August 2022 – Page 2 – Libertate Virtute (Virtue + Liberty)

August 10, 2022August 11, 2022

Perilous Times in the Age of Mordor, i.e., District of Columbia

See the source image — FBI agents block a point of egress at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate early morning 8/8/22.

Two days ago, the FBI conducted a raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. All agree that it was unprecedented. More than that, it was shocking. We’ll have to wait for more information before anything more can be definitively concluded. Still, given all that has happened from 2015 to the present, maybe even going back further to the 1990’s, I am worried for my country.

Yes, we are divided. The red/blue thing is real. No surprise. Also, no surprise, DC is deep, deep blue, almost to the color of deep space, and it just so happens to be the seat of immense federal powers. DC down to its lowliest employee is as one-party as California. The District is a big seat for the Democratic Party, the party of government, alongside the DNC’s other seats in dysfunctional urban nodes, college campuses, most of corporate media, and Fortune 500 boardrooms – the narrow, isolated cultural satraps of America.

What we know at this point is that a DC-headquartered Justice Department directed the DC headquarters of the FBI to pursue a search warrant before a DC federal magistrate so that the DC FBI could fly down to Palm Beach to search the home of a DC-detested ex-president. These dysfunctional urban nodes already have an outsized and sometimes malignant influence on the rest of the country, and none is more noxious than DC, similar in toxicity to Mordor.

Why the sanctioned incursion into Trump’s home? Frankly, it’s odd if we ignore the inordinate bias in the District. Andrew C. McCarthy in a piece yesterday morning reasonably speculates that Biden’s people and their natural allies in the bureaucracy are out to pin criminal charges on Trump. It’s about January 6 and not some classified materials in Trump’s possession. The documents and the Presidential Records Act were just a pretext. Breaking into an ex-president’s personal safe and seizing boxes of documents is actually about using the big net of a broad search to capture pieces of incriminating evidence of other flashier criminality for a big show trial later, a common prosecutorial tactic.

Political Cartoons by Bob Gorrell

Now, think about it. If it’s about January 6, charges in the capitol riot up to now have centered on obstruction of a federal proceeding (counting electoral votes) and defrauding the government (perpetrating lies in order to obstruct). The AG Garland cabal would have to show that Trump plotted the riot and disseminated knowing falsehoods to encourage the criminal actions. That’s a big mountain to climb. Fraud requires a personal understanding that the theories are false. But they’re theories, maybe goofy ones but still theories. Belief in an exotic legal theory is not a crime.

After all, the henchmen of the Democratic Party have been foisting on the public racist anti-racism, CRT, identity favoritism as “equity”, the disjunction of gender from chromosomes, blatant discrimination against people of faith, defund the police, non-prosecution as public safety, and fighting inflation by opening up the fire hose of government money. If eccentric legal theories are fraud, well, how do you rate these? If that is our standard, search warrants could be easily acquired on the Pentagon, CIA headquarters at Langley, the J. Edgar Hoover Building (FBI headquarters in DC), the Justice Department offices, the Treasury Department, the White House, other DC federal office buildings, and almost any college humanities department in the country.

Hanging the prosecution hat on the peg of legal foolhardiness is an exercise in futility. Taking an active part in the riot has equal difficulties. Reveling in the scenes on TV is neither evidence of obstruction or fraud. Unseemly, yes, but not criminal. The anticipated smoking gun may turn out to be a pop gun that a kid put in the oven.

All in all, it’s a risky venture on the part of the donkey party. If nothing comes of this but embarrassment for Trump, red America will be enflamed. What a trade-off: Great dangers in exchange for the likelihood of little reward. The plebes in the hinterlands could very well conclude that the Democratic Party in their DC redoubt is at war with them. And, in a way, they’d be right.

After all, the historical record going back to the 1990’s would encourage the conclusion that a monumental threat to the people arises from DC’s cultural and physical cocoon. Remember Ruby Ridge and Waco? In both cases, DC-headquartered federal law enforcement in their isolation conducted military-style raids with disastrous results. DC FBI agents on a plane to Ruby Ridge wrote down broad rules of engagement to shoot anyone with a gun at Weaver’s home. And, that they did, killing Weaver’s 14-year-old son and his wife as she was holding their infant daughter. A federal agent in commando-style gear was also killed. The ATF for its part conducted a Battle of Kursk operation against a religious sect outside Waco culminating in a lethal fire. The stage for the cataclysms was set in the secluded environs of DC offices.

