The “soft coup”: killing a king
In the very olden days of the monarchy, kings often used to kill their opponents before they got killed by those opponents. It was a pretty brutal world.
Wretchard (Richard Fermandez) uses that as a metaphor to talk about the present:
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, one can make the equivalent argument that a probe against Obama officials would be just as much “a good faith attempt to investigate a credible charge” as the Mueller investigation. But one should not deceive oneself into not realizing that the ultimate targets of such a course would be Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Such a turnabout would not end the crisis which began in the waning days of the Obama administration, it would only change its direction. And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which “is to prevent a clash between kings” would still be in ruins. Perhaps this is why Karl Rove is urging Trump, having won the round, to move on; for by considering the affair closed, Trump could restore the tradition of comity, which has been damaged.
Or could he? In the current political culture, magnanimity is unlikely to be met with gratitude, unless the words are spat out with irony. Passions are high and neither side appears willing to give an inch. It may take time before an extended hand is not met by a punch. The fever must still run its course. One can only hope the fever breaks before the patient does.
Good points and interesting points as well. But the problem is that this situation is not really some sort of tit-for-tat, any more than the police trying to find a cop-killer is tit-for-tat.
Of course, if in fact Trump had been an agent of Russia, that couldn’t be left to stand. The problem was that it was not only an absurd notion but there was no evidence for it that could pass the smell test, and so those wanting the investigation to go forward had to fake evidence, leak it, and lie about it to make the allegations seem at all credible.
So this really was an effort first to discredit Trump the candidate and then, when that didn’t work well enough, an attempted coup on Trump the president. If it was that—and I think it’s clear that it was—Trump can’t just let bygones be bygones. The precedent would be awful. The perpetrators of what amounts to a several years long attempt at a frameup have to be made to think they will be caught and cannot get away with it.
And yet, as Richard Fernandez says in his post that I quoted at the outset, an investigation of the investigators could help to destroy the peaceful transition process that America has seemingly enjoyed till 2016. But it was the previous administration that actually destroyed it, and we can’t pretend that didn’t happen.
I wrote all of the above before reading this article by Roger Kimball. An excerpt from it:
I think my friend Karl Rove is a very smart man. But I dissent categorically from his judgment a couple of days ago that the president ought not to “obsess” over the “origins” of the investigation because that was not an effective strategy to win over swing voters. Rove said Trump should let bygones be bygones and “move on.”
On the contrary, the president, to the unalloyed delighted of the crowd, made it clear last night that “moving on” was not part of his agenda. Or, to put it more accurately, move on he would, but not without making sure that those who weaponized the intelligence resources of the United States against him (and, more to the point, against them) were called to account. This is not a matter of vengeance. It is a matter of preserving the central core of our democratic republic, which turns on the integrity of our elections.
As I have said on many occasions, the whole Russia-collusion narrative represents the biggest political scandal in our history. Why? Because a cabal of officials in the Obama Administration, aided at every turn by a hysterical media, decided that the candidacy and then the election of Donald Trump was not to their taste. They used every expedient to challenge his campaign and then to attack his presidency. Senior officials in the CIA, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and Department of State decided that they had a “higher loyalty” than their loyalty to the Constitution. The people may have spoken on November 8, 2016. But they made the wrong choice. Therefore it was incumbent upon people like James Comey to correct the mistake. They would lie under oath and leak classified material to the press to damage President and people close to him. Perhaps most stunning, they would employ a legal instrument designed to be used against suspected foreign terrorists and repurpose it to open a conduit into Donald Trump’s campaign and then into his administration.
The whole Russia-collusion fantasy, of which the Mueller investigation was only the desperate centerpiece, has cost the taxpayers untold millions ($30-$40 million for the Mueller investigation alone), it has destroyed the lives and careers of several people whose only “crime” was to have been in the orbit of Donald Trump, and it has gravely damaged public faith in the impartiality of our intelligence and security institutions to say nothing of what public faith remained about the media. It is imperative that people like John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and James Comey are made to understand—and that the public can see that they have been made to understand—that the heads of the FBI or the CIA or the Office of National Intelligence do not have a veto over who gets to be the president of the United States.
The Resistance tried to kill the king. They may not like the king—you may not like the king, either—but that’s not the point. The effort cannot be allowed to stand, and it must be driven home to the American people what actually happened and what the dangers are. And we certainly can’t count on the MSM to do that, since they were in on the conspiracy.
That’s not tinfoil hat territory. That’s just the way it was and the way it is.
[NOTE: I’m starting to experiment with using tags for post content as well as the usual categories.]
Some of this, I’m not sure how much, is a result of the Bush response to 9/11. I’m reading a book about “Beruit Rules,” the story of Reagan’s worst failure, Lebanon in 1983. Most of it was CIA failure, of course. We should have stayed away, or at least allowed the Marines to defend themselves but it was chaos and the CIA has not functioned well since The Bay of Pigs.
Bush got excited about terrorism after Clinton neglected it for 8 years then got out of town before the sh*t hit the fan. The Patriot Act is behind a lot of the indiscipline we see in the Intelligence Community. 90% of the CIA employees sit around reading foreign language newspapers and building bureaucratic empires. No wonder a threat to their empire was seen as an existential threat.
The State Department is worse, if possible. I remember when they were trying to get State FSO’s to go to Iraq and Afghanistan. Bob Baer’s “See No Evil” has the story of his request, as he was about to retire, for a Turkic speaker to replace him in Turkmenistan. Instead, he got a CIA officer who was an expert in sexual harassment.
I totally agree the conspirators should be held to account for their actions which were treasonous. Military trials and life in Gitmo sounds appropriate to me.
The MSM–key members of the coup themselves–has been very assiduously not getting anywhere near describing what had been happening as a soft coup attempt.
“Soft” only because there have not been–as yet–tanks in the streets.
Up until a couple of years ago, the U.S. had been very fortunate–in the 243 or so years of it’s existence–because no coups had ever been attempted in this country.
Now that one has been attempted, this attempted coup d’etat has to be seen and understood by everyone–far and wide–for the truly “existential threat” it is to our Republic, to our Constitution, to the Rule of Law, and to the Freedom of each and every one of us.
This attempted coup has to be stopped, and stopped hard.
I agree that Trump has to go after–and go after hard–those involved in this attempted soft coup–still in progress, by the way–to prevent this type of thing from becoming the norm.
It cannot be a case of “forgive and forget,” or of just “moving on.”
We have to have a definitive resolution–with the elements, actors, and actions of the coup laid out for all to see, with lessons learned, villains identified, prosecuted, and punished.
If those who were behind this soft coup d’etat aren’t identified, indicted, prosecuted, and punished then such a coup attempt–and perhaps a lot of them–will be in our future here in the U.S.
After all, why not try a coup if there is no penalty for such an attempt?
“And then some other king would lie on the political floor and the whole point of a peaceful transition of power which “is to prevent a clash between kings” would still be in ruins.”
By establishing and organizing his OFA, Obama told the world he intentions were to destroy the United States.
Do you see the democrats suddendly shifting toward a direction less hostile and less socialist in nature?
Obama’s OFA is well funded, organized and still in aciton not just against President Trump but any and all Republican initives and candidates. Look at all the initives they have on the table just to change voting.
“Organizing for Action, a group founded by former President Barack Obama and featured prominently on his new post-presidency website, is distributing a training manual to anti-Trump activists that advises them to bully GOP lawmakers into backing off support for repealing ObamaCare, curbing immigration from high-risk Islamic nations and building a border wall.”
https://nypost.com/2017/02/18/obama-linked-activists-have-a-training-manual-for-protesting-trump/
If a Republican wins the White House after Mr. Trump leaves office, I see the leftist democrats continuing with their same tactics and agendas. They hate Trump that’s obvious but they want power and they are tenacious in their continuing assaults in almost every area of American culture.
