Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
I met Angela Davis at a book signing in Los Angeles years ago.
My older sister got to know her after attending one of her courses at San Francisco State. This was back in the 1980s. I was still a Democrat. Little did I know just how nasty a leftist Angela Davis is.
I read her autobiography at the time, but was still fawning and doe-eyed. Not so much now.
Know your enemies, people. If you wonder why I read these books, even pay for them. I always make it a point to know my enemies, and to have read their works. I'm usually better read on all the collectivist cant than my faculty colleagues at work, to say nothing of the idiot trolls online.
I already hate Facebook. I use it to post links a couple of times a week, and that's it. Once my old high school classmates found me on the network, and they all turned about to be idiot progressives, that pretty much ruined the experience --- to say nothing of all the data tracking bullshit.
We're pretty much screwed in the social media age.
There's gotta be some law on celebrities that their brains go to jelly over "global warming" at some point in their careers. And I've been cutting Paul McCartney so much slack, heh.
BONUS: 1984. (The Erich Fromm afterword in this Signet pocket edition is excellent, reminding us that 1984 isn't just about totalitarian regimes like the Soviet Union under Stalin. It's about us too.)
WILLIAMSON, W.Va. – When Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton said in March that she would put a lot of coal miners out of business, Bo Copley took it personally.
On Monday, the laid-off coal worker from this struggling Appalachian community came face to face with the former secretary of state and called her to account for her remarks.
“I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend,” Mr. Copley said.
During a roundtable discussion in a county that has been ravaged by coal-industry layoffs, Mrs. Clinton sought to make amends for remarks that sparked a furor in Appalachia. In March, she predicted that coal companies would be put out of business during a Clinton administration. She added that those workers should not be forgotten and spoke about her plans to boost the economy in coal country, but her comments landed with a thud here in Appalachia.
On Monday, the former secretary of state told Mr. Copley that she had misspoken. During a campaign stop in West Virginia, Mrs. Clinton said she meant to suggest that the area was on a path to continued job losses, but that she would act to boost the economy in this depressed region. In November, she released a $30 billion plan aimed at revitalizing communities dependent on coal production.
“What I said was totally out of context from what I meant,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It was a misstatement.”
Mr. Copley, who is 39, choked up as he showed Mrs. Clinton a picture of his family and spoke about other coal workers who have lost their livelihood.
“When you make comments like we’re going to put a lot of coal miners out jobs, these are the kind of people that you’re affecting,” he said.
Such an emotional and frank exchange is a rarity on the campaign trail, where candidates speak to friendly crowds and seldom are compelled to answer their detractors. Mrs. Clinton thanked Mr. Copley for raising the issue, saying “it’s important to put it out on the table.”
She added that regardless of whether West Virginia supports her, she would work to help the state, acknowledging that she faces a steep challenge in the Democratic primary there on May 10...
Republican Ron Unz may have jumped into the high-profile race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, but he’s not drafting the speech he’s planning to deliver on the Senate floor in January.
“I’m an honest person, and I say what I believe,” said Unz, a Palo Alto software developer and entrepreneur who made an unsuccessful GOP primary bid for governor in 1994. “Sure, I could say I’m going to be the next senator, but that wouldn’t be honest.”
A Field Poll earlier this month shows just how tough a road Unz and other Republicans face in the Senate race, where only the top two finishers, regardless of party, advance to the November general election.
Democrat Kamala Harris, the state attorney general, leads the field at 27 percent among likely voters, followed by Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Santa Ana, with 14 percent support. None of the top three Republicans — Unz, Walnut Creek attorney Tom Del Beccaro and Palo Alto mediator Duf Sundheim — had more than 5 percent backing.
Instead of being in it to win it, Unz is using his Senate run to battle a measure on the November ballot that would repeal much of 1998’s Proposition 227, an initiative he sponsored — and bankrolled — that banned bilingual education in California public schools.
Focusing primarily on repeal
Unz isn’t making a secret of his plan to shove aside many of the typical issues of the Senate race to focus on a measure that’s not even on the June 7 primary ballot. His campaign business card, for example, reads, “Keep English. Vote Ron Unz!”
“The overwhelming factor (for his Senate run) was the absurd effort by the Legislature to repeal Prop. 227,” Unz said.
When the Legislature overwhelmingly voted in 2014 for SB1174, which put the repeal on this November’s ballot, Unz first thought about organizing an opposition campaign.
“But I decided the best way to get focus (on the repeal) was to get into a race,” he said. “It gives me a platform.”
Unz took out papers for the Senate race on the Monday before the deadline and returned them two days later on March 16, the last day possible.
“I really had to scramble,” he said.
Unz’s spur-of-the-moment decision blew up the careful plans of the other Republicans in the race, Sundheim admitted.
In 1979, three years after the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping visited the United States. At a state banquet, he was seated near the actress Shirley MacLaine, who told Deng how impressed she had been on a trip to China some years earlier. She recalled her conversation with a scientist who said that he was grateful to Mao Zedong for removing him from his campus and sending him, as Mao did millions of other intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, to toil on a farm. Deng replied, “He was lying.”
May 16th marks the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution, when Chairman Mao launched China on a campaign to purify itself of saboteurs and apostates, to find the “representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the army, and various spheres of culture” and drive them out with “the telescope and microscope of Mao Zedong Thought.” By the time the Cultural Revolution sputtered to a halt, there were many ways to tally its effects: about two hundred million people in the countryside suffered from chronic malnutrition, because the economy had been crippled; up to twenty million people had been uprooted and sent to the countryside; and up to one and a half million had been executed or driven to suicide. The taint of foreign ideas, real or imagined, was often the basis for an accusation; libraries of foreign texts were destroyed, and the British embassy was burned. When Xi Zhongxun—the father of China’s current President, Xi Jinping—was dragged before a crowd, he was accused, among other things, of having gazed at West Berlin through binoculars during a visit to East Germany.
