America’s Cold Civil War

Scott over at PowerLine calls our attention to an article in Imprimis. It is indeed well worth your time and your careful meditation.

Quoting Scott

Charles Kesler is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College, editor of the Claremont Review of Books and a recipient of the 2018 Bradley Prize.

Imprimis has now adapted Charles’s lecture at Hillsdale this past September 27 into the essay “Our cold civil war.” It is the best diagnosis of our political situation that I have read. In it Charles articulates my own observations and thoughts not fully formed. Perhaps he captures some of yours as well. Here is the opening paragraph:

Six years ago I wrote a book about Barack Obama in which I predicted that modern American liberalism, under pressures both fiscal and philosophical, would either go out of business or be forced to radicalize. If it chose the latter, I predicted, it could radicalize along two lines: towards socialism or towards an increasingly post-modern form of leadership. Today it is doing both. As we saw in Bernie Sanders’ campaign, the youngest generation of liberals is embracing socialism openly—something that would have been unheard of during the Cold War. At the same time, identity politics is on the ascendant, with its quasi-Nietzschean faith in race, sex, and power as the keys to being and meaning. In the #MeToo movement, for example—as we saw recently in Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle—the credo is, “Believe the woman.” In other words, truth will emerge not from an adversarial process weighing evidence and testimony before the bar of reason, but from yielding to the will of the more politically correct. “Her truth” is stronger than any objective or disinterested truth.

You will find the article at Imprimis. I highly recommend it.

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Sunday/ Monday Funnies

Didn’t want to overshadow, Remembrance/Veteran’s day so here we go, a day late, and a dollar short. Normal in other words.

One hopes.

 

A historical artifact, left in place to make people wonder!

 

And, of course

The Day After

So, I hear there was an election, had anybody mentioned that to you?

Yeah, I’m still sorting it out, maybe I’ll tell you what I think in a few days. For right now, Dov Fischer in The American Spectator makes a lot of sense to me.

Republicans knew the House was going to flip. It is common to argue over polling predictions days or weeks in advance, when survey numbers are within a reasonable margin, especially when only one race is in question. But with 435 House races, and so many lining up for Democrat flips, the settled question had become whether a “blue wave” would overturn Washington in a tsunami, even flowing up-ticket for Democrat gubernatorial and U.S. Senate candidates, and whether the President’s agenda would be stymied or even stifled.

Ultimately, that “blue wave” proved modest, enough to flip the House as expected but not more. Indeed, if he could have had one dream from his father, Obama could only have wished that the 2010 and 2014 midterms had been this modest. In 2010, the Republicans gained 63 House seats — the biggest House pick-up since 1948 and the biggest midterm pick-up since 1938 — and six U.S. Senate seats. The GOP even ended up controlling 26 state legislatures and 29 governorships. In the 2014 Obama midterms, the Republicans somehow found thirteen more House seats to net, and they gained nine more Senate seats, retaking the Senate and scoring the largest midterm Senate pick-up in 56 years. They also grew to 31 governorships while controlling 68 state legislative chambers. Similarly, the 1994 Clinton midterms saw Republicans gain 54 House seats, eight Senate seats, and ten governorships. You want to talk “waves”? Them’s waves. Them’s tsunamis.By contrast, this one did not even see the oceans stop rising. So, perspective.

It is true that a Democrat House will mean stalemate in areas where the House can jam progress. Therefore, the President will have to find his $25 billion for The Wall by taking it from the $716 billion defense budget already allocated for Year 2019 instead of getting it at the next Budget Reconciliation. The House cannot touch his judicial nominations or cabinet appointments, but they can waste resources by conducting endless investigations aimed at Resist and Disrupt. Along the way, the two sides possibly will coalesce on a great new infrastructure-modernizing program, an objective important to both. Maybe also on that new ten-percent tax cut for the Middle Class that the President has been touting. On the other hand, a DACA deal is questionable because Republicans do not want to legalize more undocumented people, and the Democrats prefer to keep the so-called “Dreamers” as permanent pawns; otherwise, the Democrats would have resolved it when they had a filibuster-proof Senate, the House, and Obama. House subpoenas to the President and his cabinet will fly fast-and-furious, feeding CNN panel discussions when Malaysia flights are not in the news, and turning into endless federal litigation, giving the federal judiciary a chance to remind suburban Caucasian voters by 2020 that their own tax returns matter more than those of the Trump family. Time and resources in the hundreds of millions will be wasted, and the trope about how “the American People are too smart to…” will again be proven trite. So that is the bad news for the GOP, though it could have been infinitely worse.

For Republicans, the huge news is that an undetected “red wave” roared in the Senate. We all knew that Heidi Heitkamp was a goner in North Dakota, and she lost to Republican Kevin Cramer by more than ten points. But beyond that, America went even deeper-red conservative in the U.S. Senate, and the Republican Party no longer is the McCain-Romney “sweetie-pie RINO” alternative to Left Democrats but now has evolved into a seriously conservative, Middle Class, combative party that fights back when punched. That, too, was the Kavanaugh impact: instead of withdrawing a good man’s nomination in the face of defamation and perjury — the way Richard Nixon had caved on Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell — this time the Republicans, led by Lindsey Graham, hit back at the bullies and won. No more “sweetie-pie” apologetics aimed at currying the favor of CNN and MSNBC, the New York Times and WaPo, but a serious conservative party with a conservative agenda that includes building the Dam Wall, cutting taxes, ending globalism and international accords that help every country but ours, and boldly asserting that this country is proud and unique — and we like it that way.

