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. 

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.

 

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.

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.

The Weekly Standard dies a much-deserved death

I've been away from the ranch for a few days, so I was unable to comment on the timely death of The Weekly Standard on Friday.

As a Christian, I derive no pleasure from the thought of people desperately seeking work during the season of Advent.  I have myself experienced a layoff at exactly this time of year and it sucks.

Yet while the timing stinks, the deed was entirely necessary and proper.  As I've repeatedly noted, the magazine served no useful purpose.  It was a low-calorie version of Trump hate and the artificial sweetener simply couldn't cut it when compared to the real thing.

I've also been interested to see how the same people who continue to extol the virtues of "free trade" are suddenly angry with capitalism for allowing members of their protected class to finally take it in the shorts like the rest of us. 

When tens of thousands of blue-collar workers lost their livelihoods and whole communities withered away,  Conservatism, Inc. had zero sympathy for them.  Indeed, the demise of an obscure magazine with perhaps a few dozen employees is getting far more ink than far larger layoffs. 

What goes around, comes around, I guess.

Another lesson learned is that - as I've also pointed out repeatedly - the employees of the magazine worked for pay, not out of ideological conviction.

And now that their gig is going south, they have zero problem with whoring themselves out to leftists and/or corrupt Middle Eastern potentates.

Unfortunately, the more crooked cash these courtesans take, the less anyone will care what they have to say.  Their entire gig was predicated on the notion that they were actually true believers.  Without that, they're not even decent fifth-columnist shills.

Let's face it, the economic value of Quisling Never Trumpers is pretty close to zero. 

See, the free market does work.

 

Deathwatch for the Weekly Standard

I'm a bit late to the story, but for the last few days, ominous reports have been circulating that the formerly conservative magazine turned Quisling Never Trumper broadsheet is in the brink of collapse.

For those needing a heavy dose of Schadenfreude, look no further.

The larger lesson, though, is that the market is saturated with anti-Trump propaganda.  The novelty of True! Conservatives! trashing him has gotten old.

Of course, the left loves to host traitors on their panel discussions, but serving as the Democrats' trained seals, barking at Trump on command, doesn't cover the payroll.

Back in the day, political magazines covered the ideological spectrum.  On the solid left one had Mother Jones and the The Nation.  The center-left was held by The New Republic with The Atlantic straddling the line.  These were balanced by The Weekly Standard and National Review, with Reason representing the libertarian fringe.

In recent years, everyone drifted left.  Reason (and its libertarian backers) clearly decided that drugs trumped everything else and went all-in on Obama.  Similarly, The New Republic and The Atlantic abandoned their old pragmatic roots and become nothing more than print versions of The Huffington Post.

This should have been an opportunity for the remaining righty publications, but they squandered it.  Kristol began pushing "big government conservatism," which translated into endless war and unlimited immigration combined with outsourced jobs.

This left National Review, which at least made a show of opposing immigration and defending traditional marriage, but even there they ultimately caved in.  In fact, they not only caved in, but fired their most interesting writers in their desire to curry favor with progressives.

It's not clear what either nominally conservative magazine was thinking (assuming they were), but the end result was that they were marketing themselves as the "diet" versions of hard-left magazines.  Given the choice, the core progressive readership chose to go with the full-strength version of Trump-hate, not the low-calorie variety.

At the same time, the uniqueness of the publications was lost.  They became yet another source of anti-Trump screeds, which can be had for free.  So why bother to subscribe?

The failure of The Weekly Standard is proof that the people in charge don't always know what they are doing.  The right has invested the free market with almost mystical powers, but in fact the people who make decisions there are just as prone to mistakes as anyone else. 

In fact, they're more prone, because so many of them are legacy holdovers from a bygone era.

There are rumblings that other leftist outlets like Vox and The Huffington Post are also facing a financial pinch, making it even less likely TWS will survive.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people.

George H. W. Bush and the collapse of conservative intellectuals

When I heard George H.W. Bush had died, I wasn't surprised.  His wife had passed earlier this year and couples who have spent a lifetime together literally can't live without each other. 

My esteemed co-blogger has offered a first-rate consideration of the man's life and legacy.  I have nothing to add to the topic, save to note the absolute collapse of the conservative movement's intellectual wing.

During the 1980s there were vibrant and spirited debates with a number of keen intellects arguing about the future of conservatism.  Most of those voices have passed on, and publications like National Review and The Weekly Standard have since become pale imitations of the Huffington Post.

