, is bound by law.” That goes for judges too.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett

Your enemies are not demonic, and they are not all-powerful and the right hasn’t always lost and the left hasn’t always won. But if you convince yourself of that, you give yourselves all sorts of permission to do a lot of stupid and terrible things under the rubric of “Do you know what time it is?”

Jonah Goldberg.

Trumpism can be seen as a giant attempt to amputate the highest aspirations of the human spirit and to reduce us to our most primitive, atavistic tendencies.

David Brooks

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite social medium.

Saints of North America

Today, many American Orthodox Churches will commemorate the Saints of North America. It’s an annual joy to sing:

Rejoice, O mountains of Pennsylvania;
leap for joy, O waters of the Great Lakes;
rise up, O fertile plains of Canada;
for the elect of Christ who dwelt in you are glorified,
men and women who left their homes for a new land!
With faith, hope, and patience as their armor,
they courageously fought the good fight.
Comforted by the beauty of the Orthodox Faith,
they labored in mines and mills, they tilled the land,
they braved the challenges of the great cities,
enduring many hardships and sufferings.
Never failing to worship God in spirit and truth
and unyielding in devotion to His most pure Mother,
they erected many temples to His glory.
Come, O assembly of the Orthodox,
and with love let us praise the holy men, women, and children,
those known to us and those known only to God,
and let us cry out to them:
“Rejoice, all Saints of North America and pray to God for us.

Although she’s too newly-glorified to have made it into the services, Righteous Olga of Kwethluk is now in their number.

And I awoke to the news that we’re (unofficially?) at war with Iran, about which I can only feel ambivalent, knowing the arguments pro and con and with a personal history of formal conscientious objection during the Vietnam era. Pray in accordance with your deepest convictions about this conflict, but do pray, and add “Thy will be done.”

No creed but the Bible

By the 1840s one analyst of American Protestantism concluded, after surveying fifty-three American sects, that the principle “No creed but the Bible” was the distinctive feature of American religion. John W. Nevin surmised that this emphasis grew out of a popular demand for “private judgment” and was “tacitly if not openly conditioned always by the assumption that every man is authorized and bound to get at this authority in a direct way for himself, through the medium simply of his own single mind.” Many felt the exhilarating hope that democracy had opened an immediate access to biblical truth for all persons of good will.

Americans found it difficult to realize, however, that a commitment to private judgment could drive people apart, even as it raised beyond measure their hopes for unity.

Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity.

Enamored with power

“I’ve lived in SE Michigan my entire life, and have always been a Republican—part of the Evangelical-Republican alliance, back when it was, I believe, honorable. But Evangelicals as a whole lost their way many years ago when the alliance became a religious cause in itself, a cause larger than our former convictions,” Brown told me earlier this year. “We became so enamored with power, it should have been no surprise to me (though it was) that evangelicals were and are willing to sacrifice our moral reputations for the sake of ‘winning.’ … I’ve hated every moment of Trump’s presidency, because of what I fear it’s done to the Gospel, and the reputations of those who claim to believe it.”

Tim Alberta, 20 Americans Who Explain the 2020 Election – POLITICO

Ken Brown is not wrong, I think, about what Trump has done to the reputations of “Christians” writ broadly.

But on the chance that someone reading this thinks that Christians suck because they support Trump (or for any other reason), be it remembered that Evangelicals (whatever and whoever they are) are merely a prominent public face of Christianity in the USA. They are not the only Christians. They are not uniquely “real Christians.” They are not consistent adherents of historic Christianity. And historic, Orthodox Christianity is deeply, deeply different than its thrice-removed cousins.

(And not all Christians support Trump, though it would seem more than a bit fishy to me if one could consistently predict another’s political preferences merely be the church they attend.)

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Saturday, 9/7/24

Revisionist History

Tucker Carlson’s interview with some doofus named Darryl Cooper has gone viral in the world of Carlson-skepticism, which world I now whole-heartedly join, no looking back:

Some on the right found Carlson’s turn toward Holocaust skepticism surprising. “Didn’t expect Tucker Carlson to become an outlet for Nazi apologetics, but here we are,” Erick Erickson, the conservative radio host, wrote on X. But Carlson’s trajectory was entirely predictable. Nazi sympathy is the natural endpoint of a politics based on glib contrarianism, right-wing transgression and ethnic grievance.