Indeed, the major—sorry, the HUGE—problem is that they haven’t even acknowledged what they’ve done, let alone apologize for it.
It’s the old double-/triple-/quadruple-down policy leading to catastrophe and then further catastrophe—while the adolescent-acting miscreants insist that they’re the “moral” party.
They just keep motoring on, flinging utter crap and hoping that it continues to stick….with the MSM’s near total encouragement egging them on. (Yes, we understand very well that they believe that facts don’t matter.)
Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
I think it’s vital that the roots of the collusion delusion be publicly explored. Otherwise we’ll have to play out this weary script at least every time a Republican is elected president (and if Republicans were to decide to give ’em a taste of their own medicine, every time a Democrat is elected too).
But just as important is how that exploration is communicated and carried out. Trump needs to get his speech writers from the SOTU on this right away – they did a brilliant job, I thought, of giving him a script that clearly laid out the accomplishments of his administration, and the implications for the nation’s welfare. This case is so complex and, frankly, boring in the details that it will need just as effective speechifying to ensure that the American public *understands* that it isn’t tit for tat – that if we, all Americans, don’t get to the bottom of what happened and hold accountable those who acted unlawfully, then the rule of law and the social compact on which we have built this nation are both at grave risk.
Hailing from the realm of dirty politics as norm, Rove wants good ol’ boy bygones to be good ol’ boy bygones. In other words, he wants the door left wide open to his brand of skulduggery without consequences.
Enough said. Let’s make quick work of this. Release the hounds and the kraken.
It’s time for a reckoning.
When Trump assumed office he sent a number of signals that it was time to move on. If the opposition were to drop the Russia thing he would pretend it didn’t happen. The Dems had an opportunity for a truce but they wanted war. Be careful what you wish for.
Wretchard the Cat has been a favorite of mine for more than a decade. His blog is one to follow.
I highly recommend this entry from a different blog:
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/03/30/whats-in-the-full-mueller-report/#more-161894
It tells the story of the attempt to kill the king, and indicates that the collusion hoax is not the main weapon. That weapon is still to be attempted by the democrats.
To fundamentally transform a country is to take on a dangerous task. It’s past time for his chickens to come home to roost and his foul little fowl should no longer be free ranging.
One of the (if not the) gravest political crises in our history, and yet there is a looney aspect to it all. The players, mendacious as they are, well… take Adam Schiff. Just look at him. Study him in the video clips. Somebody gave him a wedgey in sixth grade and he’s been trying to get even ever since. This is the caliber of people we are dealing with — the first string of the Democrats.
I still don’t regret my support for the Iraq War. Given the circumstances and what I knew at the time, I don’t argue with my younger self.
However, if I could have looked ahead five years later to see the Democrats turn against the war and use it as a springboard to recapture the House, the Senate and the White House overwhelmingly by 2008, I would have made a different calculation.
It could be that running the coup to ground will tear the country apart even worse, maybe much worse, than it is now and we might look back at today as the last chance to turn away from full-on civil war.
I don’t know. We can’t know. We are stuck in time and we can’t turn the pages of history ahead to see what will happen.
So I can give Richard Fernandez, as astute a commentator as any today, and Karl Rove, a savvy fellow in his own right, the benefit of the doubt. They may have a good point.
OTOH, leaving the coup-meisters untouched to create more mischief and to embolden others to join them, may be an equally bad decision. That’s where my head and my heart go.
Perhaps it’s not a pure binary choice (how I distrust those!) but a question of deciding how hard to press. The problem with pushing back is that this goes straight to the top — Obama and Hillary — and they, I believe, are guilty along with many other prominent Democrats.
Do we put Obama and Hillary on trial and lock them up if found guilty? I am asking pragmatically. How far do we go?
I see no path forward in which Civil War ll is not, at the least a possibility and in most, a certainty.
Though he richly deserves it, imprisonment of Obama would result in violent riots and probably damage race relations beyond repair.
So too with Hillary, though absent the race angle. College campus riots would be widespread, though offering the opportunity to close down those indoctrination factories has great appeal.
Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, etc is another story.
Up until a couple of years ago, the U.S. had been very fortunate–in the 243 or so years of its existence–because no coups had ever been attempted in this country.
I disagree. Watergate was a successful coup perpetrated, as this was, by the FBI. Mark Felt did this to get revenge for being passed over for Hoover’s job when he died. The Stratfor link in that post points out that Felt’s success was evidence that the FBI had been spying on presidents for years. Nobody talks or writes about it but Hoover’s job was secure because he knew every president’s secrets,
Nixon made several mistakes which gave Felt the opportunity to take him down. Pat Buchanan’s book, “Nixon’s White House Wars” tells the story. Pat was too wary to get involved with the “Plumbers” and had enough clout with Nixon to say no. The Pentagon Papers theft drove Nixon beyond his good judgement. Pat tried to tell him it reflected mostly on Democrats but Nixon was worried about the country, not his own political welfare. He did the same thing when Rogers, Ike’s AG, told him he had enough evidence of election fraud to overturn the Kennedy victory in 1960.
“Up until a couple of years ago, the U.S. had been very fortunate–in the 243 or so years of it’s existence–because no coups had ever been attempted in this country.”
-Snow on Pine
There is some evidence, as well as the testimony of a US Marine Major General (Smedley Darlington Butler, who was awarded the Medal of Honor twice), that a coup was planned and attempted in 1933. But the coup failed because the leader they recruited (Butler) went along with the plan long enough to figure out what was happening, and then testified in front of Congress about the coup, putting an end to it.
Historians debate whether it was an actual coup or fantasy. But considering the men named as the planners (men like JP Morgan) and the testimony of Butler (two Medals of Honor), its not hard to think that newspapers and congressmen were convinced to call it all a fantasy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot
Business Plot.
Fractal Rabbit: I was going to say! My impression is people agree a coup was in the wind but how far and how serious it got is another question. When I was a leftist, I ran across that story a lot.
“Seven Days in May,” a 1964 film about a military coup against the White House, is still good fun. A Kirk Douglas/Burt Lancaster cage match. I love how earnest those sixties political thrillers were.
Though he richly deserves it, imprisonment of Obama would result in violent riots and probably damage race relations beyond repair.
So too with Hillary, though absent the race angle. College campus riots would be widespread, though offering the opportunity to close down those indoctrination factories has great appeal.
Comey, Brennan, Clapper, Strzok, etc is another story.
Geoffrey Britain: Thanks for a serious response. I basically agree.
huxley,
It make me wonder: were those leftists in the 60’s really that earnest? Or were they just waiting for their chance?
I was raised to be a good little Progressive by a couple of 60’s leftists. And I always thought that my parents, however wrong in their beliefs, were earnest. But as the Trump presidency goes on, I am not sure I can give my parents, or even the nicest leftists, the benefit of the doubt anymore.
Regarding the Business Plot, my gut says it was the real deal. I’ve known people who worked in the Federal Government, some FBI and Treasury guys, and some JSOC guys. They were the first I had ever heard of it and I am pretty well read. They believed it was the real deal. According to them, info about the plot and its outcome had been passed down through the decades by older agents and soldiers as a warning.
In the comments section of the Wretchard article neo here cites I said;
“None of us want a civil war. How to avoid it while still winning is the conundrum. The Left has two strategic pincers; the schools and illegal/legal immigration. Trump is working to eliminate the immigration pincer. The internet has dealt a body blow to the media/propaganda arm of the Left. The internet can also do the same to academia.
The obstacle is accreditation. Laws must be passed that a passing grade on a course conducted over the internet, entitles the student to the right to take something like a college/university SCAT test and, a passing grade on that test entitles full accreditation by brick and mortar colleges.
It’s a virtual certainty that leftist colleges and universities will resist, so tie federal funding to compliance by the brick and mortar colleges. Also, the college/university SCAT test must be objectively accurate, rather than the ‘right’ answers being in accord with leftist political correctness.
