“Why are the polls tightening up?”

The New Neo Posted on by

…asks Michael Barone. His explanation relies heavily on voter turnout models that might favor Republicans this year because of lack of enthusiasm for Hillary in the Democratic camp, as well as Trump’s recent more presidential presentation of self.

I can offer my own answer, though, and it goes like this:

(1) It was the widening of the polls not too long ago, when Clinton pulled way way ahead of Trump after he hit a rough patch, that was the aberration. In fact, she’s led in the national polls all along and still does, but her lead hasn’t usually been altogether huge except for that recent bump. You might say that this is the correction. She’s still favored to win, but not by odds that are quite as huge (238 now says Trump has a 33% change of winning).

(2) This presidential election has been described as a race to the bottom, and it is. The pattern seems to be that Trump falls more behind by saying or doing something repellent to a host of voters, and then a new and awful revelation comes out about something Hillary did during her tenure as Secretary of State and he comes closer again—close, but so far no cigar. Back and forth, back and forth. Trump, just by reading a speech off a teleprompter and sounding relatively normal as he does it, reassures people that he might not be the raving maniac Hillary’s ads portray him to be. And Hillary, by laying low for a while, tries to give Trump enough rope (and time) to hang himself.

As for me, I sometimes spend my time imagining how I’d feel after a Clinton victory or a Trump one. Unfortunately, both prospects fill me with dread. The dread is different, though, with each one. With Trump, it’s the dread of a loose cannon in the highest office in the land (perhaps the world), a man I have grown to deeply distrust on almost every level. With Clinton, it’s the dread of another leftist presidency, not unlike the one we’ve just experienced since 2008, minus the charm (not that I find Obama all that charming, but he’s charm itself compared to Hillary).

America is doing something similar, with many many voters asking themselves which one it is they dread more. The final outcome will rest on how many say they dread Trump more and how many say they dread Hillary more on the day the election is held.

And there are still two months to go till then. Feels like it could be a long two months. Will the debates happen? Will they matter? I must say I’m looking forward to the debates more than I usually do. I can’t quite imagine how they will go; we’ve never seen Trump in a one-on-one debate situation (he wisely backed out of the GOP debates when it came down to just him and Cruz). One thing I think we can safely predict is that the Trump/Hillary debate will be a contrast of styles and approaches—probably more sharp a contrast than we’ve ever seen before in a presidential debate in this country.

[NOTE: It wasn’t a debate. But if you want to watch yesterday’s Commander in Chief Forum featuring Clinton and Trump fielding questions from Matt Lauer, here’s the video.]

Cloud cuckoo land

The New Neo Posted on by

Recently a commenter used the phrase “cloud cuckoo land” to refer to something outlandish in the political realm.

I’d heard the phrase before, and always had thought it was of relatively recent vintage—sort of like “la-la land” or “tinfoil hats.” But curious, I Googled it, and discovered to my surprise that the phrase is actually ancient. It’s a literary reference to something from the play “The Birds” by Aristophenes, believe it or not:

Aristophanes, a Greek playwright, wrote and directed a drama The Birds, first performed in 414 BC, in which Pisthetaerus, a middle-aged Athenian persuades the world’s birds to create a new city in the sky to be named Nubicuculia or Cloud Cuckoo Land (Νεφελοκοκκυγία, Nephelokokkygia), thereby gaining control over all communications between men and gods.

The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer used the word (German Wolkenkuckucksheim) in his publication On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1813, as well as later in his main work The World as Will and Representation and in other places. Here, he gave it its figurative sense by reproaching other philosophers for only talking about Cloud-cuckoo-land.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche refers to the term in his essay “On Truth and Lying in a Nonmoral Sense.”

Author Edward Crankshaw used the term when discussing the Deak-Andrassy Plan of 1867 in his 1963 book The Fall of the House of Habsburg (Chapter 13, “The Iron Ring of Fate”).

The Wiki article then goes on to tell of many instances of the phrase’s use in politics by people such as Thatcher, Gingrich, Henry Wallace, and Paul Krugman, plus some artistic references to it.

I had no idea.

That’s one of the wonderful things about the internet. It’s one of the things that keeps me up at night, too—following the long and winding road of associations.

