Posse Incitatus

Trump to Pelosi: If you want a junket, fly commercial

Over most of my life, the left has diligently worked to erode the unwritten customs that have sustained the Republic.

Each time they have flouted a long-standing convention, they've been careful to note that no laws were broken, or if they were, the was (as Al Gore put it) "no controlling legal authority."

At the same time, they've constantly harped on how each and every GOP move has violated this or that ancient custom.  With Donald Trump, they went positively bonkers, howling that his very presence in the Oval Office was an offense against everything Americans hold dear.

Of course, they did this all the while running a grossly illegal surveillance operation followed by a blatant coverup disguised as an investigation.

Much of the federal government is currently idle.  This is supposedly a crisis, but not enough of a crisis that Nancy Pelosi and a number of Congressional Democrats would be willing to postpone or cancel their seven-day world tour using US military aircraft. 

As all know by now, Trump put the kibosh on it.

What is noteworthy is that once again, Trump is answering the left's discourtesy with discourtesy of his own.  The GOP Establishment has never dared to do this, instead preferring to play the noble loser.

Their explanation was that someone had to uphold the ancient norms, but of course allowing one side to run over them did the exact opposite.  It is only through reciprocity that both sides have a reason to follow the unwritten rules of courtesy.

Pelosi and the Dems have just learned an important lesson:  Trump is playing for keeps.  He's done trying to be conciliatory and for all that they deride him as the second coming of Hitler, refusing free first-class air travel via the Air Force is hardly Kristallnacht. 

Theresa May's Brexit debacle

It is fascinating to see how many of the allegedly competent establishment politicians are in fact staggeringly incompetent.

Emmanuel Macron has managed to create persistent unrest in France.  Despite his earlier policy surrender, the popular anger shows no signs of abating.

Angela Merkel is Germany's first lame-duck Chancellor.  She's still clinging to office, but her abysmal electoral performance resulted in her resignation as the head of her party.  It's a pretty damning indictment that most of her final term in office will be as a "caretaker."

Then there's the UK.  The British are often the forerunner of popular movements, both good and bad.   Just as Thatcher's rise heralded the Reagan revolution, so Brexit anticipated the Trumpening.

But Theresa May has proven herself one of the most inept politicians in British history.  She inherited a solid majority which she pissed away and a botched snap-election.  She then negotiated a Brexit deal that was voted down by the largest margin in modern British electoral history.

The next step is likely a vote of confidence on her creaky minority government.  The Ulster Unionists who've been propping her up have been getting treated like crap and are likely to tell her to piss off.

This would lead to a bit by Labour to form a government, which will likely fail, bringing on a general election that would certain favor the Reds.

I've long since come to realize that sometimes people can't be saved from themselves.  A Corbin-led government would give the UK as much socialism as it could handle and wreak ruin on the nation, but maybe that's what the Brits need. 

Meanwhile, the fall of May's government would also free President Trump to declassify documents relating to the bogus RUSSIA investigation - a step he backed away from after the British and Aussies begged him to.  With May's government a smoking ruin, there's little reason for him to offer deference at this late date.

Each one of these three leaders - May, Macron, Merkel - were held up as the anti-Trump, the globalist alternative that would save the world from the horror of the deplorables taking control.

And yet, all of them have failed by any objective measure.  The nations now powering ahead are the ones who have heeded the call of their people to stand up for their nation rather than interests of their own elite class.

The political establishment has proven they are unworthy of any deference.  The sooner they are swept away entirely, the better.

Gillette: We don't want to sell razors to men with enough testosterone to actually grow beards

I'd seen some of the buzz about the infamous Gillette commercial and figured "How bad can it be?"

The answer:  Stupid bad.

I've been a steady customer pretty much since my fast-growing beard started coming in my senior year of high school.  I don't go in for anything fancy, just the no-frills disposable model.  Two blades seem to get the job done.

But I guess that's over now.  Gillette's commercial explained to me in clear, unambiguous terms that I'm not wanted as a customer.  The notion of letting children work out things on their own is apparently verboten.  Gillette only wants to sell razors to helicopter dads who want to stunt their sons' development.

Of course, "suicide by wokeness" is nothing new.  We've watched other businesses do it.  I'm just curious as to what kind of jacked-up market analysis persuaded Gillette's management that this was a good idea.

Politically correct men come in two categories:  those without enough T to grow beards, and neckbeard-wearing noodle-arms who obviously don't buy razors.

Not a lot of growth potential in this bunch.

