Shot and chaser (culture wars)

Note the delta on the Rotten Tomatoes move review aggregator site between audience scores for the movie "Nefarious" and professional critics' reaction to it.

Then ponder this essay by John Daniel Davidson for The Federalist.

Davidson's point (not coincidentally hinted at by the wildly different reaction to "Nefarious" from average moviegoers and film critics) is this: "When one side stakes its claim to political power on offering abortion up until birth and transgender operations for 8-year-olds, and holds out these policies as proof of its moral authority, we're way past arguing over how to get the economy back on track." Moreover, "Tucker Carlson hit on this at the end of his big speech at Heritage recently. He compared the values of the political left to the values of the Aztecs, who sacrificed children to their bloodthirsty gods -- and he wasn't wrong." 

Several commentators have since said that Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch fired Tucker Carlson over that speech, because Murdoch has peculiar notions of what "extremist" thinking is. Tucker probably saw that coming, joking even at the time that prayer is always a good strategy when you're engaged in spiritual warfare, even if the guy recommending that is -- like Carlson himself -- a mild-mannered Episcopalian.

Presumptive Italian PM quotes Chesterton

This passage from G.K. Chesterton of England has currency again, thanks to Giorgia Meloni of Italy:

"Truths turn into dogmas the instant that they are disputed. Thus every man who utters a doubt defines a religion. And the scepticism of our time does not really destroy the beliefs, rather it creates them; gives them their limits and their plain and defiant shape. We who are Liberals once held Liberalism lightly as a truism. Now it has been disputed, and we hold it fiercely as a faith. We who believe in patriotism once thought patriotism to be reasonable, and thought little more about it. Now we know it to be unreasonable, and know it to be right. 

We who are Christians never knew the great philosophic common sense which inheres in that mystery until the anti-Christian writers pointed it out to us. The great march of mental destruction will go on. Everything will be denied. Everything will become a creed. It is a reasonable position to deny the stones in the street; it will be a religious dogma to assert them. It is a rational thesis that we are all in a dream; it will be a mystical sanity to say that we are all awake. Fires will be kindled to testify that two and two make four. Swords will be drawn to prove that leaves are green in summer. 

We shall be left defending, not only the incredible virtues and sanities of human life, but something more incredible still, this huge impossible universe which stares us in the face. We shall fight for visible prodigies as if they were invisible. We shall look on the impossible grass and the skies with a strange courage. We shall be of those who have seen and yet have believed."

Plans A through F

Michael Anton's astute political analysis is always worth reading. This time he writes about why "They Can't Let Him Back In."  And you know very well who he is.

Anton writes:

Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump. The regime can’t allow Trump to be president not because of who he is (although that grates), but because of who his followers are. That class—Angelo Codevilla’s “country class”—must not be allowed representation by candidates who might implement their preferences, which also, and above all, must not be allowed. The rubes have no legitimate standing to affect the outcome of any political process, because of who they are, but mostly because of what they want.

Complaints about the nature of Trump are just proxies for objections to the nature of his base. It doesn’t help stabilize our already twitchy situation that those who bleat the loudest about democracy are also audibly and visibly determined to deny a real choice to half the country. “No matter how you vote, you will not get X”—whether X is a candidate or a policy—is guaranteed to increase discontent with the present regime.

To the point that Anton makes about what might be called a country club war on Trump's base -- and Neo's related thoughts about the January 6 subcommittee's quixotic quest for something to charge Trump with legally -- think of Rodney Dangerfield's character in Caddyshack: Like Donald Trump, Dangerfield's character ("Al Czervik") has money enough for membership at the Bushwood Country Club, but other golfers consider him uncouth. Attitude-wise, Czervik, like Trump, has more in common with Bill Murray's gopher-hunting groundskeepr than with the other people in his social class.

