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2016

True True Conservatism By Andrew C. McCarthy —

While I am an admirer of his work, Ross Douthat’s New York Times post-mortem on the candidacy of Ted Cruz is a caricature of “True Conservatism,” the demise of which he undertakes to explain.

Devoid of any context except reaction to the futilities of George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism,” Ross builds his straw man:

Thus True Conservatism’s determination to avoid both anything that savored of big government and anything that smacked of compromise. Where Bush had been softhearted, True Conservatism would be sternly Ayn Randian; where Bush had been free-spending, True Conservatism would be austere; where Bush had taken working-class Americans off the tax rolls, True Conservatism would put them back on — for their own good. And above all, where Bush had sometimes reached for the center, True Conservatism would stand on principle, fight hard, and win.

This is warped because it fails to tell even half the story.

President Bush’s conservative heresies had not merely “reached for the center” or, as Ross elsewhere puts it, “led the Republican Party into a ditch.” They had paved the way for President Obama and the radical Left to lead the country into a bottomless pit. The national debt that Bush and the Republican Congress would double to $10 trillion, Obama would double again, to $20 trillion. The unsustainable entitlements that Bush added to, Obama would double-down on — including with Obamacare, which (unlike Bush’s well-meaning prescription entitlement) is about government control, not government compassion. The Bush bailouts became Obama mega-bailouts cum stimulus. The push for “comprehensive immigration reform” became the systematic non-enforcement of the immigration laws, the breakdown of border security, and a Justice Department crackdown on states that tried to affirm the rule of law. The conflation of national security with Muslim outreach, oxymoronic sharia-democracy building, and the pie-in-the-sky notion that Iran could be a helpful force for regional stability became willful blindness on steroids, Muslim Brotherhood promotion, and an Iran deal that combines nuclear proliferation with the provision of material support to the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.

In the interim, Republicans pleading to be returned to power repeatedly promised to use all constitutional means at their disposal, particularly the power of the purse, to thwart Obama’s steamrolling agenda. Typical was Mitch McConnell, GOP leader in the Senate, who thundered that Obama “needs to be challenged” and vowed “to do that through the funding process.” Here is McConnell, for example, in the run-up to the 2014 midterms:

In the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.

Yet, as soon as conservative voters put them in control, Republicans promptly dropped the combative rhetoric and forfeited the power of the purse. With Obama applauding, they funded the administration’s priorities while leaving themselves no leverage to fight the excesses that were sure to come and are sure to continue through the next eight months.

Protestors Have Jumped the Shark By Victor Davis Hanson

‘Jump the shark” is an American pop-culture expression that derives from a 1977 Happy Days sitcom episode; it describes a moment of decline. At a certain point, a TV show becomes so predictable, empty of ideas, and gimmicky that in desperation its writers will try anything — like the character “The Fonz” jumping over a shark on water skis — just to keep on the air.

Contemporary protestors have reached that moment, when demonstrations exist for demonstrations’ sake, without any consistent or coherent agenda of dissent.

At a recent forum on political correctness at the University of Massachusetts, three invited guest speakers were shouted down by protestors in the audience. A video of one shouter went viral. In the manner of a two-year-old, she threw a loud temper tantrum, interrupting the speakers, screaming obscenities, and repeatedly yelling, “Keep your hate speech off this campus!”

How does one stop “hate speech” by bellowing out four-letter obscenities to disrupt free expression at a university? The childish protestor then proved that she had jumped the shark when she finished by screaming, “Stop treating us like children!”

At an earlier protest at Yale, one particularly emotional student jumped the shark by cursing at a faculty member whose crime was advising students not to overreact to the childish Halloween costumes that other students would be wearing.

Protestors have a right to object to Donald Trump’s various crudities, as long as they do so peacefully and respect the right of free speech. But recently, disrupters at a Trump rally in California likewise jumped the shark when some waved the flag of Mexico or bore placards with slogans such as “Make America Mexico Again.” If the protest was directed against Trump’s pledges to deport undocumented immigrants to Mexico, then it made little sense to celebrate the country to which protestors did not wish immigrants to return, or to suggest that immigrants’ new home should become identical to the old home that they had chosen to leave.

