Stromata Blog

Malapropism of the Day: Kamala Will Ban Price-Gauging

Words get confused now and then. Hardly anyone knows the difference between “gauntlet” (a glove) and “gantlet” (an American Indian torture). Englishmen often write “prevaricate” (mislead) for “procrastinate” (put off until tomorrow). And even Presidents of the United States think that “literally” and “figuratively” are synonyms.

Kamala the Joybringer therefore did nothing unprecedented yesterday when she firmly cackled that under her reign the federal government will crack down on “price-gauging”.

She has indeed much reason not to gauge prices. The gauge shows that the inflation rate, 1.4 percent when she and that other guy took office, is now 2.9 percent. That’s a slowdown from the nine percent peak that it reached. Nonetheless, it is a rate at which prices double in 24 years and nearly octuple over the Biblical three score and ten. That gauge doesn’t bring Joy. Ban it now!

How a “Brat” Reacts to Bad News

Here are the opening paragraphs of this morning’s begging letter from the Harris-Walz campaign:

 

Edward, do you remember how you felt the day after Donald Trump was elected?

 

I do. It was election night for me as well.

 

It was incredibly bittersweet. When I took the stage for my acceptance speech – to represent California in the Senate – I tore up my notes. I just said, “We will fight.”

 

Then I went home and I sat on the couch with a family-sized bag of nacho Doritos. I did not share one chip with anybody. Not even Doug. I just watched the TV with utter shock and dismay.

 

Here, incidentally, is the text of newly elected Senator Harris’s actual word-salad victory speech, delivered on Tuesday evening, November 8, 2016, well before the outcome of the Presidential race was known. She did indeed talk a lot about “fighting”. Then, by her own account, she went home and, when she learned that Hillary Clinton would not become President, fought a bag of Doritos.

 

Yeah, there’s a fighter: React to disappointment by gobbling junk food. That’s the brat our country needs to stand up to Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and the Iranian mullahs and the other villains who have grabbed more and more of the world stage during the Biden-Harris years.

 

I wonder what she will do when the shortages created by her price controls make it impossible to find Doritos at her local market. Switch to Cheetos?

Quote of the Day: Tim Walz in Iraq AND Afghanistan

The indefatigable Steven Hayward, writing at PowerLine, has excavated a striking paragraph from a speech Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, now the understudy in Kamala Harris’s “Campaign of Joy”:

I had the privilege of serving in this state’s national guard. I stood one night in the dark of night on the tarmac at Bagram Air Base in Iraq and watched a military ramp ceremony–a soldier’s body being loaded onto a plane to be returned home. And if you’ve seen it, you don’t leave the same. It makes you wonder, what are we doing? What are we trying to get to? And then watching as all of you have been, the confusing last few weeks with the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. [Emphasis added.]

Tim Walz, “Remarks at the Minnesota 9/11 20th Anniversary Commemoration, September 11, 2021”, reprinted in Minnesota in the Global War on Terrorism, Post-9/11 Profiles, p. 374 (394 of the PDF).

Mr. Hayward comments:

 

First, Bagram Air Base was in Afghanistan, not Iraq. Second, did Walz ever visit either Iraq or Afghanistan? If he did, it wasn’t on an official guard deployment – that much has been nailed down. It is exceedingly unlikely that he was ever present for a military ramp ceremony of a fallen soldier in either nation. He made this up out of whole cloth. Full stop. (Stay tuned: He’ll claim again that he “misspoke,” and was present when a plane from Bagram landed in Minnesota, if he hasn’t claimed this already.)

 

I think that the Walz “stolen valor” controversy has now been resolved.

Misgovernor Walz Summarized in Five Charts

John Hinderaker, CEO of the Center for the American Experiment, is a Minnesotan and has first-hand acquaintance with the state’s egregious governor Tim Walz. He has summarized the Walz record in five charts showing that –

• “Under Walz, Minnesota became a high-crime state for the first time ever.”
• “Under Walz, student achievement tumbled even as spending on schools skyrocketed.”
• “Under Walz, per capita GDP in Minnesota fell below the national average, for the first time ever.”
• “Under Walz, increases in energy costs have far outstripped the national average.”
• “And under Walz, Minnesota has joined New York, California and Illinois as a state that people of all ages are fleeing.”

Additional commentary on the charts is here.