No, I don’t believe that Republicans would be willing to impeach/convict Donald Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I often see people claiming that one advantage of Trump is that Congress would have no hesitation to impeach him if he oversteps. (As so often happens, they’re probably using “impeach” to mean “impeach and convict,” but let’s not be too pedantic about it.) But just to be a little pedantic, impeaching without convicting is an exercise in futility, and can have the effect of drawing sympathy for a president rather than decreasing his or her power.

But the claim that Congress would be an effective check on Trump and not Hillary is advanced so often that I though it worthy of a post. It’s certainly true that Hillary would no more be impeached/convicted than Obama has been; with that, I certainly agree. But I think Trump’s chances of impeachment/conviction if he becomes president and oversteps is the same: that is, just about zero. In fact, I don’t see that Republicans or the press would hold Trump’s feet to the fire in any effective manner.

The press will try it to the extent that they do with any and all Republicans, but I don’t see them as being able to do any more than that. Trump is particularly free from the influence of what the press says about him; his support does not depend on it and he has made his way by mocking and reviling the press. Many press members also rather like Trump, because he is good for their business and brings readers. So they tolerate him and in some cases even promote him.

As for Republicans, they have not successfully held Trump’s feet to the fire so far on anything—even in ways they might have, such as uniting to support one main opponent of his, or changing the rules at the convention. And the more power he gains and wields as president, and the more he threatens to damage them if they don’t toe the line, the less likely they are to do that. I’m always surprised at how many people think that the GOP would be willing and able to stand up to a President Trump who has become drunk with his own power and not at all averse to flaunting it and using it to destroy his enemies. In many cases, the same people saying that the GOP would stand up to him are the people who are angry at the GOP because it has been so wimpy and/or so unprincipled in general over the years.

Impeaching Trump would be relatively easy, because it only takes a majority of the House. That could end up happening, I suppose (it could happen even to Hillary, if the GOP retains a House majority). But, as I said earlier, impeachment itself is more or less irrelevant. The only thing that really matters is conviction, as Bill Clinton’s Lewinsky woes demonstrated.

And conviction is very very difficult—made purposely so by the Founders. It requires a two-thirds majority, and that isn’t easy to obtain because it means that only 33 [*see NOTE 2 below] Senate votes can block it. Do you really think a President Trump couldn’t find 33 [*see NOTE 2 below] senators (probably among the Republicans, I would assume) to either intimidate, promise favors to, threaten, or cajole into letting him do whatever he wanted? Have enough of them become such profiles in courage, such principled defenders of liberty, that you trust them to garner at least 67 votes for this?

I certainly don’t.

It also is a sad commentary on the state we’ve reached that, “Vote for Trump, he’s easier to impeach!” has become a rallying cry. And yet that’s where we’re at.

I’ve said many times that I don’t know if I can bring myself to vote for Trump, and I probably won’t know till I’m in that booth in November. But if I do vote for him—and I might—it won’t be with the idea that he could be removed through the impeachment/conviction process if he oversteps. Sorry, I just don’t see it that way. And I suggest if you are voting for Trump—and I assume most of you are—that you do so with eyes open, and not reassure yourself that he could or would be removed by that GOPe you otherwise so deeply distrust.

[NOTE: I’m well aware of the fact that Nixon resigned because enough Republicans turned on him that he realized he probably would be impeached and convicted. The Republican leaders had come to him and told him so. But those days and those types of people are, for the most part, long gone.]

[*NOTE 2: I think of 33 as the threshold. But of course the number is 34, not 33, in order to acquit.]

The “people don’t care” election

The New Neo Posted on by

Donald Trump gave an interview yesterday:

In an exclusive sit down with ABC News’ David Muir, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that people don’t care about whether he should release his taxes, while Gov. Mike Pence argued that the calls to release them are a “distraction” from Hillary Clinton.

“I think people don’t care,” Trump said Monday afternoon in Ohio of his tax returns, which he has not released. “I don’t think anybody cares, except some members of the press.”

Do they care? Is he right or wrong?

Well, on the “yes, they do” side, plenty of people seem to care and are suspicious of Trump’s not releasing the information:

A Monmouth University poll released at the end of August showed that 31 percent of voters think it’s very important that a candidate release his or her taxes, while 36 percent think it’s not important. Fifty-two percent of voters polled said Trump is withholding his tax returns because there’s something he doesn’t want the public to know. Twenty-four percent think Trump is keeping his tax returns private because his taxes under audit.

If Trump doesn’t release his tax returns, he’ll be the first presumptive major party nominee since 1976 not to do so.

