RUTHFULLY YOURS

Democratic opposition to Donald Trump and his cabinet nominees is consistently shrill, but the inability—or unwillingness—to make distinctions may backfire. Not everything deserves emergency footing, and eventually people tune out. Witness the meltdown over Tom Price’s investment portfolio.

The Georgia Republican and orthopedic surgeon is on deck to lead the Health and Human Services Department, and at Wednesday’s Senate hearing and in the Democratic trade press he stands accused of abusing his office for personal profit. Mr. Price’s net worth includes about $300,000 of stock in health-care-related companies, and over the years he’s sponsored legislation, sent letters or otherwise taken policy positions that reporters are now flyspecking for evidence of insider trading.

To take the latest non-bombshell at face value, Mr. Price took a position in 2015 in a company called Zimmer Biomet that makes hip, knee and other replacements. The same year, HHS proposed changing how Medicare pays for such devices. In a letter Mr. Price cosigned, he warned that the new system “could have a negative impact on patient choice, access and quality,” and he asked HHS to delay the project. In 2016 he cosponsored legislation to do so.

According to the daisy-chain allegations, the HHS proposal would reduce reimbursements for joint replacements, and therefore harm Zimmer Biomet’s profits, and therefore Mr. Price intervened. But the rule went forward in 2016 despite Mr. Price’s criticism, and he has been consistent as someone with health-care expertise in scrutinizing all HHS regulations he believes undermine patient care.

About 5,000 bills are introduced in every Congress and far more “dear colleague” letters are posted. This background noise is rarely market-moving, and Members of Congress are not prohibited from trading. Politicians aren’t insiders in the classic definition, meaning they don’t work for companies and owe a fiduciary duty to shareholders. Many Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee, such as Tom Carper and Mark Warner, also hold health-care shares.

In any case, the Zimmer Biomet purchase was made by Mr. Price’s Morgan Stanley broker and became known to him only for financial-disclosure compliance. The broker bought 26 shares whose total value has risen by about $300 in the months since. If Mr. Price really is self-dealing, he’s doing a lousy job.

The larger question is whether politicians, or any nonprofessional investor for that matter, should hold individual securities. As a matter of financial literacy, most small investors should opt for index funds, eliminating the familiar day-trading peril of buying high and selling low, with low transaction costs to boot.

The political danger is the appearance of conflicts of interest, which is why Members would be wise to not actively trade, whatever the law allows. Chief Justice John Roberts recently had to recuse himself from a patent case because he discovered after oral argument that the petitioner was a subsidiary of a company whose stock he owned, which means the outcome could flip in favor of the Supreme Court’s judicial liberals. Why public officials think they can beat the markets is a mystery, even if such trades don’t interfere with or compromise their public duties.

If Democrats were praising index funds and divesting their own portfolios, they’d be more credible critics. Inflating Mr. Price’s boring investments into scandals guarantees that when something does merit outrage, fewer people will believe it.

The most important statement in the Justice Department’s damning report on the Chicago Police Department has nothing to do with police behavior. Released on Friday, the report found the Chicago police guilty of a “pattern or practice” of unconstitutional force. But it turns out that the Justice Department has no standard for what constitutes a “pattern or practice” (the phrase comes from a 1994 federal statute) of unconstitutional police conduct. “Statistical evidence is not required” for a “pattern or practice” finding, the DOJ lawyers announce, citing unrelated court precedent. Nor is there “a specific number of incidents” required to constitute a “pattern or practice,” they proclaim.

Having cleared themselves of any obligation to provide “a specific number of [unconstitutional] incidents” or a statistical benchmark for evaluating them, the DOJ attorneys proceed to ignore any further obligation of transparency. The reader never learns how many incidents of allegedly unconstitutional behavior the Justice Department found, nor how those incidents compare with the universe of police-civilian contacts conducted by the Chicago Police Department. No clue is provided regarding why the DOJ lawyers concluded that the alleged abuses reached the mysterious threshold for constituting a pattern or practice. Instead, the report uses waffle words like “several,” “often,” or “many” as a substitute for actual quantification. This vacuum of information hasn’t stopped the mainstream media from trumpeting the report as yet another exposé of abusive, racist policing. EXCESSIVE FORCE IS RIFE IN CHICAGO, U.S. REVIEW FINDs, read the headline on the New York Times’s front-page story, which went on to note that the excessive force was “chiefly aimed at African-Americans and Latinos.”

The report does disclose that the DOJ attorneys reviewed 425 incidents of less-than-lethal force between January 2011 and April 2016. But what proportion of total force incidents those 425 events represent or how many of those 425 incidents the federal lawyers found unconstitutional isn’t revealed. As to how many stops and arrests were made over that same time period that didn’t involve the use of force, the reader can only guess.

