Tag: politics

Unfit for office

It’s fascinating to hear the press and the Republican Party that just sold out the American people again trying to claim Donald Trump is unfit for office when it’s got idiot candidates like these spouting off like ignorant tough guys who don’t understand that Russia and Iran are not Iraq and Grenada:

“If you’re in favor of World War III, you have your candidate.”

So said Rand Paul, looking directly at Gov. Chris Christie, who had just responded to a question from CNN’s Wolf Blitzer as to whether he would shoot down a Russian plane that violated his no-fly zone in Syria.

“Not only would I be prepared to do it, I would do it,” blurted Christie: “I would talk to Vladimir Putin … I’d say to him, ‘Listen, Mr. President, there’s a no-fly zone in Syria; you fly in, it applies to you.’

“Yes, we would shoot down the planes of Russian pilots if in fact they were stupid enough to think that this president was the same feckless weakling … we have in the Oval Office … right now.”

Ex-Gov. George Pataki and ex-Sen. Rick Santorum would also impose a no-fly zone and shoot down Russian planes that violated it. Said Gov. John Kasich, “It’s time we punched the Russians in the nose.”

Carly Fiorina would impose a no-fly zone and not even talk to Putin until we’ve conducted “military exercises in the Baltic States” on Russia’s border. Jeb Bush, too, would impose a no-fly zone.

These warhawks apparently assume that President Putin is a coward who, if you shoot down his warplanes, will back away from a fight.

Are we sure? After the Turks shot down that Sukhoi SU-24, Moscow sent fighter planes to Syria to escort its bombers and has reportedly deployed its lethal S-300 antiaircraft system there.

A U.S. Marine Corps aviator describes the S-300: “A complete game changer for all fourth-gen aircraft [like the F-15, F-16 and F/A-18]. That thing is a beast and you don’t want to get near it.”

Yes, the US military can beat the Russian military. It can almost surely beat both Iran and Russia-in-Syria. But it can’t do so without paying a price that is far heavier than any rational American wishes to pay. And if an already-exhausted US military gets stuck into the Middle East, that will give China a free hand in the Pacific and might even permit Russia to take back Ukraine.

This is precisely how great military powers manage to lose wars; they overrate their capabilities, sufficiently alarm enough enemies to cause them to band together, and try to fight a multiple-front war.

If this still surprises you

Then you really, really, need to read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America:

Conservatives give Ryan a pass on budget deal they despise

‘The end product here is just cleaning the barn, it’s a disaster,’ one Freedom Caucus member complains.

The House Freedom Caucus hates the massive government-funding bill: Spending levels are billions of dollars higher than what conservatives wanted, and at least two top policy priorities — language addressing Syrian refugees and so-called sanctity of life — were cut.

But unlike past fiscal battles, when lawmakers took shots at GOP leaders and tried to tank bills, this time conservatives are largely holding their fire. Even as they vow to oppose the package, many are still praising Speaker Paul Ryan’s handling of the $1.1 trillion spending bill and $680 billion in tax breaks.

“In terms of the process, I can tell you I’ve had more meaningful conversations with the speaker and leadership in the last couple of weeks than I think I have in the last couple of years,” said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who instigated the revolt against Speaker John Boehner that led to Boehner’s resignation this fall. “I would give it an A-plus in terms of trying to reach out to the rank and file.”

See, it may be a really dreadful bill, but the important thing is that those who oppose it had “meaningful conversations” and got “to feel included”. It is because they lack any sort of coherent ideology or substantive political principles that conservatives inevitably “grow” in office.

It may not prove much comfort, but the undeniable fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of human history, governments have ruled without much interference from the governed. What we are witnessing is simply a return to historical normalcy. It’s not the end of the world, it’s just the end of a dream that the Founding Fathers knew very well was likely to be transient.

Are we a moral people? No, obviously not. So, it should not be surprising that we are no longer fit for the form of government they created.

“Donald Trump has won the nomination”

Roger Simon throws in the towel and declares Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee:

La Serenissima may be among the most beautiful cities in the world but everything there seems to be done “for affect” as well. It’s all a stage set.

