Accounts of the last moments of Abū Bakr al-Baghdadi depict him retreating into a tunnel with a dead end and blowing himself up with three of his children. The tale proves that a dead end is what you make of it. For al-Baghdadi, it was off to his 70 virgins (I don’t know where the kids ended up in Islamist theology.). For the Democrats in their incessant drive to impeach Trump, similarly at a dead end of facts, they are weaving a fairy tale in order to create the illusion of the light of dastardly and impeachable offenses at the end of the tunnel. The reality is that there is nothing but a wall of rock and compacted dirt.
Let’s see, we’ve experienced a “whistleblower” complaint which proved to be a collection of hearsay water cooler and lunch room talk among the minions of the administrative state.
The conspirators couldn’t spin the call at the center of their scheme because Trump released the transcript to everyone on the planet. Then the story is repeated, nothing much added, in the tales spun by others vaguely mentioned in the initial yarn. If anything is added, it’s nothing but feelings of anger of people who are upset about how the president is conducting foreign policy. They’re flabbergasted that an elected official – the president – would dare skip over they’re unelected, self-anointed wisdom. Then they’ve attempted to establish a “quid pro quo” as if something that is common in the course of foreign relations is somehow illegal, while it clearly isn’t. What does all this add up to? Nothing!
Shakespeare spun a tale of “Much Ado About Nothing”. The Democrats are trying to steal the mantle of master poet laureate. Their fiction, though, says more about them than Trump.
Go Astros! I had no dog in the hunt that is called the 2019 World Series. Sunday’s rude crowd at Nationals Park changed that. If you can’t find a good reason to root for someone, rooting against someone may just fit the bill, particularly when they behave like vulgar buffoons. The boos and the oral flatulence of “Lock him up” were glaringly repulsive. Go Astros!
It was fitting justice that the Astros pummeled the swamp things 7-1 on boo day.
Conversely, the chant at Trump rallies, “Drain the swamp”, has gained new relevance. The “swamp” in this case is DC’s polyglot population of government workers, government influencers, partisan operatives, and the net of white-collared professional handlers and manipulators. The city’s only industry is politics, or the many ways to finagle something for somebody at somebody else’s expense. The controlling party is, of course, the Democratic Party – the party of big, and ever bigger, government.
The crowd in the stadium is a microcosm of this swamp: the assemblage of over-paid schemers who can afford the $1,000 tickets. These folks aren’t the peanuts-and-beer bleacher bums at Wrigley or Dodger Stadium. The Series at Nationals Park is reserved for these well-heeled destroyers of American wealth.
Now the swamp denizens have a professional baseball team to shower their affections upon. Why the new team to replace the caput Senators in 1960? It’s simple: the market got bigger. DC grew into the obese metroplex that busted its lap belt of boundaries, most recently thanks to Obama.
2016 election results by county in Virginia. Note the blue counties across the Potomac from Washington DC.
Its girth flooded into the Maryland and northern Virginia ‘burbs producing one-party Democrat enclaves who’d support Nicolás Maduro if he was the nominee. The consequence is a deeper-blue-approaching-charcoal Maryland and a Virginia about ready to take the plunge into California governance.
What’s my chant? Shrink DC! A depression in DC is a renaissance everywhere else. Go Astros!
The Coriolis Effect: the natural bending of global air and water currents due to the earth’s rotation on its axis.
The global oceanic gyres from the Coriolis effect.
I’ve often wondered why liberals since the late 19th century have a reflex to lean ever further left. The tendency is very pronounced in today’s Democratic Party. Propositions that were soundly rejected only a couple of years ago have morphed into near dogma in the party. Take for instance the almost universal embrace of gargantuan social engineering in Green New Deals; or the racially charged seizure of wealth from one generation to fund awards to a current and specific racially-favored group 150 years removed from the wrong; or the open and broad avowals of faith in socialism, while, for some, still denying it; or the proud espousal of confiscatory taxation in spite of its historically ruinous effects (JFK would be shocked.).
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn presents a possible answer in the second volume of his 3-part historical novel, “The Red Wheel: November 1916”. In describing the rise of Russian left radicalism in the decades prior to the 1917 revolutions (there ended up being two in March and October), he compares the liberal’s leftward reflex to the natural phenomena of the Coriolis effect. Here’s how he puts it:
“Just as the Coriolis effect is constant over the whole of this earth’s surface, and the flow of rivers is deflected in such a way that it is always the right bank that is eroded and crumbles, while the floodwater goes leftward, so do all forms of democratic liberalism on earth strike always to the right and caress the left. Their sympathies [are] always with the left, their feet are capable of shuffling only leftward, their heads bob busily as they listen to leftist arguments – but they [are] disgraced if they take a step to or listen to a word from the right.” (p.59)
Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
Makes sense to me. Daniel Pipes in his magisterial works on the Russian Revolution described the blind spot in the outlook of the liberals as they deposed the Tsar in March of 1917 and tried to build a constitutional republic. If there was a threat, they were convinced it would come from the right. They ignored the warnings of the intelligence services that left extremists, the Bolsheviks, were arming and planning a seizure of power. Low and behold, Petrograd was left mostly undefended and the rest of Russian history thereafter is one of villainy and misery.
The 1930’s Holodomor, or Stain-engineered famine to destroy peasant resistance in southern Russia and the Ukraine.New arrivals to the expanding chain of concentration camps as part of Stalin’s war against the peasants in the 1930’s.
What lies in store for us as we approach the momentous date of November 2020? We have a president wounded by the incessant drumbeat of an increasingly radical left Democratic Party with numerous allies in the media, academia, entertainment, and among the campus and street mobs. His opposition, the Democratic Party, has become the vanguard of the radical left’s implementation of an all-encompassing transformation of all of society to fit their warped vision.