In examining the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, the most difficult measurement cannot be quantified so precisely: What effect did the Cultural Revolution have on China’s soul? This is still not a subject that can be openly debated, at least not easily. The Communist Party strictly constrains discussion of the period for fear that it will lead to a full-scale reëxamination of Mao’s legacy, and of the Party’s role in Chinese history. In March, in anticipation of the anniversary, an editorial in the Global Times, a Party tabloid, warned against “small groups” seeking to create “a totally chaotic misunderstanding of the cultural revolution.” The editorial reminded people that “discussions strictly should not depart from the party’s decided politics or thinking.”
Nonetheless, in recent years, individuals have tried to reckon with the history and their roles in it. In January, 2014, alumni of the Experimental Middle School of Beijing Normal University apologized to their former teachers for their part in a surge of violence in August, 1966, when Bian Zhongyun, the deputy principal, was beaten to death. But such gestures are rare, and outsiders often find it hard to understand why survivors of the Cultural Revolution are loath to revisit an experience that shaped their lives so profoundly. One explanation is that the events of that period were so convoluted that many people feel the dual burdens of being both perpetrators and victims. Earlier this year, Bao Pu, a book publisher raised in Beijing and now based in Hong Kong, said, “Everyone feels he was a victim. If you look at them, you wonder, What the fuck were you doing in that situation? It was everyone else’s fault? You can’t blame everything on Mao. He was responsible, he was the mastermind, but in order to reach that level of social destruction—an entire generation has to reflect.”
China today is in the midst of another political fever, in the form of an anti-corruption crackdown and a harsh stifling of dissenting views. But it should not be mistaken for a replay of the Cultural Revolution. Even with thousands under arrest, the scale of suffering is of a different order, and shorthand comparisons run the risk of relieving the Cultural Revolution of its full horror. There are tactical differences as well: instead of unleashing the population to attack the Party, as Mao did in his call to “bombard the headquarters,” Xi Jinping has swung in the direction of tighter control, seeking to fortify the Party and his own grip on power. He has reorganized the top leadership to put himself at the center, suffocated liberal thinking and the media, and, for the first time, pursued critics of his government even when they are living outside mainland China. In recent months, Chinese security services have abducted opponents from Thailand, Myanmar, and Hong Kong...
Well, once again, to slightly paraphrase Glenn Reynolds, "WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF OFFICIAL FEAR, CRIME, AND NEIGHBORHOOD INSECURITY?"
Chicago, unsettled by a crime wave and a troubling police shooting, is in a grim mood. The outlook is clearly bleaker in some areas than others. African-Americans, especially, see their neighborhoods as beset by crime, bad schools and a host of obstacles to a better life for their children.
A survey of 1,123 Chicagoans from April 21 to May 3 found a majority of every race agreeing that the city has veered off course and that the mayor is not addressing their needs.
But when it comes to life in their neighborhoods, people in different groups describe substantially different experiences. Crime, for instance, is a greater concern for blacks in particular.
And in a city with a history of racial segregation, blacks see their neighborhoods as more isolated than people of other races do.
But the worst thing about their neighborhoods, and one of the biggest contrasts between blacks and other races in the poll, had to do with children.
When it comes to raising children, blacks and Hispanics see obstacles that most whites aren’t worried about.
Blacks and Hispanics are more likely to say they want to get out of their neighborhoods, and indeed, out of Chicago entirely.
They've got a lot of great conservative folks out that way. Murrieta's right next door, where we had the huge immigration protests a couple of years back.
God bless our beloved country as it again undergoes one of its quiet upheavals.
Donald Trump will receive the Republican nomination for the presidency and nothing will be the same. How we do politics in America is changed and will not be going back. The usual standards and expectations have been turned on their head, and more than one establishment has been routed.
A decent interval should be set aside for sheer astonishment.
We face six months of what will be a historically hellacious campaign. Yes, we picked the wrong time to stop taking opioids.
Before I go to larger issues I mention how everyone, especially the media, is blaming the media for Donald Trump’s rise. I hate to get in the way of their self-flagellation but that’s not how I see it. From the time he announced, they gave Mr. Trump unprecedented free media in long, live interviews, many by phone, some possibly from his bathtub. We’ll never know. It was a great boon to him and amounted, by one estimate, to nearly $2 billion worth of airtime.
But the media did not make Donald Trump’s allure, his allure made for big ratings. Mr. Trump was a draw from the beginning. If anyone had wanted to listen to Jeb Bush, cable networks would have been happy to show his rallies, too.
When Mr. Trump was on, ratings jumped, but it wasn’t only ratings, it was something else. It was the freak show at its zenith, it was great TV—you didn’t know what he was going to say next! He didn’t know! It was better than everyone else’s boring, prefabricated, airless, weightless, relentless word-saying—better than Ted Cruz, who seemed like someone who practiced sincere hand gestures in the mirror at night, better than Marco the moist robot, better than Hillary’s grim and horrifying attempts to chuckle like a person who chuckles.
And it was something else. TV producers were all sure he’d die on their show. They weren’t for Mr. Trump. By showing him they were revealing him: Look at this fatuous dope, see through him! They knew he’d quickly enough say something unforgivable, and if he said it on their air he died on their show! They took him down with the question! It was only after a solid six months of his not dying that they came to have qualms. They now understood they were helping him. Nothing he says is unforgivable to his supporters! Or, another way to put it, his fans would forgive anything so long as he promised to be what they want him to be, a human bomb that will explode by timer under a bench in Lafayette Park and take out all the people but leave the monuments standing.