The barbaric overreaction took place in Oklahoma City in 1995, the second anniversary of the Branch Dividian debacle.

Fast forward to 2016, and DC and its patron, the Democratic Party, are at war with the results of the 2016 presidential election. The nexus of the Clinton campaign, the DNC, Obama operatives, the FBI, the CIA, the administrative agencies at one time or another conspired to remove, thwart, and hogtie Trump throughout his term . . . and after. The Clinton Campaign’s Steele dossier. The fraudulent FISC warrants based on it. Crossfire Hurricane. The impeachments, one based on a donkey party agent in the Pentagon. The Joint Chiefs chairman subverting the authority of the president as commander in chief to our biggest foreign adversary. And now the hunt for criminal charges against him. It’s monomaniacal.

See the source image

This latest episode smells as bad as the others. If nothing else, any return of the people’s government back to the people demands that DC be broken up. Other than the immediate staff of the three branches, the rest should disburse into the boondocks.

Disband or move the DC Circuit Court of Appeals and DC District Court outside the District. Leave just a municipal court to handle judicial matters for the District’s residents. Currently, a double system of justice – one for R’s and one for D’s – is clearly evident in the District. No good has come of federal judges, prosecutors, juries, and grand juries fully marinated in the DC socio-political eco-system. Till that time, routine changes of venue should be the order of the day. It’s the only way to stop the inherent partisan weaponization of the District’s justice system.

Trump, as personally repugnant as he is, has given us the time of day. The clock says it’s time to give Mordor (DC) an induced coma, or induced recession, in order to save our constitutional republic. Having Mordor look more like today’s Detroit is far healthier for the country than a city with a burgeoning workforce that has forgotten “servant” in public servant. If allowed to fester untreated, a dark time awaits. I don’t think that people outside the blue bubbles are going to tolerate for long an oligarchy run out of Mordor.

Political Cartoons by Tom Stiglich

RogerG

Source:

*” The FBI’s Mar-a-Lago Raid: It’s about the Capitol Riot, Not the Mishandling of Classified Information”, Andrew C. McCarthy, at FBI Mar-a-Lago Raid: Capitol Riot Real Reason | National Review

August 7, 2022August 7, 2022

When Buffoonery Infects the Right

May be a cartoon of standing and text

Republicans are bedeviled by the spawn of Trump and Democrats are enthralled by neo-Marxism in their combination of rank socialism and malignant identity pandering. While Democrats engage in a headlong rush into college-campus extremism, many Republicans seem intent on adopting the philosophy of Smoot-Hawley, ignoring Adam Smith’s lessons on the inherent foolishness of politicians managing trade or the general economy, shunting Hayek’s knowledge problem to the corner, and an emulation of Soviet Gosplan (central planning) only with them in the catbird seat. As a Republican in the Buckley-Reagan tradition, it’s galling. Trump is responsible for unloading this hash of blustery claptrap on the sole remaining party that should know better.

The steamy love affair with government by some of today’s Republicans shouldn’t catch anyone by surprise. Every politician loves to bring home the bacon, so politics can make hypocrites of us all. Yet, this is different. An orthodoxy developed around Trump’s buffoonery. Suddenly, Republicans and others on the Right started walking around proclaiming the evils of the free market.

It’s not surprising that Trump should be their spiritual leader. Here’s a man who made fame and fortune in real estate, the economic sector most debased by politics and government at every level. Government can help you make millions, indeed billions. Government is a partner for a big developer who needs local potentates to eliminate competitors, get approvals, and steamroll recalcitrant homeowners. Trump happened to have a career in an industry that found government not necessarily an obstacle but just another factor of production. The transition from Big Government Developer to Big Government Republican is easy in that matrix. Add a little 60’s Queens street tuff to the public persona and you too can have people walk over broken glass to attend your rallies.

See the source image

The Republican slide into incoherence came to the fore at the conservative Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s American Economic Forum on July 29. Billed as the antidote to Davos’s left-leaning World Economic Forum, it interestingly emulated Davos. Both confabs provided ample grist for government control of the economy. The only difference is the targeted beneficiaries.

A defensible role for government as referee against brute force and monopoly in the market is one thing. It’s quite another to play Karl Marx in distorting economic activity to the advantage of one class. For Rick Santorum, it’s blue-collar workers – not much different from Marx’s Cinderella class of the proletariat. Subsidies, the tax code, and regulatory powers should be geared to cementing the working class to the GOP in Santorum’s grand design – admirable as a political goal, but lousy economic advice. Did it ever grace his mind that blue-collar workers need blue-collar industries? And blue-collar industries need investment, i.e., capital, i.e., Wall Street. The economy is a synergistic whole. The only answer from Santorum and company is to grease the skids for manufacturing, mindless of the effect on the rest of the economic web.