I'm tickled by that fact that Anton uses a nautical analogy near the end of his essay. I had a similar thought (seawater on the brain?) for this recent piece published by The Locke Institute's Carolina Journal, except that I was looking at progressive reaction to Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, rather than political machinery prepping for the 2024 presidential election.

The ghost of Christmas past?

Writing for American Thinker, James S. Corum observes that Joe Biden (or his people) have applied analogy ineptly, not least because they don't remember the differences in World War Two events between the bombings of Dresden and Hamburg. 

Biden and his handlers pulled the Nazi card reflexively, as progressives too often do. 

They accused Republicans who questioned election irregularities of touting a big lie. The truth is very nearly a mirror image of what some progressives say it is, and when they don't pull the Hitler card, they just say shut up, as spokespeople for NY governor Andrew Cuomo have hoped in vain that Janice Dean would do. (Deplatforming is what happens to people who don't toe the progressive line, if they have a big enough audience to come to the attention of the nomenkatura).

Here's how Corum put it:

"The Big Lie of 2020 is that it was a clean and honest election. Like the Big Lie of Hamburg raids, the Big Lie will fail. Like Hamburg in 1943, there are simply too many witnesses. There are the videos of election observers being blocked in several cities and videos in Atlanta of observers sent away, and in their absence election workers piling ballots into the counting machines.  There is sworn testimony from hundreds of election workers detailing illegal actions. There are the Dominion machines in Michigan that were set up to create ballot errors which were “adjudicated” (flipped) in favor of Democrats. There is hard documentary evidence of the dead voting by mail, or of (supposedly) living voters receiving and returning their ballots by the postal service within a day. There are thousands of Georgia voters who illegally provided post office box numbers as their place of residence. There is the analysis of highly respected IT experts and statisticians who have spotted statistically implausible vote spikes, unusual local turnout, and voting patterns not seen in previous elections. The evidence presented at state legislative hearings (I watched some on One America News) is thorough, well-documented and plausible.

Joe Biden is beginning his presidency with one of the biggest lies in the history of American politics. On top of the “honest election” lie, he will have to maintain lies about his family’s Chinese and Ukrainian business connections, as well as his involvement in illegal deep state surveillance of political opponents."

James Bovard has written something similar. So has Conrad Black, not linked from this entry but well worth reading even when his essays appear in the otherwise deeply disappointing National Review, towering like sunflowers over the cat box where NeverTrumpers leave their odiferous deposits.

The thing is -- for example -- Antifa isn't actually "anti-fascist." They're just the most vocal of several groups carrying signs that mostly say "hooray for our side," as Buffalo Springfield put it generations ago. They're self-appointed hall monitors in the Temple of Wokism. And despite what Nancy Pelosi claims, the riot in Washington D.C. on January 6 wasn't even remotely an insurrection or an attempted coup.

Why John Roberts fumbled again

We know longer have cause to look down on the corruption of so-called "Banana Republics," because we've become one (I borrowed the image above from The People's Cube, where they're familiar with totalitarian impulses).

E. Donald Elliot in American Spectator Online yesterday:

"The [U.S. Supreme] Court's stated reason for turning down the case brought by Texas against Pennsylvania and other swing states was its ruling that one state has no "judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections." That should go down in history as one of the dumbest things the court has ever said, right up there with 'separate but equal' as a justification for racial segregation or 'three generations of imbeciles is enough' as a justification for mandatory sterilization.

The question was not how Pennsylvania conducted "its" election, as the Court wrongly characterized the issue. The allegations went to the constitutional legitimacy of election procedures in a presidential election in which voters in both Texas and Pennsylvania participated. If one state may illegally manipulate votes in a presidential election, the influence of all the other states that do play by the rules is undermined. The Court was essentially saying that one team has no interest in whether the other team is cheating."

(To see and think about what the Supremes should have but chose not to, see this compendium of evidence for ballot fraud and irregularity as alleged by no less than 923 fact witnesses)

A satirist who understands

"Conservative Momma" explains why this election was decided by the American people but is being arbitrated in court, very possibly the Supreme Court.