In this regard today’s television producers remind me of the producers of 1969 who heard one day that Spiro Agnew, the idiotic new Republican vice president, was going to make a big speech lambasting the media for its liberal bias. They knew Agnew was about to make a fool of himself. Who would believe him? So they covered that speech all over the place, hyped it like you wouldn’t believe—no one in America didn’t hear about it. It made Agnew a sensation. The American people—“the silent majority”—saw it as Agnew did. “Nattering nabobs of negativism,” from the witty, alliterative pen of William Safire, entered the language.
The producers had projected their own loathing. They found out they and America loathed different things.
That’s a little like what happened this year with TV and Mr. Trump.
My, that wasn’t much of a defense, was it?
The Trump phenomenon itself would normally be big enough for any political cycle, but another story of equal size isn’t being sufficiently noticed and deserves mention. The Democratic base has become more liberal—we all know this part—but in a way the Republican base has, too. Or rather it is certainly busy updating what conservative means. The past few months, in state after state, one thing kept jumping out at me in primary exit polls. Democrats consistently characterize themselves as more liberal than in 2008, a big liberal year. This week in Indiana, 68% of Democratic voters called themselves liberal or very liberal. In 2008 that number was 39%. That’s a huge increase.
In South Carolina this year, 53% of Democrats called themselves very or somewhat liberal. Eight years ago that number was 44%—again, a significant jump. In Pennsylvania, 66% of respondents called themselves very or somewhat liberal. That number eight years ago was 50%.
The dynamic is repeated in other states. The Democratic Party is going left.
But look at the Republican side. However they characterize themselves, a majority of GOP voters now are supporting the candidate who has been to the left of the party’s established thinking on a host of issues—entitlement spending, trade, foreign policy. Mr. Trump’s colorfully emphatic stands on immigration have been portrayed as so wackily rightist that the nonrightist nature of his other, equally consequential positions has been obscured.
In my observation it is a mistake to think Mr. Trump’s supporters are so thick they don’t know his stands. They do.
It does not show an understanding of the moment to say Donald Trump by himself has changed the Republican Party. It is closer to the mark to say the base of the party is changing and Mr. Trump’s electric arrival on the scene made obvious what was already happening...
Keep reading.
Noonan basically says that voters gave Amanda Carpenter the boot along with all the other #NeverTrump ghouls. That's why Carpenter's dissing Noonan. And why Stephen Hayes is too, apparently, heh:
Long been an admirer of @Peggynoonannyc and look forward to each new column/book. But her zig-zagging on Trump is...confusing.
If you want to experience the full-on contempt of the leftist intelligentsia right now, go on social media and suggest, as I did this week, that Donald Trump isn’t certain to get crushed in November. (Trump, in case you hadn’t noticed, brings out pretty much the worst in everybody.)
The way a lot of partisan Democrats see it, Hillary Clinton — despite a loss to Bernie Sanders in Indiana Tuesday — will soon lock down her party’s nomination, and the only way she finds herself even threatened by Trump is if the media decides to legitimize him so we all have something to talk about. The word I keep hearing from liberals is “layup.”
Clinton does, in fact, enter the general election season with some serious structural advantages. Having analyzed trends from the past six elections and factored in demographic shifts, Third Way, the leading centrist Democratic group, concluded that Clinton starts the campaign virtually assured of 237 electoral votes — 46 more than Trump and just 33 short of a majority.
And as you’ve probably heard, no candidate has ever overcome — or even tried to overcome — the kind of ugly impressions Trump has made on women and minority voters to this point. Next to him, Clinton polls like Santa Claus.
But if history is any guide, Clinton comes to the campaign with a structural disadvantage, too, and one that shouldn’t be overlooked. It may explain why she can’t seem to put Bernie Sanders away — and why the outcome in November is hardly assured.
I’ve gone through this history once or twice before, but it bears repeating: In 1947, Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, which said no one could be elected to the presidency more than twice.
In the 65 years since the last state ratified that amendment — comprising 16 elections, and six elections following an eight-year presidency — only one nominee has managed to win a third consecutive term for his party. That was George H.W. Bush, who overcame a double-digit deficit late in the campaign, thanks in part to one of the most ineffectual Democratic campaigns in history.
(And before you start with me, I know, Al Gore actually won, and in an alternate universe somewhere they are building his monument on the Tidal Basin in a climate that is, on average, four degrees cooler than the one we inhabit, but for purposes of this discussion, let’s just live in the here and now.)
The important question is why it’s proved so difficult for either side to win third terms. The most common explanation has to do with voter fatigue. Essentially, we’re told that voters get sick of having one party in office for eight years, and so the pendulum swings back.
I don’t find this theory especially persuasive. I’ve met an awful lot of voters over the years, and rarely have I heard anyone make the case that it was time for the other party to get a turn. It seems to me voters focus a lot more on the candidates themselves than on the parties they represent.
And this may get to the truer cause of the third-term conundrum. If you look back at elections over the past half century, what you find is that the parties of two-term incumbents almost always nominate the candidate who is nominally next in line. Of the six candidates who have sought third terms since 1960, five had previously served as either president or vice president. (The president was Gerald Ford, who ran for election in 1976 after having held the job for two-plus years.)
The outlier was John McCain, who, like Clinton, had been the runner-up in the last open election, and who ran in a year when the incumbent vice president was sitting it out.
It’s not hard to see how this happens. A two-term president has both the time and the muscle to set up someone who will carry on his legacy — while effectively boxing out challengers.