But in the end I believe Trump is correct and the answer is “no, they really don’t care, at least not in terms of how people will vote.” So far I haven’t found the detailed stats from that Momnouth poll, but I’d wager that very few people would say they care enough to change their votes. For example, I can’t imagine that there’s a Trump supporter around who will change his/her mind and won’t vote for him on the basis of his failure to release his tax returns. Nor is there a Hillary supporter who will switch to Trump if he does release them.

In an election like this one (although there never has been another election in this country like this one), voters for the most part are choosing candidates based very much on the lesser of two evils principle. That means that the evils of the other candidate are considered so great that there is almost nothing a person’s own candidate can do to sway them. If Hillary Clinton is defined as practically the devil incarnate, how can Trump’s failure to release his tax returns (even if one is suspicious about his motives) matter? And if Donald Trump is defined as practically the devil incarnate, what could Hillary ever do to get her voters to abandon her? I don’t see anything on either side that will change this.

Of course, in this election there are still a lot of people who say they are undecided. I’m not sure whether they really are undecided; my guess is that they are actually leaners. Do they care enough about Trump’s failure to release his tax returns for it to matter, even to them? I doubt it, and that’s because there are so many other, larger issues to think about—including other issues involving corruption and character in both candidates—that something such as the absence of tax returns, which might loom large in another election, starts seeming like relatively small potatoes.

Thoughts on comments; comments on thoughts

The New Neo Posted on by

The comments section here offers food for thought, and lots of it. So here’s a post based on a few comments and my reaction to them.

(1) “The Other Chuck” wrote of all the GOP presidential candidates in 2016: “It’s interesting how Trump makes them ALL seem reasonable in retrospect.”

Well, true. But most of them (maybe all) seemed pretty reasonable at the outset. Some were a lot more reasonable than others, of course. But if any of them—and that includes the ones I disagreed with most—had ended up the nominee, I would not have hesitated to have voted for that person.

(2) “Julie near Chicago” says “One of the things I find interesting is the number of people coming out from behind a bush to say that their first pick was Scott Walker ”” including me.”

I think I said it long before the campaign began. I initially thought Walker would be the one to beat. Courageous, experienced in the executive branch, with conservative bona fides, he had a proven ability to earn votes in blue states. Unfortunately he was too bland for the fired-up and angry electorate of 2016, and his foreign policy inexperience showed. But the latter problem wouldn’t have mattered to voters so much, I think, if it hadn’t been for the former. No, this year, the candidate who stomped his/her feet loudest was the one a plurality of people seemed to want. And because of the size of the pack, a plurality rather than a majority of the voters were able to decide the outcome.

(3) “AesopFan” quotes an article that claims, “a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.”

I am heartily sick of the common but misleading Russian roulette analogy. I wrote an entire post describing its inappropriateness to the situation we face with these two candidates.

(4) “Sergey” asks a very interesting question:

I can’t understand why authoritarian ruler is always considered to be a bad choice. It entirely depends on personal virtues of this ruler. Singapore and Chile are clear examples how authoritarian ruler can save his nation on the verge of catastrophe and do the job which no democracy can ever accomplish due its inherent weakness and impotence.

Certainly some people acknowledge that as a dilemma, because it’s well understand here (at least by those who think about such things) that authoritarian rule can be more efficient. But in this country it has been rejected, at least so far. It has to do with our special heritage about liberty.

We are very touchy about our liberty—at least, we used to be, and many of us continue to be, probably more than any other group of people on earth. Liberty is considered a good thing in and of itself, even a necessary thing. Also an American thing. Of course, our liberty is compromised in certain ways. But there are still many Americans who consider it very important and even vital, the key to American exceptionalism and to American culture itself

Hitler made the trains run on time [*see NOTE below]. We really don’t care. At least, most of us don’t. We’d rather they were a bit late and we kept our liberty. That’s why we don’t sing “God Save the King” any more, although we use the same tune for a different sentiment:

My country ’tis of thee
Sweet land of liberty
Of thee I sing.
Land where my fathers died
Land of the pilgrims’ pride
From ev’ry mountainside
Let freedom ring.

[*NOTE: A reader mentioned to me that it was Mussolini who is said to have made the trains run on time. When I Googled it, I found a few references to Hitler having done it in Germany, but the majority of the references were to Mussolini. So it’s likely to have been him.