She gets it. And she's funny. The funny is subjective, of course, but this is how I know she gets it:

• Good reason not to trust the election results
• Election anomalies in PA that the state has yet to explain
• The whole PA voting system is whack
• Georgia poll watcher notes error that gave Joe Biden at least 9,000 votes
• Perspective from attorney Lin Wood
• Dominion Software was first built for Hugo Chavez
• Nevada had a cash-for-votes scheme going to benefit Joe Biden
• Michigan has issues with vote certification
• Do you believe in magic?
• What we just had was what Bookworm calls "the first postmodern election"
• The chairman of the Federal Election Commission calls the charges of election fraud "legitimate (i.e., evidence-backed) accusations"

Last but not least:

Most of the foregoing is also summarized in graphic form by Doug Ross. There are rebuttals of sorts out there, but they don't rebut the broad outlines of the cause for consternation. 

Blueprint for the machine

 

Writing for Epoch Times but excerpted at Instapundit, Michael Walsh explains election theft:

"The mechanism was simple: Flood the electorate with unsolicited ballots due to the “pandemic,” establish collection points from which they could be scooped up and monitored, sit back to watch the honest electorate stand socially distanced at the polls in the mistaken belief that Election Day actually meant something anymore... 

[then] count into the wee hours, suddenly “suspend” the tallies while figuring out exactly how many votes would be needed to erase Trump’s lead over time, and then declare Biden the winner."

Walsh also has solid suggestions for more housecleaning at the Department of Justice and the CIA. I like that he's not afraid to say that Attorney General Bill Barr is "starting to make Jeff Sessions look good." And he's not enamored with the allegedly straight-shooting John Durham, either, because that so-called "straight shooter" (U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut allegedly looking into the origins of the 'Crossfire Hurricane' coup attempt against Donald Trump) seems also to be a slow walker, figuratively speaking. 

Indictments handed down several months ago would have been hard to ignore. Indictments handed down now will be buried as fast as the few stories about Hunter Biden's laptop were. Meanwhile, FBI Director Christopher Wray and CIA Director Gina Haspel, who were mentored by some very sketchy people, seem to have allegiance only to the administrative state of which they're both a disreputable part. 

Funny, isn't it, how Donald Trump has had to face so much opposition from within government itself? The root of the problem there lies with the Obamas, who never had the good grace to leave Washington, D.C. after Barack's two presidential terms were over, and seem to have been running a kind of government-in-exile ever since. The lecturer-in-chief initially assumed that he was his own legacy, then realized that interest charged on everything he purchased with a race card would tarnish that legacy. Now he's got coastal property in Martha's Vineyard, minions in high places, and book writing to think about.

"No drama Obama" was always a façade, anyhow, else Barack would not also have bragged at a fundraiser with NBA players in 2012 that he was very rarely "the 5th- or 6th most interesting person" in any room, or gleefully reminded Republicans who questioned his penchant for executive orders that he had a pen, and he had a phone, and "elections have consequences." 

Barack and Michelle have always yearned to be among Carol Baskin's "cool cats and kittens." That they felt that way even before Baskin became a minor celebrity can be deduced from Michelle's observation that her husband's political success marked the first time in her adult life that she was "really proud" of her country -- as though the rest of us had finally made good on a debt owed. I'll grant that the Obamas are too young for the Berlin Airlift to have made an impression on them, but it's telling that things like the warm popular reception for Purple Rain, the formal end to the Cold War, the stellar career of Oprah Winfrey, and the rise of the iPhone never registered as things to be proud of, either.

