Trump ramps up his attack on Hillary with a speech

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s not that he’s never criticized her before. But the speech Trump gave today focused on those criticisms. I’ve been expecting that to happen, because realistically speaking it’s his only chance—to ramp up the already-existent dislike and disapproval of Clinton (and the Clintons as a duo), and to make people vote for him as a reaction to her.

If I vote for Trump, that would be the reason.

The speech contained other elements, mainly focusing on his usual populist and nationalist appeals and promises. It was a good speech in the strategic/tactical sense, because that’s Trump’s main attraction for those attracted to him. Did he write it? I don’t know.

Anyone who’s been paying attention for the last year (and I certainly have) knows a great deal about how Trump operates and what sort of character he has. Those who already favor him will favor him even more after this speech. Those who don’t favor him but might reluctantly vote for him will probably find it a smart speech (as I did; but I’ve always said that Trump is a smart or at least a clever man—street-smart and combat-smart). Those who will never vote for him (and they are legion) will find it either more of the same or more fuel for their anger.

This does nothing to change my opinion of his character or his chance of winning—both low. The much more important question is whether, if he keeps pounding on these themes, it will change the opinion of a significant number of other people, enough to help him win. My answer is that I haven’t a clue, although I don’t see why it would for most people, whose opinions are quite solidified. However, there are a significant number of “undecideds” in a lot of polls, and they’re the ones I wonder about.

The odd thing about this election—actually, one of many many odd things about this election—is that the two opponents are people Americans know quite well. We may not know Trump in the context of political office, but we know him as a character and we certainly know Hillary both as officeholder and person. To me, that indicates that opinions about these two are less likely to change than could occur if lesser-known people were running for office. But since Trump has never held office and Hillary has, there’s more wiggle room (perhaps) in people’s opinion of what he would be like in office than there is about the possibilities with her. This could favor him or not favor him, depending on his behavior between now and November.

[NOTE: When I read his speech, one of the first things that occurred to me was: then why did you give her so much money over the years, and praise her so highly?

To me, the most powerful part of the speech—and a theme Trump should hammer home, because this is the sort of thing that could change the minds of people who are not already predisposed to vote for him, women and the LGBT community—was this:

I only want to admit people who share our values and love our people. Hillary Clinton wants to bring in people who believe women should be enslaved and gays put to death.

Note that he has eliminated his usual idea that Muslims would be banned, and focuses here on an ideological test for immigrants, which is something I’ve been advocating (not that he’s listening to me; he’s not).]

[ADDENDUM: I have never bought the “Trump is a stalking horse for Hillary and in cahoots with her” explanation of his candidacy. It seemed a possible but highly unlikely motive for a person like Trump who so very much loves to win. This speech should put that theory to rest, I think—although it’s also a remote possibility that he initially agreed to the set-up and then changed his mind and betrayed her.]

ADDENDUM II: Here’s the video—

A thought from John Keats

The New Neo Posted on by

The British poet (1795-1821) wrote:

Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?

By the way, I highly recommend the film “Bright Star,” about Keats’ romance with Fanny Brawne. It’s a bit of a chick flick, I suppose—but a deeply moving one, with beautiful cinematography and stupendous acting.

Congress and the latest on gun control

The New Neo Posted on by

Four measures—two by Democrats, two by Republicans—went down to defeat:

The measures Monday each went down in succession on largely party line votes. The 60-vote threshold required for passage prevented even Republicans, who control the chamber, from pushing through their favored measures.

The Senate rejected first a Republican proposal to update the background check system for gun purchases, which would have required states to add more information on mental health records to a national database. It also included a provision to alert law enforcement agencies when an individual who was on a government terror watch list in the last five years buys a gun.

See also this and this about some of the skewed coverage.

Is Trump’s campaign imploding?

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though I’ve come to believe that Trump is a terrible candidate for the general election and would like to see him replaced by a viable conservative alternative, I take no comfort whatsoever in how poorly he seems to be doing right now. That’s because the prospect of a Clinton win fills me with deep alarm and even despair.

I have thought for a long time that both candidates would be very bad presidents, but in somewhat different ways. Lately, I have been leaning towards an exceedingly reluctant Trump vote, but I was hoping (not assuming, but hoping) that if he were to be elected—an event I think is extremely unlikely—he would be significantly better at the job than I feared.

So if his campaign is doing poorly, it not only distresses me because the prospect of a Clinton presidency distresses me, but because it indicates that, among other things, I could be correct in my assessment of his organizational skills as poor-to-middling in anything other than the narrow areas of his expertise, which are real estate development and self-promotion. Self-promotion helped him get the nomination; it may or may not get him the presidency (I think “not”). But it can’t make him a competent president, and running a country as its chief executive is not at all the same as running a business such as his.