At the University of Missouri last year, protestors demanded concessions from the university. In a public area, assistant communications professor Melissa Click called for “some muscle” to manhandle a student journalist who was trying to photograph a public demonstration. Click might as well have put on water skis and jumped a plastic shark. A right-wing cartoonist could not have dreamed up a sillier scenario, with a faculty member from a university’s communications department trying to have a student reporter physically blocked from covering a news story in a free-speech zone.

The Race Is Not Always to the Swift of Mind By David Solway

My article “How Smart Is Justin Trudeau,” posted here, in which I argued that the Canadian PM is a posturing showboat whose credentials can only be described as risible, provoked a robust response. Most of my correspondents and commenters were (and are) aware that Trudeau is an intellectual nonentity who relies on a combination of superficial charm and media adulation, much like Barack Obama (Trudeau has been called “Obama North”), in order to sway a credulous electorate.

Naturally, there have been a number of dissenters, who reacted by praising Trudeau for having won the election, as if this were evidence of high intelligence, as well as approving of his legislative record. Much of the commentary struck me as malingering at approximately the same level as Trudeau’s embarrassing ineptitude.

It should be noted that Canada has been moving “progressively” leftward and that Conservative governments are really anomalies in a culturally socialist landscape. Indeed, Canada tends to elect only one Conservative government per generation. The Conservative party has managed to maintain an electoral presence owing chiefly to a voter split among the country’s two major socialist parties, the welfare-state Liberals and the quasi-Marxist New Democratic Party.

A typical example of the anti-Conservative pro-statist mindset is provided by a number of my respondents. One, for example, censures a positive comment about Geert Wilders in the course of our discussion with a vibrantly eloquent “Yuck!” Another dismisses former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s legacy of a balanced budget as “all smoke and mirrors”—an error of fact since the Harper government successfully ran a temporary deficit to ride out the collapse in the global economy on a scale we had not seen in 80 years, but balanced the budget by early 2015.

Yet another skeptic claims that defeating the “odious” Harper government is an accomplishment in itself. He is thrilled by the gender equalizing of the Cabinet, the augmentation of entitlement and social programs, the reinstatement of tax credits for labor-sponsored funds, a costly inquiry into missing Aboriginal women (which will reveal what we already know about systemic native poverty and violence), the substantial increase of Syrian refugee immigration, the restoration of “rights to appeal for immigration decisions” (presumably the right for Muslim women to wear the niqab during citizenship swearing-in ceremonies and the reluctance to extradite jihadists or defund problematic Islamic organizations), and the doubling of funds for the (bloated and sybaritic) Canada Council for the Arts. I would consider each of these innovations or restitutions as a form of political abuse: in other words, a waste of public monies, a policy infatuation with the cultural trends and sophistries of the day, and the endangering of national security.

Detractors fall back on the claim that the Harper government was “odious,” as if invective were a suitable replacement for analysis. Trudeau, on the contrary, was media savvy and therefore street smart. His victory was, according to these lights, plainly deserved and his party platform unassailable. The truth is that Trudeau’s electoral triumph had nothing to do with substance, intellectual capacity or fitness for the job of prime minister, for Trudeau can boast of none of these qualifications. Apart from family name (his father was a former prime minister), a telegenic manner and a carbonated personality—obvious plusses in the current environment—the issue was decided by a series of extraneous factors that coalesced at the same time to constitute something like a perfect storm. CONTINUE AT SITE

Administration will cut screening time for refugees by two thirds By Rick Moran

From our “not such a good idea” department comes a new plan from the Obama administration to resettle refugees even faster by cutting the time expended to screen the newcomers for ties to terrorism.

What could go wrong?

Washington Free Beacon:

The Obama administration has committed to bring at least 10,000 Syrian refugees onto American soil in fiscal year 2016 by accelerating security screening procedures from 18-24 months to around three months, according to sources who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

Obama administration officials told the Free Beacon that they remain committed to the plan, despite warnings from the FBI and other law enforcement officials who say the federal government is not equipped to properly vet these individuals within that timeframe.