Now argument (as opposed to random commentary) is in short supply, but the Democrats seem bent on turning Joe Biden into the "Commander in Thief." When American citizens with roots in Venezuela take to Twitter to say that they've seen this movie before, and when the President of Mexico has to remind Fox News and other bastions of the mainstream media that our election isn't over yet, then you know you've been played by people in both major parties who really do consider you "deplorable." And the same people want you to forget that Al Gore litigated his election loss for 37 days, as Governor Kristi Noem helpfully reminded George Stephanopoulos.

Neither major U.S. political party has cornered the market on virtue, and neither one can, but those with eyes to see have noticed that the Donkey party since 2016 has become far more authoritarian than the Elephant party.

The always-acerbic Kurt Schlichter put it this way: "Reject the gaslighting. This election was not normal. It was not regular. It was not worthy of your blind deference. Is it some sort of coincidence that all the problems arose in big urban centers in swing states run exclusively by Democrats? ...Texas could do it right in one night. Florida could do it. The swing states? Not so much."

It comes down to words again

It almost always comes down to words, because words are windows into worldviews. Here's Andrew McCarthy's summary of the current goings-on:

“Every vote counts” is yet another semantic battle the Left has won before the right even realized it was on. And winning the semantic battle usually means winning the policy battle.

Of course, it is not suppression to oppose the counting of votes that should not count because they are not lawful. Yet Democrats succeed in putting Republicans on the defensive because Republicans do not want to be smeared as vote suppressors . . . especially when, inevitably, Democrats and the media will intimate that any effort to enforce election law as written is suppression driven by racial animus."

McCarthy's right about that.

Thinking along similar lines, Daniel Greenfield is also worth reading, and for him the key word in this election was "racist," because Democrats tried hard to paint Republicans with that threadbare brush despite mountains of evidence to the contrary. (As one Internet wag put it, every blot on the American national character -- slavery, segregation, and abortion -- either is now or once was a part of the Democrat party platform). 

Perhaps the only thing that Greenfield's analysis misses is the impact of "panic porn," which is what we got for eight months because of the way the media mishandled reporting on Wuhan Coronavirus cases with scant attention to recovery rates, context, or risk management.

Another example of a semantic struggle surfaced in Newsweek magazine, which described courageous Catholic priests as "hostile" to a Biden presidency.

One wonders what John Leo would say (although Maureen Mullarkey's tribute to him gives strong hints).

Steve Hilton with a closing argument

Hilton makes a persuasive case in just a few minutes here.

Daniel Greenfield has also noted what happens when you pit love against hate, or MAGA against the 1619 Project.

Tyler O'Neil's election thinking is a lot like my own. And I agree with Neo, too.

With respect to COVID-19 (Wuhan coronavirus) specifically, Matt Margolis has done yeoman work cataloging progressive lies about the Trump administration's pandemic response.

Scattershot and ideological, methinks

 Years ago, I thought his book Bobos in Paradise was amusing even if blinkered in the way it used white-collar workers in the Acela Corridor as templates for pronouncements about changes in American culture. Since then, however, Bobos author David Brooks has been on a long glide into self-parody. 

Brooks is the guy who in 2005 was much taken with Barack Obama's "perfectly creased pants leg" after an interview. In a recent puff piece for The Atlantic titled "Bruce Springsteen and the Art of Aging Well," Brooks takes a gratuitous swipe at President Trump before strewing rhetorical flowers at Spingsteen's feet:

"President Donald Trump is a prime example of an unsuccessful older person," Brooks writes, "-- one who still lusts for external validation, who doesn't know who he is, who knows no peace." 

Sheesh. That's amateur psychoanalysis at its most disposable, not to say hilarious. Donald Trump seems to know exactly who he is. More than that, he seems comfortable with  himself (as does his very different but complementary Vice President, by the way). Heck, Trump seems to appreciate people who are comfortable with themselves (not least among them Melania Trump), and you can't do that if you're insecure. How Brooks missed that when it's been on public display as long as it has, I'm not sure. Why he missed it is easier to explain -- the man has axes to grind, and they have nothing to do with Bruce Springsteen's latest album. Perhaps the "problem" is that Trump does not care to be validated by the same people that Brooks does. Cocktail party invitations don't mean as much to bar owners as to partygoers who are still looking for signs that their phone calls get returned.