We also learn that the federal civil rights team identified 203 officer-involved shootings between January 1, 2011, and March 21, 2016. How many of those were bad shootings? Fifteen? One hundred? The reader is left in the dark. The massive New York Police Department averaged 48 shootings a year from 2005 to 2015. The per-capita rate of officer shootings in the NYPD is therefore much lower than in the Chicago Police Department, which is about a third the size. But Chicago’s crime rate is much higher than New York’s; CPD officers confront many more armed and resisting suspects. It would have been useful to know how the ratio of officer-involved shootings to criminal shootings in Chicago compares to other cities. We don’t even learn how many of those 203 officer-involved shootings in Chicago were lethal.

The absence of any quantified evidence for DOJ’s judgment of systemic abuse is all the more significant, since it was only yesterday that Chicago law enforcement was the darling of the left-wing academic establishment. In 2010, the New York City Bar Association held a forum on the New York Police Department, during which Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan and Yale University law professor Tracey Meares both touted the Chicago department as a model that the big, bad NYPD should emulate. (I participated on that bar panel as well.) Meares and her Yale colleague Tom Tyler have used the Chicago Police Department as a laboratory for their concept of “procedural justice and legitimacy.” The Obama administration’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing incorporated the procedural justice idea from Chicago into its May 2015 report; the Justice Department distributes the Chicago procedural justice curriculum to other departments, according to Time magazine. John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor David Kennedy worked with Chicago on his theory of violence reduction. Garry McCarthy, who was superintendent of the Chicago Police Department during the period covered by the DOJ’s report, presented himself as a “reform” commander focused on community relations, and he was received as such by academia and the media. The Chicago PD’s extensive collaboration with academic researchers was the hot topic during a November 2015 conference of the American Society of Criminology, reports Time.

https://quadrant.org.au/

Yea, we must surely be at the End of Days, when improbable amities and alliances will blossom hither and yon, as they have been doing these past two months in Washington. Consider the portents:

After decades of making excuses for Moscow, the Western left now presents the Kremlin as the greatest threat to all mankind.
After decades of denouncing the imperialist machinations of the CIA, the spy agency is now the go-to source of geopolitical wisdom and must be trusted absolutely by all intelligent people everywhere.

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this article, the White House announced on Tuesday that Oscar Lopez-Rivera’s sentence would be commuted.

As Barack Obama begins the last week of his presidency, speculation about potential candidates for an eleventh-hour presidential pardon has inevitably heated up. And one name that has been bandied about should send a particularly unpleasant chill down the spines of law-abiding Americans everywhere: Oscar Lopez-Rivera.

Lopez-Rivera has been in federal prison since 1981, after he was convicted of seditious conspiracy and arms trafficking in connection with his leadership of the FALN, the notorious left-wing terrorist group that perpetrated more than 130 attacks on U.S. soil from the mid 1970s through the mid 1980s, killing six and wounding many more. Most members of the FALN, which purported to fight for Puerto Rican independence but maintained deep ties to Fidel Castro’s Cuba, were long ago captured and imprisoned, and many of them have already served their time and been released. But Lopez-Rivera remains unrepentant about his crimes, and he’s hardly been a model prisoner: In one of two failed attempts to escape, he conspired with others inside and outside his prison to kill his way to freedom, attempting to procure grenades, rifles, plastic explosives, bulletproof vests, blasting caps, and armor-piercing bullets. After the FBI thwarted this plan, another 15 years was added to Lopez’s original 55-year sentence.

Then, in 1999, President Bill Clinton stunned the world by offering clemency to twelve FALN members, including Lopez, without notifying the families of the FALN’s victims beforehand. Eric Holder, at the time a deputy attorney general in Clinton’s Justice Department, had been trying to free the imprisoned radicals for two years. When then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s staff thought freeing the terrorists might help her pick up the significant Puerto Rican voting bloc in her N.Y. Senate race, they reached out to Holder for an assist. Holder came up with a statement the terrorists would have to sign expressing remorse for their actions, Mrs. Clinton met with an advocate for the group who passed along documents to assist with the clemency, she gave the documents to her husband, and just two days later President Clinton made the surprise announcement.

The plan quickly began to implode when both branches of Congress overwhelmingly condemned it and the administration failed to get all twelve terrorists to agree to its conditions. As a 30-day deadline to accept the offer approached, eleven of the twelve prisoners signed on, walking free as a stunned nation watched. Lopez-Rivera was the only prisoner to decline the administration’s offer.