The administration is committed to moving forward this year with a plan to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees and 85,000 refugees overall, officials said.

Lawmakers are pressing the State Department and White House to reconsider the plan, arguing that critical security concerns should be addressed before it is implemented.

“We know the 18- to 24-month vetting process for Syrian refugees has severe vulnerabilities after FBI Director James Comey warned about the federal government’s inability to thoroughly screen Syrian refugee applicants for terrorism risk and after the Department of Homeland Security’s investigative arm warned about ISIS’s capability to print fake Syrian passports for terrorist infiltration,” Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) told the Free Beacon.

The administration has not specified what mechanisms it has put in place to facilitate the screening of a larger number of refugees on a three-month timeline, according to Kirk.

“Given that the administration has not explained to the American people whether and how it fixed these and other known vulnerabilities to terrorist infiltration, it is highly irresponsible for the administration to reduce the 18- to 24-month vetting process for Syrian refugees down to three months to meet its artificial and ideologically-driven goal of bringing 10,000 Syrian refugees onto U.S. soil by September,” said Kirk, who recently introduced legislation to impose enhanced screening measures to prevent terrorists from taking advantage of the U.S. refugee program.

The Labour Party’s Anti-Semitism Reaches Crisis Stage By Steve Postal

Anti-Semitism, poetically dubbed “the oldest hatred, forever young,” is rearing its ugly head in a rapidly unfolding scandal within the United Kingdom’s Labour Party. To clean house and/or try to contain the fallout, Labour chair Jeremy Corbyn has initiated an independent inquiry. On May 2, a British paper reported that fifty members of the Labour party have been “secretly suspended” in the past two months over anti-Semitic remarks. But there have been public suspensions and resignations as well. On May 3, Naz Shah stepped down from the Home Affairs Committee, pending the results of Labour’s investigation into her past anti-Semitic social media posts. On May 2, Labour suspended three councillors (Ilyas Aziz, Shah Hussain, and Salim Mulla) for anti-Semitic remarks discovered in their social media. On March 15, Vicki Kirby, who was elected vice chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party following being suspended in 2014 for anti-Semitic writings on Facebook, was suspended a second time for posting anti-Semitic remarks (this time, on Twitter). On April 28, former London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended following a statement he made claiming Hitler was a Zionist. Other recent suspensions include Khadim Hussein (March 23) and Mohammad Shabbir (April 27).

These perpetrators of the anti-Semitism that has been reported so far are mostly posting on social media, and thus projecting their hatred with ease around the world. They include common canards that: equate Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians and Nazi treatment of the Jews; propagate the blood libel; advocate for the expulsion of Jews out of Israel; and maintain that Israel created and controls the Islamic State. Here are some examples, from the political elite in Britain that were introduced above:

Calls for the Relocation of Israel

“Jews and Muslims lived together in the Middle East, in peace pre 1948. Perhaps it would have been wiser to create Israel in America it’s big enough. They could relocate even now.” -Ilyas Aziz, July 2014
A post of an image on Facebook titled “Solution for Israel-Palestine Conflict” that had Israel superimposed in the United States, with the statement “relocate Israel Into the United States,” with comment “problem solved” –Naz Shah, August 2014

[The “peace pre 1948” reference ignores the lethal Arab riots against Jewish civilians, including in the British Mandate for Palestine (1920, 1921, and 1929), Morocco (1875, 1903, 1907, 1912), Algeria (1934), Iraq (also known as the Farhud, 1941), Egypt (1945), Libya (1945 and 1948), Aden (1947), and Syria (1947); the Arab leadership’s genocidal incitement against Jews during Israel’s War of Independence; and the dhimmi/lower class status institutionalized for Jews throughout the Arab world, all which predate Israel’s conquest of the territories in 1967, and the rebirth of the modern state of Israel. Calls to relocate Israel deny the Jews their historic and internationally-recognized right to Israel where it is currently. Aziz’s and Shah’s quotes above also imply that Israel instigated its wars against the Arabs, which is patently false.]