Quote of the Day: Paying the Dane-geld

That sixteen innocent Westerners, most visibly Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, have been released from Russian captivity is a happy occasion for them, their families and their countries, but it is not, as Jim Geraghty points out this morning, an untainted diplomatic triumph:

 

The message is clear to every Russian spy, assassin, operative, hacker, or criminal: If you get caught, don’t talk. Sit tight. Be patient. Vladimir Putin can and will get you out eventually. He can get anybody out, from an arms dealer so notorious he inspired a Nicholas Cage movie to a guy who’s executing dissidents in front of horrified kids in a German park. There is no monster so heinous and wicked that Putin can’t strongarm a foreign government into releasing him.

 

We should expect additional wrongful arrests, detentions, kidnappings, and abductions in the future, because the U.S. government had made clear that the tactic works; if you arrest our people on nonsense charges and throw them in prison, we will give you back the worst of the worst, the ones who required Herculean efforts to bring to justice.

 

As the price paid for the prisoners’ release sinks in, expect to see this Rudyard Kipling quotation “again and again”:

 

And that is called paying the Dane-geld;

   But we've  proved it again and  again,

That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld

   You never get rid of the Dane.

 

If you have travel plans in Russia, it might be prudent to reconsider.

Quote of the Day: Workers of the World, Unite – Against the Jews

On NRO’s Capital Matters thread, Dominic Pino calls attention to a new priority of Organized Labor:

Seven major U.S. labor unions have issued a joint letter urging President Biden to immediately stop all military aid to Israel. “Mr. President, the time to act decisively to end this war is now. Stopping U.S. military aid to Israel is the quickest and most sure way to do so, it is what U.S. law demands, and it will show your commitment to securing a lasting peace in the region,” the letter reads.

 

The Association of Flight Attendants, the American Postal Workers Union, the International Union of Painters, the National Education Association, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers, and the United Electrical Workers all signed the letter.

The timing of this démarche, which naturally bears no relation to the ostensible purposes of labor unions, is no surprise. As Seth Mandel observed yesterday –

The Democratic Party’s changing of the guard is almost certainly a milestone in American politics, a bold notch on the timeline marking a point of departure for the party’s approach to anti-Semitism and the Jewish state. The party’s standard bearer 24 hours ago considered himself a Zionist and routinely condemned – even if his administration took no appropriate action against – Jew-baiting mobs on campus. The party’s standard bearer today fears and admires those mobs for, in her preposterous words, “showing exactly what the human emotion should be, as a response to Gaza.”

 

Members of the Biden-Harris administration who resigned over the president’s support for Israel against Hamas see Harris’s succession in that light. Lily Call, a former Interior Department staffer and member of the virulently anti-Israel group IfNotNow, expressed hope that Harris might enact an arms embargo on Israel. “I’ve worked for Kamala, and I know she’ll do the right thing,” Call told Politico. [emphasis added]

Analogy of the Day: The Deist Theory of the Presidency

Joshua Treviño, writing at Armas:

 

The managerial theory is that the discontinued President may persist in office, fully vested with its prerogatives, by virtue of the nature of the office. This is of course totally fictitious: Joseph R. Biden at midafternoon Sunday lost the ability to do nearly every meaningful thing intrinsic to the Presidency, including real cooperation with the Legislative branch, persuading the nation to make war, and representation of the whole American people in government. What’s left is a headless apparatus, dominated but not led – ruled but not governed – by the thousands of functionaries of the administrative state. It is a Deist simulacrum of government, the clockmaker having wound the mechanism, which will then inexorably tick forward undirected. But clocks break, God retains active sovereignty, and the American system requires a President. 

 

Once before in our history, when Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke 17 months before his term ended, the White House stood empty de facto, but that truth was hidden from the public. This time the curtain has been drawn back, and the functionaries behind it can no longer fool anyone into thinking that the movements of the mannikin’s lips and limbs are its own.

 

If Joseph Robinette Biden does not resign the Presidency or, in the absence of a voluntary exit, is not removed by impeachment or the abstruse mechanism of the 25th Amendment, the American people will know that he and the Democratic Party have no taste for Constitutional government but are content that the nation be “dominated but not led”.

Quote of the Day: “No future for Jews in France”

After the results of the second round of voting for France’s National Assembly came in, showing that the left-wing Nouveau Front Populaire (“New Popular Front”; the only more ominous moniker would be “New Third Reich”) had become the largest grouping, the Chief Rabbi of Paris spoke: “It is clear today that there is no future for Jews in France. I tell everyone who is young to go to Israel or a more secure country.”