As was the debate Tuesday night, because, for all the back and forth, the chills and semi-thrills, the Rubio-Cruz-Paul contretemps,  the desperate pleadings of Jeb Bush, the reminder by Chris Christie of what might have been if he hadn’t kowtowed to Lord Obama, Carly Fiorina telling us again that she has met Putin, Frank Luntz and all his focus groups and all the thumb-sucking wise men and women in all the ships at sea and CNBC, as they say about a mile up the Strip from the Venetian at the Monte Carlo, “les jeux sont faits.“

No more bets, ladies and gentlemen.  The game is over.  Donald Trump has won the nomination.

Everyone acknowledged as much, heads nodding around me in the press room, when, nearly at the end of the debate, Hugh Hewitt served up by far the most serious, in the sense of fateful, question of the night by asking Trump to answer finally whether he will support the Republican candidate under any circumstances.

The Donald smiled, stared straight into the camera with the practiced skill of a Cronkite or a Murrow, though more playful and, one reluctantly admits, winning, and acknowledged that, yes, he will.  He has been treated well by all concerned and even come to like and admire many of the candidates on the stage with him.  Murmurs of approval all around.

And then he administered the coup de television. Looking square into the lens at America he promised to beat Hillary Clinton in November.  And he did so in full recognition by all concerned, barring force majeure, he already was the nominee and everybody knew it.  He was taking a graceful bow.

Game, set, match, tournament and whatever they say in bocce.

I wouldn’t count out the inevitable shenanigans on the part of the Republican establishment. But regardless of their best efforts, it is obvious that Trump has successfully defied every expectation and prediction of his collapse.

Of course, it didn’t help the establishment that they lined up behind Jeb Bush, arguably the worst mainstream candidate in recent history. 


“We can’t disassociate ourselves from peace-loving Muslims.” 
– Jeb Bush

 Or from rainbow-farting unicorns.

Why John C. Wright is not a libertarian

In which Mr. Wright explains why he is no longer a libertarian:

I often introduce myself as a recovering libertarian. It is not an entirely serious introduction, but it is not entirely frivolous either.

Why “recovering”? Sad experience teaches that any ideology, even a sound one, like libertarianism, is intoxicating. The appeal of ideology is the appeal of elegance. Just as Newton reduced all motions from the orbits to apples falling to three expressions, every intellectual craves a simple formula to explain the human condition. Libertarianism is based on a single principle that limits the state’s use of force to retaliation against fraud and trespass.

Nearly all the natural moral rules all men carry in their hearts are satisfied by the simple rule that you may do as you like provided you leave your neighbor free to do as he likes. No neighbor may rob, defraud nor attack another.

The intoxication comes with each case that fits neatly to the theory. Natural morality agrees that wars to defend the innocent are permissible, as is killing in self defense. Natural morality agrees that a man should keep his contracts, and so on.

The theory says the state must remain carefully neutral in all cultural and moral questions: the use of intoxicating drugs for recreational use, suicide assisted or no, polygamy, prostitution, gambling, pornography, duels to the death (provided only all participants fully agree!) or, for that matter, copulating with a corpse on the roof of your house in plain view of the neighbors’ children playing in their backyards, and then eating the corpse, all must be legal.

For me, the intoxicating spell ended in three sharp realizations, each one as forceful as a thunderbolt.

Read the rest of it there.

As for me, I’ve always been a small-l libertarian rather than a large-L one. These days, I consider myself more of a Christian nationalist, or a Western Civilizationist than a libertarian per se. Human liberty is an important priority, but we now have a sound historical basis for understanding that a free and open society of the sort that Libertarianism assumed is simply not an option.

The anti-nationalist conspiracy succeeds

The second-round defeat of the Front National in France is not surprising; as I said, it is going to take TWO election cycles before the nationalists can come to power. But for now, the alliance of the left and “center right”, which in American terms is similar to the alliance between liberals and cuckservatives, has been sufficient to keep the Front National out of power:

France’s far-right National Front (FN) has failed to win a single region in the second round of municipal polls. The party was beaten into third place, despite leading in six of 13 regions in the first round of voting a week ago.