There are few better trolls, after all, than Holocaust deniers, who love to pose as heterodox truth-seekers oppressed by Orwellian elites …

Obviously, not every red-pilled conservative ends up arguing, as Owens did, that Hitler gets a bad rap. But the weakening of the intellectual quarantine around Nazism — and the MAGA right’s fetish for ideas their enemies see as dangerous — makes it easier for influential conservatives to surrender to fascist impulses …

Ultimately, Holocaust denial isn’t really about history at all, but about what’s permissible in the present and imaginable in the future. If Hitler is no longer widely understood as the negation of our deepest values, America will be softened up for Donald Trump’s most authoritarian plans, including imprisoning masses of undocumented immigrants in vast detention camps.

Toward the end of their conversation, Carlson and Cooper discussed how the “postwar European order” has enabled mass immigration, which has, in Carlson’s telling, destroyed Western Europe. “So why not have a Nuremberg trial for the people who did that?” asked Carlson. “I don’t understand. I mean, that’s such a crime.”

“Well,” Cooper responded, “we have to win first.”

Michelle Goldberg, who rarely writes things I want to pass along.

Tucker Carlson—who spoke prominently at the Republican National Convention, advises Trump’s campaign, and is scheduled to appear on stage with J. D. Vance later this month—has made himself famous in recent years for “just asking questions.” Carlson hosted revisionist-history podcaster Darryl Cooper on his interview show on Twitter/X, saying he “may be the best and most honest popular historian” in America. Cooper went on to expound his view that Winston Churchill was the “chief villain” of the Second World War, primarily on the basis of the fact that Churchill rejected Adolf Hitler’s peace feelers and kept Britain fighting the Nazi tyranny even after the fall of France. And Churchill, wouldn’t you know, was motivated to fight Germany not to protect British liberty but because he was a “psychopath” and perhaps even bought off by Zionist financiers. After an uproar, Cooper doubled down in a long, rambling tweet storm in which he insisted that Hitler had only wanted peace with Britain and “an acceptable solution to the Jewish problem.” The interview has rocketed Cooper’s formerly obscure podcast to the top of the charts. Is Carlson off his rocker, seeking the viewership of those who are, or both? Just asking.

National Review’s weekly news summary email

Free speech update

→ Iranian writer sentenced to prison over dot: Hossein Shanbehzadeh, an Iranian writer and activist, has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by the Tehran Revolutionary Court after he tweeted a period at the Supreme Leader. Officially, NPR reports, “Shanbehzadeh was sentenced to five years for alleged pro-Israel propaganda activity, four years for insulting Islamic sanctities, two years for spreading lies online and an additional year for anti-regime propaganda.” Suspicious. . . this was my exact penalty in college for attending Shabbat services. 

Shanbehzadeh’s one-character tweet, which was in response to a photo posted by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei of himself with the national volleyball team, received more likes than the Ayatollah’s post. He basically got 12 years for ratioing. Which, if that’s a crime, I guess I’ll be going in for twenty to life any day now. 

→ Now, maybe you’re telling yourself: This could never happen in the U.S. Thank Allah and the Founding Fathers for the First Amendment! And you’re probably right: Tweeting a period at President Harris and/or Trump is unlikely to get you thrown in jail, and American citizens enjoy more speech protections than probably any other people on Earth. But don’t let your Bill of Rights throw pillow woo you into complacency. I mean, we’re not some tyrannical shit hole like the UK, where people are being charged for mean tweets, but government censorship does exist here. The last few years has seen huge surges in book banning and protest crackdowns, and just last week, Mark Zuckerberg admitted that Meta caved to Biden administration pressure to censor content posted by users on Facebook. 

This week, Reason reported on the case of a “citizen journalist” who goes by the name Lagordiloca, or “the fat, crazy lady” (catchy), who was arrested by police in Laredo, Texas, after she broke stories obtained by a confidential source from within that same department. And vice presidential hopeful Tim Walz said in a recently resurfaced interview that misinformation and hate speech aren’t protected by the First Amendment. Now, he’s wrong about that, which you’d think a former high school social studies teacher would know (you actually are allowed to be a prick and a liar in America, thank God), but it’s a troubling statement from someone who could soon occupy the little closet down the hall from the Oval Office where they stow the VP.

Katie Herzog, filling in for Nellie Bowles.

Oh, Texas!

Speaking of things that could never happen here, in the US of A, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton keeps making a liar of me for my “calm down, that will never happen” assurances about what conservatives want.