And because presidents almost always lose congressional seats and governorships in off-year elections, an eight-year presidency tends to decimate the ranks of worthy, younger successors from outside the establishment, anyway.
In other words, by the time a president gets done slogging his way through the peaks and troughs of eight years on the job, there aren’t a lot of new, exciting alternatives to whichever former rival or loyal No. 2 has been patiently waiting on the edge of the stage...
Well, Clinton would certainly have to defy historical trends going back to the 1990s, but I actually do think voter burnout with the party in power plays a key role here --- voter enthusiasm is almost always more fervent among partisans of the out party, and 2016 will showcase more partisan fever than we've seen in a long time, heh.
We'll know how well all these election theories hold up this November. Nothing's locked down. Nothing's written in stone. It's going to be awesome, lol.
It's gonna be an election for the ages. Seriously, this is going to be the most bitter, bruising, and abusive election in generations, and not just at the top of the ticket. Down-ballot races are going to be nasty!
It has not yet been seen on television, but the early notices for a digital advertisement from a Democratic candidate for the Senate from Arkansas, Conner Eldridge, suggest it could well become a blueprint for how other Democrats — incumbents and challengers alike — attack their Republican opponents by linking them to Donald J. Trump.
THE AD Highlighting some of Mr. Trump’s most misogynistic remarks, the ad alternates between those quotations and slowly spelling out the definition of the ad’s title: “Harassment.”
A white, blinking cursor on a black screen begins to peck out a dictionary’s entry for “harassment,” before the screen cuts to video and audio clips of Mr. Trump: “She ate like a pig.” “I’d look her right in that fat ugly face of hers.” The cursor continues typing the definition — “To subject someone to hostility” — before cutting again to the voice of Mr. Trump opining about a woman’s cosmetic surgery: “The boob job is terrible.”
This continues for a full minute before the cursor blinks ahead of a new phrase: “Trump enabler: Arkansas Senator John Boozman,” who is shown in a black-and-white photo as he is heard saying he will support the Republican nominee, “regardless of who we pick,” even if it is Mr. Trump.
THE IMPACT The two-minute ad was instantly seen as a preview of general-election attacks on down-ballot Republican candidates with Mr. Trump at the top of the ticket. It received even more attention on the right than on the left: “This is brutal,” wrote Erick Erickson, a conservative writer who opposes Mr. Trump’s candidacy. He called it a road map for how Democrats “are going to take back the Senate.”
THE TAKEAWAY Mr. Trump’s victory in the primary campaign has created a sense of worry and uncertainty for lower-level Republican candidates, unsure if he will drag them down or if they will need to hold onto his avid supporters to have a chance in November. The threat contained in this ad — effectively using Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Boozman’s own voices against them — could well prompt some Republicans to try to distance themselves from their presumptive nominee...
I think Republicans should just say bring it.
I mean, as much as leftists can smear Trump for misogyny, racism, Islamophobia, or whatever other slur-of-the-day, there's ten times the material available from Hillary and Bill Clinton's decades-long careers in the public eye. Just Hillary's years in the Obama State Department will provide so much brutal attack material, it's going to make the Democrat Party look like the key state-sponsor of Islamic State.
And Bill Clinton's misogyny can't be topped. Yeah, Hillary enabled it, despite her lies to the contrary. It's going to be mud-slinging and nasty all the way down. What a hoot. I can't wait for the fall campaign!
By seizing the Republican presidential nomination for Donald J. Trump on Tuesday night, he and his millions of supporters completed what had seemed unimaginable: a hostile takeover of one of America’s two major political parties.
Just as stunning was how quickly the host tried to reject them. The party’s two living former presidents spurned Mr. Trump, a number of sitting governors and senators expressed opposition or ambivalence toward him, and he drew a forceful rebuke from the single most powerful and popular rival left on the Republican landscape: the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan.
Rarely if ever has a party seemed to come apart so visibly. Rarely, too, has the nation been so on edge about its politics.
Many Americans still cannot believe that the bombastic Mr. Trump, best known as a reality television star, will be on the ballot in November. Plenty are also anxious about what he would do in office.
But for leading Republicans, the dismay is deeper and darker. They fear their party is on the cusp of an epochal split — a historic cleaving between the familiar form of conservatism forged in the 1960s and popularized in the 1980s and a rekindled, atavistic nationalism, with roots as old as the republic, that has not flared up so intensely since the original America First movement before Pearl Harbor.
Some even point to France and other European countries, where far-right parties like the National Front have gained power because of the sort of resentments that are frequently given voice at rallies for Mr. Trump.
Mr. Trump, with his steadfast promises to deport immigrants who are in the country illegally and to build a wall with Mexico, may have done irreversible damage to his general election prospects. But he quickly earned the trust that so many of those voters had lost in other fixtures of America — not just in its leaders, but in institutions like Congress, the Federal Reserve and the big-money campaign finance system that Mr. Trump has repudiated, as well as in corporations, the Roman Catholic Church and the news media.
And he has amplified his independent, outsider message in real time, using social media and cable news interviews — and his own celebrity and highly attuned ear for what resonates — to rally voters to his side, using communication strategies similar to those deployed in the Arab Spring uprising or in the attempts by liberals and students to foment a similar revolution in Iran.
“Trump leveraged a perfect storm,” said Steve Case, the founder of AOL, in an email message. “A combo of social media (big following), brand (celebrity figure), creativity (pithy tweets), speed/timeliness (dominating news cycles).”