May be an image of 1 person and indoor — Rick Santorum

It doesn’t work. Thomas Sowell’s famous dictum cannot be repealed: “There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” The reality is that some manufacturers get favored treatment over others. Some get the resources that are sucked away from others.

And what of those labor unions who turned themselves into the false champions of those blue collars? Remember, the same unions that drove two of the big three automakers into the arms of a government bailout in 2008-9 are manifestations of the one currently aggravating the supply-chain crisis at west coast ports, the featherbedding International Longshoreman and Warehouse Union. Anchored cargo ships are visible over the horizon. A blue-collar organization meant to benefit blue-collars does so at the expense of every other facet of economic life, and other workers. Government has a congenital habit of only turning its gaze to the squeaky wheel and to heck with the other three. Try driving a car with three flat tires. Trade-offs anyone, aggravated by government winner-picking?

May be a cartoon of 1 person, standing and text

How do tariffs fit into Santorum’s quest for the blue-collar vote? Good question, but another participant at the talkfest, Trump’s trade czar Robert Lighthizer, is a fanboy of them. He is a practitioner of economic snake oil, just like his patron, Donald J. Trump. With “balanced trade” as code for tariffs, he proclaimed that they wrought “astonishing results”. Really? I hear “post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy” (two events happening chronologically with the earliest one mistakenly assumed to be the cause) in the bombast. So many reforms were swirling around in 2017-2018, thanks to a Republican Congress, to overwhelm the impact of the tariff silliness.

May be an image of 1 person — Robert Lighthizer

Thus, attributing the so-called “Trump economy”, pre-COVID, to the orange man’s tariffs is demagogic self-puffery. Take the “Trump” tax cuts. They were really the Paul Ryan/Republican-caucus tax cuts, a distillation of ideas running around Republican policy circles since at least the 1990’s. Trump just happened to be in office to put his signature to something that was mostly the work of others. The business tax reductions were testosterone for economic muscle growth. And it showed according to AEI’s James Pethokoukis. Let’s just call the “Trump” tax cuts what they really were: the “Paul Ryan/Republican” tax cuts.

Oftentimes, cutting regulations can act like tax cuts. Remember the Congressional Review Act (CRA) of 1996? It codified a Congressional veto power over the administrative state’s rule-making juggernaut. Keep in mind that the Democrats love the administrative state going back to Woodrow Wilson so don’t expect them to exploit the power. Thus, Congress’s successful use of the CRA is dependent on the vagaries of presidential elections. A repeal requires a president’s signature like any bill. From 1996 to 2001, a repeal succeeded only once when a Republican, George W. Bush, was in the Oval Office. We’d have to wait another 16 years for a Republican-controlled Congress to remind itself of its power. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell in 2017 jumped at the chance and sent to Trump’s desk 14 veto resolutions bringing to heel the federal eco-agencies, FCC, Department of Labor, SEC, the Ed Department, etc., of our community-organizer-in-chief, Barack Obama. Trump simply put his signature to a political impetus that began elsewhere by other people.

For Lighthizer to bully his way to the podium at the American Economic Forum to take credit brings braggadocio to new heights, like his mentor, the prince of Mar-a-Lago.

The tax cuts, reining-in the pit bulls of the Left’s administrative state, and unleashing American energy production have long been Republican talking points and planks in the party platform, and not the lab creatures of Trump, Robert Lighthizer, or Peter Navarro (by the way, a former SoCal Dem no-growther). The GOP has long been a booster of opening up ANWAR, fracking, horizontal drilling, pipelines, refineries, offshore platforms, things that would incite conniptions in Silicon Valley lunchrooms. Trump just happened to be the sympathetic warm body to not stand in the way of affordable energy.

As for Trump’s beloved tariffs, they are sand tossed into the economy’s gears. They are a drag since tariffs are taxes. Surprise! Impose them and you just increased the burden on consumers and businesses. The Trump 25% tariff on imported steel slabs is a case in point. American steel producers remanufacture these slabs into sheet metal for fenders and appliance housings among other American-made desirables. Well, guess what? Since March 2020, the price of steel ballooned by 215%. While Biden’s eco-craziness and socialism has a role, Trump’s contribution to our current travails is his mindless worship at the altar of “balanced trade”, i.e., tariffs. If business tax cuts are testosterone, then tariffs are a flesh-eating virus. Give ‘em a little time before we end up in intensive care. The Republican Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 showed the way.