You know who does buy razors?  Military guys.  It's in the regs.  They have to be clean-shaven.  Oddly, they aren't a bunch of limp-wristed eunuchs who buy into feminist-ally self-loathing.

Even if they're trying to win over the Sneaky Fucker abusive-guy-pretending-to-be-a-friend-of-women market segment, Joss Whedon actually sports a beard.  Think about it.

Since I tend to buy in bulk and my stockpile is adequate, the effect of my boycott won't be felt immediately.  But that's okay.  I got plenty of shaving yet to do - without Gillette.

The Dems have betrayed just about everything they ever believed

One of the interesting things about getting older is that personal memories stretch back into periods that are increasingly regarded as "history."

Of course we have lots of books and now even videos to document what was, but no written (or video) account can replicate the immediacy of seeing events as they happened.

I'm not an old man (yet), but already I feel like an age of the world has passed.  Yes, I was literally born in a previous century, but the political landscape is unrecognizable from what it was only a quarter century ago. 

The media blames this on radicalized Republicans, but in fact it's the Democrats who have now repudiated almost their entire party platform from my youth.  The GOP has made changes as well, but mostly these are in response to massive lurches from the opposition.

Once upon a time, there were these strange creatures called "pro-life Democrats," and they included prominent figures among them.  Bill Clinton famously said abortion should be "safe, legal, and rare."  Abortion was lawful, but a tragedy and people of good will should work hard so that it rarely if ever happened.

But now of course it's a great thing, and billion-dollar industry profits not only off of the wholesale murder of America's youth, but from the sales of the unborn corpses as well.  Hypocrites like Nancy Pelosi can hide behind the "seamless garment" mumbo-jumbo to defend their betrayal of the Catholic faith, but on what grounds does she excuse cannibalizing unborn children for spare parts?

Democrats used to be the party of the blue-collar working class.  Now they despise manual labor as a past time, and also the very masculinity that supports and sustains it.  The party that once ranged itself against Big Business is now a slave to it, beholden to dot-com billionaires who want endless streams of indentured low-wage servants to code their platforms and support their server farms.

The southern border was once a prime concern of the Democrats, and there's plenty of tape showing Bill Clinton, Chuck Schumer and other luminaries demanding stronger safeguards to protect American workers.

Now those same sentiments are "racist" or "immoral" and what America really needs is an endless flood of human trafficking, smuggled drugs and unskilled labor to drive down wages.

Free speech was something the Dems loved, but now they hate it.  The old ACLU was willing to sue on behalf on Nazis; the new ACLU thinks that "hate speech" shouldn't be protected.

Similarly, the Dems once supported due process for people accused of crimes.  Now they and their ACLU allies think it's more important to get convictions than defend the presumption of innocence.

I remember when John F. Kennedy was a symbol of religious integration, and his election as president was hailed as triumph over Protestant bigotry.  But now the Dems are the ones pushing anti-Catholic bigotry and suggesting that people of certain faiths are unsuitable for public office.

One of those suspect faiths is also Judaism.  The Democrat party is still the home for the vast majority of the Jewish electorate, but they can't sit along side anti-Semites indefinitely.  At some point the Jews will be expelled from the party, which will fully embrace anti-Israel policies it's currently flirting with.

I also can remember when Democrats shouted "keep government out of the bedroom!"  Now they want it there on a continual basis to document everything that could possibly happen.

In the 80s it was no one's business what consenting adults do, but now the very notion of whether women can consent at all is in play.

Democrat feminism went from "I am woman, hear me roar!" to "I'm a snowflake, and even the slightest pressure will cause me to knuckle under to patriarchy."  Hillary Clinton's bitter speech that GOP women vote the way their menfolk say they should was a total repudiation of Democrat feminism.  Indeed, one could make the case for repealing the Nineteenth Amendment simply by quoting modern feminists.

Ronald Reagan famously said that he didn't leave the Democrats; they were the ones who left him.

Compared to what has happened since my youth, the change he saw was incremental.  Other than the name, it's hard to recognize anything a Democrat of 1980 would have in common with one today.

 

Trump's eight minutes of blunt truth

I did not watch President Trump's speech live, but saw it shortly after it was given. 

Having seen it, I can understand why Democrat-supporting media were reluctant to carry it and why so many of them went into fits afterwards.

It was a short, powerful message built on an unquestionable foundation of truth.

Trump's proposition is a simple one:  are we nation of laws?  Are we a nation at all?