Antifa protesters burning American flags.
Will the political Coriolis effect in modern America duplicate the misery foisted on Russia? This is the time for some serious adult thinking on the question … before it is too late.
Proverbs 18:17 (ESV): The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.
************************
A 1930’s Stalinist show trial in the Soviet Union.Adam Schiff (l), chairman, and some of the House Intelligence Committee members.
The madhouse in DC over impeachment is more reminiscent of Stalin’s show trials during his purges than American jurisprudence. The House spectacle is all about a predetermined verdict being sold behind a facade of serious-sounding rubbish. The American public is being misled. Putin is taking notes.
The Democrats have been on a jihad since November 8, 2016. The latest gambit hinges on a nefarious Trump “quid pro quo”. If the ploy was limited to that, it’s a nothingburger. “Quid pro quo” literally means “something for something”. If that was all there was to it, it’s a very thin reed to support a massive structure of impeachment. Does the Louisiana Purchase remind you of anything? International relations are almost solely conducted on a quid-pro-quo basis.
Really, though, what the show-trial prosecutors are trying to conjure is something more: a quid-pro-quo-or-else. And that, the call’s transcript doesn’t support. The “favor” doesn’t mention the Bidens till further down in the conversation. At the top of Trump’s mind is the skulduggery conducted against him in 2016. The Bidens were an afterthought. Many interpretations are possible whenever a verbal conversation is put to paper, but you can’t say that only Schiff’s reading is the viable one.
The “or else” part is the withholding of a weapons sale, or so they say – while confusing a “sale” with “aid”. Well, whatever, the Ukraine got the weapons a month later. The only president to withhold military aid to Ukraine was Obama. And further, Zelensky and his government wasn’t even aware that they were being allegedly coerced. It’s a strange quid-pro-quo when quid has no knowledge of the purported quo. This is nonsense on stilts.
US javelin missile. It was the key part of Trump-approved weapons sale to the Ukraine.
Schiff and his sorcerers have to create the illusion of a grand evil out of thin gruel. How? It’s simple: control the process! In other words, hold a show trial but call it something else. The Dems liken this charade to a grand jury. They’re right in an infantile way: charges (articles of impeachment) come out of it. But there the resemblance ends. It’s a strange grand jury proceeding when people representing the defense (Republicans) are present alongside people representing the prosecutors (Democrats). Instead, the whole affair has the adversarial characteristics of a trial. As such, the situation cries for full due process, not the secret hearings with Schiff the only one allowed to call witnesses and his serial leaking of cherry-picked statements to make his fiction seem like non-fiction. All the while, the Republicans are muzzled by keeping the thing secret. This is scandalous.
Another underhanded excuse is often bellowed to make the outrage more digestible. The process is said to be exclusively “political” in nature. But is that true? No. Impeachment is a blend of politics and statute. If “politics” was the sole driving force, once we developed political parties in the late 18th century, opposing parties controlling the Presidency and Congress would be embroiled in impeachments right and left. The fact that we have had so few impeachments tells us something. It tell us that something more than the fulfillment of political vendettas should be at the core of the process. It must be anchored in a clear and unmistakable violation of the Constitution or a serious criminal statue. A high bar is required, not the low bar of grotesque interpretations of paper transcriptions of phone calls or previously Court-approved exercises of executive privilege.
U.S. President Bill Clinton points while being asked questions regarding his relationship with former White House intern [Monica Lewinsky] during his videotaped interrogation before a grand jury on August 17. The four hour videotape was released by the U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee along with 2,800 pages of [Lewinsky] case evidence.If Trump is guilty, what of Obama’s use of his “phone and pen”? He created by his lonesome new categories of immigration law violators to be free of those same laws. Is this an example of the Article II branch acting like the Article I branch? What about “faithfully executing the laws”? Or how about the Fast and Furious episode in an entrapment scheme against our Second Amendment? Have we forgotten the IRS vendetta against Obama’s political opponents? There’s more here against Obama, using Pelosi’s standard, than there ever is against Trump.
Republicans, remember this time. It’s no holds barred regarding impeachment. The Democrats have unleashed the tactic of hiding election loss anger and ideological and policy disagreements under spurious claims of misbehavior. You too, Republicans, can follow the same show trial script when the time comes.
Prelude: The 19th century Progressives bequeathed to us a many tentacled Leviathan. The monster grew out of the progressives’ fundamental premise that life is too complicated to be left to individuals. We need, they asserted, “experts” to guide and assist us in achieving our highest potential. They did not see the monster developing a mind of its own with distinct interests from those it was intended to serve. You might say, a culture evolved from its peculiar ecosystem. Out of this unique culture arose a predilection for certain views, born of its circumstances and concomitant norms and expectations. The 2016 election threw back the rug and exposed the thing for what it really is. It is a living and breathing thing no longer moored to its original raison d’être. Its purpose for existence is itself, not the country and the country’s citizens.
*******
At times Tucker Carlson drives me nuts. One of his favorite bogeymen is “neocons”, which occasionally crowds out his infatuation with UFO’s. To him, free markets are “just a tool”. He completely misses the point that they are what happens when the state leaves people alone. Free markets blossom when a state is created to protect our natural rights, not the creator of them. But I have to admit that he is onto something in most things Trump. The latest Trump furor erupted over a whistleblower complaint about his phone call (later referred to simply as “the Call”) to Ukrainian President Zelensky. A CIA veteran appeared on his show to present his view of the whistleblower’s complaint. His observations should raise at least a few eye brows. Watch.