It would not comfort me to be correct about this if he ends up as president. If he ends up as president I want him to be a much much better chief executive—and man—than I think he is.

Remember one of the main arguments for Trump in the beginning? The one all the Trump-supporters around the blogosphere were touting as his strong suit, that he wouldn’t be beholden to big money donors because he was self-funding? Some of the bad news about Trump concerns the fact that, although he may be self-funding at this point, it seems to be because he can’t get donors to give him money. And “self-funding” is a relative term, because it turns out (as many have long hinted) that he either won’t give his campaign much money, either, or that he can’t give his campaign much money because he’s neither as rich nor as liquid as he’d said he was.

If you want to see some of the myriad articles on this, go here. RedState also has a lot coverage of the funding story: see this, this (an especially interesting one), this, and this.

Trump’s campaign argument during the primaries has rested on four pillars. The first is his anti-immigration rhetoric. The second is his anti-PC-rhetoric. The third is that he’s less corrupt than the others, in part because he’s rich. And the fourth is that he’s a great manager.

His current money problems undermine those last two points. In the event that he somehow does end up winning it all, it will almost certainly be because of a fifth pillar: he’s not Hillary.

I don’t think it will be enough.

I’m going to sit down

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s my new plan, formulated last night: I will try to eat actual meals, and I will sit down to eat them.

Most of you might say: whaaat? Don’t you already do that? Doesn’t everybody?

No, and no. I’ve mentioned in the past that, because of my bad back, I stand to blog and to do work at the computer in general.

What’s more, blogging is an unpredictable thing. But one pattern is that things tend to take longer than I estimate they will. For example, today’s previous post—all 2,000+ words of it, plus the research that went into it—gobbled up a lot more time than I’d originally estimated it would. That’s the way it often goes, which means I’m usually playing catch-up, racing and in a hurry.

Which means that I tend to grab food on the fly and to stand while eating. It doesn’t hurt (or maybe it does) that my computer is not far from the refrigerator.

I don’t think this is a good thing. So today I actually forced myself to sit down to eat breakfast/lunch/brunch, or whatever I want to call my first meal of the day. It was a somewhat novel experience, and I think a good one. I’m not sure I can sustain this program, but I’d like to try. The food tasted better, for one thing. I felt less hungry when I was done, for another. And it got me away from my love/hate affair with the computer.

What did I eat? A half of one of these:

limeyog

And one of these (minus the pears):

engmuf

With a bit of this on it:

butteroliveoil

Who is Paul Ryan and why do all these people hate him?

The New Neo Posted on by

I never intended for this blog to become Paul Ryan headquarters. Nor do I intend that to happen now. In fact, most of what I’ve written about him here has been in the context of his 2012 run as Vice President on the Romney ticket. Back then (at least at the beginning) he was somewhat of a conservative favorite, and supposedly evidence that Romney had veered somewhat to the right with his VP pick.

Those days—ah, those days are gone. Since then (and I’m not sure when it began, but it wasn’t too long after that) Ryan has sunk like a stone with two groups: conservatives, and Trump supporters (not the same thing). The left, of course, can’t stand him; that’s a given. So seeing both right and left against him, I have long tried to ferret out the truth.

Yeah, I know. Good luck with that.

But I continue to attempt it, because I try not to judge people on the spin given them by left or right. Saturday’s post about what Ryan had really said about suing Trump was a good example of my efforts.

Now, this present post isn’t going to be a biography of Ryan. It isn’t even going to be a summary of what he has done or hasn’t done in the seven and a half months since he became Speaker. Those things would take a lot longer than the hour or so I’m going to spend writing this. But I want to discuss a comment that “snopercod” made today, because I think it’s both typical of attitudes towards Ryan and understandable as well, given the sort of coverage Ryan has had:

Neo asks:

“”¦did you ever wonder how much of your Ryan-hate was based on media spin and how much on reality?”

I ask that question to myself all the time. When confronted with an epistemological question, though, I always look at the results to determine who is lying to us. So far, Ryan is found wanting when it comes to results. The federal budget is still going up, Koskinen still hasn’t been impeached, and the U.S. is still spending Billions to build power plants in Africa and wind farms in Vietnam (corporate welfare for GE). I would love to change my assessment of Ryan; All it would take would be ONE small victory for conservatives ”“ just one little thing that I could look to as a sign that Ryan isn’t just another Boehner. Like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, I Am Waiting.

