Posse Incitatus

May finally out - UK's worst prime minister ever?

Theresa May has finally announced her resignation, ending one of the most sordid and disgraceful governments in British history.

I say this as a student of UK government.  When people think of awful prime ministers, Neville Chamberlain frequently comes to mind, but while Chamberlain's foreign policy was disastrous, he didn't undermine the core values and rights of the British people.

May has done exactly that.  Her nominally "conservative" government has turned a blind eye to rape gangs, stood helplessly as violent crime has surged and instead wastes police resources on censoring people's social media accounts.

Her political prosecution of Tommy Robinson is a national disgrace to the Sceptered Isle.

Electorally, he's wrecked her party and undermined public faith in the government itself.  She lied about holding a snap-election and then lost it.  She lied about implementing Brexit and then lied about its timetable.  

The Tories have lost their way and Nigel Farage's Brexit Party may be the only hope to rebuild British liberty.  

Set against these follies, Chamberlain looks pretty good by comparison.  When he reluctantly stepped aside, his successor faced a dire strategic situation, but at least could look with hope and confidence at the core institutions and society of the United Kingdom.  May's successor won't have that luxury.  Virtually every institution stands discredited.

Good riddens.

BONUS ANGLE:  Her ouster will likely free Donald Trump of any reluctance to expose British involvement in Spygate, particularly collusion between CIA and CGHQ.  I can't help but wonder if Trump's declassification order might have been a factor.

Trump's trade war isn't hurting growth, it's causing it

As if record-low unemployment isn’t enough, President Trump’s economic team is now moving to hit even more Chinese good with hefty tariffs.

According the Chamber of Commerce types, this is a disaster for the common man.  They continue to pitch the Free Trade Lie that tariffs are always and everywhere an unmitigated evil and that allowing countries with distorted economies access to our markets is an unalloyed good.

In truth, tariffs are morally neutral and their utility varies upon the circumstance.  A protective tariff is not only appropriate but necessary when another nation undertakes predatory trading practices. 

Yet the Quisling Never Trumpers and their globalist allies continue to spread the falsehood that boosting the cost of cut-rate consumer goods assembled by slave labor in unsafe and heavily polluting factories is somehow a crime against the free market.

They give the game away when they announce that “American consumers” will pay the heaviest costs.

Nope.  China will.

Consider a tariff that raises the price of toasters by a couple of dollars.  Will that crush the wallets of American workers?  Hardly.  But that incremental increase changes the production curve so that American workers and factories now become more profitable than overseas locations.  This in turn boosts American prosperity and cuts the trade deficit.

Now consider the counter-example, which we lived through for decades:  Toasters get a little cheaper, but the plant employing hundreds of workers has now closed.  So does the steel mill, and the ore mine.

All the businesses that served those workers go next, and soon we are in a downward spiral of collapsing tax revenue, rising welfare costs and increased crime and drug abuse.

This is the world that paid shills like Jonah Goldberg have tried to convince us we want to live in.  It is a world that benefits the elite and crushes everyone else.

Protection for American industry from foreign competition and higher wages for American wages are bedrock principles of the Republican Party dating back to Abraham Lincoln.  It’s strange that so many True Conservatives have turned their backs on them.

Venezuela proves yet again that civilian disarmament empowers tyrants

The bloody uprising in Venezuela provides yet another example of how civilian disarmament does nothing to reduce violence and in fact renders a population helpless to resist tyranny.

There is no disputing either contention here.  Venezuela is one of the most violent places on earth.  Restricting firearms ownership in fact increased crime by allowing criminal elements aligned with the government the ability to act with impunity.

Democrat Congressman and wannabe presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell may have thought he was being clever when he observed that small arms are no match for nuclear weapons, but all his did was showcase his ignorance and bloody-minded willingness to devastate the nation he supposedly serves in order to crush political opposition.

In fact, small arms are far more useful than nuclear weapons to preserve liberty.  Have we learned nothing over the last half-century about insurgent movements?  Small arms an improvised explosives have allowed Afghanistan to defy both superpowers.