The complaint (read here) according to former CIA officer John Kiriakou reads too polished and legally suave to be a product of a single person. In his view, the complaint by the time it got to Congress had passed through multiple hands. Maybe this is normal, but today’s political environment isn’t normal. Multiple hands might mean a coordinated effort. There are concerns that the administrative state is a hyper-partisan outfit, particularly in its DC stomping grounds. Is it possible that our bureaucracies in DC are a well-oiled special interest group with a clear ideological cast? Is the “whistleblower” a pseudonym for a cabal of apparatchiks intent on removing Trump?
Details about the complaint and the complainant are only now beginning to emerge. The existence of an accusation was known to Adam Schiff (D, Ca.), chairman of the House Intel Committee, as it was gestating in the intel bureaucracy (read about it here). According to the latest information, the accuser interacted with a Schiff aide and was referred to a lawyer. Who’s the lawyer? It’s none other than one of the many revolving-door Democrat apparatchiks who populate the environs of the DC Mall, Andrew Bakaj with Mark Zaid as co-counsel.
Andrew Bakaj of Comparr Rose Legal Group, PLLC
Previously, Bakaj has been at the center of insider politics to frustrate Trump appointees. In 2018, he went after Christopher Sharpley, Trump’s nominee for CIA Inspector General, ironically a holdover from Obama’s tenure where he served as deputy IG of the CIA, and functioned as acting IG under Trump. Out of the woodwork arose a cadre of former apparatchiks to blast Sharpley for allegedly punishing “whistleblowers”. At the tip of the spear was Bakaj. They successfully torpedoed Sharpley’s nomination when he withdrew his name rather than face the Dem gauntlet. And who was retained as Bakaj’s legal counsel in this earlier jig? It was Zaid. You can read about the episode here.
It’s time to clear up this business about “whistleblowers” before we go any further. “Whistleblowing” can be more than just a sincere exposure of those of public trust who cook the books. It also lends itself to partisan political crusades. Whistleblowing at this level looks a lot like leaking. Whistleblowing has the potential to be legal cover for leaking.
The motivations of the complaining actor (or actress) can be of a partisan nature. Speaking of partisan, look at Bakaj’s political background. The guy is fully marinated in Democratic Party politics. He interned for Sens. Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton in the Spring and Fall of 2001 according to his Linkedin page. He was employed at the CIA’s IG office during the Obama years. That’s where he ran afoul of Sharpley, the CIA’s Deputy IG, at a time when Obama was petrified over leaks. Even Democrats at that time were aware of the blurred line between “whistleblowing” and “leaking”.
Bakaj is now part of the web of professional handlers who are on speed dial with Democrat officeholders with a political ax to grind. So the Call’s digestive tract might look like this: leaker > Schiff aide > Schiff? > Bakaj > Zaid. As more information comes to light, we may have to add more entrails to the guts of the beast.
The Call’s coming to light is starting to eerily resemble the sliming of Kavanaugh. At the root of that campaign was Debra Katz, the DC lawyer who represented Christine Blasey-Ford and her completely unsubstantiated allegations. Is her’s (Katz) a fully objective legal mind? Are you kidding? She once crowed not long after Trump’s inauguration, “This administration’s explicit agenda is to wage an assault on our most basic rights — from reproductive rights to our rights to fair pay . . . We are determined to resist — fiercely and strategically.” She’s a charter member of the Resistance.
Debra Katz at The Wall Street Journal CFO Network on June 12, 2018. (Photo: Paul Morse for the WSJ)
Into this boiling stew is thrown the Call. Cutting through the bombast, we find the complaint adds nothing, other than what appears to be Democrat boilerplate. Trump trumped them by releasing the transcript of the Call. The very thing that was to be the accelerant for a full blown uproar was now equally in the possession of any congregation of people at a barber shop or supermarket. The mom with a basket full of groceries knows just as much as the “whistleblower”. With the transcript, we get to compare the whistleblower’s account of what was said with … what was actually said.
The New York Times’s report on the complaint refers to it as following the released transcript of the Call. Of course it does. Dah! But there’s much more to the complaint that sounds more like a legal brief than a singe person’s recollection. In-between references to the Call are interpretations and embellishments. These could have just as easily come out of the Resistance hothouse or Adam Schiff and the worst of the Democratic caucus. Examples are in order.
Example #1: Right at the start, in the introduction, the complaint rattles off a partisan indictment: “… the President of the United States is using the power of his office to solicit interference from a foreign country in the 2020 U.S. election. This interference includes, among other things, pressuring a foreign country to investigate one of the President’s main domestic political rivals.”
This is not in the transcript. It’s in the mind of the complainant, and whoever else helped him (or her) write it. As we know, Trump requested assistance from the Ukraine in our investigation of possible governmental misbehavior surrounding the 2016 election. We have treaties for this purpose, one with the Ukraine. Any reference to the Bidens is brief and offhanded, and fleetingly mentioned to make the point of possible corruption and other wrongdoing of recent vintage. As for a “quid pro quo”, to be blunt, there ain’t one. This is clear if you listen to a dramatic reading of the Call in natural conversational tones and rhythms (One was performed on the Hugh Hewitt Show, Hour 2, 10/2/2019).
Example #2: Here’s chilling reminder of the cabal within the unleashed Leviathan: “Over the past four months, more than half a dozen U.S. officials have informed me of various facts related to this effort.” Further, “It is routine for U.S. officials … to share such information with one another ….” Additonally and astoundingly, we have this admission: “I was not a direct witness to most of the events described. However, I found my colleagues’ accounts of these events to be credible because, in almost all cases, multiple officials recounted fact patterns that were consistent with one another.”