I contended in last weekend’s column that the Justice Department’s inspector-general investigation, focusing on statements by FBI director James Comey in the stretch-run of the presidential campaign, is part of a carefully orchestrated Democratic scheme to win the narrative battle over the 2016 election. The inquiry into whether Director Comey’s disclosures about the Clinton e-mails investigation violated DOJ standards is merely a pretext. The real objective is to bolster the claim that Donald Trump’s triumph was illegitimate, thus undermining his presidency.

The same strategy informs the Democrats’ continued repetition of the theme that “Russia hacked the election.” Notwithstanding that Putin’s regime did not tamper with the actual voting process and that the embarrassing information released by WikiLeaks (mostly e-mails from the DNC and Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta) was true, Democrats are determined to depict President Trump not as elected fair-and-square by Americans but as maneuvered into the White House by Russian “cyber-espionage.”

Now it’s the same old wine in a different bottle.

The Senate Judiciary Committee is currently considering Trump’s nomination of Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.) to be attorney general. On Tuesday, all nine Democrats on the committee signed a letter demanding that, if confirmed, Sessions recuse himself from any investigation of efforts by Russia to interfere in the election.

Let’s once again take a step back and understand what’s going on here.

If Russia merely tried to interfere in an American election, there is no basis to call for Sessions’s recusal. There is no reason to question Sessions’s motivation and commitment to investigate and prosecute espionage by Putin’s regime. The purported conflict of interest would arise only if we accept the narrative — i.e., the fiction — that “Russia hacked the election.” Had that actually happened, then it could be credibly claimed that Trump owes his presidency, and Sessions his stewardship of the Justice Department, to Russian espionage. That would be a major conflict of interest. Thus, Democrats want Sessions to concede, in effect, that he has a powerful motive to conceal Russia’s espionage — such that he must recuse himself because we cannot trust him to lead a fair and impartial investigation. Implicitly, Sessions would be conceding — and thus cementing — the fiction that “Russia hacked the election.”

In other words, the Democrats’ latest recusal ploy has nothing to do with Sessions, just as the IG investigation has nothing to do with Comey. The objective is to engrave a story on the election: The Democrats lost not because their candidate was terrible and their policies unpopular; they lost because Russia stole the election for Trump — rendering Trump illegitimate, and implicitly obliging Americans to resist him as a Putin puppet.

To the Left the highest form of service to America is to betray it.

This is why President Obama yesterday ordered that the 35-year sentence of convicted traitor U.S. Army Pvt. Chelsea Manning be commuted. Manning, who leaked vast quantities of classified materials, was born male with the given name Bradley but now identifies as female.

Bradley’s transgender status, which has made the prisoner a cause célèbre among left-wingers, almost certainly played a huge role in the commutation. Manning, who has tried to commit suicide in prison, has not had sex-reassignment surgery but has been campaigning for it for years.

As a consequence of our Marxist, identity politics-obsessed president’s order, Manning is now scheduled to be released from military prison on May 17 of this year, instead of 2045. This means that upon release Manning will have served about seven years behind bars.

Manning was convicted by court-martial on July 30, 2013, of 20 counts, including six violations of the Espionage Act, along with theft and computer fraud. An acquittal was registered on the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, which can result in a sentence of life imprisonment.

As a clemency-sweetener, on Jan. 12 WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange offered to allow himself to be extradited to the U.S. if President Obama ordered the release of Manning.

Will Assange honor his promise? We’ll see.

White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest’s comments last Friday may have foreshadowed the Manning clemency.

Responding to a reporter’s question, Earnest said there was a “pretty stark difference” between Manning’s case and document leaker Edward Snowden’s.

“Chelsea Manning is somebody who went through the military criminal justice process, was exposed to due process, was found guilty, was sentenced for her crimes, and she acknowledged wrongdoing,” Earnest said.

“Mr. Snowden fled into the arms of an adversary and has sought refuse in a country that most recently made a concerted effort to undermine confidence in our democracy.”

Earnest added that the documents Manning is said to have provided to WikiLeaks were “damaging to national security,” but those disclosed by Snowden were “far more damaging to national security.”

Manning’s actions constituted the largest intelligence leak in U.S. history.

It is naïve to think that political correctness is simply a matter of being scolded for saying something unacceptable to liberals. It has become much more than that. Political correctness is a deliberate tool used by the Left to intimidate conservatives and people of faith into silence, with the goal of making our classic and time-tested opinions illegitimate.

Political Correctness is a strategy, a weapon of social warfare, a bullying against those unwilling to reshape and renounce their traditional belief system and bow to the dictates of the leftocracy dead-set on total domination of our lives and culture. It enforces censorship and activates demonization, threatening those unwilling to submit and apologize with loss of job, livelihood, social acceptability, company sales, friends, reputation, and status. It is the liberal version of Islamic blasphemy laws, ruthlessly excising anyone who questions or strays from the leftwing cultural and social dogmas. It is the most un-American development in our lifetime.