We have to break the stranglehold that the Left has upon the schools or in another generation or two the American Republic will, undeniably be over.”
This is the only path that I can conceive of that avoids either a civil war or 1984.
It make me wonder: were those leftists in the 60’s really that earnest?
Fractal Rabbit: I was earnest. My friends were earnest. The people in my communes were earnest. The people in my affinity group were earnest. Basically the ordinary folks on the left I met were earnest. We were all circle dancers in neo’s parlance. That was much of the appeal.
However, I wasn’t so sure about the leftist leaders a couple rungs over us. The revolutionary types I never quite trusted. Robin Morgan and her husband Kenneth Pitchford (radical leftist feminsts) gave me the creeps.
Back then it was more of an experience, but experience decays into concepts and today most of my old leftist friends are living in an outdated script (Watergate!) about who is right and who is wrong, which IMO is how public support of the soft coup got so far along.
Thanks for your take on the Business Plot based on sources you’ve known. I’ve tried to run it down but I don’t have any sources and I haven’t noticed any thorough treatments.
On a possible coup in 1933, Roosevelt went after political enemies with enough enthusiasm to stimulate such thoughts in some. His persecution of Andrew Mellon, for example, was a disgrace and comparable to the Trump coup attempt.
AMEN brothers and sisters!
“Back then it was more of an experience, but experience decays into concepts and today most of my old leftist friends are living in an outdated script (Watergate!) about who is right and who is wrong, which IMO is how public support of the soft coup got so far along.”
Huxley,
Thanks for that. I think that’s my parents in a nutshell.
huxley,
Many may have been earnest but it seems they were most earnest about power and being in charge and less so about what they were protesting.
Free speech, for example, which was such a big deal for many when they were protesting but as the years have gone on and they have taken over now many (especially on campus) no longer have much interest in the free speech of the current out of power group.
Many similar examples but it seems to me that for many it was less of an idealistic struggle and more of a power struggle and now they have the power so lock the door behind them.
Today’s college “education” has increasingly become a joke–much more indoctrination, these days, than education–and it’s price bankrupting.
The colleges and universities that should be the places where–above all–all ideas are allowed and compete, where free speech and debate, where unfettered inquiry is fostered–have become just the opposite, have become increasingly oppressive indoctrination factories that are churning out more and more ill- adn mis-educated supposed “graduates.”
It’s quite true that one of the key, decisive advantages that the Left has is their almost complete control, their stranglehold on the Educational Establishment.
Breaking that control by the government making it possible for far less expensive Internet/distance learning courses–their completion and actual learning certified by fair, un-rigged, standardized testing–to be accepted as the equivalent of courses attended at a brick and mortar school is a great idea and might, indeed, serve to break the Left’s stranglehold on education
“Race relations” are already severely damaged precisely because of Obama, and increasingly many so-called “black” people are joining the conservative side or at least moving toward it, and also denouncing Obama himself. It is the race-hustlers (of European, of African, of west-Asian, etc. etc. ancestry) who lead in the work of tearing apart the country by destroying trust and good-will among persons and groups of differing ethnicity or ancestry — or race.
The MSM and a preponderance (I believe) of the lefty “blogosphere” are delighted to follow their lead, for various reasons; as are the librul-to-left politicians (mostly). The conservative-ish politicians (mostly), either because of their “Progressive” beliefs or their cravenness or their natural decency, also follow along, though one hopes with less delight.
HOWEVER. If the United States stands for anything beyond what has been called “the law of the jungle,” then we MUST live by the principles of Justice and Benevolence. (Neither of which is to be conflated with something called “Social Justice,” however interpreted; nor with forced “Charity,” which is an expression of rule by fear and manipulated emotional reactions, neither of which has anything to do with Benevolence.)
And by the way, “Compassion” is meaningless without Justice.
“Justice must be done, and it must be SEEN to have been done.”
Otherwise, status + clout + $ can be counted on to get you off the hook, and we Americans — regardless of political position — will lose a bit more respect for the law, for our legal system, for our government, and for our nation.
Does anyone think that Jesse Jackson has the slightest respect for any of these things?
.
Pres. Trump said, fairly soon after he took office, that he thought it best not to indict Hillary. (I presume this was on the grounds of “it would tear the country apart” — which was Nixon’s excuse for not challenging the results of the 1960 election. This was the line being pushed by most right-ish and conservative commentators, advisors, and pundits at the time.)
But on Hannity, in the last week or two IIRC, the President said that he no longer holds that view.
Good for him!
(And I’m no different from anybody else. In a way the prospect is very scary if he does that. But is the prospect of giving in to corruption and the rule by gangsters less frightening? But he will need the strongest possible backing by the Republicans and a vocal and well-informed base in order to succeed.)
I think the Lincoln assassination was an attempted coup, although on a much smaller scale than this one.
Many may have been earnest but it seems they were most earnest about power and being in charge and less so about what they were protesting.
…it seems to me that for many [on the left] it was less of an idealistic struggle and more of a power struggle and now they have the power so lock the door behind them.
Griffin: Those earnest about power, not surprisingly, ended up with power. The rest got on with their careers and families but stuck with the old script without noticing the world changed.
When I was in San Francisco I was amazed at how many gay friends believed Republicans were within inches of shipping gays to camps. If that’s what one believes it’s easy to bend the rules on free speech.
I see the need to prosecute higher ups in government or in the Democrat Party, pour encourager les autres. If there is no punishment for their failing this time, they will not hesitate to do it again. And again.
“Trump can’t just let bygones be bygones. The precedent would be awful. The perpetrators of what amounts to a several years long attempt at a frameup have to be made to think they will be caught and cannot get away with it.”
* * *
Well, judging by the Smollett & Co. out-of-town try-out, they don’t have a lot to fear.
If the Chicago PD keep pushing, and the new mayor is behind them, this might turn into a fable with a different moral.
As the man said,
Barry Meislin on March 30, 2019 at 5:39 pm at 5:39 pm said:
Indeed, the major—sorry, the HUGE—problem is that they haven’t even acknowledged what they’ve done, let alone apologize for it.
The link to Wretchard is bad
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/continued-high-stakes”
It should be this
https://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/continued-high-stakes/
The Obama administration used the machinery of government to help win the 2012 election (remember the IRS scandal, and the other agencies who harassed Republican fundraisers and conservative groups). They did it again in 2016, to maintain their legacy, this time the corruption coming in the Intelligence Community, the DOJ, and the FBI.
Ignoring this means they’ll do it again, and despite who’s in the White House, the federal bureaucracy is still heavily leftist and feels entitled to rule.
I’m not entirely gung-ho about prosecuting these people, but I am completely supportive of exposing everything they did, per the Report, FISA warrants, etc., to the scrutiny of We the People, subject to appropriate legal limitations, e.g., grand jury testimony, etc.
Prosecution takes a long time, and over the course of multiple prosecutions would extend the national pain & render the social fabric of the country such that it might not mend. Whereas perhaps fully exposing the naked ambitions, manipulations, lying and conspiracy of these people (and there were a lot of them) and leaving their judgment to history, might be sufficient.
Perhaps I’m thinking too “Ford like” here, w/r/t his pardon of Nixon. But it did resolve the situation enough to move along to address other pressing national issues.
Okay, now that spring is here, I can put om my tinfoil hat without fear of frostbite.
To accept Rove’s argument, is to accept that those who contrived the soft coup are done, and will now go back to ordinary politics. As far as I can tell, it’s more likely that they’ll double down against Trump.
Each morning, I half-expect to be greeted by news of an assassination attempt. Has the Secret Service been corrupted? Should Trump hire private security? After what we’ve seen the last two years, is that really a tinfoil hat question?
Cornflour,
Good point.
.
Kate,
Good point.
ColoComment on March 30, 2019 at 8:49 pm at 8:49 pm said:
…
Prosecution takes a long time, and over the course of multiple prosecutions would extend the national pain & render the social fabric of the country such that it might not mend. Whereas perhaps fully exposing the naked ambitions, manipulations, lying and conspiracy of these people (and there were a lot of them) and leaving their judgment to history, might be sufficient.