The centre-right Republicans finished ahead of President Francois Hollande’s governing Socialist Party.

FN leader Marine Le Pen said that mainstream parties had colluded to keep it from power and vowed to keep on fighting.

“Nothing can stop us now,” she told supporters. “By tripling our number of councillors, we will be the main opposition force in most of the regions of France.”

Ms Le Pen said the party had been “disenfranchised in the most indecent of ways by a campaign of lies and disinformation”.

She had stood as a regional presidential candidate in the northern region of Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, while her niece Marion Marechal-Le Pen was the FN’s candidate in the race in Provence-Alpes-Cote d’Azur, in the south.

After both led with more than 40% of the vote in the first round on 6 December, the Socialist candidates in those regions pulled out so their voters could support Republican candidates in the second round.

The FN actually increased its votes in the second round to more than 6.8 million, from 6.02 million on 6 December as more people voted, according to the ministry of the interior (In French). But the FN share of the vote went down slightly from 27.73% to 27.36%.

The anti-nationalists always call the nationalists “Nazis”. It’s nothing more than the usual DISQUALIFY write large. But of course, through their collusion and corruption of the democratic system, the anti-nationalists ensure that the real version, the ultranationalists, will come to power through non-democratic means as soon as the nationalists realize that the will of the people is defined as automatically excluding them, stop playing the game, and throw their support to the ultras.

Reformers turn restrictionist

Donald Trump has a convert, and then some, in Larry Kudlow:

I’ve Changed. This Is War. Seal the Borders. Stop the Visas.

I know this is not my usual position. But this is a war. Therefore I have come to believe there should be no immigration or visa waivers until the U.S. adopts a completely new system to stop radical Islamic terrorists from entering the country. A wartime lockdown. And a big change in my thinking.

ISIS and related Islamic terrorists are already here. More are coming. We must stop them.

Until FBI director James Comey gives us the green light, I say seal the borders.

Here’s what we must do: Completely reform the vetting process for immigrants and foreign visitors. Change the screening process. Come up with a new visa-application review process. Stop this nonsense of marriage-visa fraud. And in the meantime, seal the borders. I agree with Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, who argued many of these points in excellent detail on the National Review website on Friday.

Again, why am I taking this hardline position? In the past, I have been an immigration reformer, not a restrictionist. But we are at war. That changes everything.

This is an expected, but delightful, development. It won’t be long before the American mainstream endorses mass repatriations. That is the best possible outcome; a widespread resurgence of peaceful nationalism that is not unlawfully resisted by an anti-democratic internationalist elite.

  1. Stop all visas, green cards, and immigration.
  2. Seal the borders. 
  3. Repatriate all illegals, criminals, dual-citizens, and nationals from Muslim countries.
  4. Debate and formulate a new immigration system that will return the US demographics to a reasonable facsimile of 1965 over time.
  5.  Implement the new system.

Ben Carson will not play Republican House Negro

As far as I’m concerned, this is the first interesting thing Ben Carson has said since he started his quixotic campaign:

Ben Carson on Friday blasted the Republican National Committee following a Washington Post report that nearly two-dozen establishment party figures were prepping for a potential brokered convention as Donald Trump continues to lead most polls.

RNC Chairman Reince Priebus held a dinner in Washington, D.C., on Monday, and, according to five people who spoke with the Post, the possibility of Trump heading into the Cleveland convention with a substantial number of delegates was a topic of discussion. Some attendees suggested the establishment lay the groundwork for a floor fight that could lead the party’s mainstream wing to unite behind an alternative. Carson rejected this approach.

“If the leaders of the Republican Party want to destroy the party, they should continue to hold meetings like the one described in the Washington Post this morning,” Carson said in a statement released by his campaign.

Carson said he prays the Post’s report is incorrect and threatened to leave the GOP. “If it is correct, every voter who is standing for change must know they are being betrayed. I won’t stand for it,” said Carson, who added that if the plot is accurate, “I assure you Donald Trump won’t be the only one leaving the party.”