The parties of France’s center and center-right joined forces in the second round to defeat what they saw as the true menace, the “far right” Rassemblement National (National Rally) of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella. Irony abounds. From the French Revolution onward, the French Right was identified with antisemitism. Today its most popular component, the RN, is the country’s strongest supporter of Israel. Meanwhile, as Rabbi Sebbag laments, the progressive Left has become the home of Jew-Hatred.

Quote of the Day: Discounting Our Blessings

Cole S. Aronson, an American who lives in war-torn Israel:

Americans live free from armed invaders under a masterful, basically peaceful constitutional system. Things have been good for a long time. The republic’s achievements seem commonplace, so commonplace they aren’t even recognized as achievements. The instinct to rip it all down, the declaration that everything is broken – it’s difficult to credit either when the wretched of the earth hand over their life savings to violent smugglers for a chance to make it to America. America has responded to its generous inheritance with a listless hysteria, palliated by sweet poisons that, if we get the doses just right, may help us sleep without finally killing us.

Quote of the Day: “We May All Be Banana Republicans Now”

J.D. Tuccille:

“Prosecuting current or past top officials accused of illegal conduct seems like an obvious decision for a democracy – everyone should be held accountable and subject to the rule of law,” James D. Long, Morgan Wack, and Victor Menaldo of the University of Washington's political science department cautioned in 2022. “But there are consequences to prosecutions of these officials – not just for them, but for their countries…. If the prosecution of past leaders is brought by a political rival, it can lead to a cycle of prosecutorial retaliation.”

I expect we’re going to see exactly that in the U.S. It’s a regular feature of some other countries’ political systems. Costa Rica, for example, more or less offers prosecutions as parting gifts to its former heads of state. It’s still a lovely country. And the bananas there are delicious.

An unstable political system in which laws and regulations are weaponized by the powerful against opponents isn’t the end of the world. But it delegitimizes the system, turns courtroom proceedings into an expected part of the election process, and poses serious legal dangers for dissenters.

By no means are all Americans sympathetic to the GOP. But we may all be banana republicans now.

Vexillological News of the Day

As you can hardly help knowing, the New York Times has devoted breathless reporting by multiple correspondents to Justice Samuel Alito’s taste in flags. Based on that reportage, a host of left-wing politicians and commentators are demanding that the Justice resign, be impeached or, at the very least, refrain from taking part in cases arising out of the January 6th “insurrection” or even all cases involving Donald Trump.

There’s no need to recount the jeremiads back and forth – not only because they have become repetitious and dreary but because Jeryl Bier of Pluribus has done the homework needed to fatally undermine the factual underpinning of the anti-Alito assault.

The Times claims that the flags hoisted at the homes of Justice Alito and his wife – an upside-down Old Glory and the Revolutionary War Pine Tree flag – are symbols of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Mr. Bier demonstrates that such is not the case, drawing his proofs from . . . the New York Times.

To wit, a week after the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, the Times published a “Visual Investigation” titled “Decoding the Far-Right Symbols at the Capitol Riot.” Neither the inverted American flag nor the Appeal to Heaven/Pine Tree flag were mentioned in the article–the latter despite a brief appearance in a video clip accompanying the article. 

 

The following day, as part of the Times’s Learning Network, a suggested lesson for high school students was posted that promised “[i]n this lesson, students will learn about the people who participated in the violence at the Capitol as well as the flags, clothing and hand gestures they displayed and what they represent.” Neither the inverted US flag, a supposed “‘Stop the Steal’ Symbol”, nor the “provocative” Appeal to Heaven flag were mentioned in the lesson. They were apparently not worth including in the “dizzying array of symbols, slogans and images” the linked article discussed.

 

The more detailed Visual Investigation was preceded by an article that ran on Jan. 6 itself entitled “Stunning Images as a Mob Storms the U.S. Capitol”. It included no images of either of the purported far-right symbols either.

In short, the association of the Alito’s flags with the January 6th riots was a concocted smear. The story is as phony as the Rathergate memos and deserves the same scorn.

The United Nations Is Not Your Friend (But You Probably Know That Already)

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind is a fragment of a poem describing the United Nations headquarters in New York City as –

. . . that great glass palace
of mendacity, mendicancy and malice.

If you doubt that, mark the words of the U.N.’s “High Commissioner for Human Rights”:

The UN human rights chief on Tuesday said he was “troubled” by a series of “heavy-handed” steps taken to disperse and dismantle protests across university campuses in the US in support of Palestine.

 

“Freedom of expression and the right to peaceful assembly are fundamental to society – particularly when there is sharp disagreement on major issues, as there are in relation to the conflict in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel,” Volker Turk said in a statement.