“Fact patterns”? “Multiple officials”? “Share such information”? What are “fact patterns”? They are opinions usually fueled by bias. In today’s climate, there’s no hotter bias than DC Trump-hatred. As for the “sharing” and “multiple officials”, that sounds to me like “intrigue”. I would like to remind the Dem caucus that interpretation equally applies to the complaint as it does to the Call.
Example #3: The frequent appearance of the word “pressure” to characterize Trump’s request for assistance from Zelensky, president of the Ukraine, underscores the partisan bombast. “Pressure” is a very loaded verb. Once again, a natural oral recreation of the conversation conveys no such “pressure”. It is a provocative verb enlisted for the sole purpose of advancing a political agenda. The complaint has the odor of DNC press releases.
Example #4: To further the charge of Trump “pressuring” Zelensky, a quid pro quo was stitched together by the author(s). First, they attempt to paint White House officials as “deeply disturbed” as they “witnessed the President abuse his office for personal gain”. The “abuse” relies on cobbling together a line from the Ukrainian president’s account of the talk on his website with the fleeting reference to the Bidens. Here’s the Ukraine line in the complaint:
“Donald Trump expressed his conviction that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve Ukraine’s image and complete the investigation of corruption cases that have held back cooperation between Ukraine and the United States.”
Attach the above with this:
“Aside from the above-mentioned ‘cases’ purportedly dealing with the Biden family and the 2016 U.S. election, I was told by White House officials that no other “cases” were discussed.”
And you have a “quid pro quo”. Really? Yeah, in the minds of those in the fever swamp. So, we are supposed to believe in the space of a limited conversation that the mere mention of the Bidens is ipso facto proof of “give me dirt on the Bidens or we’ll let you die on the vine”. The only way to get away with the accusation is to be unfamiliar with the Call. Now that we have it to read during our morning constitution, we know that the shenanigans of the intel community and the FBI in DC, along with Crowdstrike, were mentioned. “No other cases”? The Bidens were one of three, all brought up during the length of a short phone talk. The complaint’s author(s) are lying.
I could parse more of the thing by going beyond the first 3 pages of the 9 in the screed. The document is risible. It will become more of a farce as more comes to light, maybe more about the complainant. Some reports have revealed the author to be a registered Democrat. Something not unexpected given the natural affinity between the party of government (Democratic Party) and the employees of government.
Neighboring states around DC all of a sudden have a predilection for Democratic Party candidates. The federal government grows and Democrats flock to DC and its environs. Examine the map of Virginia from the 2016 election. Notice the northern state house districts on the south side of the Potomac, a few bridges away from DC?
Republicans venturing into DC are lambs stumbling into a den of wolves.
The tale of the Call is the story of the sunset of popular sovereignty. We must recognize that the government is so big that it cannot be controlled through elections. In fact, if elections go against the lunch room zeitgeist, the new officeholders will be undermined or removed from office. Welcome to modern impeachment in the age of the institutional radical left.
Stay tuned for more from the impeachment clown show.
The transcript is a Rorschach test exposing the realities of domestic and international politics. What does it mean? Here’s my take.
(1) Politics brings out the crudity in people. Yes, Trump is crude, him being a political neophyte with all the rough edges and a huge ego. But have you watched the Democrats’ presidential sweepstakes lately? It’s insanity on parade. Their rants include more than wacko ideas but also serial insults to Trump (“punch him in the face”, etc.) and half of the electorate (“racist”, “anti-gay”, “we’re going to forcibly take your guns”, etc.). Trump is crude and the Democrats are crude and unelectable.
(2) Washington, DC, is a cesspool – not the city but the environs around the capitol. There is a Deep State and it’s in those dozens of blocks encompassing the Mall. The “whistleblower” apears to be a never-Trumper. The whistleblowing complaint apparently is based on scuttlebutt from water-cooler or social banter. The complainant wasn’t tapped into the president’s line. If he’s a never-Trumper, he (or she, et al) will have to join the hierarchy in the State Dept., Justice Dept., and intelligence community in 2016 and 2017. A partisan leak has been recast as whistleblowing.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
(3) The transcript shows the nature of politics as it has existed since political power was wedded to a human being. Trump’s call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not unknown in history. For example, FDR’s shenanigans in going after Samuel Insull, a prominent utility CEO, just because he needed a scalp for the Depression, was sickening. After they finally got their hands on him, and after much chicanery with France, Greece, and Turkey, all FDR and the boys (girls, et al) got was an innocent verdict on all counts. Do I need to delve into the more egregious antics of JFK, LBJ, and Richard Nixon?
Samuel Insull
(4) Trump’s call has an interesting predicate: Joe Biden’s on-air boast in 2016 that he got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired. He was the same prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was investigating Burisma Holdings for corruption at the time his son was on the Board of Directors. Intriguing, eh?
Viktor Shokin
(5) The transcript of Trump’s call shows no quid pro quo: as in, you give me the dirt on Biden and I’ll give you American aid. You could argue that it is implied, but that would be no more dispositive than Sens. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) letter to Ukraine’s prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, demanding the end of investigations critical of Robert Mueller’s probe. They demanded that he “reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this important investigation.” You can read about the episode here.