It is interesting to note that even during the height of the ISIS insurgency, Iraq’s government refused to ban small arms, instead allowing each family to retain an actual assault rifle (that is to say, fully automatic) for the defense of hearth and home.

I have written this many times, but we do not have a gun problem, we have a mental health problem.  Our schools and mental health professionals are not only failing to help, but actively harming young people.  Social media adds further fuel to the fire, offering would-be killers easy access to attention-seeking media and the promise of posthumus glory.  The New Zealand shooter took this to its logical conclusion by live-streaming his crime.

The subsequent tightening of gun laws will do nothing to stop the next shooter.  No level of gun prohibition will achieve perfect, but each incremental ratchet leave more of society vulnerable to the next attack – or tyranny.

I will also note that such tyranny need not be one based on a minority.  It may (and usually does) take the form of a majority determined to put down a despised minority, be it Jews, Armenians, Christians, or political enemies.

Venezuela was once a prosperous nation and a robust democracy.  Its socialism is entirely democratic of the kind that so many Democrats say they want.

Yet socialism must turn to despotism, and so it has.

And because the people have allowed themselves to become disarmed, they must now pay a far higher cost in blood to redeem their liberty.

About that Trump recession...

It must be tough being Paul Krugman.

Sure, he's probably got a good income, and there are a bunch of beta-boys who seem to hang on his every word.

But he's also wrong almost all the time.  After a while, it doesn't matter how many titles you've accumulated, when push comes to shove you're still a Former Enron Advisor who blows almost every prediction.

Strangely, Donald Trump's economic team seems to be on a hot streak.  It's interesting to contrast the steadiness and competence of this group compared to other parts of the administration.  Still, one can't find fault with the results.

I've said it before, but it bears repeating:  The recession of 2009 didn't end until Trump took office.

Oh, the statisticians cranked out numbers and claimed the economy was growing, but that growth was dwarfed by the increase in the federal debt.  

What Trump's team has done is unleash all that aggregate demand and it is continuing to surge forward.  The US has almost an entire decade of growth to make up, which is why things are going to boom for a while.

Not only that, Trump is changing the rules of the game, bringing manufacturing jobs home.  Those jobs in turn create even more jobs and small towns across the country are seeing the kind of economic revivals we were assured by the likes of Kevin Williamson could never happen.

This is Trump's strongest argument for re-election and one he will hit home again and again.  Whoever he is up against is going to face the question of how many jobs they want to export to Mexico or China.  No amount of smoke-blowing will obscure that fact.

Trump is the worst anti-Semite ever

The left has pretty much given up on argument or debate.  All they have left is smears, and nowhere is the more apparent than in their constant howling that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist/RUSSIAN/anti-Semite.

This high-decibel howling can work for a while, but there comes a point where reality intervenes and then the press looks really, really stupid.

Like now.

It was always stupid for the Democrats to try to play the anti-Semite card on Trump - after all, his daughter converted to to the Jewish faith and his grandchildren are observant Jews.

Hitler this guy is not.

He's also been the best friend Israel has had since Harry Truman.  He moved the US embassy to Jerusalem, has steadfastly supported the Jewish state (reversing Obama's passive-aggressive stance) and recently recognized Israel's legal right to hold the strategic Golan Heights.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged this by calling for a town in the Golan to be named after Trump.

You know, because Trump is such a Jew-hater.

This rote howling and throwing of insults reminds me of the old Soviet Union, where ritual denunciations were commonplace.  I remember being able to do a nice riff (in a Russian accent, of course) where I'd denounce the "imperialist, fascist government of the United States and its running dog lackey European allies."

Maybe you had to be there, but the point was that the insults were pathetic because they were so hollow.

So it is with Trump hatred and the pathetic lie that he isn't the most pro-Jewish president of my lifetime.

Of course, the Dems are desperate to maintain their grip on the Jewish vote, just like they need to convince black people that Trump is a latter-day Klansman.

At some point, however, you'd think these people would come up with something that was so self-evidently stupid.

You'd think that, but you'd be wrong.

Benedict speaks and Notre Dame burns

Over the weekend, word came out that Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI had prepared a 6,000 word essay examining the moral basis for the Catholic Church's sex scandals.