The analogous saying about Hitler was that “he built the Autobahn.” Apparently, I got the two types of transportation mixed up in my mind, but the idea being expressed is the same: increased efficiency. Of course, in other ways, dictatorships and authoritarian rulers are not necessarily efficient at all. Five-year plans, anyone? How often does authoritarian rule actually “save” a country on the brink of catastrophe, as Sergey posits occurred in Chile and Singapore, and how often does it lead a country further down the road to ruin? I maintain the latter is far more common than the former.]

Happy Labor Day

The New Neo Posted on by

Labor Day is a three-day-weekend, but today is the actual Labor Day. What are you going to do?

I’ve got a $25 credit at a store that expires after today, and it’s burning a hole in my pocket. So I’m going shopping now.

Then this evening I watch the first of two finales of this season’s TV show “Bachelor in Paradise.” I won’t even try to argue for the show’s redeeming social importance (probably doesn’t have any). But it does have Shakespearean overtones, as I described here.

So, what are you planning? Have a happy one, whatever it is!

Infighting on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, why rehash the bitter disputes that led us to where we are right now in September of 2016? Sometimes I think it’s impossible—or at least highly unlikely—for people to learn from their errors, or even pay attention to them. We don’t even agree on what those errors are.

But this Red State article by Kimberly Ross entitled “Cruz vs. Rubio Hindsight in the Dark Days of Trump” got me to thinking about it.

Red State is very much an anti-Trump site. But it’s got a lot of good writers and it also covers news that has nothing to do with Trump. You don’t have to agree that these are “dark days of Trump” (although I certainly tend to think so) in order to wonder what happened in the Cruz vs. Rubio battle, or how it’s emblematic of what has so very often gone wrong on the right.

Ross writes:

As Trump was continuing to rack up primary victories, there remained a deep division among those who supported Rubio and those who supported Cruz, the only two (apart from Trump) who really had any shot at becoming the nominee. The divide was vicious and filled with attacks, strange accusations, and some legitimate grievances. I guess the mood from both sides was desperate as they saw the disastrous, embarrassing Donald Trump suddenly lead the pack.

Emotions continued to boil over until Rubio dropped out following the Florida primary loss. Suddenly we were left with Cruz and Trump. While plenty of Rubio supporters obligingly backed Cruz, many did not. Their loyalty to Rubio just couldn’t be shaken. Once Cruz was gone, reality began to sink in. This is who we are left with? Donald Trump??

There’s a lot more at the link. I read the whole thing, and although I agree with some of it (and think it does fairly represent a certain mindset at the time), it wasn’t anything like what I was going through back then. For example, I don’t think that what drove the bitter, nitpicky accusations between Cruz and Rubio supporters (or, for that matter, Trump supporters and both) had all that much to do with Donald Trump. The phenomenon of bitter division on the right long predated his rise. Anyone on the right who was dissatisfied with the nomination of alleged RINOs McCain and Romney understands that I’m talking about a split on the right that long preceded 2016 and which has made it difficult for a conservative alternative to be nominated.

Perhaps it is because I came to this crowd as an outsider—and to a certain extent am still an outsider—that I have always observed and been very concerned about the destructive bitterness of the disagreements on the right. Just before the 2012 election I wrote that the right would tear itself apart in the next four years, and though I certainly didn’t foresee all the ins and outs ad backs and forths of those years, the main outlines were clear and have been for a long, long time.

Not just clear to me. Clear, period.

My immersion in politics online coincided with my political conversion and was part of what made it possible. So I don’t recall being part of political discussions online (or even in person very often) back when I was a liberal. But to the best of my recollection, plus a certain amount of reading I’ve done in the last fifteen or so years on liberal and leftist blogs, there is a big difference in the way left and right approach candidates.

Simply put, the left accepts its candidates and unites against the common enemy, the right. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule (remember the pro-Hillary PUMAs in 2008? or some of Bernie Sanders’ die-hards now?). But they just aren’t all that numerous.

On the right, however, the focus is different. The right agrees that the left is an enemy, but somehow the left seems to fade way way into the background for many people, and looming huge and insurmountably in the foreground are the candidates on the right and their imperfections.