 

Any actions taken by university authorities and law enforcement officials to restrict such expression must be “carefully scrutinized” to ensure that they go no further than what is demonstrably necessary to protect the rights and freedoms of others, Turk said.

 

He said such restrictions may be permissible for another legitimate purpose, such as maintenance of public health or order, adding: “I am concerned that some of law enforcement actions across a series of universities appear disproportionate in their impacts.”

 

Turk stressed that incitement to violence or hatred on grounds of identity or viewpoints “must be strongly repudiated.”

 

“Such conduct can, and must be, addressed individually, rather than through sweeping measures that impute to all members of a protest the unacceptable viewpoints of a few,” the human rights chief said. “Here, as elsewhere, responses by universities and law enforcement need to be guided by human rights law, allowing vibrant debate and protecting safe spaces for all.”

 

“It must be clear that legitimate exercises of the freedom of expression cannot be conflated with incitement to violence and hatred,” he concluded.

Anyone who has paid attention to the wave of anti-Jewish uprisings on college campuses and doesn’t get all his news from Al Jazeera knows how untethered to reality that accusation is. On the one side, we hear protesters (not just “a few” but crowds of hundreds) chanting slogans that demand a judenrein Middle East and a worldwide intifada against the Jewish people. We see them threatening Jewish students, building barriers to deny access to public spaces and, in the case of Columbia University, seizing control of the main administration building.

On the other side, we see that the police whom university officials belatedly and apologetically summon don’t employ deadly force, or much force at all. There is a little scuffling. Those trespassers who don’t flee are zip-tied and carted to jail, from which they are quickly released. There have been few reports of injuries. If anyone has been hospitalized, it hasn’t made the news.

The most serious breach of “human rights law” that any protester has claimed is that Columbia refused to deliver food to the students and non-students who occupied Hamilton Hall. Tiananmen Square? Soweto? Selma? The hands of authority in the United States are so light that it’s a surprise they haven’t floated away.

Herr Türk doesn’t base his accusations on even a scintilla of evidence. He needs no evidence, because he is certain in his heart that America is the crime lord of the world and Israel is its henchman. His malice is patent. He is probably a liar and a deadbeat, too.

“As God is my witness, I thought aid packages could fly!”

From The Telegraph:

Air-dropped US aid packages struck and killed five Palestinians in Gaza after their parachutes failed to open properly, according to reports.

Footage circulating on social media appears to show several packages plummeting to the ground from a transport aircraft.

Either the videos circulating on Gaza social media are authentic, which would be pretty bad, or they are fakes, which would be worse, showing that Hamas wants to scare ordinary citizens away from the air drops. That would make it all the easier for terrorists to appropriate this “humanitarian assistance”.

Soon Hamas will have Americans to shoot at, as our troops construct the dock through which Joe Biden will channel more aid to Israel’s enemies.

Quote of the Day: Biden vs. Israel

Philip Klein, “Biden Delivers the Most Anti-Israel Presidential Speech in History”:

After a perfunctory mention of October 7 and the hostages, Biden then launched an extended attack on Israel’s response to the war and the conditions in Gaza that accepted, whole cloth, Hamas casualty figures that his own administration had previously questioned as unreliable. For those keeping score, his description of the events on the day of October 7 lasted 42 words (or 77 if you count his shout-out to the hostage families present at the speech). The part of the speech describing the “heartbreaking” conditions in Gaza, demanding that Israel do more, and describing U.S. aid efforts in Gaza was 214 words.

Speaking of aid. At the start of his speech, Biden spoke of the “unprecedented moment” we’re in – and in his survey of momentous world events, he made the case for the need for the U.S. to support Ukraine. And he pitched his hare-brained scheme to have the U.S. military build a port in Gaza to facilitate more aid. At no point did he make the case for the component of the security bill that would provide aid to Israel.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Quote of the Day: "We Don't Hate Jews. We Just Love the Guys Who Do."

Every word of “The woke wing of Hamas” is worth reading. Here is the conclusion:

 

The woke set’s claim that all they’re doing is criticising Israel is increasingly unsustainable. Their plea goes something like this:

 

‘We don’t hate Jews. We just hate the Jewish State, make excuses for Jew-hating terrorists, disbelieve Jewish women who say they were raped, support pirates whose flag says “A curse on the Jews”, and march alongside people who want all-out jihad on Jews. It’s totally different.’

 

Yes, totally different. Not at all like those guys who thought that Jews were a problem that needed a final solution.

