The Republican convention ends on a high note – literally By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/08/the_republican_convention_ends_on_a_high_note__literally.html

The Democrats and Republicans approached their virus-era conventions in different ways. The Democrats opted for a dark, barren, and claustrophobic convention, bounded by the size of a computer monitor. The Republicans, however, chose a magnificent convention, one with a sense of spaciousness and color. After three dynamic days, it was hard to know if they could keep that momentum for the fourth day — but they did.

On Thursday, Republicans again used the vast and splendid Andrew Mellon auditorium as a backdrop for many of the speeches. And then, for Ivanka’s and the President’s addresses, the setting moved to the White House’s South Lawn. Behind the speakers was the beauty of the White House; behind the audience was the symbolism of the Washington monument. It was a wonderful culmination to a powerful convention conducted under challenging circumstances.

Before I even get to the substance of the speeches, compare how Biden and Trump appeared:

Trump’s setting was open, brilliant, and powerful. Biden’s looked like a high school student council election. It’s true that Trump benefitted from the symbolism of the White House, but the Democrats could easily have found an equally beautiful and powerfully symbolic site . . . if they’d wanted to. They didn’t even try, though, both because their goal was to make the point that America is a grim and dark place, and because Joe would have been overwhelmed if taken off that high school auditorium stage.

What Is the Violence in American Cities All About? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/08/what-is-the-violence-in-american-cities-all-about/

The point of the mob is to destroy what it cannot create.

It is hard to tell what the current revolutionary violence in our major cities is all about.

So far, hundreds of police have been injured, dozens of people have been killed, and we have seen billions of dollars in property and collateral damage.

Ostensibly, many of the summer demonstrations were in protest over the gruesome detention and death of George Floyd while in Minneapolis police custody on May 25.

Yet three months later, few of those trying to burn down a Portland police precinct — with police barricaded inside — or looting the high-end boutiques of Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, or indiscriminately beating up innocent pedestrians, appear to be driven by Floyd’s death.

Apologists argue that the perfect-storm furor of June, July, and August was the dividend of a collective six-month fear over the COVID-19 pandemic that has, as of this writing, killed nearly 180,000 Americans.

The unprecedented national quarantine and the sudden, self-generated recession of a once-booming economy certainly added to the tensions.

Millions of youths were sequestered in their apartments and basements, unemployed, without school, and worried over their career prospects. Many simply wanted to vent their rage at the world and almost everything in it.

The media romanticized the “summer of love” unrest and downplayed the violence. Newspapers ran bizarre photo essays on the chic garb at the protests — umbrellas, leaf blowers, wooden shields, armor, and colored bike helmets.

Douglas Murray Politics US Politics Protesters are clearing a path for Trump The ‘mostly peaceful’ carnage unfolding in American cities Douglas Murray

https://spectator.us/protesters-clearing-path-trump-kenosha-black-lives-matter/

‘This city is not going to stop burning itself down until they [the protesters] know that this officer has been fired.’ Thus spoke Whitney Cabal, a leader of the Kenosha chapter of Black Lives Matter, in response to the latest police shooting in Wisconsin. The use of the passive in that sentence is revealing.

As Theodore Dalrymple has pointed out (see ‘The knife went in’) it is common for people to assign motive to inanimate objects when they are loth to admit to being in the wrong. I suspect that the suitably named Ms Cabal knows that the state of Wisconsin did not auto-combust this week, as Krook does at the end of Bleak House. True, there was first a police shooting and arrest. But someone must then have put a match to the place. The American public, press and politicians know that. But any willingness to say it appears now to fall along strictly party-political lines.

It is one of the most striking things about the violence and unrest that have followed the killing of George Floyd. Not the violence, but the increasingly ostentatious desire of a portion of the population to pretend they do not see it. Some friends in New York tell me of gang robberies at restaurants in broad daylight, of lootings, shootings and boarded-up shops. ‘Peaceful demonstrations’, I am assured by other friends, who identify as ‘liberals’ though have mysteriously stayed away from the city of late.

The same story is rolling out across America. The left says that there are nightly protests for ‘social justice’. When these protests involve mass lootings, such as those in Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, they are claimed (if acknowledged at all) to be the actions of a tiny fringe. Such dogged blindness has a clear political and cultural purpose. The political purpose is a desire to prevent the reelection of Donald Trump. The wider justification would appear to be a belief that ‘anti-racism’ is such an important omelette of a cause that a few broken eggs — or cities — is a price worth paying.