The Democrats want to answer "no" to both questions, but can't do so in public and remain a viable political party.  So they lie, generate fake news and hope that somehow their water-carriers in the media will move enough public opinion to get them out of this scrape.

But there is no easy out.  Not now.

As I pointed out before, we have now run out of slack in the federal payroll system.  Despite lies you may have seen from Democrats, no government worker has yet missed a paycheck.

That is about to change.

When it does, the furloughed federal workers will have to wonder why they are losing their pay.  Sure, most dislike Trump, but not enough to go without pay to deny him a compartively tiny $6 billion appropriation.  That amount is a rounding error in the vast federal budget.

Other programs are also going to start feeling the effect of the shutdown, including food stamps.  

It surely doesn't help matters that the Democrat "Green New Deal" will cost thousands of times as much as Trump's wall barrier.

I think Chuck and Nancy know they goofed.  Trump used his bully pulpit to devastating effect and he will continue to do so.  The fact that he actually low-balled the violence associated with illegal entries shows just how bad the situation really is.

So does the fact that CBS felt the need to drop that inconvenient truth.

Typically, when the Dems are getting clobbered on an issue, they change the subject.  The problem here is that going back to Mueller for more leaked lies or some sham indictments of RUSSIAN shell corporations won't resolve the budget impasse. 

This has long been the fatal flaw of Democrat strategy: you can only spin you way out of so much.

Chuck and Nancy may well want to get out of this and focus on other, potentially more fruitful lines of attack, but they can't do so without caving in to Trump.

The overlooked equal and opposite reaction

I've been reading up on the events leading to what we may soon have to call the first American Civil War and have picked up on a number of factors I had previously overlooked.

For example, most accounts focus on the intense belligerence of the Southern states and their threats to secede following by the actual act.

What they leave out is that Northern states were issuing parallel proclamations and declaring their willingness to fight to keep the Union intact.  The South shouldn't have been surprised by the federal unwillingness to either abandon key forts (like Sumter) nor its decision to fight.  The Northern states had been preaching it as loudly as they could. 

In an era where the primary military forces were state-supported, the resolutions passed by Northern legislatures authorizing military forces in advance of any federal request should have spoken volumes about what was to come, but it was ignored.

I think the modern Democrats are making the same mistake as the Democrats of 1860 regarding the will of their opponents not only to resist but counterattack.  Beltway conservatives are widely (and correctly) regarded as effete squishes who actively seek the favor of their erstwhile rivals.  This surely convinces the Democrats that they can push as hard as they want for raw power and all they'll get in response is clucking about "coarsening discourse."

Mitt Romney is a classic example of this, and his pathetic broadside at President Trump was also a white flag being waved at the Dems in advance of anything they might do.  The message was sent and received.

But Mitt Romney doens't speak for the party, only a tiny Beltway-based sliver of it.  Dems who assume they can continue to harass people, state police-sanctioned riots and otherwise flout the law are only building up reciprocal energy that will come back at them with a vengeance.

Just as in 1860, Democrat vitriol produces and equal and opposite reaction.  Just as then, the Dems don't seem to notice it, and they likely won't until it's too late for everyone.

Greenpeace turns to shipbreakers of Bangladesh to scrap flagship Rainbow Warrior

For a while I've been chronicling the rot among various (formerly) respected institutions.  Today's example (via Ace of Spades) is the story of how nominally environmentalist organization Greenpeace decided to dispose of its iconic flagship by using the infamous shipbreakers of Bangladesh.

Greenpeace apparently leaked the story in November, hoping to bury it and avoid bad publicity.  One might think that one of the premier environmental organizations doing something like this would be news, but one would be wrong.  Leftist journalists (and their editors) have their priorities.  They increasingly see themselves not as conveyors of information but rather gate-keepers whose job is to boost their cause and political interests.

One can read the lame excuses of Greenpeace at the link, but it's entirely insincere.

For a long time Greenpeace's core mission has been fund-raising with a little virtue-signalling thrown in.  Actual environmental improvement, sound conservation practices - these things are for the little people. 

Thus, when the Rainbow Warrior II had reached the end of its operational lifespan, the suits who run the organization wanted to get rid of the hulk as cheaply as possible.  That pointed to the hideously unsafe and environmentally toxic beaches of Bangladesh. 

Of course, one might think that since Greenpeace has specifically targeted this practice for condemnation, they'd have enough institutional self-awareness not to do it.  One might think that, but one would be wrong.