Yuriy Lutsenko
(6) The Ukraine seems to be as entwined in American politics circa 2016 as Russia was alleged to be. Trump’s call makes it abundantly clear. First, Ukraine may have been on helpful terms with at least Obama if not the Democrats in that election cycle. How helpful? The transcript shows Trump mentioning two things: Crowdstrike and the US ambassador to the Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch. The ambassador was, not surprisingly, an Obama administration conduit to the Ukraine, and given the spying capers on Trump in 2016, would be involved in any Ukrainian hanky-panky. Speculation? Yep, but no different than the knee-jerk cries of “outrageous” regarding anything Trump. And there’s the mention of the cyber-security firm Crowdstrike. It was the company who was paid by the DNC to take possession of their server and examine it for evidence of hacking. It’s out of this Democrat-funded escapade that we have the Russia-hacked-our-election chant. What’s the Ukrainian connection? Well, there’s enough intriguing evidence for John Durham to be looking into it. You can read about it here.
I’m sure that more can be said and will be said in the coming days. As for me, as of right now, one more thing needs to be mentioned. The Democrats are out to reverse an election. Suburban voters in the 2018 elections handed power to a party bent on imposing socialism and removing a president. Is this what these voters wanted? I kinda doubt it, but they are getting it anyway. Indeed, they should have known this would happen because the party leadership said as much since inauguration day 2017.
The 2018 elections show one weakness of democracy. It was indicative of how an electorate can be whipsawed from detestation of presidential behavior to handing power to the irresponsible. The individuals who were elected in swing districts may not be like the core of the party, but the newcomers will help a party with statist socialism in their political DNA to gain majority status. Those 40 reps pale when compared to the 195 others. It’s simply a matter of math.
Thank you swing-district voters. Now we have an impeachment-palooza and socialism on the cusp of being the law of the land.
Progressive/left protesters crowd and shout into Rep. Chris Stewart’s (R, Utah) townhall in Salt Lake City, March 31, 2017. George Frey/Getty Images
Our times seem to be especially fraught with some of the worst invective, character assassination, and outbursts of anger bordering on rage. Disruptive chants and slogans have replaced reasoned discourse. I’ve complained about this often. Astonishingly, it has taken place at a time when we are spending trillions on education. As it turns out, mass education hasn’t produced mass wisdom. The situation raises serious questions about our educational system. Are we educating citizens or producing close-minded activists?
Watch this episode of young climate-change activists making demands at a recent (August 22) DNC meeting in San Francisco. The Sunrise Movement is most certainly the Sundown Movement, the sundown of reasoned discourse.
Very little intelligent dialogue takes place, nor is there any evidence of its presence in the short cognitive histories of these young people. They jump from rash conclusion to street activism with nothing prior or between.
The same is true in much of our political landscape. Brusque knee-jerk reactions take the place of thoughtful discussion and civil discourse. I doubt if the groundwork in the form of sufficient knowledge has been made in order to make it possible. So, it’s back to chants, slogans, disruptions, and hectoring. I cringe just thinking about what will happen if Pres. Trump gets the chance to fill another Supreme Court vacancy.
In the case of the above video, the instigator is the previously-mentioned Sunrise Movement. When I look into the faces of these young people, I slump into depression thinking of what our media and schools have done to their minds. All is not lost though. There are still a few golden and older voices in the wilderness, even if they’re no longer with us. Two of those voices belong to the late Milton and Rose Friedman. Their legacy continues in the Free to Choose Network. Airing this month on Amazon Prime Video are “The Real Adam Smith: Ideas That Changed the World” and “Sweden: Lessons for America?”. I viewed both recently.
The first should be a must-see for Pres. Trump and some of the hosts on Fox News. Are you listening Tucker? The second one should be required viewing for – wait, it’s a list – Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, her political soul mates, the activist base of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, much of the rest of Democratic Party’s wannabee presidents, and those protesters pushing their way into the DNC’s meeting in San Francisco.
Pres. Trump reacts to trade issues in the same way as a developer dealing with his project’s immediate circumstances and the relevant people before him. Tariffs for him are like the rent charged in Trump Tower. It adds to his bottom line. The “trade deficit” is treated as a debt or loss in his books. It isn’t quite that simple. Tariffs are taxes paid by consumers in one way or another. Call it a value-added tax on imports, and operates in like manner. As for the “trade deficit”, it is just one component in the balance of payments. A shortfall in it will lead to surpluses in the other two components: the financial and capital accounts. The importer gets dollars and we get their goods. The dollars end up in financial instruments (bonds, government debt for example) and foreign direct investment.
For Trump, the dollars flow in the pockets of foreign fat cats as they live in, get this, a non-dollar society. How does that work? It doesn’t. The fat cat must translate his dollars into his country’s currency to buy that swank penthouse in Shanghai or keep the Benjamins to spend them on a Montecito mansion. He’ll need renminbis in the PRC or hand over the dollars to the old-moneyed seller in posh Montecito. Another option is parking the money in our government debt. Whichever way, dollars eventually come back here.
Dollars or renminbi (yuan).
Could trade deficits have downsides? Yes, they could. Some regions could fall into depression as they lose out in the international competition. The social effects of economic decline aren’t pretty. Shuttered factories and businesses, distressed neighborhoods, family breakdown, substance abuse, people locked into a cycle of life with few prospects, and welfare dependency are symptoms of the malaise.
Abandoned and dilapidated factory complex in Detroit, Mi.Injecting opioids.
This is one weak spot in the film. Free trade has a ying and yang quality. It works best among countries with free economies, more or less. The role of similar social expectations and norms among nations can’t be counted out. I suspect that the PRC sees trade as another weapon in the long twilight struggle for national and ideological dominance. If their people get richer in the process, that’s icing on the cake. The country is certainly one for us to be very leery.