Mr. Trump is an unlikely spokesman for the grievances of financially struggling, alienated Americans: a high-living Manhattan billionaire who erects skyscrapers for the wealthy and can easily get politicians on the phone. But as a shrewd business tactician, he understood the Republican Party’s customers better than its leaders did and sensed that his brand of populist, pugilistic, anti-establishment politics would meet their needs.
After seething at Washington for so long, hundreds or thousands of miles from the capital, many of these voters now see Mr. Trump as a kind of savior...
That's a surprisingly good analysis, especially for the far-left New York Times, heh.
More:
Mr. Trump now feels so empowered that he does not think he needs the political support of the party establishment to defeat the likely Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton. He is confident that his appeal will be broad and deep enough among voters of all stripes that he could win battleground states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania without the support of leaders like Mr. Ryan, Mr. Trump said in an interview on Saturday.
That's going to be quite a test, the defining test of this campaign. Can he really win these states without establishment backing, or even some of the establishment? It's going to be an epic campaign! I love this.
The current uproar over antisemitism is truly a wonder to behold. For the past three decades and more, antisemitism was the prejudice that dared not speak its name. It was deemed to have been stamped out, other than among cranks on the far right.
Anyone rash enough to protest that the anti-Israel animus in progressive circles was a mutation of ancient Jew-hatred was told they were “waving the shroud of the Holocaust” to sanitise the crimes of Israel. There could be no connection. The left was institutionally anti-racist, wasn’t it?
On the contrary, the left is institutionally anti-Israel and the connection is irrefutable. For sure, many who loathe Israel may not be hostile to Jews as people. Nevertheless the narrative of Israel to which they subscribe is inescapably anti-Jew....
Among the educated classes, Israel, the target of decades of Arab exterminatory aggression, is almost universally presented as the villain and the Palestinians as its victims. Israel is held to be responsible for the absence of a Palestine state and thus the obstacle to solving the Middle East conflict.
The fact that the Arabs turned down proposals or offers of a Palestine state alongside Israel in 1937, 1947, 2000 and 2008, responding instead with terrorism or war, is ignored. The repeated statements of the Palestinian leadership that its real aim is to capture all of Israel are also ignored. It is never reported how the Palestinian Authority-controlled media and educational materials routinely incite Palestinian children to hate Jews, murder Israelis and capture every Israeli city.
Instead, Britain is told that the Israelis are child-killers. During the 2014 war in Gaza, when Israel finally responded to years of rocket attacks by launching airstrikes against Hamas, broadcast and print media claimed Israel was recklessly or deliberately killing hundreds of Palestinian children and other civilians.
In fact, as the High Level Military Group of western top brass told the UN last year, the lengths to which Israel went to try to protect Gaza’s civilians far exceeded the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, even at the cost of its own soldiers’ and civilians’ lives, and going further than any other nation’s army would ever do.
Yet the British public had been told, virtually without contradiction, that Israel had wantonly killed hundreds of children. Among those on the left now vowing to root out antisemitism, I didn’t notice any of them rushing to condemn that particular blood libel.
Last year, the Islamic adviser to Mahmoud Abbas taught on Palestinian Authority TV that Jews throughout history have represented “falsehood . . . evil . . . the devils and their supporters . . . the satans and their supporters”. The Palestinian Authority daily published an opinion article claiming that Jews “are thirsty for blood to please their god (against the gentiles), and crave pockets full of money”. Children were shown on TV reciting poems portraying Jews as “most evil among creations”, “barbaric monkeys” and “Satan with a tail”.
Progressive Britain never reports any of this. Instead, it amplifies the hate in its own intellectual, cultural and media echo-chamber.
Denying the legal and historical rights of the Israeli “settlers” to the land, it demonises and dehumanises them. When they are murdered by Palestinians, this is rarely reported on the grounds that they had it coming to them. Dehumanisation of the “settlers” leads inexorably to the dehumanisation of all Jews...
This is interesting, especially the snippet of Glenn Beck going off on Donald Trump included there. He argues that if Hillary Clinton wins in November, Republicans will be shut out of the White House forevermore, since the Democrats will legalize everybody and that'll be the end of the ballgame, heh.
Our views on the Electoral College outcome of a Clinton-Trump match-up haven’t changed since we published our “Trumpmare” map a month ago. If anything, we wonder whether our total of 347 EVs for Clinton to 191 EVs for Trump is too generous to the GOP.
Still, party polarization will probably help Trump. In the end, millions of Republicans will hold their nose and vote against Hillary and for Trump, just as millions of Democrats will put aside their hesitations about Clinton to stop Trump. Negative partisanship — casting a ballot mainly against the other party’s nominee rather than for your party’s candidate — will be all the rage in November. This will be especially likely after the vicious scorched-earth campaign on both sides that is coming. Someone could make a fortune at polling places selling clothespins for the nostrils.
However, we do recognize at least some upset potential in Trump. Third terms for the White House party are difficult to secure. President Obama is, more or less, at 50% job approval — pretty good, in fact, for this president. But an unexpected economic plunge, major terrorist success, international crisis, or serious scandal could subtract critical percentage points from Clinton. Voters are not inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt, so intertwined is her fate with Obama’s, and so fixed is her scarred image after decades in the hothouse of politics.
Just as important, Clinton can lose if she and her team smugly take victory for granted. You are halfway to losing when you think you can’t lose. Students of President Lyndon Johnson’s campaign against the doomed Barry Goldwater recognize that LBJ wouldn’t let his lieutenants rest on favorable polls; he ran a superb if brutal effort against Goldwater, and never let up. Much the same was true for President Richard Nixon in 1972. While he and his team schemed to insure George McGovern became his opponent, using dirty tricks against some of McGovern’s Democratic foes, Nixon had tasted defeat and near-defeat too often in his career to rest easy for even a day. Will overconfidence generated by favorable surveys cripple the Clinton campaign?