This could have been a teaching moment, and the recycling of the Rainbow Warrior II could have been an excellent fund-raising opportunity for the organization.  Heck, they could have made trinkets out of the hulks various parts and sold them off at an obscene profit.

But they didn't because like most institutions today they suffer from the twin handicaps of short-sighted thinking and a lack of basic competence.  I'm reasonably certain that the entire "business" side of the organization consists of earnest upper-middle class kids who breezed their way through school on the backs of tutors and degree programs based on "building awareness" rather than any sort of critical thinking.

Such creatures typically end up at trendy non-profits and rely on an ossified donor base to insulate them from the real-world consequences of bad decision-making.

The problem is that eventually, stupid will win.  The decision by environmentalists to ally with corporate globalists is a prime example.  One cannot claim to favor protecting the environment and still support the free flow of capital to third-world hellholes with no environmental protections.  China's air is literally toxic, and this is deliberate policy of their government to achieve economic growth.

Each time a leftist-dominated state like California passes "clean energy" legislation, everyone knows production will simply move offshore to avoid the rules and exploit cheap labor.

Blue-collar workers have already figured this one out.  It's an open question whether their college-educated "betters" will have the brain power to do likewise.

How many times will gun control fail before its supporters admit it doesn't work?

Actually the title is a trick question.  Gun control supporters stopped caring about whether it worked a long time ago.  They new push it as a way to signal their virtue and punish people they don't like.

They don't give a damn whether it saves a single life or costs hundreds of additional ones.

But for those who live in an evidence-based world, here's the latest news from gun control paradise (via the hated Instapundit):

Chief constable Andy Cooke, the national police lead for serious and organised crime, said law enforcement had seen an increased supply of guns over the past year, and feared that it would continue in 2019.

I am of course referring to the UK, which for the last two decades at least has been the gold standard for gun control zealots.

Of course, things aren't working out the way they are supposed to in ol' Blighty.  Violent crime is soaring.  It's hard to say how bad it really is, since official figures have been doctored for a while.  This passage is particularly revealing, though:

Cooke said that the dynamics of the streets of British cities had changed and that criminals were more willing to use guns: “If they bring them in people will buy them. It’s a kudos thing for organised criminals.” [Emphasis added]

Ya think?  Michigan just abandoned the war on marijuana for essentially the same reason.  Marijuana is something people can grow themselves and they are willing to break the law to get it.  After spending countless millions of dollars trying in vain to fight it, people have finally decided to give up.

The next paragraph is also pretty telling:

He said said one factor was a reduction in police proactive work because of government budget cuts leading to big falls in officer numbers: “The ability of law enforcement to respond to this rise in the criminal use of firearms has been hampered by the large reduction in police officers and the resultant diminishing of proactive capability to keep these criminals on the back foot.” [Emphasis added]

I emphasized that section because we also know that the UK police are spending a massive amount of time on Twitter and Facebook telling people to stop using naughty words.  So maybe it isn't budget cuts but the fact that too many bobbies are handing out tickets for being impolite rather than working on more serious crimes?

In any event, the failure of gun control in the UK clearly demonstrates why it would never were here.  The UK is an island, which should make gun smuggling devilishly difficult.  The gun supply there was never that large thanks to it being a stratified, urban society.

And yet, despite both of those advantages and having close-captioned tv cameras on every corner, still the supply of illegal guns is going up.

It's a puzzler, ain't it?

Could Trump's shutdown be the end of failure theater?

The prevalence of government shutdowns are a key indicator of the breakdown of the political system.  Such impasses were formerly rare because the system itself prevented them.

Under the now almost-forgotten legislative procedure known as "regular order," bills for each department were generated at the start of the year.  These passed through committees, were marked up, modified and passed by each chamber in turn.  If there were differences between them, a conference committee reconciled them and the final bill was presented to the president for his signature.

A failure at any point in this process would result in a loss of funding for a single department.  The limited scope of the bill provided a check on non-related items, though of course these "riders" were still added in.

The system was far from corruption-free, but it at least had the virtue of keeping the lights on year after year.

When the Democrats gained control of Congress under Dubya, this system went out the window in exchange for massive, impenetrable "omnibus" bills that covered everything under the sun.  The entire discretionary federal budget was "take it or leave it."  Mostly, it was taken.

Among the many lies the GOP Establishment told its base when it sought to regain control of Congress was the fable that "regular order" would return.  Clearly, this hasn't happened and it was never meant to happen.  For all his pathetic excuses, Paul Ryan at least had the power to sort out budget bills, but this was a hill he never intended to fight on, let alone die.