* * *
The pain is already too far prolonged and the social fabric of the country already rendered; only full and complete justice against the fomenters of this fraud will end the pain and stitch the country back together, in the view of the general public.
If the Democrats keep feeling the pain because their heroes go to jail, I’m okay with that.
It doesn’t matter how much of the truth is “exposed” to the public, the Democrats, leftists & fellow-travelers, and for that matter the NeverTrumpers [henceforeward #Denialists*], will not accept it as dispositive, no more than many of the same people accept that the known evidence against Smollett (let alone what CPD has not yet released) impugns his innocence (even if some do, they are glad that he is guilty as sin, free as a bird).
And that is assuming that all of the evidence that might be found in the documents and is made known to the public is then published by the MSM and seen by the #Denialists at all.
History is written by the winners, and if the majority of law-breakers in this hoax do not go to trial and receive some meaningful punishment — I am assuming convictions, because the evidence has been exposed ad nauseum to at least part of the country — then the Democrats will BE the winners. They can hide documents, studies, lists of evidence, and Congressional testimony. They can’t hide legal convictions.**
It may be politically and practically infeasible to convict a former Secretary of State and President of crimes against the State (which these were), but if you roll up most of the complicit underlings — who knowingly broke the law because they never expected to get caught — then maybe the minions of the future will think twice about becoming part of a political hit squad.
*I refuse to use “Resistance” for the same reason as refusing to call them “liberals” — both words imply some sort of principled behavior, which does not apply.
**Okay, they can ignore convictions, and even hide them with enough help from government subversives and paid editors at Wikipedia, but they can’t disappear them completely without a lot Deeper Deep State than we have even now.
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/03/26/wikipedia-editors-paid-to-protect-political-tech-and-media-figures/
I think the Lincoln assassination was an attempted coup, although on a much smaller scale than this one.
bof: I like the way you think! How many people these days know Lincoln’s assassination was more than a lone nut actor? It was a full-on conspiracy and four people, including a woman, were hung for it.
Back then they were serious about killing the king! None of this sneaky collusion and obstruction small-ball.
Huxley,
Wanna talk what if? What if they had been successful in killing Johnson and Seward that night as well as Lincoln. What would have happened? Stanton would have probably tried to take charge completely even more than he did. It would have been chaos. And remember Lincoln was less than a month into his second term. How effective would anyone have been in those next four years as we know Johnson was a disaster but st least he was the rightful successor.
AesopFan:
I agree that “it may be politically and practically infeasible to convict a former Secretary of State and President of crimes against the State” but 18 U.S.C. 793(e) is applicable to everyone. There are many criminal statutes that these traitors violated, many times, and they could all be put away for a long time . . . and must be, if we are to retain the rule of law.
“It may be politically and practically infeasible to convict a former Secretary of State and President of crimes against the State (which these were), but if you roll up most of the complicit underlings — who knowingly broke the law because they never expected to get caught — then maybe the minions of the future will think twice about becoming part of a political hit squad.”
Well…the #metoo wave is lapping around Creepy Joe Biden’s feet & may well reach his nose, and I don’t think the Clinton’s have the same juice they once had, so she might be vulnerable.
But I reckon there’d be a flock of suicides before anyone rolls over on 44. It’d take a mighty set of brass cojones from AG Barr to go after him…and a kevlar hat for anyone giving evidence against him.
But by all means…roll up the network…Clapper, Brennan, Comey, Lynch, Holder, Strozk, Page, Rosenstein, McCabe, Ohr, Ohr, Halper, Steele, Yates… get ’em all & bury ’em deep in a federal penitentiary. No quarter.
Guess what? There is no rule of law, the center can not hold, and a rough beast slouches to DC if the traitors are not brought to real justice. It may be ‘promblematic’ to go after the messiah and shrew queen, but I say go for it. Damn the consequences. The tipping point to CW2 has been crossed already, the hard left and their lackeys stepped over that line, no reason to hold back now. Water the tree of liberty. Or, surrender all concepts of a Republic. Keep it or surrender your children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren to the darkness of totalitarianism. Learn to shoot and reload. Bullets and beans win over prevarication.
18 USC 793 (f) is also applicable
The way things are going, the Democratic Party, its apparatchiks and supporters in the MSM will soon be demanding (that is, if they haven’t already) that Mueller do penance for his role in NOT nailing Trump to the wall; as well, they’ll demand, heh, that Trump publicly apologize for “pouncing” on the Democratic Party and on the MSM.
“Unpresidential” they’ll call it. “Unethical”. “Unbecoming”. Oh dat nyasty, nyasty myan!! (Gotta stay on the attack! And of course it helps when it’s ALWAYS somebody else’s fault.)
Here’s the model:
https://voiceofeurope.com/2019/03/muslim-leader-wants-spanish-king-to-apologise-for-defeating-islam-in-1492/
Oh, but that’s ridiculous, you say? That’s ancient history?
Here, try this:
https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/86716199/auckland-imam-demands-apology-after-backlash-from-antisemitic-speeches
(And lots more where that came from….)
Remember: Palestinian rules.
I want to second Edward’s suggestion that everyone read this https://theconservativetreehouse.com/2019/03/30/whats-in-the-full-mueller-report/#more-161894
The deep state won’t just give up. The coastal enclaves are in an echo chamber much like the Planter Class during the 1850’s and believe that their positions are actually widely held.
Trump really is a Gift From God. Anyone else would have been destroyed. However, the real chaos may be yet to come. The Euro is precarious. Australia and Italy are in or close to recession, and there are several likely triggers to create a financial avalanche. The total amount of debt in society at all levels is new to the human experience.
Academia is a totally corrupt monopoly that has removed itself from market forces through student loans, We have following generations taking out loans while their parents are still paying off theirs. It is enforcing a model of political correctness that is coming to be seen as absurd, but with almost no indication of self awareness.
A way must be found to have the free market provide educational services. Academia should be reinvented as a community of scholars who set the standards for academic degrees but who make their livings in the larger commercial society.
They all need to go to jail for a long time; especially Hillary. They won’t rat out Obama, but his reputation will be completely ruined. The only way that Obama goes to jail is if he skimmed off a bunch of that Iran money or he got kickbacks from Iran. Val Jarrett knows the truth. If she moves out of the house she shares with Barack and Michelle, then something is up.
18 USC 793 A through G are also applicable.
Brennan will be living in Iran within two years. Not so sure about Comey, but he’d go to Russia if he flees. Hillary will enjoy jail. Her peeps!
Barr is the guy to get to the bottom of this. Thank god Sessions is gone!
It will be fun watching the Fake News try to spin these future attractions.
“Though he richly deserves it….”
I think a solution is standing there right before our eyes.
Trump should invite Obama for a round of golf. Just the two of them. No caddies. No drivers. No aides.
No reporters.
And on the ninth hole, Trump should say to Obama (off record, no open mike), “After the next elections, I’ll have more flexibility”.
And then continue:
“So it’s your decision. It’s up to you. Whatever you decide….
“Make my day…(if you want to).”
The Resistance tried to kill the king. They may not like the king—you may not like the king, either—but that’s not the point. The effort cannot be allowed to stand, and it must be driven home to the American people what actually happened and what the dangers are. And we certainly can’t count on the MSM to do that, since they were in on the conspiracy.
It worked on Nixon, the public campaign against him. The Deep State thought surely Trum would be easier to hate than Nixon and they had already succeeded in a coup against Nixon.