Trump has forced the political world to ingest a sizable dose of humility. Even many of political science’s much-vaunted statistical models that attempt to predict election results cannot account for a candidate like Trump — either because he overrides or suspends some of the normal “rules” of politics, or because he proves that parties do not always nominate electable candidates...
Interesting.
RTWT.
I think it's advantage Democrats, but I wouldn't count out Donald Trump for a second. It's going to be the most interesting presidential campaign in my lifetime.
We're going to see lots of different "hot" takes on how the Electoral College will shape up for November, but for now just remember, it's a long way off until the general election. A lot can happen before then.
In 1999, the libertarian party helped transform American politics by launching a campaign that ultimately sent hundreds of thousands of e-mails to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protest its proposed “know your customer” banking regulations. The FDIC withdrew the rules, and the era of digital politics was born. Roughly a decade later, social media propelled “birtherism” to the forefront of the national conversation, reinstating nativism as an active ideology in the United States. In 2009 came the Tea Party movement, followed by Occupy Wall Street in 2011, both of which drew on new online organizing mechanisms to build solidarity networks around a particular analysis of social reality. The question for students of American politics now is whether these changes can drive a fundamental realignment of our political parties.
Transformations in communications technology have made it more possible than ever before for dissenters from the Democratic and Republican parties to find one another and to form sizable communities of interest. The result is lowered barriers to entry for the work of political organization, with consequences announced daily in headlines about the 2016 presidential campaign. Insurgent candidates in both parties have drawn on the organizational power that has developed over the past decade within ideologically defined communities: Donald Trump has summoned the anger and xenophobia of the birthers, Bernie Sanders has channeled Occupy’s critique of rampant inequality, and Ted Cruz has marshaled the forces of the Tea Party universe. By attaching other groups of voters to their original, more ideologically concentrated constituencies, these candidates have achieved greater success in their respective primary campaigns than anyone thought possible just one year ago.
Regardless of whether they succeed in taking over their parties, these new coalitions have the potential to remake American politics if either the insurgents or the party faithful are driven to seek refuge in existing third parties or to create entirely new ones. For the 2016 campaign at least, that latter possibility is already foreclosed, so a takeover (hostile or otherwise) of a third party seems more likely—both the Libertarian Party and the Green Party can place candidates on the ballot in a significant number of states. Even so, our first-past-the-post electoral system makes it very hard for third parties to challenge the top two. Barring the emergence of new habits of collaboration and alliance formation among small parties, only a fundamental change to our system of voting—the introduction of proportional representation, for example—would allow for a more fluid political system to develop.
Speculating on what the future holds for America’s political alignment requires thinking through a complex array of factors: voting rules, political egos, the time horizons of charismatic leaders, questions of succession, the intensity of various ideological commitments, and a famously mutable public opinion. What we are most likely to see is more of the new normal: incredibly bitter fights among plurality-sized groups for total—if temporary—control of one of the major parties. Will this also worsen gridlock at the national level, thereby exacerbating the intensity of those intraparty battles and further destabilizing our political system overall? If these dynamics play out simultaneously in both parties, the most unified side will triumph.
There's more, FWIW, from Rick Perlstein and Daniel Schlozman at the link.
This looks interesting -- especially as how I really need to get up on the academic debates on mass incarceration. It's all the rage on the left, and the idiot progs are obviously having a significant policy impact (considering how the Obama White House is releasing hardened criminals onto the streets, to say the least).
In this brilliant, heartbreaking book, Matthew Desmond takes us into the poorest neighborhoods of Milwaukee to tell the story of eight families on the edge. Arleen is a single mother trying to raise her two sons on the $20 a month she has left after paying for their rundown apartment. Scott is a gentle nurse consumed by a heroin addiction. Lamar, a man with no legs and a neighborhood full of boys to look after, tries to work his way out of debt. Vanetta participates in a botched stickup after her hours are cut. All are spending almost everything they have on rent, and all have fallen behind.
The fates of these families are in the hands of two landlords: Sherrena Tarver, a former schoolteacher turned inner-city entrepreneur, and Tobin Charney, who runs one of the worst trailer parks in Milwaukee. They loathe some of their tenants and are fond of others, but as Sherrena puts it, “Love don’t pay the bills.” She moves to evict Arleen and her boys a few days before Christmas.
Even in the most desolate areas of American cities, evictions used to be rare. But today, most poor renting families are spending more than half of their income on housing, and eviction has become ordinary, especially for single mothers. In vivid, intimate prose, Desmond provides a ground-level view of one of the most urgent issues facing America today. As we see families forced into shelters, squalid apartments, or more dangerous neighborhoods, we bear witness to the human cost of America’s vast inequality—and to people’s determination and intelligence in the face of hardship.
Based on years of embedded fieldwork and painstakingly gathered data, this masterful book transforms our understanding of extreme poverty and economic exploitation while providing fresh ideas for solving a devastating, uniquely American problem. Its unforgettable scenes of hope and loss remind us of the centrality of home, without which nothing else is possible.
With his victory in Indiana, Donald Trump has seized a controlling stake in the Republican Party.
Back when few people took Donald Trump seriously as a potential presidential candidate, the New York businessman asked former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his wife, Callista, to meet in Iowa. Over breakfast at the Des Moines Marriott Hotel in January 2015, Mr. Trump spent 45 minutes grilling Mr. Gingrich on his experience running for president.
“It was clear to me at the end of the talk that he was seriously considering it,” Mr. Gingrich said.