I've noted before how the current crop of senior thought-leaders are not only incapable of an intellectual argument, but demonstrably incompetent. 

Someone like Max Boot howling about RUSSIA would literally have been thrown of the stage by William F. Buckley.  Henry Kissinger would dismiss him with a wave of his hand.  Thomas Sowell could crush him in less than a minute.

I haven't been paying attention to the news much, but I see over the weekend, NPR ran an article that collapsed almost immediately, yet the Quisling Never Trumpers fastened on it like a lamprey on a lake trout.    Jonah Goldberg in particular was on it.

This is remarkable given that Goldberg's parent publication has been calling for the abolition of public radio for decades.  The bias of public broadcasting has been a recurring theme of years, and yet here was a National Review stalwart now citing in his bizarre jihad against another Republican.

Of course, having been exposed as dupe of the left, Goldberg expressed zero remorse because he does what he's paid to do and he loathes his readers.

Thirty years ago, that wasn't the case, and the fact of the matter is that Bush the Elder was far more savvy and capable than his son - just as the previous generation of establishment conservatives could run rings around the legacy hires filling their seats today.

Hillary's latest idea: Maybe open borders doesn't work

 

In a functional democratic political system, ideology necessarily yields to the will of the majority.

This is how parties change their platform over time as new issues rise and old issues fade.  Unlimited silver coinage doesn't have much of a following these days, but little over a century ago it was a hot topic.

One of the signs that the US political system was breaking down was the fact that neither political party seemed willing to address the issues that actually mattered to the electorate - specifically outsourcing and immigration.

Donald Trump won the GOP primary and then the general election because he was the only one of 18 candidates to take on these issues.  His personal popularity was always secondary to the popularity of his issues.  It was a mark of how thoroughly dominated both parties are by business interests and ideologues that so few politicians were willing to co-opt his positions.

Yet that may finally be changing.  Via the Belmont Club we learn that Hillary is suddenly reconsidering her loyalty to open borders dogma:

Plagiarism is the sincerest form of imitation. Clinton's realization that mass immigration must be adapted to suit the actual conditions is a sign that the populist revolution, though it may be checked or superseded, has left an indelible mark. Trump may be impeached, though probably not convicted, in the coming months; certainly he will, like all mortal flesh, eventually fade away. But there's no denying time has moved the needle and there is no way back to the global world paradigm of 2016.

One would be tempted to cite this as proof that Hillary has no moral core, but that was never in doubt.  The fact that a major Democrat figure is now considering reversing what was a core tenet of the faith shows that America's political system may yet have hope.

The situation is Europe is not nearly so rosy.  In the UK, the establishment seems determined to fight to the death rather than implement Brexit.  Similarly, Angela Merkel has decided that she can finally sound off on the evils of nationalism since she's no longer accountable to voters. 

While the New York Times may run with these salacious Trump-bashing quotes, they are in fact the last whines of political has-beens.  Merkel was forced to resign as party head.  France's Macron may have gotten in "sick burns" over the Armistice Day observance, but his nation is consumed with riots against his policies.  Again and again, we see establishment figures cited as sources of wisdom at exactly the moment when their political careers are headed down the toilet.

Is it any wonder that the Clinton Machine might finally recognize the obvious?

To be sure, Hillary may yet be planning the classic double-cross of running on one issue and then doing the opposite.  This is, after all, a major part of the Democrats' strategy for many years.

The problem is that this will now open up a new fissure in the Democrat coalition and shift the political debate closer to Trump.  It's hard to see how this hurts him.  Indeed, the Clinton Machine endorsing less restrictive immigration might actually get that wall funded.

In any event, it will be amusing to watch the paid shills of the leftist press and their Quisling Never Trumper allies have to reverse themselves yet again. 

Confirmed: Bill Kristol is funded by deep-pocketed leftists

As I previously surmised, Quisling Never Trumper Bill Kristol is in fact on the payroll of a deep-pocketed leftist.

It's worth reading the full article at American Greatness, which is rapidly filling up the intellectual space on the right formerly occupied by The Weekly Standard and National Review.

I don't have much to add to this "see I told you so" post, other than to note that Kristol has apparently copped to taking the dirty leftist money, which causes me to wonder if one of the main boosters of the RUSSIA hoax would have any objections to taking actual RUSSIAN money if he felt it furthered his cause.