Since Lois Lerner et al and the Clintons and their camarilla skated, I’m not inclined to be magnanimous about this. Job one has to be a tremendous purge of the Department of Justice. Anyone within three steps of Loretta Lynch and and Eric Holder should be made to prove they were not implicated. And, yes, criminal prosecutions. And, yes, an administrative reorganization which will break up that department and break up the FBI (something that will have to await a Republican Congress). Another thing which has to happen is legislation which will allow the President and Congress to injure the courts when they get out of line. Another target has to be the CIA. See Reuel Marc Gerecht on its systemic dysfunctions. Another has to be the federal criminal code. It needs to be scarified and it needs an amendment in its sentencing schedule. Another target is, again, federal prosecutors and the federal judiciary. An end to comprehensive immunity and the institution of an independent ombudsman.
I agree with Art Deco on all of the above comment.
Then I would start moving some agencies out of DC. The EPA could be located in Detroit. Interior in Oklahoma. HHS could be located in Baltimore. That would be close enough for necessary meetings with Congress.
I have been a fan of Gerecht since he wrote “Know Thine Enemy” under the pseudonym, “Unknown.”
“… could help to destroy the peaceful transition process that America has seemingly enjoyed till 2016.”
That died no later than 2000, when the Democrats would not acknowledge that Gore had lost his bid.
“When you strike at a king, you must kill him” Ralph Waldo Emerson
Evidently the plotters in the Obama administration forgot this old saying. If you strike at the king and he survives, the retribution is likely to be terrible.
Dick Illyes: “Academia should be reinvented as a community of scholars who set the standards for academic degrees but who make their livings in the larger commercial society.”
Yep. When I was in school all my geology professors worked for oil or mining companies in the summer. Today, geology professors take sabbaticals to study endangered species or climate change. That’s where the guvmint grant money is.
Yep. When I was in school all my geology professors worked for oil or mining companies in the summer. Today, geology professors take sabbaticals to study endangered species or climate change. That’s where the guvmint grant money is.
The geology department I know best allocated one position (out of about 8) to palaeontology and 1.5 positions to oceans-and-atmospheres (in their case, mostly oceans). There was a volcanologist, some structural geologists, another fellow who specialized in soil. I think the distribution between subfields was pretty antique. One guy had been hired 30-odd years earlier. The paleontologist was fairly new, but she’d replaced someone who’d been hired ca. 1955.
I don’t think anyone should listen to Karl Rove. He was one of GWB’s advisors who encouraged him to take the slings and arrows and not use the bully pulpit to defend himself and his administration. Now, after even worse actions by the left, Rove wants us to make nice and move on. I don’t think so.
First, I think “Never strike a Prince unless you kill him” was Machiavelli.
Second, I think Rove was the mastermind who told Bush to conceal his drunk driving case and that was what led to the tie as religious conservatives stayed home. Bush made himself out to be a religious conservative. Trump did not and they took a chance on a guy who told them the truth.
Susanamantha: Agreed!
I hope and I pray.
Neo’s blog has fascinated me for a long time now. She is a “changer”. Some of her readers and commenters are “changers”.
They are able to say, “I was once a left/ liberal, immersed in that culture, an acolyte of the most sacred teachings, and now I am not; having seen the light and left it behind.”
And so for someone like me, it seems that there is the promise of finally, at long last, leveraging these living human sources in order to gain insight into the “true” and deepest motivations that impel someone to become a progressive.
It’s the promise – so I imagined – that I might finally get a peek into that heretofore hidden metaphysical text which spells it all out, that answers the question: “What are these people really – as in “really really” after?”
I hear terms like “the circle dance”, and I can kind of picture it in my mind. But it has the emotive force of a scrap of paper windblown on the roadside. WTF? Could someone really find that reinforcing? That cannot be the answer.
There’s got to be a text somewhere that has a series of propositions in it, which taken as a collection constitute a doctrine which the leftist or progressive finds so psychologically and intellectually compelling [though he be wrong] that he has no choice but to move toward it, as one seeing Jesus Himself descending from the clouds on a sunny afternoon, and in that moment, knowing that all the moral and metaphysical propositions which you had been encouraged by your teachers to take on faith … were REALLY TRUE.
A “Circle Dance”? Might as well argue that a vision of a dead opossum on the side of the road convinced you to become a progressive.
There is just no intellectually respectable or valid way to get from the “premise” to the professed conclusion.
It is almost as if the mind plays no role at all in the formation of the progressive’s worldview; or of his “tastes” for that matter.
It’s all very frustrating trying to get to the intellectual essence of progressivism. It is as if there is something, an explanation, always slightly beyond the line of sight, or something which recedes just out or reach as you attempt to grasp it.
I have read a lot of Marx’s writings in academic settings and out. I have read a lot of progressive social and economic writing. And I have never been able to grasp the moral or metaphysical premise that seems to be embedded there, which is seemingly assumed but never stated.
Certain scholars of Marxist thought have remarked on the same thing. They have concluded that there is no deductive keystone in the Marxist worldview which morally enables or justifies or serves as the first premise in a scheme of moral imperatives. They say, that it is the very “essence” (if one may use such a word with regard to Marxism) of the Marxist method, to sidestep the notion of first principles. That may be.
Perhaps when analyzing progressivism as a movement, we must pretend like Marx, to have entered history sideways, as if we just happened to have found ourselves in the slipstream of evolution, and then work out our aims, based on our tastes and preferences, from that point.
But the trouble is, what if the circle dance makes no sense either?
No metaphysical first principle. No categorical imperative based on self-evident principles which can be defended as self-evident. And finally, the last straw: not even a “taste” that makes any sense to an outsider.
What the … is going on in the mind of the progressive?
If someone knows, really knows, on the basis of firsthand information, please share it with the rest of us.
Because, if the answer is “you got to feel it inside to know”, then this political project we call the United States, or even civil society itself, is in way more trouble than even the most dreary pessimist could imagine.
Bush made himself out to be a religious conservative.
I’m not seeing any indication that he’s anything but what he said he was. The United Methodist Church has a liberal wing and and evangelical wing. His parents were Episcopalians who acquired their habits of observance before creatures like Paul Moore and James Hashcookies Pike did so much damage. Someone once said of Papa Bush that he gave the impression of a happy man who didn’t give much thought to religion or politics, much less both at the same time. Prior to 1965, you didn’t have to. For a generation after that, the respect for liturgy in Episcopal parishes allowed most of us to ignore the institutional rot. (The post-1965 Roman Catholic liturgies are so grisly the Mass has turned into an occasion for penitential suffering).
DNW, I am one of the changers, but I’m not sure I can answer your question. I think you might be looking for something that isn’t there. As far as I can tell, from my own experience and that of my many friends and family members who are still there, deeply a part of liberal land, it isn’t about thinking at all, it’s about feeling. It just feels so good. You aren’t going to find principles or rational constructions. They aren’t there.
I was brought up into the Democratic party, by a father whose father was a second-generation immigrant and had not gone to college, had struggled all his life, had been a devoted JFK Democrat and had occupied party leadership positions in a rural area. My father was smart like his dad and worked and dreamed and excelled and made it far past his family of origin, but he held onto the politics of his hardscrabble parents. There was a kindness in their views and a hopefulness and optimism that I think he didn’t want to leave behind. (MInd you, they were liberals, not leftists, in the classic sense of liberalism.) Plus, he lost so many friends in WWII and Korea that he became inclined towards a kind of rational pacifism — or not pacifism, he didn’t go that far, but deep reluctance to engage in war at all, ever, unless you absolutely had to — that made sense when Vietnam unrolled itself in all of its horror, and then as the questionable engagements in the middle East kept on presenting themselves later.
To me it was just the air you breathe to be a liberal Democrat. You didn’t consider any other choice. My father was very very very smart indeed. I have no patience with those who say you have to be dumb to be a liberal. Not hardly. But he was from another generation and what is going on now would have been utterly foreign to him. He thought his way into his views and he had tolerance for and interest in those who disagreed with him. It doesn’t work that way now.