Yet two months later, in March 2015, three-quarters of Republican primary voters in a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll said they couldn’t imagine supporting Mr. Trump for president. He was so marginal that during a candidate cattle call by the National Rifle Association the following month more people stayed to listen to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal than to Mr. Trump.
Most Republican leaders remained oblivious while Mr. Trump plotted the political equivalent of a corporate takeover. With his resounding victory Tuesday in Indiana, he has seized a controlling stake in the Republican Party with the backing of shareholders unhappy with previous management.
Mr. Trump, having driven out the last of his rivals, is now the party’s presumptive nominee—a jaw-dropping outcome that says as much about the GOP, caught in turmoil and transition, as it does about Mr. Trump.
Ever since their bitter 2012 presidential loss, Republican leaders and the party’s grass roots have been at odds, with rank-and-file voters angry at the failure of elites to deliver, and at odds over the issue of immigration. Mr. Trump found opportunity in the rupture.
Party leaders and the other GOP candidates almost unanimously underestimated Mr. Trump’s staying power. His rivals believed his provocative campaign would fail, a presumption that allowed him to run for months in a splintered field of competitors. Most were reluctant to attack, convinced they would scoop up his supporters when Mr. Trump’s campaign finally imploded.
Republicans proved vulnerable to his unconventional campaign style. As a skilled entertainment professional, he made himself ubiquitous. His audience seemed ready to forgive any outrageous comment or slip-up.
Mr. Trump dominated the campaign conversation with a communications-heavy strategy that relied on mass rallies, TV interviews and debates. That meant no polling, no analytics, little paid media, no consultants.
“This election isn’t about the Republican Party, it’s about me,” Mr. Trump said in an interview this week. “I’m very proud I proved an outsider can win by massive victories from the people, not from party elites or state delegates.”
Having dealt the GOP establishment its biggest defeat in decades, Mr. Trump said his mission wasn’t to change the party. He also doesn’t appear interested in whether the GOP can muster the kind of institutional support its presidential nominee normally receives...
I ordered Kim Holmes' new book on Thursday night when I got paid, with free shipping, and the package was delivered on Sunday!
Man, that was fast. And so cool too. I've been plowing through the pages!
I haven't been this excited about a new book for a year or two, and I can't recommend this one enough. It's explains very carefully the precise nature of the ideological threat we're facing, taking the argument right to the top of the Democrat Party hierarchy. Conservatives have a lot of work to do if they hope to reclaim some of the ideological space, and to save American politics from even much more dire straights in the years ahead.
I am often asked why I, a Christian libertarian and intellectual, would publicly support Donald Trump, a man of no fixed ideology, no apparent religious beliefs, multiple marriages, visible ties to the Clintons, and whose taste and sophistication tends to resemble that of a nouveau riche rhinoceros. It is a reasonable question. After all, how can anyone support a candidate whose public statements are, to put it mildly, inconsistent—when they are not completely self-contradictory.
The answer is as simple as it is conclusive and convincing. Donald Trump is the only candidate in either major party whose personal interests are aligned with those of the American public rather than with the interests of the anti-nationalist elite who see America as nothing more than lines on a map and Americans as nothing more than 300 million economic units in the global economy.
The reason I trust Donald Trump, despite all his rhetorical meanderings, is that he is a traitor to his class. Unlike Hillary Clinton and Ted Cruz, both ordinary people who sold their souls in order to be granted a seat at the table of the Great Game, Donald Trump was born a member of the elite and he has always been welcome in the inner circles of both political parties. When I met him in 1988, it was at the Republican National Convention in New Orleans, where he was the personal guest of George Bush in his private suite there. Like the Bushes, like the Clintons, Trump is truly neither Republican nor Democrat. He is a lifetime member of America’s bi-factional ruling party.
So Donald Trump was already a man of great wealth, influence, connections and power. He did not need to run for president in order to make a name for himself or to launch a public speaking career at $200,000 a pop. Nor does it make sense to claim that he is running for president in order to assuage his formidable ego. Quite to the contrary, he has been under furious attack and criticism from the media as well as from the wealthy elites his rivals are most desperate to please, and it is only his tremendous ego that permits him to survive it. He is enduring this relentless, bipartisan assault because the ruling party knows he has chosen the American people over them.
Ask yourself this: why did Donald Trump run for president in the first place? I believe that the real reason is that he, like you, is deeply concerned about the current state of the United States of America, and he, like you, fears for its future...
CARMEL, Ind.—Donald Trump rolled to a decisive victory in Indiana’s Republican presidential primary Tuesday and his chief rival, Ted Cruz, dropped out of the race after earlier calling the front-runner a “pathological liar.”
Mr. Trump was on pace to win all of the state’s 57 delegates to the Republican National Convention, leaving him in a position to clinch the party’s nomination when the final primary contests are held June 7. Mr. Cruz finished in second place and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, who made a deal with Mr. Cruz to not campaign in the state, was third.
Mr. Cruz told supporters Tuesday night that he was suspending his campaign. “Together we left it all on the field in Indiana. We gave it everything we got but the voters chose another path,” he said.
Earlier in the day, he launched a fusillade of attacks, calling the front-runner “utterly amoral,” a “narcissist,” a “serial philanderer” and a “pathological liar.”
Mr. Trump responded on Twitter: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz really went wacko today. Made all sorts of crazy charges. Can’t function under pressure—not very presidential. Sad!”
The extreme remarks reflected the stakes as the candidates turn to the final laps in a nominating contest that has defied convention, splintered the party, and left nearly two-thirds of all general election voters with a negative view of the likely standard-bearer before an expected showdown with Mrs. Clinton in November.