Sometimes it’s because the voter is a one-issue voter who uses an absolute litmus test—for example, on abortion. The rage against Rubio on immigration was another. It had nothing to do with the advent of Donald Trump, either. I watched it build for years in the blogosphere, and every now and then (not often) I also tuned in to talk shows and heard the spitting rage there. Against Rubio it focused on the Gang of Eight. Against Cruz (arguably the smartest and most conservative GOP candidate to come down the pike in a long long time) it seemed even odder, based on some form of visceral dislike for his face or his voice or his inability to get enough other senators to agree with him on issues on which they disagreed.

These things always seemed small to me. I am pretty sure that statement will rouse the ire many of my readers, who will ask how I can think that Rubio’s immigration betrayal was small. Well, “small” is a relative term. I’ve never idealized candidates, once I reached adulthood. I’ve always expected some problems with any candidate I basically like, but it’s a question of the overall picture among a very flawed lot. With Rubio, there was only that one thing, and although it was somewhat of a biggee, I carefully read all the explanations and apologia for it, and decided it was a big mistake but that on the whole Rubio was conservative and smart.

About Cruz’s conservatism there was no doubt. So either candidate was fine with me (my favored candidate at the very beginning had been Walker). But you know what? All of the rest of the candidates were okay with me, too, to different degrees, except for one: Donald Trump. He was not okay for reasons I’ve delineated in about 200 posts so far, but I’ll summarize by saying (a) I disagreed with him on many issues, not just one (b) he had changed his mind on so many of them and was sometimes still changing it, so often that I found what he said to be deeply untrustworthy (c) he seemed ignorant of a great many relevant facts (for example, the nuclear triad) and completely uninterested in learning about them (d) he had a liberal recent past and failed to adequately explain why or how he’d changed his mind (e) his character was profoundly narcissistic and vindictive; and (f) he lied not just sometimes, but constantly, and even about minor things.

That’s why, as I wrote in this post on the subject, objections to Trump are different in kind, scope, and number to objections to previous nominees.

But to get back to Rubio and Cruz—the problem was always that they split the un-Trump vote somewhat evenly between them (in addition, of course, to the huge number of other candidates who kept limping along), and that kept them both going way too long, long after one should have dropped out. I almost didn’t care which one it would be, because I thought Cruz was the most ideologically consistent and trustworthy, but Rubio the most likely to win against Hillary. Based on polls, however, both seemed like they could win, and both consistently did better than Trump.

But throughout the entire campaign season one thing that especially puzzled me was that so many pundits thought Trump couldn’t win the nominiation. It was obvious by August of 2015 that he definitely could, and might. As I wrote that August:

From the start of Trump’s rise in the polls I’ve taken him very seriously as a phenomenon. I haven’t understood those who casually asserted “He’s never going to win the nomination.” I’ve long thought he could, because the force of that appeal is obvious, and he’s somehow made himself immune to being criticized for anything he says. His niche is “the more outrageous, the better,” and the more extreme his utterances the more his supporters seem to like him””although not all of what he says is extreme, of course, and some is just common sense.

If I were one of the other Republican candidates I’d be very very scared. And if I were one of the Democratic candidates I’d be scared, too.

So here we are. Why did more people not see where it was heading? A prognosticator didn’t need a crystal ball; it was glaringly obvious. Was this wishful thinking? Denial? Yes, and yes.

But I see the main problem mostly as the propensity of anti-Trump voters on the right to nitpick about their candidates, and their inability or unwillingness to unite behind one. Who would organize that uniting?

Don’t rely on the RNC, that’s for sure; they have their own agenda. I’m not even sure what that RNC agenda was this year. At first it seemed to be Jeb Bush, but his candidacy was such a failure that after that they seemed to throw up their hands in despair. The one thing they did seem united about after Bush was gone was their hatred of Ted Cruz.

But the main problem was something else, and that’s this tendency toward extreme divisiveness on relatively minor disagreements (again, I see Trump’s problems is being of a different number and type compared to all previous GOP candidates, and not the least bit minor). It’s not for nothing that for years the GOP has been called a “circular firing squad.”

Philae: like finding a needle in a haystack

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then I lose something and can’t find it, or it takes me a long time to find it.

My favorite earring fell off in my car, and seemed to completely disappear. Several years later I found it under a mat.

My bluetooth is continually leaping out of my ear and wedging itself in the strangest of hiding places.

Right after my husband and I were married, we were moving cross-country and we stored most of the wedding presents in my parents’ attic. He also lost some eyeglasses, although we never connected those two events. It took about three years for us to get a big enough place to be able to ship our stuff from my parents’ attic to where we were now living. When we opened one of the boxes, there were the glasses, which had apparently fallen out of his shirt pocket while he was packing up our wedding haul.