Nonetheless, the first film – “The Real Adam Smith” – lays out a useful primer for the value of free trade, one that Trump and his courtiers should understand. It might restrain them in their enthusiasm for punishing our literal and natural allies with tariffs. But we can hold two ideas at the same time (per Hillary’s iteration, and true). President-for-life Xi may be Trump’s friend, but he isn’t ours.
The second film – “Sweden: Lessons for America?” – is a necessary corrective to a popular urban myth for self-styled urban sophisticates. They pride themselves in being smarter, more intelligent, and better informed than the rubes. For them, the right side of the political spectrum is populated with Morlocks.
The Morlocks in the 1960 movie, “The Time Machine”.
The prejudice was on full display when Paul McCartney accepted the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song in 2010 and bellowed this insult at ex-President George W. Bush while President Obama and wife were in attendance: “After the last eight years, it’s great to have a president who knows what a library is.”
McCartney and Pres. Obama at the award ceremony, June 2010.
Ironically, the rank condescension of an accomplished pop music star is rooted in a profound ignorance that is common in places like bein pensant circles in Georgetown. For the beautiful people, all the smart people are on the left side of the spectrum. In reality, they’ve adopted John C. Calhoun’s outlook, but the target isn’t African-Americans. It’s anyone who might wear a tool belt, pay a mortgage, attend a Bible-believing church, and just might register Republican. Johan Norberg, the documentary’s host, unwittingly presents proof of the presence in chic quarters of the “Ignorant” stamp on the forehead with a frequency equivalent to tattoos in the crowd of heavy metal concertgoers. Norberg does it by shattering their fantasies about Swedish socialism.
Bernie Sanders has frequently tried to distinguish himself from the brutal socialism in the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. He does it by attaching his socialist vision to Scandinavian “social democracy”, not Pol Pot. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , a younger Bernie Sanders with different genitalia, imitates him. Both invoke the experience of “democratic socialism” in Scandinavia.
CNN quotes Bernie Sanders as follows: “I think we should look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn what they have accomplished for their working people.” The Danes recoil from the “socialist” label. Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen responded in a speech at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, “I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.”
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, October 30, 2017.
Bernie and AOC continue to maintain that these countries are working examples of a successful socialism. They try to do so, in spite of the Scandinavian leaders’ rejection of the “socialism” label, by emphasizing “democracy”. It’s rhetorical sleight of hand. The fact of the matter is that the scheme is all about government control. It matters little if the control is exercised through a small claque of ideological oligarchs or a mob of 50% plus one. Private property becomes meaningless if it is at the mercy of any assemblage of 50%-plus-one. “Democracy” is the cover for all sorts of sins.
To say it is “democratic”, also, doesn’t mean the administrative state goes away. Rules to avoid chaos and give direction will have to be promulgated by a commissariat approaching the size of the Soviet Gosplan. The likes of Bernie and AOC have all kinds of social and eco “justice” to pursue. AOC helped author one incoherent version of the Green New Deal and Bernie later came up with his own monstrosity. Whichever of the two routes you take, you’ll end up in the same place: central planning!
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey (right) speak during a press conference to announce Green New Deal legislation on Feb. 7. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Plus, the two carnival barkers act as if nothing has happened since the heyday of Scandinavian socialism in the 1970’s. It’s here that the Swede, Johan Norberg, and “Sweden: Lessons for America?” clears away much of the verbal smog. To make it simple for Bernie and Alexandria, Sweden had a free market economy, lost it, then gained it back. How did they do it? They reined in their “social democracy”. Business taxes were lowered; pensions became contribution-based rather than benefit-based; universal school vouchers were implemented to the point of private high schools becoming half of all high schools; unions became cooperative rather than combative; the vaunted universal health care system is remarkably decentralized with vouchers and a growing number of private healthcare providers; and on and on and on. In many ways they are freer than us.
Bernie wishes that we could be more like Sweden. Oh really, Bernie? I don’t think so. There is one area that should especially draw the ire of Bernie and much of the Dem Party. Sweden makes everyone pay taxes. If you will receive government benefits, you will pay. They don’t have a tax structure that attempts to shoulder the burden of government on the pocketbooks of the wealthy and the businesses who are the engine of jobs. They tried that in the 1970’s and saw their economy slump and businesses flee. Don’t doubt for a moment that Bernie and AOC won’t try to inflict the horrible history on us.
Really, the amazing part of the story is the abject ignorance of the story. Bernie, AOC, and the like, stop history in the 1970’s. Democratic socialism’s failures are deleted from the record so they can ignore Scandinavia’s movement toward free markets. Our democratic socialist icons take the system of its heyday, pretend the failures and reforms didn’t happen, and attribute the successes of its reforms to the socialism of the earlier misbegotten period. This is circularity with a huge bite out of its circumference. It’s nonsense.
In Scandinavia, particularly Sweden, Adam Smith has made a comeback … out of necessity. Socialism failed. In America, especially among the Democratic Party base and millennials, Marx is making a comeback. Go figure. AOC tries to distance herself from Marx to be more politically palatable. So does Bernie. Yet, do they really understand Marx? I kinda doubt it. Marx is socialism with an eschatology. Strip the violent eschatology and you still have socialism. Our lefty politicos want socialism to be elected into power. But does the means of implementation matter? Socialism is socialism and it doesn’t work. Isn’t the emphasis on 50%-plus-one just another attempt at putting lipstick on a pig?
A return to a sound understanding of human nature and the modes of social organization that are attuned to it would be huge step forward in removing needless chatter and destructive venting. I doubt, though, that it will ever get a hearing in today’s toxic climate. Too many people just don’t know a damn thing. Many of them are on the left, but that won”t stop them from being oh so confident. There is nothing more dangerous than an over-confident ignoramus.