"The Boss" may indeed have life lessons to teach us, but it's hard to stomach Brooks' sycophancy knowing that Bruce has said he'd be on "the next plane to Australia" if American election results don't meet with his approval. Whatsa matter, boss man? You've already got your mansion on a hill. Do ya still feel like you're a rider on a downbound train?

Of viruses and political ops

The indispensable Ace has this to say today: "Covid is not a medical story -- not in the American media. It hasn't been for some time. It's mostly a Political Op now, as far as media coverage. Only Republican gatherings have been portrayed in the media as spreading Covid for some time now. Apparently left-wingers are immune to the virus."

And let's not forget that co-blogger J.J. Sefton brought the heat (with an assist from Megan Fox at the link) earlier:

"Amazing how every lie, smear and accusation against Trump was front-page stop-the-presses news and allowed to flow on Twitter and Facebook freely along with calls for violence against Trump and his supporters. Yet this [new story from the New York Post about Joe Biden's corruption and his son's grift] was immediately censored because, reasons!"

I expect the Democrats and Republicans to run political ops on each other, in the old Mad Magazine "Spy vs. Spy" fashion. But now we know that vast swaths of federal law enforcement and investigative machinery have been corrupted to run political ops as well. It's equally disconcerting to realize that any line between news and opinion was erased three presidential terms ago, when the media slobbered over Barack Obama in ways that Joe "That's storybook, man!" Biden would have approved (and likely did, when he was still among the silverware, albeit not the sharpest knife in the drawer).

Lessons from songwriters

Pope Francis could learn from the songcraft of Lionel Richie, Michael Jackson, and Jackson Browne, I've decided.

Echoing what the rabbi said

Rabbi and lawyer Dov Fischer wrote perceptively about the contrast between the just-concluded RNC 2020 and the DNC "virtual convention" of the week before:

"As an overriding general feeling, the Republicans were so much more live and alive, while the Democrats seemed so much more taped and tapped out."

You know there's something to that analysis -- and Melissa Mackenzie's concurrence with it -- when you see the usual suspects in high dudgeon, as the following snips show:

The general rule for me is that if the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times all dismiss something as crass or deceitful, it's probably honest and dangerous to their shared ideology. When the mainstream media doth protest too much, then you know the speech they're protesting was over the target.

President Trump's team has the enviable luxury of support from Kristi Noem, Hershel Walker, Rick Grennell, Pam Bondi, Daniel Cameron, Maximo Alvarez, Lou Holtz, and Sister Deidre Byrne. That lineup is by no means exhaustive, but it's solid.  

People who insist that POTUS is an amoral clown either haven't been paying attention or are stuck in a time warp. When Herschel Walker says that he (Hershel) is a good judge of character, I believe him. Unlike Nikki Haley, he hasn't tried to position himself as a moderate. And I notice that in this case, he also agrees with Sister Byrne. That's game, set, and match for DJT in the character reference department, as far as I'm concerned, even before you get to the existential questions.

Like children playing gotcha

Two nights into the Republican National Convention, it's plain to see that progressive commentary about anything even vaguely Trumpian can't be trusted. Sadly, that pattern won't change over the remaining two nights of the convention.

I was particularly amused to see that the lead news item at The Daily Beast this morning has nothing to do with the case that senior adviser Larry Kudlow made for the economic policy he helped POTUS advance. Instead, editors there breathlessly noted that "Trump Adviser Larry Kudlow Refers to Coronavirus Pandemic in Past Tense." Sheesh. God forbid anyone should refer to the pandemic in past tense until every American has been vaccinated against the Wuhun coronavirus, perhaps?