Benedict resigned from the papacy in 2013 and hitherto had remained silent, but the recent revelations - and Pope Francis' bumbling efforts to respond - clearly touched his conscience.

Yesterday we all watched in horror as Notre Dame cathedral in Paris caught fire and burned with incredible ferocity.  While damage assessments are still in progress, it appears that the overall structure remains sound and that most - if not all - of its priceless relics and artifacts survived.

That both of these events would coincide with Holy Week would seem to be no accident.  The crisis within the Church is in many ways analogous to a fire started through carelessness that eventually consumes the structure under repair.

Fire can destroy, but it can also warm and inspire.  Benedict clearly believes that the Church will go on, and this this will be yet another example of how the Church has gone from prosperity to complacency, to decadence and crisis - and then into a period of renewal.

Similarly, it's possible that the danger presented to Notre Dame will help spur the French people and Christians across Europe to reconsider the danger to their illustrious heritage.  Are people really willing to see all that they have known, all that was given to them, wiped out in a consuming fire?  

Much of the talk in France centers on the cathedral's historical and artistic merit, but perhaps people will also consider the faith that went into building it - and can be renewed within it once more.

The Trump Economy

Now that RUSSIA is unwinding, it's interesting to see how Trump's economic policies are helping Main Street Americans.

Economic growth continues to surge while unemployment is cratering.  Not only that, but real wages are rising for the first time in many years.

Strangely, the Federal Reserve took this to mean that inflation was imminent.  The fact that actual wage growth can be misinterpreted in this way speaks volumes about the prejudices of the managerial elites.  They take it as a given that wages should be flat or in decline and that the American economy will be services-oriented from now on.  It cannot enter their Ivy League-brainwashed skulls that by altering trade agreements and slowing immigration, the US economy can both create a resurgence in manufacturing AND raise worker pay.

This is going to make a big difference come election time.  Many of the plant expansions that started last year are only now nearly completion.  By next spring, a new wave of vocational school graduates will be happily making good money at those plants, undermining the traditional Democrat control of the "youth vote."

Indeed, the Dem candidates are continuing to indulge in a terminal virtue cycle that can only end with their self-immolation.  Racial reparations, post-birth abortion, gun confiscation, open borders - it's hard to find a single position these people hold that doesn't command massive majority opposition.

Of course, not all sectors of the economy are booming.  The Quisling Never Trump niche seems to be profoundly overcrowded at the moment and I'm curious as to whether National Review will go down like it rival or purge its ranks ala Red State.  Jonah Goldberg's departure may be a harbinger of things to come.

Why did the Dems pick Russia as the big villain in their Trump conspiracy?

As the Dems continue to gnaw on the putrid entrails of their RUSSIA conspiracy theory, it's worth looking at why RUSSIA was the villain of choice.

There are two reasons for this.

The first is that Democrats always project.  The Clintons famously took a lot of Russian money in the Uranium One affair and the Podestas were deeply involved with Russian oligarchs.  By claiming that Donald Trump was a tool of the Kremlin, this pre-empted him from making the same charge, particularly since the media could be reliably expected to take Clinton's side.

The other reason was to try to demoralize Trump's base.  The Dems have long tried to use false-flag operations to create "principled opposition" within the GOP's ranks.  Indeed, it's since come out that a lot of the social media chatter against Roy Moore in Alabama was actually created by progressives trying to drive down support and turnout by creating the illusion of internal opposition.

Picking RUSSIA as an arch-villain pulling Trump's strings allowed the Dems to use the same strategy and their Quisling Conservatives were happy to jump on board.

Neocon uber-hawks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol and of course John McCain could dust off all the hoary old slogans from the pre-1989 era and argue that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate.

The Dems of course never had a problem with RUSSIA even during the height of the Cold War, but I'm sure they got a kick out of pretending to be McCarthy-ite super-patriots.

Of course, there was nothing to it.  Having read some of the commentary by Trump's legal team, it seems likely that the Mueller report's 300 pages are mostly exhibits (transcripts, documents, and the like) to back up a fairly short summary of the findings.  Some of this will be redacted, but the core content will confirm Trump's innocence because he is innocent.