A Trump In Full Matthew Continetti –

https://freebeacon.com/2020-election/a-trump-in-full/

President Trump accepted the Republican nomination Thursday night with his family flanking him on a dais constructed atop the South Lawn of the White House. His speech hit all the marks of Trump-ism. He said Joe Biden was inept and a vehicle for the socialist left, described how he’s fulfilled the MAGA agenda, and reasserted his opposition to political correctness. “We are not a nation of timid spirits,” he said. “We are a nation of fierce, proud, and independent patriots.”

The setting of the convention was another reminder of how unusual the Trump era has been. Donald Trump appeared out of nowhere when he came down the escalator in June 2015. Since that moment, he has been the indefatigable element of American (and world) politics. There is no getting around him. We have been living in a world in which Donald Trump defines media coverage of his candidacy and administration, reshapes the Republican party, and tugs the government of the United States fitfully and persistently in a national populist direction. Then the coronavirus struck, and the oddities that have defined American life for the last half decade metastasized. And so we were left with a sitting president delivering a convention address from the White House for the first time since 1940.

Donald Trump narrowly won the presidency four years ago because large swathes of America decided that the political class had failed them. He represented an anti-politics, a rejection of the bipartisan consensus on foreign policy, immigration, and trade that had influenced public policy since the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Trump defied the consensus, and he also flouted every single norm that has governed presidential decorum since at least World War II. As every pundit (including me) assailed his character and his methods, a plurality of Republican and then American voters gave him their assent.

The Trump Disruption His policy record is better than he and his opponents have made it sound.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-trump-disruption-11598570719?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

When Donald Trump won the Presidency four years ago, half of America gnashed its teeth or cried and even supporters who cheered weren’t sure what to expect. Four years later our verdict is that he has been better on policy than we feared but worse on personal behavior than we hoped. Whether Americans re-elect him depends on how they assess that political balance sheet.

We realize that even considering the Trump Presidency in these conventional terms is offensive to some readers. Don’t we get that he’s a would-be authoritarian, a Russian plant, or at least so deeply flawed as a human being that he can’t be trusted with power? Yet our democracy survives, and the Constitution’s checks and balances are intact. Americans who heard him ask for a second term Thursday night were trying to make sense of what has been a raucous and disruptive Presidency.**

This week’s virtual GOP convention has spent hours educating voters about Trump Administration successes, and many are real, starting with the pre-Covid-19 economy that we examined this week. The political irony is that this success was due to Mr. Trump’s adoption of conventional GOP economics, not his trade or immigration agenda.

Remembering other historic flights As Secretary of State Mike Pompeo highlights the first non-stop flight from Israel to Sudan, we remember the Zionist values that led to years of flights bringing Ethiopian Jews home. Moshe Phillips

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/remembering-other-historic-flights/

While many critics of the Trump administration were focused laser-like on the second day of the Republican National Convention in their criticism of Secretary Mike Pompeo for speaking to the convention from Jerusalem, part of his own focus seemed to be on a different historical aspect of the day.

The secretary tweeted on August 25th that he was “Happy to announce that we are on the FIRST official NONSTOP flight from Israel to Sudan!”

The word that may have stood out to some readers of the tweet was “official.” When were there any “unofficial” flights? Were there any illegal flights?

The very popular and star-studded Netflix movie The Red Sea Diving Resort (2019) featured just such a Sudan to Israel flight at its dramatic conclusion.

The Chris Evans / Ben Kingsley film reveals the amazing true story of the 1984-1985 covert op when Mossad agents with members of the Israel Defense Forces rescued hundreds of Ethiopian Jews. The Ethiopian Jew had sought shelter in Sudan from both a devastating famine and a bloody Marxist insurgency that ravaged Ethiopia leaving over a million dead. Sudan itself was in the midst of a Civil War.

Nikki Haley’s stellar performance as ambassador and at the RNC Ruthie Blum

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/nikki-haleys-stellar-performance-as-ambassador-and

No wonder her appointment caused then-Israeli ambassador to the UN Danny Danon to cheer, and Permanent Observer of Palestine to the United Nations Riyad Mansour to flinch.

Nikki Haley is a star. There’s no other way to describe the former governor of South Carolina, whose subsequent two-year term as America’s ambassador to the UN was one of the most memorable in recent history.Her appointment to the latter post by then-President-elect Donald Trump came as somewhat of a surprise. She had supported Marco Rubio in the Republican Party primaries, and when he dropped out of the race, she backed Ted Cruz.When Trump became her party’s nominee, she announced that she would vote for him, in spite of her reservations about his character and abilities. She then called on him to release his tax returns, a move that elicited one of his notorious Twitter offensives.