But things changed by the time I was maturing. I remember trying to absorb some liberal idea as a very very young person — maybe it was pacifism? I don’t think so, but something like that, something lovely and alluring but utterly improbable if you stopped to think for just one second — and feeling this lift in my heart about how you just had to BELIEVE it, no matter how hard, and then you could get there. It felt amazing to make that leap into believing, and I believe that the magic of that leap is a large part of what keeps so many believing. However, I was seventeen, and even then there was a small barely-heard, ignorable voice in the back of my head saying, “Yeah, but that’s not right. You know it’s not right.” I don’t understand how those who get past seventeen keep on ignoring that voice. That part, I can’t explain — but it’s true that I made it to 40 or so before the cognitive dissonance began to get to me. It’s just that hard to stop thinking what you’ve always thought.
DNW, a lot of the adherence to liberalism has to do with what might be called group affiliation. Assistant Village Idiot has written a fair amount on tribes. Google Search: Tribes @ Assistant Village Idiot.
The first inking I had that political stances might be related to group affiliation, or to membership in a tribe, came in high school. A peer was telling us how his father had signed a petition against the Vietnam War that appeared in the New York Times- along with a group of really cool people.
Come to think of it, Tom Leherer’s song from that era,The Folk Song Army, also indicated to me that group affiliation could also be related to political stances. Or was that vice versa? 🙂
I’m not seeing any indication that he’s anything but what he said he was.
Oh, I didn’t mean he wasn’t but his failure to admit his drunk driving conviction was a near fatal error that I blame on Rove, not Bush. All he had to do was admit he’d sinned and be up front. Instead, it was a late hit by a Democrat activist in Maine. Bush looked like a liar. I think it hurt him with a certain segment of the voters.
One reason Trump is immune to this stuff is that he tells you who he is. It was no accident that a Bush family member came up with that “pussy” tape.
Steve57 — Comey testified that there was SIGINT in some of Hillary’s e-mail. That implicates 18 USC 798(a)(4). There’s 18 USC 1924 regarding storing of classified information at an unauthorized location. There’s also 18 USC 2071 which covers unauthorized removal or destruction of classified material.
It was no accident that a Bush family member came up with that “pussy” tape.
He didn’t, and he lost his job over it.
But the trouble is, what if the circle dance makes no sense either?
DNW: The circle dance does not make sense. The circle dance is an emotional experience, not a logical argument. To get to the bare bones of the Kundera passage neo has quoted:
Circle dancing is magic….and together they formed a single body and a single soul, a single ring and a single dance.
If you have lived much of your life feeling alone and you encounter the feeling of unity, love and purpose in a movement, it’s pretty damn intoxicating. All the more if you are convinced the movement is leading to a better, brighter world for everyone.
Listen to Peter, Paul and Mary sing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and imagine it’s 1963 and you have marched with a quarter million people from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial as part of the Civil Rights Movement. Or maybe you watched on television or just read about it later while playing PP&M in your dorm room.
I’m not trying to convince anyone they should respond that way, but if you do, you do, and it’s powerful stuff.
Neo mentions; I’m starting to experiment with using tags for post content as well as the usual categories.
Both Categories and Tags are top SEO factors, so many WordPress help-sites and independent authors write & rewrite guides on how to use them to ‘bump’ your content – and your site overall – with Google. 10 Best Practices of Using WordPress Tags & Categories for SEO
Google also likes to see old posts receive attention. Updates, running a spellchecker (grammar coach), including new links are ideal. But adding metadata is excellent too. Thus, those who do have a lot of old posts, have a great ready-made SEO-upgrade path, simply in tinkering with what they already wrote.
Tons of tags-plugins in the Repo. You can have a plugin scan for Keywords, and assign them to posts as tags. Of course, it’s still true that to err is human, while to to truly make a hash of everything you’ve ever done, takes a computer. You’ll see these plugins, promising to launch your site into SEO nirvana, at the effortless click of a button.
Google, ‘natch, is on a first-name basis with every one of these ‘magic’ plugins.
Categories are the higher-level metadata, but they don’t have nearly the support & enhancement options that we see for tags.
But then, WordPress got where it is ‘because’, not ‘despite’ that it is itself an unsophisticated & lower-level CMS.
We see that Neo often links to previous posts, as part of a current article. Not only can tags present Relate content links to readers, they can remind the writer of previous similar material too.
A 30 year NSA veteran and “whistleblower,” William Binney, conjectures on how the counterintelligence spying on the Trump campaign might have operated, here.
Art Deco, my old geology school still teaches paleontology, mineralogy, structural geology, and even subsurface mapping, but they are not taught as courses with economic values. No one seems to want to be associated with training people to go out and find oil, gas, or minerals. No, it’s all very intellectually interesting, but don’t sully your hands with putting the info to economic use. Work for the USGS, NOAA, or a museum; not for an oil or mining company.
When I was in school (1950-54) my profs constantly talked about the practical applications of our studies to the exploration for oil, gas, and mines. No more.
(The post-1965 Roman Catholic liturgies are so grisly the Mass has turned into an occasion for penitential suffering). –Art Deco
Indeed. My parochial school jumped right on the Vatican II bandwagon. I never forgot this sing-songy, folk hymn complete with casual cannibalism:
Sons of God, hear his holy Word,
Gather ’round the table of the Lord,
Eat His body, drink His blood,
And we’ll sing a song of love,
Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NlNlRKDFf4
From what I read online, some people remember this fondly. I had my child-like faith then, but it still sounded strange to me. I preferred the old Latin hymns like “Ave Verum Corpus Natum” which we sang at morning mass:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZrJJTZQKlA
The Catholic Church blew it when they dumped the Traditional Latin Mass.
But the trouble is, what if the circle dance makes no sense either?
No metaphysical first principle. No categorical imperative based on self-evident principles which can be defended as self-evident. And finally, the last straw: not even a “taste” that makes any sense to an outsider.
DNW: I wonder how well Christianity circa 50 AD would pass your test.
A Jewish carpenter turns out to be God, is crucified, dies, and is buried. Then, somehow, he resurrects into a new magical body, which not everyone recognizes. He interacts with people and provides miracles. He is in telepathic contact with his faithful and promises to lead them to eternal life in heaven. A mighty religion is born.
I don’t summarize in this manner to be brutal, but to point out Christianity is a peculiar religion. Centuries later some remarkable thinkers like St. Thomas Aquinas put it on a more rational, philosophical basis, but Christianity remains IMO a deeply mystical religion which does not reduce to self-evident principles.
Mrs Whatsit on March 31, 2019 at 8:45 pm at 8:45 pm said:
I appreciate the explanation. It’s one I guess we have seen before, and which is shared by other former and current modern liberals, but one that is difficult to come to terms with for an outsider.
There are though, people, progressive philosophers, who have stated as much in programmatic terms. They state outright that there is no motivating answer of the kind I was hoping for, as an explanation for what they are doing. Richard Rorty is one whom I have mentioned here several times.
His famous indifference to and rejection of “first principles” (in a metaphysical to moral sense) was nicely summed up first hand by our friend here, ‘Kolnai’: with his great story of meeting Rorty personally after a lecture, and Rorty’s subsequent reaction to a mention of Plato.
But I guess I always figure that someone who has been there themselves and can speak in the first person, will come up with a series of once accepted progressive doctrines somewhat akin to the formulas found in the old Baltimore Catechism.
Yes, well, whether one believes in the reality of the Christ, or not, or thinks that Jesus as the Christ is in any way self-evident, there is I think we all recognize a teleology (not just an eschatology) implicit in the early Christian dogmas. Christianity from the earliest days, always advanced so far as I know, what was claimed to be an objective historical and cosmic referent and an ensuing moral code that was held to flow from that referent, and which universally imposed categorical moral obligations on man.
These principles could be clearly formulated, and traced back metaphysically speaking to their origins which ostensibly transcended any subjective taste or preference, in order to “justify” them.
Thus, Gnosticism, for example, with its doctrines of subjectivity, and personal inspiration, was clearly at odds with early Christianity which purported to be based on real history.