Quote of the Day: An American Metaphor

Michael Brendan Dougherty, “The President Isn’t Home”:

Joe Biden and America are at risk of becoming metaphorically conflated. The country is aging rapidly. The number of Americans over 65 is set to double in the next 40 years. His forgetfulness mirrors America’s own lack of historical perspective. His unsteadiness on the stage is like our own lack of confidence in the national institutions upon which our lives depend for security and independence. His absence of mind seems to reflect the country’s own absence of strategy on the world stage. America is the old power on the world stage, while others are rising.

More to the point in an election year, our lack of confidence in Biden’s abilities mirrors a similar sinking feeling about the direction of our country. Not even good economic numbers can put to bed America’s sense of unease, fragility, and vulnerability.

There is a great majority in this country who looks upon the forthcoming presidential election with something like sullen horror. Why are our institutions producing this rematch? What is it about American democracy that is so paralyzed? Why, for fear of small risks, are we gambling, well, everything on these geezers?

Quote of the Day: Centrist Authoritarianism

Tom Slater, “Justin Trudeau and the rise of the liberal strongman”:

For all the talk of populists and their simpleminded working-class voters ushering in a new 1930s, we now see where the true threat to liberty comes from. And not just in Canada. Indeed, we’ve seen the rise of what we might call liberal strongmen – sorry, strongpeople – right across the Western world. From the unhinged Covid authoritarianism of New Zealand under Jacinda Ardern to Emmanuel Macron’s brutalising of the gilets jaunes to Joe Biden’s banana republic to the speech-policing, women’s-rights-shredding rule of Nicola Sturgeon, all of the ‘centrist’ darlings of our age have turned out to be itching to shut up, lock up and even beat up their own citizens. Particularly citizens with the chutzpah to stand up for their rights and their livelihoods.

The Border Bill

Much suspicion surrounds the proposed “Border Act” (no strained acronym, praise be), a compromise immigration bill whose details have been negotiated out of public view. The dislike of covenants secretly arrived at is understandable. On the other hand, the United States Constitution was drafted in yet greater secrecy, and it has proved to be a pretty good work product.

The text of the bill has now been released, and Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) has posted a summary of its provisions.

The chaotic situation along our southern border has metastasized into a major threat to national security. A subset of Congressional Republicans, among whom Senator Lankford taken a leading role, have used such leverage as they have over the Biden Administration (namely, the threat to cut back aid to Ukraine) to produce what they assert is a workable program to secure the border. It would have been better for President Biden to realize on his own that strong measures are needed to reassert control over immigration. The great majority of Republicans want to America continue supporting Ukraine’s struggle to retain its independence. But the Administration is ideologically committed to “open borders”, and only a threat to derail one of its major policies in another area was able to bring it to the negotiating table.

The negotiated document is doubtless imperfect. The question is whether it is good enough to serve its purpose. I will comment after I know enough to form a rational opinion. Unfortunately, many opponents (and some supporters, too) have made up their minds in advance and don’t want to consider any arguments to the contrary.

There is one stupid argument against enacting any sort of compromise: We can get a better deal by waiting until after the 2024 election. Can we? Yes, but only if Donald Trump is elected President and the GOP retains a majority (a working majority, not a razor-thin margin) in the House of Representatives and Republicans gain enough seats in the Senate to overcome Democratic filibusters. Will all that come to pass? If wishes were horses. . . .

Quote of the Day: Baseball and Iran

Paul Mirengoff on the notion, adumbrated in the Washington Post, that, before retaliating for attacks on U.S. forces by Iranian proxies, the United States “must identify precisely which Iranian proxy launched the deadly drone (that killed three Americans) and determine whether it did so on orders from Tehran”:

 

The Brooklyn Dodgers had a black pitcher named Joe Black. He debuted in 1952, when black players were still taunted with racial epithets by opposing players.

 

One day when Black was warming up, some players on the Cincinnati Reds bench serenaded him with a chorus of “Old Black Joe.” Black, who had one of the best fastballs in the game, responded by knocking down all nine Reds starters the first time he faced them.

 

Asked why he threw at the lineup so indiscriminately, Black responded, “I figured there must be some crooners among them.”. . .

Various militias have been attacking U.S. forces for months. Any of these attacks could have killed Americans.

The standard for striking Iranian backed militias should be a reasonable suspicion that they have attacked our forces. There is no need to “identify precisely” which one sent the deadly drone. Nor is there any need for certainty about who launched previous attacks.

Any Iranian backed militia is an enemy of the U.S. Hit the suspect ones and, to paraphrase Joe Black, there will some attackers of Americans among them.