Possibilities, two of which carry the “No True Scotsman” gene:

  1. He’s not really a conservative.
  2. I’m not really a conservative.
  3. Conservatives are frightfully heterogenous.

Mike Gallagher …

… is the kind of politician the Republican Party, or any party, should prize: bright, earnest, conscientious, etc. For seven years, he served as an intelligence officer in the Marine Corps. He was twice deployed to Iraq. A conservative Republican from Wisconsin, he served four terms in the U.S. House, or just short of that. He resigned in April. He had been the chairman of the Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, a committee devoted to an extremely important subject. He stayed in Congress just long enough to vote for aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. He bowed out at age 39. Why? Gallagher has talked to David Ignatius of the Washington Post, in a series of interviews. The long and the short of it: the threat of violence—against him and his family—from people angered at his deviations from a Trump line. There is a sickness in our politics, one that the decisions to depart of Gallagher and his like will only worsen.

National Review’s weekly news summary email.

That MAGA is shading into extortion is yet another reason to vote against Trump.

Oh, Russia!

A humorous flow chart

(Charlie Warzel)

Holding two adverse opinions at once

As I continue to parse Kamala Harris’ contradictions, and rhetorical blather, and refusal to explain all her sudden alleged policy switches from four years ago, I don’t mean to elide the fact that her opponent is out of his mind.

…

Some are incensed that after (much delayed) scrutiny of Biden’s mental deterioration, Trump still gets a pass for what in anyone else would be regarded as utter derangement. The trouble with this argument — see Jim Fallows’ Twitter feed for the full huff-and-puff — is that Biden was clearly declining fast because of incipient dementia and physical frailty, which is a story; and Trump has always been nuts, is not appreciably nuttier than he ever was, and, in stark contrast with Biden, seems physically robust.

…

This deranged con-man was president for four years — with of all this plain to see — and is still the likeliest winner of this election. Half the country takes him seriously, and they think — despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary — that he is mentally fit to perform the most powerful job in the world.

It’s merely our job, as citizens and voters, to note that we have one mentally ill candidate in this race and one mediocre but sane one. And to vote accordingly.

Andrew Sullivan, The Sane-Washing of Donald Trump

Sullivan also shared (embedded, but I won’t) a video of some impressive and even baffling ping-pong.

I suffer more from the humiliations inflicted by my country than from those inflicted on her.

Simone Weil, from a letter to Georges Bernanos.

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real.

Accumulated clippings, 2/3/19

1

Must every London gentrified street have a Starbucks, a Pret A Manger, a Caffè Nero, a Costa Coffee, a Wagamama, an Itsu, a Tesco Express, an Eat, a Hotel Chocolat, a Foxtons and a Boots? Is that all that’s left?

Emptiness is what people feel. At the end of all the myriad diversions offered up by technology-at-the-service-of-efficiency lies a great hollowness. “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” wrote Leonard Cohen. Modernity is a crack eliminator. The only cracks it allows in its polished, glistening, purring, scented spaces are fake ones.

…

I think the emptiness produced by watching a rigged globalized system deliver homogenization on a massive scale — one way to think, one way to work, one way to conceive of profit, one way to impose a brand, one way to (not) drink at lunch, one way to eat at your desk, one way to be healthy, one way to deliver a gentrified urban neighborhood — has been underestimated as a source of disruptive fury.

Roger Cohen, The Harm in Hustle Culture

2

Only Democrats can save this president. They can do so by nominating someone loopy enough to panic voters who are asking only for someone cheerful, intelligent and tethered to reality.

George Will

3

With the help of the Chapter “The Emperor’s New Literature” in John Senior’s The Death of Christian Culture, the coin dropped that part of what classical education accomplishes is that classically educated people in various countries are all reading in the Great Tradition, none in provincial or nationalistic ephemera.

That’s not nothing.

4

For a solid month Americans again focused on illegal immigration. In a country that’s never thinking about only one thing, that was a bit of a feat. Also, Mr. Trump in his statements and meetings with the press came across, for perhaps the first time, as sincere and informed. Previously he’d looked like a guy who’d intuited a powerful issue and turned it into a line.

…

The vast majority of the American people want order and the rule of law returned to the border. How it is done is up to the experts. They just want it done. The word “wall” has been symbolic to many of them too—it means taking the issue seriously.

Peggy Noonan

5

He’s fiscally to the right and on social issues to the left. There’s some market for that, but is it really where America is going?

No, it is not.

America is headed left economically. Two thousand eight changed everything, deeply undermining faith in free-market capitalism. One of the great sins of that time—and all the years after—was that the capitalists themselves, in their vast carelessness, couldn’t even rouse themselves to defend the reputation of the system that made them rich and their country great. In any case, the most significant sound in 2016 was Trump audiences cheering his vows not to cut entitlements. They would have cheered if he’d promised increases, too.