I’m arguing the kind of argument that could be made, and that it was intelligible.
Christianity from the earliest days, always advanced so far as I know, what was claimed to be an objective historical and cosmic referent and an ensuing moral code that was held to flow from that referent, and which universally imposed categorical moral obligations on man.
DNW: Boy, I’m not sure what you intended, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t in the ballpark of how I read the New Testament or early Christian history.
Early Christians were on fire with a direct experience of love, of God, of “He is Risen!” that overcame them, that sent them out into the world like lions to face persecution and martyrdom. I don’t believe any teleology, moral code or cosmic referent would explain such behavior. That’s not how humans work.
DNW: To return to the Left… Here’s the ending of Marge Piercy’s “Vida,” a novel, probably the best novel, of the radical New Left about a character loosely based on Bernardine Dohrn — Bill Ayers’ wife.
What swept through us and cast us forward is a force that will gather and rise again. Two steps forward and a step and a half back. I will waste none of my life.
That’s religious talk.
If you want teleology and self-evident principles, the Weather Underground would be glad to oblige. The Weatherfolks were plenty bright and articulate. But that doesn’t explain how hard they worked or the risks they took.
Or how influential they were. Thanks, Bill, for Obama!
Neo, I gather that your interpretation of Barr’s summery of the Meuller report is that all the datapoints that Schiff referenced didn’t actually occur…presumably because Barr says there is no collusion.
The Trump Moscow Project and Trump’s lies about it, the Trump Tower Meeting, Manafort giving polling data to a Russian Operative an lying about it, Flynn undermining US sanctions, etc…were lies.
It’s either that or you don’t thing these things are worthy of investigation. It doesn’t sound like the latter, so I’m guessing you’ve misread the Barr’s summary.
Late back to pay attention, but manju reminds me idiots never revert from their idiot mentality.
Regarding the Democratic Party today (or over the past several decades) and the Democratic Party of the approximately middle two-thirds of the 20th Century, I don’t really see what the mystery is.
The Democratic Party has CHANGED. Utterly. Sure there are some common denominators, but it would NOT be recognizable, not to FDR, not to HST, not to JFK, not to LBJ, not to HHH. I would even venture to say not to Jimmy Carter nor even to WJC.
It has the same name but it is NOT the same party.
Anyone who even vaguely views himself or herself as a “Scoop Jackson Democrat” (or is even a bit more liberal than that) would have (or should have) an almost impossible time trying to reconcile what the Democratic Party (with few exceptions) has become.
The socialist movement did, it must be admitted (it seems to me), achieve quite a lot for the workers in the 20th Century; but the AFL-CIO was organized as a bulwark against the Communist Party. For the workers, but against socialism. It was meant to co-opt socialism. Are you going to tell me that these organizations are for the most part still on-board with the Democrats?
I very much doubt it.
Even dyed in the wool Liberals, I should think, are having second and third thoughts. Dershowitz has been trying to maintain his liberal, pro-American, pro-Consitution, pro-law, pro-reason, pro-sanity credentials in the face of an ever-increasing hostile Democratic-Progressive nexus.
And he, for all his—most laudable, even heroic—efforts (yes I realize he supported Obama; but even the most intelligent and sincere, the best and the brightest among us can be blinded by the light…and by “hope”)—has been shunned by many who not so long ago would have been thinking exactly like him.
The Democratic party has changed. The Democrats have gone insane. And one can blame whomever or whatever; but it doesn’t change the fact that this is no longer even a pro-American party. (Ah but, definition, definitions, definitions—remember Macron’s brilliantly pathetic claim that to be TRULY patriotic, one must NOT even think of putting one’s nation first? Well, it’s a claim that could be fully embraced by the DP, if one is able to turn a blind eye to all those wealthy Democrats who were able to “benefit” from the system(!)).
Me? I blame the generally exemplary view that one must “make things better”. Make one’s community a better place. Make one’s society an improved society. Make one’s country a better place (pace JFK). Make the world a better place (e.g., Peace Corps, etc.)…keeping in mind, though, Reagan’s joke about the thirteen most terrifying words one could ever hear….
But what has happened is that this generally moral, ethical goal has been distorted beyond all recognition. So that one must hold the view that one’s own culture, one’s own society, one’s country is beyond all redemption unless it confesses to its evilness—and one must jettison everything in order to assist the underdog.
(So that everyone vies to be the most victimized underdog. And anyone who has achieved anything by merit and hard work, by entrepreneurship and creativity—but is not considered a victim—is vilified, individually and as a group.)
This extraordinary perversity is “humanism” and “altruism” on steroids and it leads, necessarily to Totalitarianism.
The key word is “perversity”.
(The main problem is, of course, that the humanistic belief was allowed to evolve, if perhaps naturally, to become the view that instead of (or in addition to) individuals making things better, it’s the major role of government to do so, increasingly…resulting in the creation of a monster. Unavoidably. A corrupt, rapacious, power-hungry monster that uses all the right words, all the required jargon but ceases, necessarily, to “make things better”—in fact makes things a whole lot worse.)
This is what the Democratic Party currently represents, unfortunately, until it regains some semblance of balance, of sanity.
Not sure that can happen unless some external catastrophe, alas, brings people to their senses.
No, I don’t see any mystery here.
Regarding the Democratic Party today (or over the past several decades) and the Democratic Party of the approximately middle two-thirds of the 20th Century, I don’t really see what the mystery is.
The Democratic Party is a corporate body formed in 1828 to support a certain collection of interests. The corporate shell remains, but the interests and sentiments change. During the period running from about 1932 to 1994, you had a concatenation of people therein who affiliated for disparate reasons: family history, regional loyalties, ethnic loyalties, patron-client relations (machines), union affiliation, social work interest, social-democratic sentiment, &c. Dispositionally and programatically all over the map.
Around about 1950, you saw the emergence of the influence of the oppositional intelligentsia. It’s been noted that what distinguished Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson was that one was a celebrant of American culture and the other a critic of it. After 1966, you had an escalating anti-patriotic sentiment among committed and elite Democrats. George McGovern, Gary Hart, Michael Dukakis, and Cyrus Vance provide examples of this. (Jimmy Carter was a much more eccentric and ambivalent figure in this regard, but it certainly influenced him). You also had an escalating antagonism to white wage-earners. You had the escalating influence of obnoxious secularism and the escalating hostility to community control (manifest in putting every public policy under judicial review). By 1994, this had succeeded in running out all but an odd minority of white Southerners. Outside the South, organized labor was demographically denuded increasingly composed of (commonly white-collar) public sector employees.
See Michael Lind on this point: the strategy of the Democratic Party by 1994 was crucially dependent on importing voters from Latin America, mobilizing color minorities who were more alienated and less patriotic that the rest of the population, and mobilizing bourgeois types who looked down on ordinary Americans. The programmatic preferences of Democratic officials were fairly uniform by 1995. In recent Congresses, you’ve had 4 Democratic Senators who were dissidents to some degree; none had anything approaching a conservative voting record. It’s not too different in the House.
In 1974, you might have said that the parties were about in equipoise as regards their respect for clean government and procedural norms. Since 1992, we’ve seen in the Democratic Party an inclination to have a protean and improvisational definition of corruption and abuse of power, one which protects Democrats from accountability on every conceivable occasion.
This is Spain, ca. 1933. The Democratic Party and the nexus of interests using it as an electoral vehicle have a disposition toward public life which makes alternation in power and bounded competition simply impossible. This will not end well. (And, truth be told, we all have nothing to say to each other).
No one seems to want to be associated with training people to go out and find oil, gas, or minerals.