Recommended Reading: An Immigration Deal?

Paul Mirengoff is a long-time critic of lax immigration policies. His warnings date as far back as his opposition to the George W. Bush Administration’s liberalization proposals. That he has posted “The case for the Senate border deal” suggests that it has merits that its very vocal opponents have overlooked (links omitted):

 

The idea behind the proposal is to speed up asylum processing, raise the standard for sustaining asylum claims, and close the litigation loophole in the status quo. The plan is to knock out most asylum claims at the front-end and, in all events, to knock out all meritless claims within half a year. . . .

 

Now, let’s look at the second, and related, major thing the proposed legislation would do. It would require the president to close the border after average daily migrant crossings average 5,000 over seven days, or hit 8,500 in a single day. And it would authorize him to close the border after average daily crossings surpass 4,000 in a week. . . .

 

As for the numbers said to be in the proposed bill, it’s important to understand that the bill isn’t permitting up to 4,000 or 5,000 illegal entries per day. It’s fixing the asylum process and adding the staff necessary to process (and in most cases deport) undocumented migrants.

 

If 4,999 immigrants show up in a day, they won’t be granted entry. They will go into the toughened, expedited, and beefed up removal process. And if more than that number show up – as they do virtually every day – making it impossible to conduct the new removal process, that process shuts down at the border until the daily number of crossings dips below a manageable number – 3,750.

 

In other words, the border closing provision is a backstop – a circuit breaker. As Sen. Lankford has explained, “this is a new authority to say, when we can no longer detain and deport, when we can't process the people and actually make a decision right there at the border, then we’ll actually turn those folks back around to Mexico.” (Emphasis added [by Paul Mirengoff])

 

Coming as it does from someone who has no sympathy for the Biden Administration’s “open borders” policy, Mr. Mirengoff’s column is well worth reading in full.

Recommended Reading: Political Polarization

Paul Mirengoff, “Who is responsible for political polarization in America?”
Paul Mirengoff, “The Post's weak explanations for political polarization in America”

Paul Mirengoff of Ringside at the Reckoning compares and contrasts two Washington Post op-eds (one flying under the false colors of a straight news story) on the causes of the rapidly rising and increasingly fierce polarization of American politics.

Taking them in reverse chronological order, the pseudo-news writer “threw almost everything but the kitchen sink into his explanation” and came up with nothing very plausible. Some of the purported causes (humans’ instinctive “tendency to form tightly knit groups” and a political system that tends to be dominated by two parties rather than a multitude of parties in shifting coalitions) have always been with us. They can’t explain recent trends. Others (the clustering of like-minded partisans in the same geographical areas, a decrease in the number of marriages in which the spouses are of different political parties, the rise of Donald Trump (a go-to culprit for everything that is deplorable) and “the fragmentation of the media”) look more like effects than causes of polarization.

The earlier op-ed (by Jason Willick) that Mr. Mirengoff cites, which the “news” story ignores, offers a more straightforward and plausible explanation: On virtually every significant political issue, including “abortion, same-sex marriage, guns, religion and taxes” and immigration (to which the op-ed devotes particular attention), the Democratic Party “has moved sharply to the left” over the past decade, while the Republican Party hasn’t altered its positions more than modestly.

Mr. Willick cites, among other evidence, an essay by liberal columnist Kevin Drum, who, after reviewing the data on the parties’ ideological trajectories, concluded:

Now: maybe you’re personally delighted by the Democratic Party’s leftward march and maybe you're not. It doesn’t matter. Despite endless hopeful invocations of “but polls show that people like our positions,” the truth is that the Democratic Party has been pulled far enough left that even lots of non-crazy people find us just plain scary – something that Fox News takes vigorous advantage of.

 

From an electoral point of view, the story here is consistent: Democrats have stoked the culture wars by getting more extreme on social issues and Republicans have used this to successfully cleave away a segment of both the non-college white vote and, more recently, the non-college nonwhite vote.

 

Mr. Mirengoff adds:

 

But Democrats aren’t as clueless as this passage implies. They are using the Republican blowback against leftist aggression in the culture wars to their advantage. The harshness of that blowback enables Dems, with the vigorous assistance of the mainstream media, to paint Republicans as the culture war aggressors and to gain support in suburbia. . . .

 

In my view, the Republican Party has no real choice but to respond powerfully to the Democrats’ extreme positions. But it should find champions who are better able than Donald Trump and certain members of his MAGA amen chorus to present a more human face and a more focused and effective approach to the conservative counter-offensive.