Nationwide, Mr. Trump is viewed unfavorably by 65% of voters, according to last month’s Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll. That is higher than Mrs. Clinton, who is seen unfavorably by 56% of voters.
A sweep of the state’s delegates would leave Mr. Trump just 225 delegates short of the 1,237 required to clinch the party’s nomination. With nine states to go, including Nebraska and West Virginia next week and California on June 7, Mr. Trump would require less than half of the remaining bound delegates to become the nominee.
Katie Packer, who leads an anti-Trump super PAC that spent $1.3 million against Mr. Trump in Indiana, said in a memo that her group will continue to fight against the front-runner. “There is more than a month before the California primary—more time for Trump to continue to disqualify himself in the eyes of voters,” she wrote.
And John Weaver, the chief strategist for Mr. Kasich’s campaign, said the Ohio governor will soldier on. “Gov. Kasich will remain in the race unless a candidate reaches 1,237 bound delegates before the convention,” he said.
For Mr. Cruz, Tuesday’s contest had been his strongest opportunity to change the momentum of the GOP campaign. His team for weeks had pointed to the Midwestern state, comparing it to Wisconsin, where the Texas senator won a convincing victory over Mr. Trump last month.
But Mr. Cruz never gained traction in the state. A series of decisions designed to boost his prospects, including naming Carly Fiorina as his running mate, were seen by many voters more as acts of desperation than smart maneuvers...
When it was announced that Harriet Tubman would displace President Andrew Jackson on the $20 bill, there were two sets of dramatically different reactions among Republicans on social media.
One group passed around links to a National Review piece celebrating the decision to “tell the story of a deeply-religious, gun-toting Republican who fought for freedom in defiance of the laws of a government that refused to recognize her rights.”
“If it was political correctness that drove this decision, who cares?” it asked.
Much of the Republican base, the other group, cared. Donald Trump noticed and denounced the move as “pure political correctness”.
Political correctness is the defining element of the culture war today. It’s also one of the driving forces of Trump’s candidacy. Republicans and conservatives who ignore the backlash to it do so at their own peril.
When the left exploited the Charleston church shooting to begin a purge of Confederate flags that extended all the way into reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard, Republicans failed to defy the lynch mobs and even cheered the takedowns, some of which took place under Republican governors, as progress. Congresswoman Candice Miller, a Republican, announced recently that state flags in the Capitol featuring confederate insignia will be taken down due to the “controversy surrounding Confederate imagery”. The “controversy” is another term for the left’s manufactured political correctness.
There are legitimate positions on both sides when it comes to the Confederate flag, but the historical debate is not the issue. Just as it doesn’t matter very much that Harriet Tubman was a Republican. It matters far more that both moves were driven by the social media mobs of political correctness.
Culture wars are not about actual historical facts, but a tribal conflict over culture between clashing groups. This is a conflict in which it mattered a great deal that northeastern elites were lining up to get $400 tickets to see Hamilton, a hip-hop musical praised by many of the same Republicans who wouldn’t be caught dead watching reruns of the Dukes of Hazzard. That New York theater trend led to Southerner Andrew Jackson being displaced on the currency instead of New York’s own Alexander Hamilton.
Some conservatives would argue that Andrew Jackson founded the Democratic Party while Hamilton, a longtime foe of its political forebears, would likely have aligned with the modern Republican Party. And like Tubman on the $20 bill, they would be completely missing the forest for the factoid.
Imagine that you live in a world in which the theater tastes of New York elites combined with a media pressure campaign by two obnoxious New Yorkers determines who shows up on American currency? It isn’t nearly as grating if you are a Republican living in New York or Washington D.C. and share much of the culture of the liberal upper class, even if you generally dissent from its economic and social policies.
But it’s a lot more irritating if you live in Alabama or Mississippi and your culture is not only an object of mockery and contempt, but you also have it rubbed in your face that the momentary whims of an entitled elite operating out of a handful of overrated cities matter more than your entire history...
There is no "Stop Trump" movement, or "#NeverTrump" hashtag tantrums, after this.
Ted Cruz dropped out of the GOP race a little while ago. It's very big news, but considering the full-on explosion of vitriol on the campaign trail today (with Donald Trump smearing Raphael Cruz as an alleged Lee Harvey Oswald accomplice), I don't think fences will be mended any time soon, and that might not actually be helpful as far as the general election is concerned. But we'll see. We'll see.
The video's from earlier this afternoon. Krauthammer predicted that the "Stop Trump" movement would die in the case of a Trump win tonight. Well, it's dead as far as Ted Cruz being the movement's main vehicle, that's for sure.
We've already been hearing stories about Trump's deep support among America's economically disenfranchised, especially among working class whites. But so many stories remain to be told, and it's not just blue collar whites by any means.
With the unemployment rate now exceeding 7.2% in Josephine County, the biggest issue in this year's election here is who can put people back to work. Many are betting it's the businessman in the race, even if he's a brash real estate mogul from New York whose chief previous contact with lumber was the veneered reception desks in his swank hotels.
Southwest Oregon is not a natural fit for a billionaire East Coaster, but neither are any of the other GOP candidates, particularly those running on a religious platform; Oregon is among the nation's least church-going states.
Trump's conviction that global trade deals are selling Americans short plays well with the independent streak that runs through Oregon Republican politics. Trump, many here believe, would never put up with letting the Western timber industry falter to protect endangered birds and owls.
“It's a part of the world that sees itself as having been abandoned,” said Jim Moore, a political scientist at Pacific University outside Portland. “These were not Mitt Romney people; they did not vote for George W. Bush. They've latched on to Trump as they have latched on to other outside candidates. The difference is, he's winning.”