This is because omnibus bills allow the GOP to vote for things it knows its base hates but that its corporate masters like.  The looming threat of a (partial) government shutdown gave the GOP Establishment at every level the perfect excuse to cave into Democrats.  Dubya signed it because he was too responsible to harm the nation.

The GOP House and Senate flirted with it under Obama, but mostly Ted Cruz was being an opportunist.  No actual concessions were wanted and none were gained.

And so here we are again, but this time may be different.  Donald Trump can take or leave the job and if he wants a second term, he needs wall funding.

He also has a higher pain threshold than anyone in DC.  That is why the shutdown continues.

Chuck Schumer and the Democrats have a fascinating dilemma.  They can cave now and give the new Democrat-controlled House of Representatives a clean slate to torment Trump over the next year, or they can hand Speaker Pelosi a steaming dog turd on her very first day in the big chair.  Of course, the Dems could but all sorts of goofy crap in the bill that the GOP Senate would then be compelled to strip out, but doing so would immediately mark Pelosi's restored reign as unserious.

Alternatively, they could go all-in, and it's hard to think of a less auspicious look for the 2020 Democrat contenders than forcing federal employees to endure payless paydays because they hate border security.

Trump knows this, which is why he timed the shutdown for now rather than earlier in December.  Had he held firm earlier, the payless paydays would have hit during the Christmas-New Year week, which would be horrific optics.   Pelosi's speakership would still be a distant future event, not a looming one.

But now all of these lines are converging and Trump loves nothing so much as creating chaos and forcing his opponent to figure out how to deal with it.

As a final added bonus, the Mueller witch-hunt will be a secondary consideration at best.  Lots of Democrat cultists are ready for the House to impeach him as soon as the Dem majority is sworn in.  A shutdown federal government with unpaid civil servants will make this an even more dubious strategy, since it will demonstrate to the world that the Dems are more interested in getting Trump than funding the government or border security.

President Trump consistently traps his opponents into lose-lose situations.  When Trump can't arrange that, he shifts terrain (usually to the dismay of his supporters), but such shifts are only short-term.  The master strategist has been maneuvering for a while and it will be fascinating to see his next move.

The Syrian pullout

Today President Trump announced that US forces would be withdrawing from Syria.  Their exact numbers and locations have been a closely-guarded secret ever since the Obama administration was forced to re-enter Iraq following the rise of the Islamic State, so it's hard to say how quickly (or completely) they are leaving.

But Trump has been clear:  we are leaving.

Naturally, the people who write about war for a living are upset.  Note that the vast majority of these people have not - and never intend to - actually fight in a war, but they are absolutely certain that endless American combat operations are a great idea.

News coverage is uniformly negative, of course, because Americans should keep on fight and dying in a country we aren't at war with and haven't formally invaded.  And this should go on forever.

It's almost as if that whole "give peace a chance/no blood for oil" line was total bullshit.

It's no coincidence that those beating the drums loudest for endless combat operations are also the biggest fans of the late, unlamented The Weekly Standard.   Their strident opposition tells us Trump is doing the right thing since they are uniformly wrong about everything they advocate.

Some might wonder who will occupy the power vacuum left by America's departure.  It will likely be Bashar Assad, who is still the nominal ruler of Syria.  Some of the uber-hawks naturally want to overthrow him so that the US can maintain a third shit-show of a country.  In reality, the Islamic State has been whipped pretty hard and if it rises again, we can smack it around some more.

This is the classical way to deal with piracy and unsavory actors: punitive expeditions.  It's clear that Trump's "principled realism" is based on the notion that we will never be loved and will never turn the world into upstate Vermont.  What we can do is hammer the ever-living crap out people who displease us, which is a far more reliable (and less expensive) form of deterrence.

Indeed, I admit that was what I expected in both Afghanistan and Iraq:  crack some skulls, kill the leaders, and then set up reasonably reliable strong men to keep order as we go home.   Instead, we have a war in Afghanistan that has dragged on so long, GIs who enlisted after 9/11 will be able to collect full retirement pay before it ends. 

This is insane, and why the Bush family is just as culpable as the feckless Obama crew.

Trump understands this and that's why his goal is to pull back our exhausted and overextended forces, regroup them and at the same time maintain a powerful force in being in case anyone gets ideas.

It's intelligent, sustainable and wise, which is why the usual suspects hate it.