There’s a distinction between academic and vocational instruction. Your complaint is that academic departments are behaving like academic departments. You want vocational instruction, set up a school of technology or a school of engineering with the appropriate departments. You can have joint appointments and cross-listed courses with the sister departments in the college of arts and sciences. Let’s posit an economic geology concentration within the geology major which consists of cross-listed courses taught by joint faculty.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there are 38,000 people employed as petroleum engineers or mining engineers. If the ratio of working professionals to annual degree recipients is similar to that of other professions, you should have about 1,700 baccalaureate degrees awarded in petroleum engineering or mining engineering per year. The actual number awarded is about 2,000 per year in these disciplines.
Against that, there are 6,000 degrees awarded in geology. Not sure what the recipients of geology degrees are doing. There are 15,000 people in this country employed as ‘geological and petroleum technicians’. There are about 11,000 post-secondary teachers in the geological sciences.
Richard Saunders, you’re speaking to Choir, bro. I was thinking specifically of 18 USC 793 and Comey’s speech. As I was listening to it, I’m thinking, “You know all this, and here you are not only saying you can’t prove gross negligence you also can’t prove intent?”
I didn’t mean to imply that other laws weren’t in effect.
When I served I didn’t play fast and loose with that kind of information. Too many lives depended on it not getting in the wrong hands.
“Loose lips sink ships.”
The glove has been thrown down.
Let the games begin:
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/ocasio-cortez-rallies-progressives-against-dem-leaders-bid-to-shield-incumbents-from-primary-challengers
File under: Whippersnappers wild!
I disagree with huxley. The Catholic church royally screwed up by keeping the liturgy in Latin. A language that I don’t even understand. A language that most priests during the times of the crusades didn’t understand. They had to have the liturgy explained to them.
So the message was written in a language almost nobody understood. And the result was slaughter. The exact opposite of what my Messiah wanted.
And, BTW, r.e. the crusades. There is nothing holy about war. They could have been justified. In fact, I believe they were, considering the crusades followed four centuries of jihad. But that only means the crusades were necessary. So many things so-called Christians did in the name of my God makes me want to puke.
Barry, I realize I’m going to come across as a jerk. And I’m sure I am. But I believe you mean, “Guantlet.” Not glove.
I will steal everything that works from my enemies and use it against them.
https://www.amazon.com/Shattered-Sword-Untold-Battle-Midway/dp/B002A7BFYQ
Since this about a killing a king…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtLJCbIBPi0
No problem, Steve. You’re right.
Nonetheless…glove, gauntlet. Let’s call the whole thing ON.
(On the other hand, despite the potential entertainment value of the upcoming performance—ranging, no doubt, from awful to sickening—the country needs a decent, principled opposition. Every functioning democracy does. So I hope the Democrats can emerge from this, somehow, and get their act together as a responsible party; not sure I’d put my money on it, though.)
File under: ‘Some say “tomato”; some say “tomato” ‘
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZ3fjQa5Hls
Let’s say we are both right.
A guantlet is a glove. A heavy armored glove.
https://www.history.com/news/what-does-it-mean-to-throw-down-the-gauntlet
Now I know not to pick nits with you.
“One touch of the ironed glove.” That’s how little the Japanese thought of us Americans in the months after Pearl Harbor. But by June 1942 we turned things around. Guadalcanal took longer. They thought we would quite. How little did they know us. We are so blanking serious. We don’t quite. Not then. Not now. Not ever.
The didn’t have a plan B. May we always be blessed with enemies who think they can just wipe us away with a guantlet.
And the thing is, they taught us what a carrier strike from six decks looked like. How did that work out for them? We were like, “OK, we can do that too. And more.”
Quit.
“Shattered Sword” made a good point that the Japanese did not use enough fire prevention measures, like filling gas lines with inert gas, and the fires destroyed the carriers. That might have been the case with Hornet in the Coral Sea, too, but we learned.
I think China and Iran are both headed for serious demographic trouble in a few years. I wonder if they will want to fight a war before that happens? Obama sure gave an impression of weakness. Whatever your opinion of Roosevelt as an economist, and mine is pretty negative, he was a great war president.
The Democrats have tried very hard to make it impossible for Trump to negotiate with potential enemies as they are not sure he will survive as president. That is pretty dangerous.
And Iwo Jima. If that place doesn’t send a shiver down your spine…
Well, we taught ’em not to wake up sleeping dragons….
And then we set the stage for them to become a global economic power—though they worked incredibly hard for it, to be sure.
(No, they couldn’t have picked a better enemy…. Of course, it certainly helped that the USSR had to be contained….)
Most importantly, we taught ’em baseball (not that they showed much gratitude, mind you…. Still attacked us!)
And now, after all that, they’ve decided to throw in the towel (and stop reproducing). Ingrates.
O/T – Just a sec. Hold on. Now that Joe Biden is dead meat, politically, for anyone wondering where he learned some of his by-now famous “moves” the following has just recently been declassified:
https://www.foxnews.com/science/huge-manatee-hugs-florida-woman-flips-her-out-of-water-in-astonishing-underwater-footage
(Or is that “sleeping giants”?….)
No they couldn’t have picked a better Arny.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oUtJxE4sjs
“MSG Roy Benavidez speech 1991”
I still feel pretty good about my Naval service. But we not only have the finest Army and Air Force, We also have the finest Coast Guard and Navy.
Did I leave anyone out?
You know, between the Coast Guard and Navy we’d have the finest
Army and Air Force in the world.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-military/u-s-navy-coast-guard-ships-pass-through-strategic-taiwan-strait-idUSKCN1R50ZB
I don’t think you know how lucky you are. I am eternally grateful for the Marines and Army. And Air Force.
It’s a team effort.
Steve57 — There are probably a lot more laws “The most qualified person ever to run for President” broke. When Comey said “No reasonable prosecutor would have prosecuted Hillary” I almost threw up.
Speaking of handling classified information, remember that poor sailor who was sent to the pen for taking pictures — not transmitting, removing, or storing them — of his workstation? In a very little noticed action, Trump pardoned him in March of last year.
“What the … is going on in the mind of the progressive?” An atavistic reduction (regression) to the Stone Age cavemen social psychology, when social justice was understood in the most simplistic way, as equality and equal sharing of the slaughtered mammoth. This naturally excludes property rights, hierarchies, laws and any selfish or independent behavior. The same psychology can be observed in today kindergartens. Everything more complex began with neolithic revolution, when wealth can be accumulated and instead of small groups about several dozen people the much larger communities emerge, that needed politics, laws, hierarchies of domination and everything else what we call civilization.
Richard, I remember that sailor. Trump was right to pardon him. He was just an idiot. He’s no longer in a position to harm us. But now, you and I are in a position to deal with those people who are.
Word to the wise. When you have access to a nuclear power plant, don’t take pictures of it.
huxley on April 1, 2019 at 1:42 am at 1:42 am said:
“on fire with …” Yes, I’ve read that explanation too. And I suppose some of it comes down to what and who you mean by early Christians, and ‘on fire’.
But it’s pretty plain that the Apostles continue to quote the scriptures in their work as historical and supernatural facts of a public sort, and not just as prophesy; and that Paul, and probably James, make arguments or at least assertions in their epistles in line with the concepts of ‘right reason’ or even natural law: referring to what is ordinate, and proper to its kind, as well as to the purely “spiritual” considerations.
By the time we have seen Jesus identified with the Logos, and that is pretty early on in historical terms, the elements of a cosmic order which imparts a moral order to creatures capable of reasoning and having a specific telos, is I think, pretty well evident in the Christianity of the Patristic writers.
“…But it’s pretty plain that the Apostles continue to quote the scriptures in their work…”
Quibble. They didn’t quote the scripture, if by scripture you mean New Testament. They wrote it.
Steve57 on April 1, 2019 at 9:20 pm at 9:20 pm said:
Hi. No, I did not mean that they were quoting the New Testament.
I meant that the writers of the New Testament quoted the Old.
I was primarily thinking of their quotes/paraphrases of, and references to the texts of the Old Testament and prophets repeated in the Epistles (probably in Acts, too though I cannot think of one offhand.)