Not only that, tariffs needlessly make enemies, especially at a time when you need allies, unless, of course, you want America First to be America Alone. Red China has discovered its inner hegemon. Many Pacific countries are fearful of entering the maw of the CCP and are turning to the US as the only counterforce. The relationship between trade ties and military ones is well known. Just as we were about to draw much of the Pacific rim into a closer cooperation with us, 2016, a presidential election year, came upon us. The Dems practiced their usual fealty to the AFL-CIO and Hillary trashed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), something negotiated across multiple administrations. Not to be outdone, Trump in his usual bombast blasted the deal as “a continuing rape of our country”.

Well, what is this “rape”? The pact would slash tariffs all around the Pacific rim from the US to Brunei to Chile. For an America First/Alone enthusiast like Trump, the TPP is the perfect whipping boy. He torpedoed the deal and then boasted about it, repeatedly. But he made it harder to begin a “pivot to Asia” by initiating a trade war with our natural allies. His economic advisors must have been aghast and suggested their own pivot from “rape” to “bilateral”. The rhetorical gimmick was to disparage the adjective “multilateral” (TPP) and substitute “bilateral” in agreements. So, Trump’s people scrambled around the region to cement a smorgasbord of individual pacts to substitute for the omnibus one, all to save face from admitting to the slander.

One way to prevent the much-hated “forever wars” and bankruptcy of the US treasury is to have many allies. Their contributions may be small but together think of them as forcing upon Red China a weakening by a thousand cuts. We provide the biggest military piece but it’s better than having to pay for the whole piece which would be the consequence of the America Aloners.

The Aloner evangelists such as Tucker Carlson or Tulsi Gabbard, or even the conservative Tom McClintock (R, Ca.), stray into the logical dead end of more-allies-means-more-wars. Actually, that is only one possibility, and the least likely one. More allies mean more deterrence. A worse buzzsaw cannot be imagined for Putin’s Russia and Xi’s CCP for them to venture into an attempted reconstitution of the USSR and a Red Chinese-led Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The addition of Sweden and Finland to NATO intensify deterrence on Russia and trade pacts with miliary cooperation in the Pacific rim makes Xi’s Middle Kingdom dream seem more like a nightmare.

Coups are frequently associated with costly adventurism by despots. Everyone does cost-benefit analysis, unless they’re crazy. Even then, deterrence raises the costs to prohibitive levels for any compadres-of-convenience in the regime to continue to follow the lunatics. Still, anyway, if the crazy should practice a Nigh of the Long Knives (Hitler’s 1934 elimination of his rivals), you’ll definitely need those allies more than ever.

Foreign relations and a nation’s economy are intricately connected. Our national prosperity cannot survive a world with the renminbi as the world’s reserve currency, the World Bank headquartered in Beijing, the world’s shipping lanes policed by the PLA Navy, a NATO decaying in its nearly vacant Brussels headquarters, and a new USSR bullying its way westward and southward. Then we will be really alone. And it begins when we start to mangle economics and our recent history to fit the ambitions of narcissists and the hucksters of economic nostrums. I am worried that we are seeing too many of both among the people who should know better.

Specifically, the golden years, pre-COVID, from 2017 to early 2020 should not be referred to as the Trump economy. It was the Republican economy, all of it emanating from the Republican “establishment”. Anyone but Tucker Carlson fanboys should realize it.

May be a cartoon of text

RogerG

Sources:

*“Did the Trump Tax Cuts Work? The Answer May Not Be What You Think”, James Pethokoukis, American Enterprise Institute, at https://www.aei.org/economics/did-the-trump-tax-cuts-work-the-answer-may-not-be-what-you-think/
*” Trump’s Steel Tariffs Still Harming Producers and Consumers”, Bob Luddy, Brownstone Institute, at https://brownstone.org/articles/trumps-steel-tariffs-still-harming-producers-and-consumers/
*”Congressional Review Act”, Ballotpedia, at https://ballotpedia.org/Congressional_Review_Act
*”Where Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump stand on Obama’s legacy trade deal”, Business Insider, at https://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-tpp-2016-9
*” Central Planning with Conservative Characteristics”, Dominic Pino, National Review Online, at https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/08/central-planning-with-conservative-characteristics/
*Tom McClintock’s vote against support for adding Finland and Sweden to NATO in “One California congressman voted against Finland and Sweden joining NATO. Here’s why”, in the Sacramento Bee, at https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article263626043.html

August 3, 2022

We Are Stuck with the Democracy that We Have. The Result of Kansas Amendment 2 is Proof.