Nevertheless, he selected her for the sensitive position based on what he considered to be her professional merit. This did not prevent critics from highlighting her lack of experience in foreign affairs.

To be fair, Haley seemed to many at the time who hadn’t heard of her to be an odd choice for a job that requires not only familiarity with global politics, but a rejection of conventional diplomacy – certainly by representatives from countries like the US and Israel.

Grenell Torches ‘Unlimited Globalization’ that ‘Hollowed Out’ U.S. John Binder

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/26/rnc-ric-grenell-torches-unlimited-globalization-that-hollowed-out-u-s/

Richard Grenell, the former Acting Director of National Intelligence and former United States Ambassador to Germany, torched “unlimited globalization” and it’s devastating impact on America’s working and middle class during his speech at the Republican National Convention (RNC).

“No candidate [in the Republican presidential primary in 2015] could bring themselves to admit that something had gone badly wrong with American foreign policy. That the American voter, the American soldier, and the American taxpayer had all been let down,” Grenell said. “Except for one – Donald Trump.” Grenell went on to say:

After the end of the Cold War, Democrats and Republicans in Washington bought into the illusion that the whole world would start to resemble America. And so they started to pursue unlimited globalization. They welcomed China into the World Trade Organization … but they didn’t ground any of it in the interests of the average American.

Grenell added:

So for decades, while Washington politicians built a global system, American wages stagnated. Our great cities and industries were hollowed out. Entire communities were devasted, and our manufacturing plants were shipped off to China. That’s what happened when Washington stopped being the capital of the United States, and started being the capital of the world.

DNC vs RNC Compare and contrast what the two conventions are saying Charles Lipson

https://spectator.us/two-conventions-saying-dnc-rnc/

What’s the bottom line, so far?
 
Democrats think they will win by making the race a referendum on Donald Trump (more the person than the policies, though they hate both). They are effectively trying to run Joe Biden as a generic Democrat.
 
Republicans think the path to victory is to make the race a choice, Trump versus Biden, and to say Biden is unable or unwilling to stop the far-left in his party. Drawing a sharp contrast between the two parties was the whole point of Vice President Mike Pence’s speech to conclude the convention’s third night. For the most part, though, Republicans focused on the positive case for Trump, not the negative one for Biden. They featured lots of everyday Americans who said they had been helped by Trump’s policies, sometimes adding that he had reached out to them personally.
 
The Democrats made a very strong negative case, devoting almost their entire convention to attacks on Trump, leavened by their depiction of Joe Biden as a genuinely decent guy. Their policies got very little attention.
 
The parties did agree on one thing: the differences between them are stark. Both make a convincing case that this is the most consequential election in decades.
 

Discipline, Determination, and Data Will Get Us Through the Pandemic Getting through the worst of the pandemic won’t be easy, but we need to be smart, resilient, and disciplined, and go where the data take us. By Andrew I. Fillat and Henry I. Miller

https://amgreatness.com/2020/08/26/discipline-determination-and-data-will-get-us-through-the-pandemic/

While discussing many pandemic-related issues with friends and colleagues, we were reminded of the quip of journalist and satirist H.L. Mencken: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

As we battle the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and the illness it causes, COVID-19, the “fog of war” continues on both the medical and epidemiological fronts. On the public health side, different studies, especially those that involve modeling, seem to reach conflicting, or at least ambiguous, conclusions. And politicians and pundits have jumped in to make the fog denser, with many policy prescriptions contaminated by misinformation, ideological spin, and partisan politics.

                                                       Obtaining clarity about many aspects of COVID-19 has been elusive. Dr. Anthony Fauci has emphasized the virus’s unique “protean manifestations”: “I have never seen a virus in which you have 20 percent to 40 percent of individuals who could have no symptoms at all, to individuals who get mild illness and do not need to go to a hospital, to people confined to their beds at home for weeks with multiple post-viral syndromes,” he said. 

SARS-CoV-2 is also unusual in being able to infect a broad spectrum of body tissues beyond the respiratory tract, including the digestive tract, neurons that mediate smell and taste, kidneys, and most critically, the heart and lining of blood vessels. 

Infection often leads to widespread inflammation and tiny clots, which cause secondary deleterious effects. Moreover, an Italian research study found that upwards of 85 percent of patients who had been hospitalized have persistent, sometimes serious aftereffects that can drag on for an indeterminate amount of time, and possibly permanently. (The virus is too recent to know conclusively.)

The clear lesson is that efforts to prevent infection are critical. But, absent a vaccine, which is still likely far off, that’s complicated and involves difficult cost-benefit calculations.