As for what are called the social issues, moderation is the future, maybe even a new conservatism, not leftism. The left has demanded too much the past few years, been maximalist in its approach, got in America’s face and space. Its social activism is a daily harassment in ways that don’t show up in the polls. The new abortion regime in the states, bake my cake, the farther edges of #MeToo, demands for changes to our very language. Liberation becomes propaganda and filters up through the media and down to the schools. America once had a lot of “live and let live” in it. Not anymore, and its giving way is causing barely articulable grief, and more broadly than the left imagines.

Wise Democrats are developing reservations. Young conservatives are perhaps about to come alive.

I think Mr. Schultz has it backward.

Peggy Noonan.

I can only hope.

6

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear: There is no national security crisis on the southern border.

President Trump claimed otherwise in his nine-minute Oval Office address to the nation … But he was lying.

How do we know this? Because if there were a genuine national security crisis on the southern border, Republicans in the House and Senate would be tripping over themselves to fund — and take credit for funding — Trump’s border wall. There is no political downside whatsoever to taking a strong stand in defense of the country in the midst of a national security crisis.

And yet, what have we seen over the past two years during which Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and could have appropriated funds for Trump’s beloved wall at any time? Zip. Nada. Nothing.

…

[P]ublic opinion has shifted in favor of immigration since the president was elected, no doubt in large part because of the above-mentioned ineptitude and malice the administration has displayed toward immigrants over the past two years. That has, if anything, put the cause of immigration restrictionism in a weaker position politically than it was when he was running for president.

Like King Midas in reverse, every policy Trump touches turns to excrement.

Damon Linker

7

Iranian political culture is deeply authoritarian, and, therefore, whatever political order follows the mullahs is unlikely to be liberal. And that’s okay. We don’t need to replicate liberalism everywhere. Iranians can have a decent, benign regime that is nevertheless responsive to the deep longings in the Persian soul for order, continuity, and visible authority — kingship, in a word. That’s how the political culture is wired. My friends at Freedom House, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the rest will, of course, find it repellent that I’d say so. But what can I say? I’ve lost a lot of my spread-freedom-everywhere idealism.

Sohrab Ahmari, emphasis added.

I should note that the interview is about Ahmari’s conversion from Shiite Islam to Roman Catholicism.

8

[A]t great cost I bought the first volume of the Works of St. John of the Cross and sat in the room on Perry Street and turned over the first pages, underlining places here and there with a pencil. But it turned out that it would take more than that to make me a saint: because these words I underlined, although they amazed and dazzled me with their import, were all too simple for me to understand.

They were too naked, too stripped of all duplicity and compromise for my complexity, perverted by many appetites. However, I am glad that I was at least able to recognize them, obscurely, as worthy of the greatest respect.

Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain.

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Clippings, 11/24/18

1

This first item is more than just a clipping. So sue me.

  • The U.S. Government’s own list of terrorist attacks since 2001 shows a dramatic drop in the violence carried out by Iran and an accompanying surge in horrific acts by radical Sunni Muslims who are not aligned with Iran.
  • The last major terrorist attack causing casualties that is linked to Iran was the July 2012 bombing of a bus with Israeli tourists in Bulgaria, retaliation for what Iran perceived to be Israel’s role in assassinating five Iranian scientists involved with Iran’s Nuclear program, between January 2010 and January 2012.
  • The U.S.-led 2003 war in Iraq played a critical role in Iran’s resurgence as a regional power.

Intel Vets Tell Trump Iran Is Not Top Terror Sponsor.

[A]s I have observed before, the red hazard light that continues to be blinking most brightly relates to Washington’s relationship with Iran, which has unnecessarily deteriorated dramatically over the past year and which brings with it collateral problems with Russia and Turkey that could trigger a much wider conflict. I say unnecessarily because all the steps taken to poison the relationship have come out of Washington, not Tehran. The Trump administration refused to certify that the Iranians had been in compliance with the nuclear agreement negotiated in 2015 and has since escalated its verbal attacks, mostly at the United Nations, claiming that the regime in Tehran is the major source of terrorism in the world and that it is seeking hegemony over a broad arc of countries running westward from its borders to the Mediterranean Sea.

Philip Giraldi, Who Are the Leading State Sponsors of Terrorism?

John Bolton is bound and determined to wage war on Iran. I’d bet a bundle on it happening.

2

To secular and leftist Europeans, Hungary’s Fundamental Law came as a shock. The preamble set the tone—it is the opening line of the Hungarian National Hymn (anthem): “God, bless the Hungarians.” That was already too much for The Guardian. A writer for that left-wing British newspaper noted that the new constitution’s “preamble is heavily influenced by the Christian faith and commits Hungary to a whole new set of values, such as family, nation, fidelity, faith, love and labour.” It was enough to point this out: further criticism would apparently have been superfluous.