Quote of the Day

Eitan Fischberger, “Violent Pro-Palestine Demonstrations Are Not a Bug”:

Individuals, after all, matter little in the struggle of global class and sectarian warfare. In the protesters’ eyes, “Palestine” is a stand-in, a representation of every ostensible victim class across the world fighting for their liberation from oppression. Their “solidarity” transcends geographical boundaries, making any random cause and the Palestinian cause inseparable in their eyes.

That’s why, as Seattle-based Palestinian American journalist Tariq Ra’ouf so eloquently put it when his cohorts blocked Seattle’s northbound I-5 last week: “We are going to inconvenience every single person who doesn’t give a f*** [about Gaza] until they give a f***. That’s how this goes.” [redaction not in original]

Quote of the Day

Although its thesis is farfetched (short, unfair summary: transgenderism causes wars) and its nostalgia for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a Cold War communist front group, is grating, Peter Baehr’s “The Peace Women” offers interesting insights, including this one:

Long gone are the days when citizens were enjoined to “fear only fear itself.” Instead, we are told to fear without respite. In the past decade alone, Westerners have been deluged by panics over Brexit, Donald J. Trump (ongoing), covid, Russia (ongoing). Today we are told that, without draconian action planned and executed by experts, the planet is in danger of a climate apocalypse. A fear that arises spontaneously is, usually, a natural response to the perception of danger; fears that follow in quick succession are almost always orchestrated. Philosophers dispute whether zero is a number, and mathematicians say that it can be treated as a number, but when politicians invoke it, zero is neither a number nor a non-number: it is a portent that life is about to get a lot nastier. The most obvious results of such alarums – Net Zero, Zero covid, Year Zero – are suspended parliaments, rule by decree, internet censorship, skewed data, corrupted science, and a poorer society, especially for the already poor.

Abraham Lincoln, Mark Tushnet and Dred Scott

You may have heard of an “open letter” to the Biden Administration, co-authored by Mark Tushnet, an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School (self-described socialist and advocate of scorched earth progressivism), and San Francisco State University political science professor Aaron Belkin (whose self-description is “scholar, author, activist and dancer”), urging the President to “to restrain MAGA justices immediately by announcing that if and when they issue rulings that are based on gravely mistaken interpretations of the Constitution that undermine our most fundamental commitments, the Administration will be guided by its own constitutional interpretations”. If that screed is news to you, you can read critiques here and here and here and many other heres.

Professors Tushnet and Belkin call their stance “Popular Constitutionalism” (a peculiar label, given that one of their main targets is Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, a decision that the populace strongly approves). That doctrine, they say, “has a proud history in the United States, including Abraham Lincoln’s refusal to treat the Dred Scott decision as a political rule that would guide him as he exercised presidential powers”. That is true in a mushy sort of way, but not the way that the professors assert. They see it as justification for massive resistance.

For example, President Biden could declare that the Court’s recent decision in the affirmative action cases applies only to selective institutions of higher education and that the Administration will continue to pursue affirmative action in every other context vigorously because it believes that the Court's interpretation of the Constitution is egregiously wrong.

That recommendation is a trifle odd. The only colleges that aren’t “selective” are those that admit all applicants; by definition they don’t practice affirmative action. It seems unlikely, too, that the professors contemplate drawing an arbitrary line between the most selective tier and the rest. They surely aren’t demanding that Harvard be cut off from the federal money spigot. Any concession that SFFA v. Harvard applied to anyone would be for display purposes only, a thin cover for an all-out push for continued discrimination.

That brings us to Abraham Lincoln, whose views on responding to Dred Scott v. Sandford are worthy of consideration. Lincoln did indeed declare forcefully that the decision was bad law. His principal statement on what its opponents should do about it was set forth in an address that he delivered on June 26, 1857, in the course of his campaign for the Senate:

Judicial decisions have two uses – first, to absolutely determine the case decided, and secondly, to indicate to the public how other similar cases will be decided when they arise. For the latter use, they are called "precedents” and “authorities.”

We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.

Lincoln was replying specifically to his opponent, Stephen Douglas, who had argued that, once the Supreme Court decides a question, “forc[ing it] upon the country as a political issue” is “a deadly blow at our whole Republican system of government”. Lincoln disagreed.

If this important decision had been made by the unanimous concurrence of the judges, and without any apparent partisan bias, and in accordance with legal public expectation, and with the steady practice of the departments throughout our history, and had been in no part, based on assumed historical facts which are not really true; or, if wanting in some of these, it had been before the court more than once, and had there been affirmed and re-affirmed through a course of years, it then might be, perhaps would be, factious, nay, even revolutionary, to not acquiesce in it as a precedent.