Michael Warren Davis Man, Superman and Donald Trump

As of the Indiana primary and Ted Cruz’s bruised exit, the vulgarian protectionist is the last Republican standing and all but certain to carry his party’s banner into November. If Hillary Clinton thinks it will be a cakewalk, she hasn’t paid attention to the man who makes his own rules
Whenever someone asked for my opinion on Ted Cruz, I couldn’t help but start on a litany of negatives. “Well, his voice is really annoying. So is his nose. Or maybe it’s his cheeks? I can’t really tell. Something about his general face region just seems a bit off. He was a great debater in high school, but doesn’t really seem to have evolved much on that front since. His father, and radio talker Glenn Beck too, said he was appointed by God to be the next president, which is weird. Even his kids don’t want to hug him. And he eats boogers.”

A few hours later: “Then again, I agree with basically everything he says.”

You could probably leave it there. On paper, Ted Cruz is everything the “Outsider” movement could have asked for in a candidate. He’s a strict constitutionalist, a social ultra-conservative, an immigration hardliner, a foreign policy moderate, and he’s the leader of the conservative anti-establishment faction in the senate. True, he’s not a protectionist; but I don’t think the Outsiderists went into this contest as protectionists, either. The chicken came before the egg in this particular instance: they became anti-free trade because Trump is anti-free trade. Had Cruz gotten the momentum instead of Trump, the North America Free Trade Agreement would not have come up once in the entire primary season.

But he didn’t get the momentum. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he comes off as hobbledehoy-ish. We say of George W. Bush, “He’s the kind of guy you’d have a beer with.” That was his charm, and it helped Republicans overlook his lackluster ideological credentials. (He’s conservative, William F. Buckley wrote, but he’s not a conservative.) Cruz is the opposite. His ideological credentials are impeccable, but he seems like the kind of guy who was carded at the bar well into his thirties. “I’ll have one alcoholic beverage, please, my good publican.”

The Cop on the Global Beat It’s true: Iraq wasn’t transformed into Denmark. But it’s also not true, as the author argues, that Bush achieved none of his goals there. By Douglas J. Feith

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cop-on-the-global-beat-1462400073

“Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” By Michael Mandelbaum

Overstatement is the bane of scholarship about government. When political scientists study history, they want to do more than simply record and understand what happened: They aim to discover rules of behavior, based on the belief that political science is actually science.

In the 19th century, various theorists claimed to have discovered history’s key. Karl Marx famously said it was class conflict. Others said it was race. These ideas threw some useful light on history, but they were oversold. In the 20th century, the realpolitik school of foreign affairs stressed that nations act to increase their military and economic power. That’s a valuable insight as far as it goes, but the “realists” often overstate their case by belittling the role of ideology in world affairs. Likewise, the generally correct observation that democratic nations tend not to fight wars against one another is often embellished by democratic-peace theorists into a categorical proposition that such nations never clash.

Now, along comes an eminent foreign policy scholar, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis about how nation-building missions became America’s chief post-Cold War foreign activity, despite failure after failure. As a generalization, there’s much merit in the thesis. But the author carries it too far.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s book, “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” is, first, a story—a well-told, lucid, thoughtful survey of world affairs. I take issue with points throughout, but any student of the last quarter century would be well served to read this volume. CONTINUE AT SITE

Labour’s Radical ‘Moderate’ The party’s mayoral candidate in London gladly shared a stage with extremists.By Sohrab Ahmari

Londoners head to the polls on Thursday to decide who should succeed Boris Johnson as their next mayor. With the Paris and Brussels attacks fresh on voters’ minds, Islamism and terror have emerged as central themes of the campaign. And Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, is struggling to distance himself from his party’s growing radicalism.

The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.

For days Labour’s “anti-Semitism row” has dominated U.K. headlines. The proximate cause was a series of TV interviews by Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Coming to the defense of a Labour MP accused of anti-Semitism, Mr. Livingstone claimed that Hitler had been a Zionist. “A real anti-Semite,” he said, is someone who hates all Jews, not just those in Israel.

Mr. Khan quickly distanced himself from Mr. Livingstone, who has since been suspended from the party. “Sadiq has said repeatedly that he is disgusted at the growing problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party,” a spokesman told me. He added that Mr. Khan opposes the so-called boycott, divest and sanction movement targeting the Jewish state, adding that “we must not turn our face against Israel.”