The retired neurosurgeon said that next summer’s Cleveland convention could be the last Republican National Convention if leaders try to manipulate it.

“I am prepared to lose fair and square, as I am sure is Donald,” Carson said. “But I will not sit by and watch a theft. I intend on being the nominee. If I am not, the winner will have my support. If the winner isn’t our nominee then we have a massive problem.”

Good for him. He may not be a serious candidate, but it’s good to see the lesser players calling out the corrupt Republican establishment.

Ignoring the elephant

Paul Krugman may call it “ugliness”, but he nevertheless does a better job of explaining the massive shift in American and European politics to frightened American left-liberals than one might have expected. Unfortunately, he omitted the most important element, which is to say, immigration:

My European friends will no doubt say that I’m oversimplifying, but from an American perspective it looks as if Europe’s establishment has tried to freeze the xenophobic right, not just out of political power, but out of any role in acceptable discourse. To be a respectable European politician, whether of the left or of the right, you have had to accept the European project of ever-closer union, of free movement of people, open borders, and harmonized regulations. This leaves no room for right-wing nationalists, even though right-wing nationalism has always had substantial popular support.

What the European establishment may not have realized, however, is that its ability to define the limits of discourse rests on the perception that it knows what it is doing. Even admirers and supporters of the European project (like me) have to admit that it has never had deep popular support or a lot of democratic legitimacy. It is, instead, an elite project sold largely on the claim that there is no alternative, that it is the path of wisdom.

And there’s nothing quite like sustained poor economic performance – the kind of poor performance brought on by Europe’s austerity and hard-money obsessions — to undermine the elite’s reputation for competence. That’s probably why one recent study found a consistent historical relationship between financial crises and the rise of right-wing extremism. And history is repeating itself.

The story is quite different in America, because the Republican Party hasn’t tried to freeze out the kind of people who vote National Front in France. Instead, it has tried to exploit them, mobilizing their resentment via dog whistles to win elections. This was the essence of Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy,” and explains why the G.O.P. gets the overwhelming majority of Southern white votes.

But there is a strong element of bait-and-switch to this strategy. Whatever dog whistles get sent during the campaign, once in power the G.O.P. has made serving the interests of a small, wealthy economic elite, especially through big tax cuts, its main priority — a priority that remains intact, as you can see if you look at the tax plans of the establishment presidential candidates this cycle.

Sooner or later the angry whites who make up a large fraction, maybe even a majority, of the G.O.P. base were bound to rebel — especially because these days much of the party’s leadership seems inbred and out of touch.

What the liberal-left elite tends to forget is that a lot of liberals and left-wingers are still nationalists at heart. They may want a liberal, or a left-wing France, or America, or Britain, but they still want it to be identifiably France, America, or Britain. That’s why Front National, Trump, and UKIP, among others, are actually drawing more heavily from the Socialists, the Democrats, and Labour than they are from the center-right parties.

Immigration is a cross-spectrum issue, and until you realize that, you cannot understand that it is the only issue that matters in Western politics now. Everything else is akin to worrying about the details of French pension payments when the Wehrmacht is blitzkrieging past the Maginot Line.

It’s not conservatism, it’s NATIONALISM

The coming Republican civil war on immigration:

“This is not conservatism.” With those four simple words, House Speaker Paul Ryan dismissed Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s proposal to temporarily ban Muslims from entry into the United States until the federal government gets terrorism committed in the name of Islam figured out.

“This is not what our party stands for,” Ryan added, “and, more importantly, it’s not what our country stands for.”

That may depend on how the party is defined. While elected Republicans have almost unanimously distanced themselves from Trump’s Muslim gambit, one poll found that nearly two-thirds of GOP voters agreed with him. Another determined that more than three-fourths believe the United States is accepting too many immigrants from the Middle East.

There is a civil war in the Republican Party on immigration. Those on Trump’s side tend to see the enemy as including the party’s leadership, consultants, intellectuals and donor class. (The dust-up over Trump and Muslims is likely to bolster that perception.) But they’ve been courted by other GOP presidential candidates too, including Ted Cruz, Scott Walker and Rick Santorum.