But when, as it is true we find it wanting in all these claims to the public confidence, it is not resistance, it is not factious, it is not even disrespectful, to treat it as not having yet quite established a settled doctrine for the country.

Lincoln could have been speaking for those who believed that Roe v. Wade and the Court’s equivocal pre-SFFA affirmative action jurisprudence were “wanting in all these claims to the public confidence”. Those critics didn’t treat those decisions as “settled doctrine”, but they also didn’t defy them. States enacted laws placing restrictions on abortion, many of which the Court found to be permissible. Congress forbade spending federal funds to procure abortions in most circumstances. That law, too, the Court upheld. With regard to affirmative action, several states, including such liberal bastions as California and Washington, outlawed racial preferences in higher education by the vote of the people. All of those were acts that Lincoln would not have regarded as “factious” or “even disrespectful”.

If Professors Tushnet and Belkin advocated that species of resistance, both sexes of goose are entitled to the same sauce, but their rhetoric makes it clear that they have in mind something more vigorous. Their spirit is more Ross Barnett and Orval Faubus than Abraham Lincoln.

The Next Trump Indictment: Clarity Starts to Emerge

I had been waiting for Andy McCarthy to weigh on Donald Trump’s announcement that he is about to be indicted again by special counsel Jack Smith for something or another. Now he has (behind NRO’s pay wall, unfortunately), and, as usual, he shines light into murky corners. In particular, he suggests a possible basis for the indictment that, unlike charges stemming from the ex-President’s alleged role in the Capitol rioting, makes sense and raises no Constitutional issues.

It is said that the Trump campaign raised tens of millions of dollars on the representations that the money would go to a legal fund that would fight the election fraud by which Trump claimed the election was being stolen. Yet, at least according to the January 6 committee (see, e.g., final report at p. 770 & ff.), there was no such fund and at least some of the money was diverted to other purposes (such as, the New York Times reports, more than $200,000 spent at Trump hotel properties).

If Smith can prove that, then he is in the ballpark of traditional fraud.

“In the ballpark” rather understates the case. If this accusation is true, Mr. Trump’s conduct is unconscionable, a betrayal of his most loyal supporters that was evidently motivated by simple greed. Exposing it and sending the perpetrator to prison would be an act of justice and would also, as Mr. McCarthy goes on to note, have other beneficial effects:

To be sure, if [Smith] has decided to go down that road, the next Republican Justice Department is going to be spending a great deal of time scrutinizing what Democrats and their allied outfits such as Black Lives Matter actually do with the goo-gobs of money they raise for this or that stated cause. But if past is prologue, progressives and other anti-Trumpers do not concern themselves with the unintended consequences. What matters is nailing Trump – especially if you can get Republicans to nominate him in the process.

It’s possible, though, that the special counsel will shy away from taking this clear and direct course and will instead rely on dubious theories of “obstruction of Congress” and “fraud on the government” that have fared poorly in the courts on other occasions. Alleging financial fraud has two potential drawbacks from the Democratic Party’s point of view:

First, the January 6th committee’s claims about Trump’s conduct may be false. Nothing about that body (to call it a “kangaroo court” insults marsupials) inspires confidence in the accuracy of its findings. If Trump really did establish a legal fund and pursue bona fide efforts to expose election fraud, not even the most Javert-like prosecutor in the most favorable of venues will have much chance of securing a conviction.

Second and more important, supposing that the fraud charges are true and their truth becomes manifest, a key element of the Democratic strategy for the 2024 Presidential electinn, namely, ensuring that Donald Trump is the Republican Party’s nominee, is likely to fail. It’s hard to believe that even the most fervent forever-Trumper will retain his admiration for a grifter who tried to cheat him out of his money.

Perhaps the special counsel can maneuver around these pitfalls. Until the trial begins, the existence vel non of the alleged fraud will be uncertain. The accusation can be kept in front of the public, and Trump zealots can continue to portray their hero as a martyr to the Deep State.

What the health of our country’s politics most demands (and, alas, is not too likely to get) is not the imposition of criminal liability but an immediate presentation of the evidence of fraud. If Donald Trump is demonstrably a liar and thief, it is more important that the public know that as soon as possible, so that he can be exiled from political life, than that he undergo legal punishment. The same is true, of course, of the Democratic Party’s prospective 2024 candidate. Both parties’ slates need thorough disinfection.