President Obama: “We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people,” Obama told reporters at the White House. “We have been very clear to the Assad regime — but also to other players on the ground — that a red line for us is we start seeing a whole bunch of chemical weapons moving around or being utilized.”
“That would change my calculus; that would change my equation.”
* Barack Obama from Aug. 20, 2012 press conference as reported by CNN.
******
Here we go again down the same road paved by Obama. On Thursday Iran shoots down one of our drones. Trump threatens action, speculates that the action might have been that of a lone wolf officer, issues the threat of retaliation, then couples the threat with a request for talks, and finally announces that he’ll do … nothing. What does this sound like to you? It’s worse than an unenforced red line. It’s open season on American surveillance of the Persian Gulf.
What accounts for the spastic reply to an Iranian provocation? I may be way off base but I think that he has a kitchen cabinet of a couple of Fox News celebrities: Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham. Both make noises that they would like the U.S. to return to being a regional power. In broadcasts after the shootdown, Carlson and Ingraham rhetorically questioned the vital U.S. interest at stake in the Middle East. Call them the Rand Paul wing of cable news. The result is that the rest of Trump’s foreign policy team is left to compete with flashy cable TV personalities for influence.
Tonight, Tucker was at it again. A fire hose of hyperbole ensued about the evil influence of “neocons”, meaning John Bolton, who in Tucker’s mind, along with Bill Kristol, “planned” the Iraq invasion. Leaving aside the insult to fact and logic, Tucker appears to be channeling Charles Lindbergh and his America First Committee of 1940-1. Lindbergh fit into the overall climate of revulsion after World War I just like Tucker and a few others in the neo-isolationist right were repulsed by Bush’s messy Iraq adventure. Lindbergh and his group lasted until Japanese bombs starting dropping on our servicemen in Hawaii. What’ll happen to Tucker and Laura if American blood is shed because we failed to act when it was a drone?
Oh, I forgot. These types always have an easy out. They will claim that we should have never been there in the first place. Of course, the same logic would hold true wherever in the world that we happen to plant the flag. Soon our navy will be relegated to coastal patrol duty. Only in those places will neo-isolationists accept our interests to be “vital”.
Is this any way to run a foreign policy? You’ve got to wonder. At times, Trump’s foreign policy path resembles a user of LSD.
First, Trump thought he could charm the leader of a brutal thugocracy – North Korea – and came away with __?__ . He probably thought that he was engaging the equivalent of a city planning commission. The Kim clan, like many littering the world since the dawn of hominids, has so much blood on their hands that you’d mistake their fiefdom for the old Union Stockyards in Chicago. Underlings who fail Kim die, which was the fate of the unlucky chap who was Kim’s main functionary at the Hanoi soiree. Apparently, there’s no such thing as severance pay in North Korea.
And Trump actually thought that he was going to charm this guy?
Trump came out of both meetings talking up North Korea’s prospects as something like the next Atlantic City. Come to think of it, the current reality of Atlantic City comes close to matching the current reality of North Korea.
Trump campaigned as the anti-Bush and the anti-Obama. Trump personalizes issues such that policies and actions taken by these two bogeymen must be bad because … Bush and Obama did them. It’s not due to some grand strategic vision. Vision shmavision. His comes close to the hallucinations of the aforementioned LSD user. It took TV images of children being gassed to force Trump into his anti-Obama personality and enforce Obama’s rhetorical red line. TV works for Trump when “peace through strength” doesn’t. Absent a TV image for Trump, “peace through strength” has all the wallop of wet toilet paper.
Now we’re back to TV taking center stage with “sage” advice on dealing with Iran offered up by the Tucker and Laura gang. For them, so what if Iran’s proxies are tramping all over the Middle East firing rockets into Israel, propping up thugs, threatening our alliances, and turning the Persian Gulf into a minefield. For them, so what if the Middle East is a crescent of terror that’ll make another part of the world off limits to the United States, and a staging base for crazies with box cutters and pressure-cooker bombs. For them, so what if our regional allies feel abandoned and look elsewhere. China and Russia are waiting in the wings. For Tucker and Laura, so what.
For the rest of us, it smells like Jimmy Carter’s foreign policy of the 1970’s, or maybe Lindbergh’s of 1940-1, or the fallout of Obama’s apology tour. Are you sure we didn’t elect Barack Hussein Trump in 2016?
Adams Schiff (D, Ca.), Chairman of the House Intelligence (?) Committee, and key champion of impeachment.
Are you as tired as I am of the endless incantation of “Russian attacked our democracy”? I was going to write about the Dems’ call for a takeover of healthcare or Romney’s Trump-bashing. Instead, I talked myself into this topic after running into the hackneyed charge for the zillionth time since before Trump placed his hand on the Bible, Jan. 20, 2017. I feel like the Peter Finch character in “Network” when he shouts, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”. Enough; please, enough! Put it to bed.
The reason is obvious. This is disinformation about a commonly-used disinformation campaign. The Russians have been at it for a long time, and so have we.
The ex-veep Dick Cheney fed the monster of overheated rhetoric by calling Russian campaign interference an “act of war”. But the monster had already been unleashed in the interregnum between the Obama and Trump presidencies (more about this is likely to come from the “investigation of the investigators”). It became the established Democrats’ tag line to explain Hillary’s loss. From the gitgo, it was a ruse to muddy the winner and exonerate the loser. Apparently, the Democrats aren’t supposed to lose elections.