…

Equally against the European grain were provisions of the Fundamental Law such as these: “We avow that the family and the nation constitute the most important framework of our coexistence”; “The life of the offspring shall be protected from the moment of conception”; “Hungary shall protect the institution of marriage as the union of a man and a woman.” This last, in particular, was subjected to almost universal condemnation, expressed in the language of hatred and rage.

Lee Congdon, Viktor Orbán and the Hungarian Resistance (Modern Age, Fall 2018)

I am mindful of this every time I read the New York Times writing of Orban being “far-right.”

3

[W]riting off an ocean of rural and Rust Belt red is a terrible strategy in the long term. If the Democrats want to win and keep winning, with a mandate to put their policies into effect, they need to face four hard truths.

1 Demography Is Not Destiny
“Why not just wait for the white working class to die off?” asked an audience member at last year’s Berkeley Festival of Ideas. I get this question a lot, and I always reply: “Do you understand now why they voted for Trump? Your attitude is offensive, and Trump is their middle finger.”

Joan C. Williams, The Democrats’ White-People Problem (Atlantic, December 2018) (Italics added).

4

We may be witnessing another voter realignment. When I was young, the Republicans were the party of the elite, and the Democrats were the party of the working class. It seems that now the Republicans are the party of the white working class, and the Democrats are the party of the wealthy and educated. Democrats have decided to go after those elite voters and have done so in ways that have made them less attractive to working class whites. It remains to be seen if this realignment is temporary, or whether we are at the beginning of a larger migration of elite whites to the Democrats and working class whites to the Republicans. But the recent midterm elections seem to have strengthened this switch.

… [M]oney is not everything. After all how would you feel about a political party that offers you higher wages but talks about you as a “deplorable?” You probably would not see that party as looking out for your best interest. But this sort of attitude plays well among the educated elite. So to become palatable to white elites Democrats have acted in ways that have made their party more alienating to the white middle class.

… I remember watching a Beto/Cruz debate a few weeks ago. The debate moved to the topic of gun control. And right on cue, Beto whipped out one of the favorite talking points of highly educated whites that we need to do more than give gun victims “thoughts and prayers.” At that point I knew that Beto did not have what it took to cut into the hold Cruz had on the lower class white voter and in a state with a lot of small towns filled with such voters that Cruz was likely to win.

… The real irony of that was Beto was trying to run a campaign of inclusiveness across racial, economic and even political lines. Yet, he could not quite leave out this little bit of snark.

George Yancey

5

Washington think tanks are undergoing a fundamental evolution. A lot of them, like the American Enterprise Institute and the Brookings Institution, were built to advise parties that no longer exist. They were built for a style of public debate — based on social science evidence and congressional hearings that are more than just show trials — that no longer exists. Many people at these places have discovered that they have more in common with one another than they do with the extremists on their own sides.

So suddenly there is a flurry of working together across ideological lines. Next week, for example, the group Opportunity America, with Brookings and A.E.I., will release a bipartisan agenda called “Work, Skills, Community: Restoring Opportunity for the Working Class.”

…

One of the core questions before us is this: Who is going to lead this country? Is it perpetual outsiders like Trump, with no governing or policy competence, who say the establishments have forfeited all credibility? Or are there enough chastened members of establishments, who have governing experience, who acknowledge past mistakes, who take the time to reconnect with the country and apply their expertise in new ways?

I don’t know about you, I’ll take a chastened establishment any day.

David Brooks, The Return of the Chastened Establishment (The Opportunity America link is a 136-page PDF download.)

6

But politics isn’t just a seething cauldron of unmanageable and frightening shifts and realignments. There’s also the tacit requirement that politicians prattle on demand about anything and everything. F’rinstance:

“He shot from the hip with a sledgehammer instead of using a scalpel.”

Sen. Claire McCaskill, on … oh, what does it matter anyway? She was prattling about something. (via George Will).

7

My periodic reminder that “more conservative than other major newspapers” does not mean that it gets religion:

Deep down, however, beneath the trappings of food, family and often-forgettable football games, Thanksgiving is really a management story. It’s a case study in how extraordinary leaders build happy, productive teams.

Sam Walker, Wall Street Journal

8

Wealth, she said in a 1983 interview with Parade magazine, was “sort of like having good looks: It’s not something you’ve earned, but you don’t go out and scar your face, either.”

Carolyn Rose Hunt via the Wall Street Journal (which does more or less “get” money).

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