In many ways it is worse than the McCarthyism practiced in the early 50s. Senator Joseph McCarthy, who sat on the Senate Committee of Government Operations, targeted relatively few, whereas liberal political correctness is targeting over 60%, tens of millions, of Americans. And whereas McCarthy was generally correct regarding the communist leanings and activities of his targets, liberal political-correctness czars are off-the-wall incorrect when accusing regular and patriotic Americans of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, or whatever is the latest “ism”. Joe McCarthy’s hearings lasted a mere couple of years, while the scourge and punishment of political correctness is into its 20th year.

Today’s New McCarthyites exist and labor on the Left and are engaged in the thoroughly un-American activity of censoring speech, curtailing and ostracizing religious freedom, and doing whatever they can to deconstruct traditional family life and taint the values of our parents, our Founders, and our grandparents as evil. By deriding everything we hold dear as unacceptable, and making us pay the price of holding onto our cherished beliefs, they hope to transform America, and American family and religious life, into a Sweden/Brussels fantasy or a completely secular and unwholesome political entity. They wish to replace America while we stand by and watch it happen.

But, the good news is that we are not helpless

The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

Donald Trump has gone on record as wishing to unite the nation. In fact, he has declared it one of his urgent priorities in numerous post-election comments. I hope this is mere presidential rhetoric, for America has long passed the point when unity would be possible. The nation is now hopelessly divided and will remain so. Unless Trump recognizes this unpalatable reality, much of his decision-making and hard work will go for nought.

The left, which includes the majority of national institutions — the legacy media, the academy, television, Hollywood, the social media providers, the judiciary, online and print groups, government departments, the Democratic Party and much of the Republican Party, the political class as a whole and the army of liberal voters — will never be pacified. The left will never cease in its efforts to scheme against a Trump — or any conservative-leaning — administration.

Trump must take seriously Newt Gingrich’s warning against the temptation to “give in” to the left when opposition starts to mount from every quarter — the Greens, government employees, the teachers’ unions, indeed the entire progressivist Category 5 hurricane of demands and vilification. Not only should Trump resist that temptation, he must not waste his time and energy seeking to heal what cannot be repaired, but needs to engage in a kind of domestic cold war, using every legislative means in his purview to contain a dangerous and implacable internal enemy. This is realpolitik applied locally.

Robert Oscar Lopez pillories the academic left and the education industry at all levels, he writes: “Try to build bridges to them, and they punish you for it…[they take] kind gestures from conservatives as a sign that conservatives are weak.” The arts of conciliation tend to be perceived as “an invitation to shame you publicly, using anything you say against you.” He continues: “Higher education is not a swamp to be drained. It is a diabolical machine, and it is time to pull the plug.” What he says of the education consortium is true of the left across the entire cultural, social and political spectrum.

It is naïve to assume that the political fissure between left and right, collectivism and individuality, Socialism and classical liberalism, fantasy and reality, can ever be bridged. In essence, this is a perennial conflict, one which the great satirist Jonathan Swift in The Battle of the Books, drawing from the classics, described as the enmity between the predatory spider, who purls illusions out of his own entrails, and the foraging bee who produces sweetness and light and convulses the spider’s self-spun “citadel.” It is a conflict between opposed epistemological frames of reference — in Swiftian terms, that of the fanatic parvenu and that of the companionable humanist. Today it is a war between progressivists and conservatives, between utopian experimentalism and traditional values. The rupture cannot be parged. One should not invest in a fruitless and destructive effort to create unity where none is possible.

Where the effort to achieve unity has real meaning is in the attempt to mend the surmountable divisions of opinion within the conservative family in order to form a strong front against the forces that would subvert the political coherence and even the survival of the nation. Unity only makes sense if it is accomplished within the often disparate group of genuine patriots who may disagree on many points, yet who are basically at one in struggling to establish the rule of law and a functioning democratic — or rather, republican — polity. But to work for the unification of oil and water is not only an egregious error but a recipe for social and political disunity.

E.M. Cadwaladr argues America now comprises “two separate peoples…where any notion of compromise…is painfully naïve and utterly futile.” Conservatism is about the “freedom from government interference,” the freedom for citizens “to do with their property as they see fit [and to] prosper or fail in accordance with [their own] choices and abilities.” Conservatives believe that “charity is an individual virtue, [the purpose of which] is to raise the unfortunate to a state of self-sufficiency.” Freedom includes the right “to make one’s own judgments about other people” (so much for political correctness). And “equality” means equality before the law.