Do I really have to recount the long roll call of Russian attempts to influence western electorates? The tactic was done through espionage by comrades in the various national chapters of the Communist Party (“Witness” by Whittaker Chambers) and “agents of influence” in the chancelleries of the West (Research our government’s Venona Project). It was done by financially feeding fellow-travelling activists in the anti-nuke, anti-war, and anti-capitalist movements west of the Iron Curtain.
Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts addresses pro-freeze demonstrators on Capitol Hill, 1981 or 1982 (?).
Reagan faced a full fusillade of these “acts of war” in the 1980’s when he moved to counter the Russian medium-range nuclear missile threat in Europe. Anti-war sympathizers went nuts in Congress, the media, and the streets. Thank God he stuck to his guns … er, missiles.
Shenanigans in western elections were, and are, a staple … and it includes us. Our interference in Israeli elections is less than unusual. Obama sent some of his campaign veterans to Tel Aviv to assist Labor. The smell of hypocrisy is rich in the air.
Jeremy Bird, a former Obama campaign organizer, who assisted the Left-leaning parties’ effort to oust Benjamin Netanyahu, 2015. (Melina Mara/Getty Images)
We could do much worse for humanity than doing more of this in places like Iran, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Cuba.
The Democrats are desperate to remain politically relevant by any means at hand. The means at hand, though, are patently ludicrous. The crazy plot requires a god-like omniscience on the part of the Russians. Russians are seemingly more adept at electioneering than Robby Mook, Hillary’s campaign tsar. Maybe that’s true.
The scheme demands a Russian crystal ball to foresee how to precisely calibrate their phone bank of basement bots and Facebook ads to tilt the election to Trump. But there’s a fly in the ointment. They don’t need a crystal ball or time machine if their goal is to sow discord regardless of who wins. Their objective was to sully the winner, who everyone, including the Russians, expected to be Hillary.
They succeeded beyond their wildest imagination. The winner was falsely covered in mud. Shockingly, it happened to be Trump. If it had been Hillary, the story would end up in the same place as the Ark at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
The place of storage for the collusion plot if Hillary had won? (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”)
The only successful part of the subterfuge was the Hillary-Steele-Russians element. The product of the cabal – the Steele Dossier – was fed to the mandarins of the Obama administration, and used and leaked to soil the real electoral winner. For over two years, the country, the president, his family and helpers, were subjected to a drawn out nothingburger.
A lot of people have egg on the face from their nothingburger (sorry for the mixed metaphor). The “egg” is ruined reputations and more business for defense lawyers. The sorry affair was always a Dem disinformation campaign rooted in a Russian one.
“The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.”
Trump speaks at his Sept. 2018 West Virginia rally.
Trump may be a great real estate developer but his understanding of trade stops at the water’s edge. It’s almost childlike, as it probably is for most people.
In recent rallies, Trump talks like a Democrat in his boasts of the prospect of $100 billion for the US treasury from his tariffs. The Dems do the same when trying to jack you with tax increases. It’s advertised as more money for “investment” – i.e., government spending out the wazoo.
The reality is different. If you want less of something, tax it. So, the Dems get less money to transform America into the image of their frenzied imaginations as people scurry about to escape Bernie-bro policies. Trump gets less money from his tariffs as they drive up prices which leads to less imports, fewer sales, and less dough for Uncle Sam. It’s elementary.
Of course, Trump might be guilty of good ol’ hucksterism. He’s been known to do that. Remember his crowing about his inaugural crowds.
He routinely bellows about the “trade deficit” sucking out the life blood of the nation. Each quarterly $124-billion hole is treated by him as a debt. It ain’t that simple.
In fact, it’s not the whole trade enchilada. The thing hawked by Trump is one third of the “balance of payments” super stat. Add the capital and financial accounts to the mix. Jury-rig one of the trio and you unexpectedly alter the other two. Anyway, ignoring the other two makes them as optional as sight for a driver’s license test. There’s a good chance in both instances that you’ll end up in a bad place.
The trade hole isn’t even a good barometer of the health of the economy. It’s ups and downs appear to be mostly irrelevant. Of the 120 months of the 1930’s and the Great Depression, 102 were trade surpluses. Being in the black in trade didn’t make a dent in industrial collapse and 25% unemployment. (See here)
Good times and trade surpluses don’t necessarily correlate. Policies intended to create trade surpluses can backfire. No best-laid-plans are immune. A blowback can erupt with nearly all policies, including globalization.
Globalization isn’t a golden brick road either. Nothing is. Costs and benefits aren’t evenly distributed in whatever economic tack is taken. The rich do get richer despite the Lenin-style attacks of Bernie and the congresswoman from the Bronx. There’s just a greater likelihood that enough of the blessings spillover to everyone else.
Socialism isn’t a prettier alternative. It lodges benefits in the growing numbers of meddlesome government workers while the costs show up as everybody else descending into a worsening mediocrity.
Take your pick: richer government workers and malaise for the masses, or the filthy rich getting filthier and the masses living marginally better. My money is on the latter.
With socialism, either of the national or international variety, a nation’s vitality is smothered. With globalization, the financial centers of megalopolis USA ride a wave as flyover country sinks into depopulation and a meth epidemic. Bernie bros bewail an inequality of wealth in the vertical dimension. They’re blind to an inequality of the geographical, horizontal dimension. It’s real and troublesome. It’s the only justification for Trump’s trade demagoguery.
This goes to show that cocooned knowledge in real estate doth not translate into hyper-wisdom on everything any more than an inside-the-beltway existence ensures good sense. The crooked timber of humanity is evident everywhere from the administrative state to party hacks to zealots of the left, right, and center.
A classical understanding of economics would help. Is anyone delivering it? Kudos to the few who are trying.