Walker is already out of the race and Santorum has stalled in the low single digits. But Cruz is ascendant and Trump has been leading in the New Hampshire polls for a longer period of time than Walker’s presidential campaign lasted.

Trump isn’t the most articulate or consistent spokesman for immigration control in the GOP. That distinction goes to Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. And Trump’s Republican critics would be the first to point out he isn’t the most conservative. But his rise has fueled a family argument inside the party about how conservatives should view immigration.

Ryan’s position has a long conservative pedigree. He has followed in Jack Kemp’s intellectual footsteps. He can cite Ronald Reagan as well. The Wall Street Journal editorial page that championed Kemp and Reagan’s tax cuts also called for open borders. Republicans like Ryan tend to see America as a proposition or an idea, defined by the political principles laid out in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.

In this telling, immigration affirms the truths we hold to be self-evident, particularly that all men are created equal and the unalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. The willingness of immigrants to come here is a testament to the success of those principles. “Immigration,” writes veteran conservative columnist George Will, “is the entrepreneurial act of taking the risk of uprooting oneself and plunging into uncertainty.”

Restricting immigration, according to these Republicans, isn’t conservative because it requires government bureaucracies to interfere in labor markets. Immigration is like free trade and restricting it is like protectionism.

Read that last sentence again. Those who have read Cuckservative: How “Conservatives” Betrayed America will now understand, if they didn’t already, why we addressed free trade and immigration in the Immigration and Economics chapter, because the latter, in its open-borders variant, is a subset of the former.

It’s interesting, is it not, that the cuckservatives are willing to fight fellow Republicans to the death, but they’re always eager to negotiate a genteel surrender with the liberals. Of course, as we showed when discussing the six conservative principles laid out by Russell Kirk, cuckservatives reject the last two.

Trump, the proto-Destructor

A great column by Glenn Reynolds in USA Today:

Enter Donald Trump. People who are unhappy with the things Trump is saying need to understand that he’s only getting so much traction because he’s filling a void. If the responsible people would talk about these issues, and take action, Trump wouldn’t take up so much space.

And there’s a lesson for our ruling class there: Calling Trump a fascist is a bit much (fascism, as Tom Wolfe once reported, is forever descending upon the United States, but somehow it always lands on Europe), but movements like fascism and communism get their start because the mechanisms of liberal democracy seem weak and ineffectual and dishonest. If you don’t want Trump — or, perhaps, some post-Trump figure who really is a fascist — to dominate things, you need to stop being weak and ineffectual and dishonest.

Right now, after years of Obama hope-and-change, a majority of Americans (56%) think Islam is incompatible with American values. That’s true even for 43% of Democrats.

In that sort of environment, where people feel unsafe and where the powers-that-be seem to be, well, weak and ineffectual and dishonest, the appeal of someone who doesn’t seem weak and ineffectual grows stronger.

You can see this in France, where the long-marginalized “far right” National Front is now winning elections all over. It’s doing so well because the French people, after not one but two Islamist mass shootings in Paris, feel that their government is not serious about protecting them, and their way of life, from their enemies.

Likewise, it’s a bit hard to take people seriously about Trump’s threat to civil liberties when President Obama was just endorsing an unconstitutional gun ban, when his attorney general was threatening to prosecute people for anti-Muslim speech (a threat later walked back, thankfully) and when universities and political leaders around the country are making clear their belief that free speech is obsolete.

Glenn is making two very important points here.

  1.  If the ruling parties break the laws and manipulate the democratic rules to keep out the law-abiding, democratic nationalists, they will soon find themselves facing the the lawless, anti-democratic, and violent ultranationalists. They are methodically cutting down the very trees of respect and authority that protect them from the people.
  2. The ruling Left has made it clear that they have zero respect for our free speech or our unalienable rights. That means we need not respect theirs.

The mainstream media and the political establishment pretends to be frightened of Donald Trump in order to try to keep American nationalism down, but they should treat him fairly and let the chips fall where they may rather than play their games in order to defeat him. Because despite being somewhat of a bull in a china shop, Trump plays by the rules. And others are watching his example, and learning from it.