I’m reminded of the truism in military strategy of knowing your enemy. In the arena of great policy debates, it takes the form of knowing and being able to summarize your opponent’s arguments. Don’t expect such awareness among the general public. They have neither the time nor inclination to do the homework. More commonly, they have vague analogies and precepts in their heads to help them make sense of the world. The origins of these ideas are unknown, just blindly accepted as fact, and for which they have adapted their lives around. Thus, not knowing that these fuzzy ideas have a birthdate, it’s very hard to get the electorate to reverse a notion maybe born in their childhood but one that they have grown accustomed to.

We are simply stuck with the democracy that we have.

Yesterday, Kansas voters soundly rejected Amendment 2, an attempt to remove an earlier exercise of raw judicial power when the state’s high court wrote into the Kansas constitution something that isn’t there, namely the right to abortion. “Raw judicial power”, yes!

That gets to the crux of the matter. The general public is mostly unaware that the Kansas high court was egregiously out of their lane, actually to the point of deserving impeachment and removal from office. They legislated from the bench, a habit taught to them by the Warren Court and its federal progeny.

Formerly, new rights, powers, and privileges were in the wheelhouse of our elected representatives, our legislators. If you can’t get an idea past our elected representatives, well, that’s called a democratic republic. Don’t run to black-robed jurists trained in the application of laws to make the laws for you on the fly. That’s called autocracy. Distinctions in the basic functions of government aren’t taught and, therefore, most people only have the experience of their limited experience to guide them. Our instructional and informational organs have fallen flat on their face.

As a result, relatively new ideas – new in the sense of a lifespan of only a generation or two – have an extended grip for an understandably oblivious public. They do their duty, go to the polls, and express a discomfort in reversing something whose origin and basis is mostly unknown to them.

No, don’t mistake this for popular “wisdom”. It’s always “wisdom” if your side wins. It’s “racism” or some other scapegoat if your side loses. Welcome to the airheads of The Squad and fans of Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Who is to blame? Not the general public, for how can we expect them to exhibit a mental acuity that large groups have never shown before? If you have a desire to point fingers, aim them in the direction of the media and schools, or maybe the proponents for not doing the necessary groundwork.

The media and schools have been particularly derelict. Don’t expect your teacher or mediagenic news personality to patiently explain “raw judicial power”. That would require knowing the existence of the first three articles of the US Constitution. They establish three branches with their own lanes of competence: to legislate, to carry out the law, and to apply the law. Today, the appliers now legislate, ergo “raw judicial power”. How? The propagandists of the imperial courts claim the law says something that it doesn’t. Well, it doesn’t say it in clear words, they say, but the words that do exist can be stretched to cover what it doesn’t say. Got it?

For those 17-year-olds taking US History, it’s called “The Living Constitution”, and in the high school where I did the bulk of my teaching, the textbook has an entire chapter devoted to it. The “grooming” starts early.

No wonder people get attached to The Living Constitution. Yet, opinion polls consistently show disapproval of its consequences. How else can one get to racism as anti-racism from equal protection in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments? How else can one get to defund the police, no-cash bail, non-prosecution of crimes, blanket early releases from prison, and filthy, homeless, dangerous, and drug-addled streets and parks? How else can one codify in court opinions the newly minted wall of separation between gender and chromosomes? And as a result, get masturbation, new ideas for playtime, and drag queens in elementary school and public libraries? How else can sports designed for one set of chromosomes be destroyed by the forced acceptance of those with a different set? How else can we get to Obama and Biden Justice Department letters threatening Title IX actions against schools who insist on keeping distinct bathrooms for each set of chromosomes? Want your ten-year-old daughter to share a bathroom with a twelve-year-old XY “girl”? The Living Constitution folks do. The malformation of the Constitution knows no bounds.

It doesn’t stop there. Try to announce the obvious and you’ll face condemnation, maybe prosecution, disciplinary action, termination of employment, ostracism, and a life under the chronic threat of Twitter-hell. There are dire consequences for speaking truth to . . . .

If we are ever to get back to law being law, and not just an utterance of the zeitgeist, people who are cognizant of the nonsense must stand up and work to correct the miseducation coming from our educrats and telegenic poseurs. Strap on your waiters for this is going to be a long hard slog.

RogerG

Source:

Kansas rejects Amendment 2, which would have eliminated a right to abortion from the state constitution (msn.com)