Meanwhile, almost every speech at the convention so far has been better than I had expected it to be. With the exception of First Lady Melania Trump's impressively heartfelt talk last night, the addresses have also been shorter than standard convention fare, also -- and that's a smart move.

Night One luminaries included Maximo Alvarez, Hershel Walker, Andrew Pollack, Jim Jordan, Natalie Harp, Tim Scott, and Kim Klacik. I'd never even heard of three of them before, but all were wonderful. A golden thread-- knowledge of history-- linked each of their different speeches. 

Night Two (i.e., last night) brought the aforementioned home run from Melania Trump, plus great stuff from Abby Johnson, Pam Bondi, Daniel Cameron, Larry Kudlow, Rand Paul, and a Maine lobsterman named Jason Joyce. Even Covington Catholic High School alumnus Nick Sandmann, young as he is, was well worth hearing.

Two of the speeches last night might even be called life-changing. Abby Johnson described abortion as it has never been described in prime time before, and Jon Ponder's story of redemption through faith put a human face on the criminal justice reform that is one of this administration's under-reported achievements. (Speaking of which, I keep up with current events more than the average bear, but I knew nothing about the "Right to Try" legislation signed into law in May 2018 until Natalie Harp mentioned it earlier this week. WRAL, you let me down!) 

The RNC so far has been putting on a clinic in effective political outreach, both to its base and to any "undecideds". Stories alleging that this administration has a vested interest in being "divisive" are misleading at best.

The man is not also a malady

 I had some fun debunking the idea that "Trumpism" is an actual condition that people suffer from. The same piece has a few thoughts on which Republicans might become party standard-bearers after Donald Trump leaves politics.

This news item from Neo about Trump's recent use of executive orders seems related. POTUS created a payroll tax holiday and mandated the continuation of enhanced unemployment benefits.

The new politics

Conrad Black offers an acerbic but spot-on analysis in the pixels of American Greatness:

"Andrew Weissman and the other fanatical partisans who conducted the so-called Mueller investigation and wrote the report of it, sent an infirm figurehead forward to defend their dirty work under withering examination before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees last week. They knew from the beginning, as the Strzok-Page texts confirm, that “there was no there there” on the bunk about Trump-Russian collusion, but spun the farce of the Mueller investigation out for two years trying to provoke Trump into an action that could be called obstruction of justice, and sold through the wall-to-wall Democratic chorus in the national media as a “high crime or misdemeanor” such as “treason or bribery” which the Constitution requires two-thirds of the Senate to be convinced of beyond a reasonable doubt to remove a president.

Obviously, as Trump did not take the bait, there was no chance of that, so the best they could do was to invent the preposterous notion that failure to “exonerate” the president of obstruction meant that the House of Representatives should pursue it through impeachment. It is such cynical nonsense they can’t get even the Democratic majority of the House to vote for an impeachment resolution, and are trying to substitute continued investigation in what is taintingly called an “impeachment inquiry,” to try to smear Trump enough to cost him reelection."

Ascribing too much to Rush

On the one hand, "God writes straight with crooked lines". On the other hand, leftists like to "retrofit history to their own ideology, rather than learning from history," as my friend Bookworm has observed.

I noticed a progressive crediting Rush Limbaugh with making Americans believe in God. Rush is a talented and hard-working, indeed pioneering, talk show host, but that seemed to me to be an example of progressive wish-casting, so I took issue with it (and related anti-Trumpian illogic) in fresh pixels at American Spectator Online.

Mixed media

Food, music, logic, and media criticism (to be more specific) -- the part-time pundit's equivalent of this fountain in downtown Cary, NC. Originally published a few days ago, but still fresh.

Some thoughts on Voter ID laws

I have another essay out for a local think tank. This one looks at Voter ID laws and the ideologues who insist that anyone who wants to safeguard elections is a tool of the patriarchy.

What is a community, anyway?

Some thoughts on real communities vs. fake ones, in what for me is a new venue.