Keep reading at the link above. So far, I haven’t found anything here that I disagree with.

Amazing what a difference a spine makes.

Sunday Funnies, Election Edition

The Unit sent this along yesterday, I probably don’t have to say how pleased I am. Thanks, buddy!

A Fake news primer:

Both are true, only one is accurate. That’s one way it is done.

No picture to go with this one, Thank God!

Reports suggest that Jamal Khashoggi was injected with poison, then dismembered while still alive. So his official cause of death would be “routine abortion.”

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) October 28, 2018

Doublemint Sunday, double your pleasure

As always from PowerLine (including comments), Bookworm, and PA Pundits – International, and divers wonderful places.

Attempting to Destroy the Country

This has been wandering about in my mind as well, since Hillary! did that interview. From The Federalist.

Hillary Clinton is right. We cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what America stands for. She’s right that we must fight against politicians and activists who degrade the rule of law, seek to delegitimize our elections, spread corruption, attack truth and reason, and try to undermine our national unity. A defiant, defensive, and dystopian political party must be met with determined aggression, not niceties. But she’s living in upside-down world if she believes that’s the Republican Party.

Two years into Donald Trump’s presidency, there is no question the Democratic Party is on the side of those working to undermine the American system of government and the American way of life.

When they didn’t get the president they wanted in 2016, Democrats attacked the legitimacy of our election and of the Electoral College. They questioned the integrity of the result and boycotted his inauguration. They encouraged electors to go rogue and overturn the election, and moved to abolish the Electoral College, disregarding its purpose of preventing mob rule. As they undermined faith in the American electoral process in these and other ways, they helped Vladimir Putin achieve one of his primary election-meddling goals.

Democrats weaponized the FBI and the Justice Department in hopes of taking down Trump, or at least of bogging him down in investigations and a cloud of suspicion that would undermine the legitimacy of his presidency. Some who are paid to implement the president’s agenda continue to brag about efforts to sabotage him from within the administration.

When Trump nominated a Supreme Court justice they didn’t like, Democrats disrespected the confirmation process by withholding information, then tried to destroy the nominee’s life by means of an unsubstantiated allegation. Their allies in the press attacked the structure of the Senate and urged them to pack the court. When the nominee was confirmed according to the rules of the Senate, they attacked the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

This is the party that wants to use the military purposed with defending our way of life as a petri dish for progressive social policies. They demand the military enlist men and women with gender dysphoria, then pay for expensive and time-intensive surgeries, and insist women must be in combat roles, regardless of the complications, cost, or potential effects on combat readiness.

More at the link, but it seems so to me, that the Democrats singly and together, have gone round the bend, and unless and until they get a grip on reality, well there is little point in dealing with them. It’s very sad, we need an opposition party for the Republic to work well, but this insane hot mess of a party ain’t it.

I cannot see any reason why a sane person would cast a vote for a Democratic candidate next week, none, not one.

Monday Stuff

Well, a week from tomorrow, we’ll decide whether we’ll continue to progress or stop and yell at each other for a couple of years. You all know that I’ve come to the conclusion that I cannot vote for any Democrat. I don’t like that, I think we do better when we hash it out between us, but it’s not my choice. Evil is not a choice. Here, thanks to my friend Pumabydesign001 (Hi, Denise) are some other people who think the same way.

Well, easy enough for me to see, the Democrats drove me away long ago. My folks were New Dealers and carried that on. But watching the Democrats in the 60s was enough for me. I’m still an independent, but it became quite rare for me to vote for a Democrat other than locally.

Isn’t it nice to finally have a few people who can get across what we’ve all been saying all these years? Of course, a goodly bit of it is because the Democrats have become so loathsome that they drive their own supporters out, and when they begin thinking, well then they end up on the right.

Tradition is important.

U.S. troops landed in Iceland last week ahead of the start the largest NATO military exercise since the Cold War, and apparently, they left their mark in the most appropriate way possible: by drinking every last beer in the nation’s capital.

A significant number of bars in downtown Reykjavík were forced to make emergency beer runs under the onslaught of thirsty American sailors and Marines in town for the start of Trident Juncture 18, Iceland Magazine reports.

OOH-Rah

And with reference to the massacre in Pittsburgh, the President said this.

Before going any further I want to address the horrible shooting that took place earlier today. The hearts of all Americans are filled with grief following the monstrous killing of Jewish Americans at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

This evil anti-Semitic attack is an assault on all of us. It’s an assault on humanity. It will require all of us working together to extract the hateful poison of anti-Semitism from our world. This was an anti-Semitic attack at its worst. The scourge of anti-Semitism cannot be ignored, cannot be tolerated and cannot be allowed to continue. We can’t allow it to continue. It must be confronted and condemned everywhere it rears its very ugly head. We must stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters to defeat anti-Semitism and vanquish the forces of hate. That’s what it is.

Through the centuries the Jews have endured terrible persecution. And you know that. We’ve all read it. We’ve studied it. They’ve gone through a lot. And those seeking their destruction — we will seek their destruction.

Thanks to Scott Johnson for the transcription. As Scott titled his post; Trump speaks for me!