And on and on and on. Lose it, and no matter how hard you look, sometimes you just can’t find what you lost.

But sometimes you can.

Which brings us to this:

Philae, Europe’s comet space lander that went missing nearly two years ago after its batteries ran down, has finally been found wedged into a dark crack on Comet 67P.

The discovery was made by the European Space Agency’s craft Rosetta, which came within 2.7km of the surface of the comet and used a high-resolution camera to capture the main body of the lander along with two out of three of its legs on Friday.

Philae went missing after completing a soft-landing on icy dirt-ball 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in November 2014.

On landing, the probe’s harpoons did not fire to keep it anchored to the surface and it bounced a number of times, before settling in the shadow of a cliff where its solar panels could not pick up enough energy to keep it going.

…“This remarkable discovery comes at the end of a long, painstaking search,” [Patrick Martin, ESA’s Rosetta mission manager] said. “It is incredible we have captured this at the final hour.”

It seems to be a close relative of my bluetooth:

philae

Happy Labor Day weekend

The New Neo Posted on by

Are you planning to have fun this weekend? I am. Of course, my idea of fun is pretty sedate: going out with friends for a meal, going to a dance performance, going out for a walk and enjoying the fine weather—“fine” till Monday, that is.

Labor Day is a sort of bittersweet holiday. When I was young I dreaded it because it meant back to school, although it was always nice to get those new pencils and pens and erasers and bookbag and clothing. But on the other hand it was the gateway to autumn, one of my favorite seasons then and now.

Georgetown University tries to expiate its guilt over slavery

The New Neo Posted on by

Georgetown is a Jesuit school trying to atone for an episode in its past:

In an effort to acknowledge its ties to slavery, Georgetown University will offer the descendants of nearly 300 slaves preferential treatment in its admissions process.

In 1838, the school sold 272 slaves who were working on plantations in southern Maryland to pay down its debts.

Now, the school said it will give the descendants of those slaves “the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community” when they apply. That means that the applicants will “receive an extra look” and that their relationship to the university will be considered.

Interesting.

It’s not as though these descendants aren’t required to meet certain standards; they are. It’s just that the standards are slightly lower, and equivalent to those required for what used to be called “legacies.”

And Georgetown is free to do whatever it wants concerning admissions. I suppose this would not be considered any more discriminatory than already-existing preferences for “diversity” (racial, geographic, economic, what-have-you) or the already-existing preference for the descendants of those who have attended the school and/or given it money.

However, I have reservations about this one (not that Georgetown cares). The first is that it is a rather arbitrary thing. The slaves themselves were wronged by being sold into conditions that were almost certainly worse than those they were already enduring (they had been in Maryland and ended up in Louisiana). Their immediate descendants of the next couple of generations likewise probably suffered. But, eight generations later (that’s what I calculate an 18-year-old living today would probably be)? Can we really assume that that person today is still feeling some effects of that 1838 sale, and should be given preferential treatment because of it?

Also by my calculations (which are both rough and quick, so I certainly might have made errors), if you imagine two descendants for each of those eight generations, there would now be 139,263 descendants in all. How on earth could those people be found? Apparently, “research conducted by Georgetown and other organizations, including The New York Times, has identified many living descendants of the slaves.” But I bet it’s only a very small fraction of the actual descendants. Another interesting question is whether any of these descendants are white, and what’s to be done about them. Do they get special treatment, too? After all, when people track their DNA, it’s not at all unusual for people who are to all intents and purposes white to find they have some black ancestry, which could be assumed to have occurred for many of them back in the days of slavery. Do those descendants get special treatment, too?

As I said, Georgetown is free to do this. My guess is that it has more to do with the Georgetown administrators’ own feelings of guilt for something that happened about 175 years ago, an act perpetrated by people they have nothing to do with except for ties to the same institution. How far back does one take guilt, I wonder? And does this really change anything, except Georgetown’s PR?

[NOTE: If you want to learn the backstory of the pressure that was brought to bear on Georgetown regarding its slave-selling history, please see this. It’s been going on for a long time. Daniel Berrigan was instrumental in the preface to it many decades ago, as part of his general leftist (and in his case, Catholic and Jesuit) focus on American and Western guilt.]