What will be interesting is what else we learn regarding the investigation, in particular the still-secret instructions given to Rosenstein.  Speaking of which, didn't he resign?  Why is he still hanging around?

The investigation into the real scandal is just beginning and I expect the Dems will rue the day that they picked this particular hill to fight on.

Traditionalists in the United Methodist Church hold firm

This story is a couple of weeks old, but bears further examination.

For the first time, the traditionalists in a mainline Protestant denomination have forced a halt to the watering down of their theology and a total embrace of political correctness.

The Atlantic describing this as "conservatives taking back the church," which appears to be yet another variation on the old "conservatives pounce!" but in fact all that happened is that the majority of delegates refused to cave in to their liberal win.

It wasn't a counterattack, just a spirited defense, but that now counts as aggression.

The article notes that a schism is still likely, but instead of traditionalists pulling out, it will likely be the progressives who leave.  They are so invested in their theology of sexual license that there can be no compromise.

A decisive factor in the vote was the unwillingness of traditional congregations outside the US to embrace dressing up Western decadence and depravity as Christian virtue.  Like many churches, the United Methodists have been sending missionaries around the world for a long time.  Those missions have born fruit and while the American core is falling into heresy, the periphery remains true to their doctrine.

A similar dynamic is at work in the Anglican communion.  The Church of England has gone all-in on progressivism, even coming up with liturgies to feed the delusions of the mentally ill.  The other provinces, however, are not willing to accommodate this and other depravities.  A split there seems inevitable.

The core problem is that progressivism makes for a lousy religion.  It is constantly evolving and changing based on political need and cultural impulse.  The compulsion to signal virtue by coming up with ever-newer fads is anathema to maintaining a timeless and eternal way of describing the universe.

Churches are supposed to provide rules for a lifetime - and beyond.  Progressivism can't even go a decade without repudiating core beliefs in favor of newer ones that are ever more "woke."

As I said, this isn't a counterattack so much as a desperate defense that succeeded after years of assault.  The next challenge will be to see how the UMC enforces its doctrine.  To this point, it hasn't, which is why there are a number of homosexual clergy who are quite happy to perform unauthorized ceremonies - and to do this with impunity.

The Methodists have halted the flooding on their ship.  What now remains to be seen is whether they can pump out all the water that's already aboard.

With their victory, Democrat anti-Semites will only become louder and more confident

There's a personality type that can't simply accept the win with dignity.  They have exult, preen and boast after every victory.

This can be a problem, however, when the victory is supposed to be downplayed.

For example, the Democrats have long pretended that anti-Semites only existed on the right (just as they pretended that the KKK all joined the GOP in 1968).

They were able to get away with this charade because the media steadfastly ignored examples of leftwing anti-Semitism and their own Jew-hating allies know how to keep their remarks on the downlow.

To be sure, there were provocations from time to time, but nothing that their media allies couldn't cover up.

That time is now past, and it is precisely because the new generation of Jew haters are actually proud of the distinction and want to world to know what they think. 

It is ironic that these people won't shut up because of another Democrat belief - that of the virtue of ignorant youth.  Alexandria Occaiso-Cortes and her fellow freshman believe that their youth and inexperience make them morally superior to the leaders of the caucus.  They believe that far from owing deference to their elders, their elders actually owe deference to them.

Nancy Pelosi was able to keep a lid on this, but Ilhan Omar was always a loose cannon, beholden to none.  She'd smear Jews, apologize, and then go do it again.  I'm sure she found this hokey-pokey style of discussion tedious and was willing to finally give it up so she could air her full-throated hatred of Zion and the hook-nosed blood-drinkers therein.

To their great discredit, the Democrat leadership caved.

Expect the statements to grow more strident as victorious anti-Semites consolidate their position.  I anticipate a plank in the 2020 platform endorsing both the Boycott Divest and Sanction movement as well as the "Zionism is Racism" United Nations resolution.

When that happens, the Trumpening will have yet another Great Reveal to its credit.  While alarming, this reckoning is also absolutely necessary.  Only after we know the full scope of the problem can we solve it.