The party’s mainstream blames Mr. Corbyn for this state of affairs. They’re right—up to a point. Mr. Corbyn came from the party’s red-flag-waving fringes. Labour reflects Mr. Corbyn’s ideological preferences now that he has moved to the center of party power. But other, more respectable Labour figures paved his path. Sadiq Khan was one of those figures, rising to prominence toward the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure as a voice of the party’s anti-antiterror wing.

Mr. Khan in 2004 shared a platform at a pro-Palestinian conference with Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, which at the time boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day. Another speaker was Ibrahim Hewitt of Interpal, which in 2003 was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations for funneling funds to Hamas, an allegation the U.K. pro-Palestinian charity denies. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump Reality He may be the highest variable nominee in American history.

With his victory in the conservative heartland of Indiana, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee for President. A plurality of GOP voters has rejected the strongest presidential field in memory to elevate a businessman of few fixed convictions and little policy knowledge who has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential polling. Now what?
***Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives. Dozens of miscalculations made his hostile takeover possible, not least decisions by other candidates in the early primary states to attack each other instead of Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz and his allies also prepared the ground by stoking rage against “the establishment” and immigrants, only to have Mr. Trump hijack their stage-managed rebellion as a more convincing restrictionist. (See nearby.)

Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy. The GOP electorate had its chance to reconsider Mr. Trump after his Wisconsin defeat a month ago. Instead the voters rallied behind him for seven straight wins with a majority in each state.

The most hopeful way to look at this is that GOP voters see Mr. Trump as the vehicle for American revival. They are at heart nationalists who see the U.S. in retreat abroad and the economy failing to raise wages at home, and they are revolting against both. Unlike the Japanese or the French, they aren’t going to accept decline without a fight.

In that sense they hope Mr. Trump will be another Ronald Reagan, who can storm Washington and overturn the status quo. This may be one reason so many of Mr. Trump’s voters are older Americans who recall the failures of the 1970s and the Reagan revival that followed.

The problem is that Mr. Trump is no Gipper, who had spent 40 years developing a philosophy of limited government and the U.S. national interest. As his letters show, he had superb instincts about the major issues of his day and was a brilliant political strategist. Mr. Trump is a clever political tactician, but his policy and rhetorical jaunts don’t lead to anything coherent we can detect beyond his desire to “do great deals.”

The Condescending Patriarchy By Marilyn Penn

Although feminists have claimed to seek equality – in education, employment, sexual and civil rights – a curious acceptance of patriarchal condescension still meets with their approval and demands. They won the battle to bare their breasts in public since men are entitled to do the same (see the painted topless ladies of Times Square), but when it comes to accepting equal responsibility for the consequences of drunken excess, they plead special protection. On campuses throughout America, women who claim to have been sexually molested while they were blotto are considered victims of a crime, not cooperating partners. Men, on the other hand, are never excused for molesting a woman (anything from a grope to rape) because they were drunk. Title IX and university administrations give women a pass and they willingly accept it.

Similarly, the media has traditionally withheld the names of women who claim to be victims of rape or molestation while they publish the names of men who are accused but have not been tried. Now,, in the strangest extension of this macho protectiveness, both Lincoln Center and the NY Times have admitted that Jed Bernstein, the former president of Lincoln Center, was forced to resign because he had a consensual affair with a woman on his staff, violating the company policy of no dating of subordinates. Mr. Bernstein had promoted this 30-something woman but so had his predecessor – twice. Both Mr. Bernstein and his subordinate were single and the affair was over by the time the relationship came to the attention of the Center’s higher-ups. Nevertheless, Lincoln Center did not divulge the name of the employee in order to “protect” her. Since she consented to flouting company policy, why was she not named and asked to resign as well? Is the assumption that an adult woman capable of performing in a high-powered job is nevertheless helpless to withstand the seduction of her much older employer? Does this sit well with Gloria Steinem? It’s not what Hillary thought of that 21 year old “narcissistic loony toon” who nearly brought down the president.