At the outset I will remind everyone that Ryan has been in office for not-quite eight months, and Congress is a notoriously slow engine. In addition, for bills to actually pass and become law, there’s a Senate that must be gotten through, as well as a Democratic president named Barack Obama with a veto pen and a phone—as he seldom tires of reminding us.

But let’s get back to snopercod’s comment. There are several issues here. The first is what snopercod would like to see Ryan have done—that is, snopercod’s agenda. On that, I will take the things he mentioned (which I’m sure are not inclusive) point by point. On the budget, I previously wrote this post—containing links that I’d recommend following or you won’t understand what I’m talking about—about Paul Ryan’s explanation for what happened with the budget and what some of his plans are for the future. I wonder how many people are familiar with what he said then, rather than what the MSM or many blogs on the right wrote about what they think he did or didn’t do and why.

Then there is the agenda for impeaching Koskinen, which is going forward. Probably not at a pace desired by those who would like Congress to be a speedier venue, but it’s going forward nevertheless, at least in the House (where Ryan resides). Instant gratification is not the sort of thing in which Congress specializes, and I repeat that Ryan has only been in office for a little less than eight months.

As for African power plants and Vietnamese wind farms, those are issues about which I know nothing and don’t have time to look into at the moment. But I think we can agree that dealing with whatever problems that might be involved with them has not been a big priority for the right within the last eight months, and Ryan is not a miracle worker who needs to quickly fulfill every single item on a particular voter’s legislative agenda.

Which brings us to the second big issue: what has Ryan actually accomplished? I wrote at length about one accomplishment that most people don’t even know about (or which they have minimized, if they do know about it), the fact that Obamacare was repealed by both House and Senate and then the repeal was vetoed by Obama.

In addition, Ryan’s plan is to vote on an Obamacare replacement. Now, coming up with a replacement plan is not easy, to say the least, and it’s been delayed much longer than I’d like to see. But that’s not surprising, either, considering the complexity of the issue and its contentiousness even among Republicans—and again, remember that Ryan has been in office not quite eight months. At any rate, yesterday this announcement was made:

Ryan and several key House committee chairmen believe they have finally come up with a concept and plan that could be used as the basis for the replacement of Obamacare, provided of course that Donald Trump succeeds President Obama in the White House and the Republicans can retain control of the House and Senate in the November general election.

The new plan set for release this week reportedly will include a refundable tax credit that could be used by low and moderate-income families or others who don’t have the benefit of employer-provided coverage to purchase health care insurance in the private market. One version getting a lot of attention provides a universal tax credit adjusted by age, so that the older you are the bigger the tax credit.

The proposed GOP tax credit would mark a significant departure from the refundable credit currently available under Obamacare, which is based on a sliding income scale and can only be used to subsidize the premiums on health care insurance plans purchased within state and federal Obamacare exchanges.

The proposal would also raise billions of dollars in revenue for the new program by imposing a cap on the federal tax exclusion on employer-based health insurance. Currently, premiums paid for employer-sponsored health insurance are excluded from taxable income. That reduces the amount that workers owe in income and payroll taxes by about $250 billion a year. The House Republican plan would substantially cut into that major tax break.

Read the whole thing if you’re interested. But it’s just a preliminary report, so wait till next week to see the actual proposal as announced (assuming, of course, that is is announced). My point is that this represents a lot of effort and must have been difficult and time-consuming to iron out, but that whether you approve or not it’s something that’s been going on under Ryan’s watch.

If you want to see other bills that have been passed, it’s not easy. There haven’t been many comprehensive articles on that, so you have to go to something like this site and try to separate the wheat from the chaff, knowing that for the most part the vast majority of bills passed by the House are going to be about something minor. But how many people have actually tried to find out—not relying on the MSM or blogs—what has been done under Ryan so far and what hasn’t? Very few, I’d imagine, because it takes way too much time and effort.

Which brings us to a third issue: future plans. How many people have familiarized themselves with Ryan’s detailed and oft-laid-out plans for future legislation? Probably not many, because it’s long and bor-ing to do so. But if you care to see what he’s got in mind—or at least what he says he’s got in mind—go here and start reading.

A lot of people, of course, have already soured on Ryan and don’t want to hear what he has to say. They have already dismissed him because he didn’t do what they wanted, and he didn’t do it fast enough, and what he did (repealing Obamacare, if they even know that happened) didn’t matter because Obama vetoed it. So I’d ask them a question: what should he have done, and not just “what” but “how”? How might he have accomplished it, and please be realistic? If your answer to everything is “shut down the government”—well, I don’t think that would have worked, because I think it would have only resulted in greater Democratic power and popularity and an Obama stonewall. That’s an old question that we can debate ad nauseam (and have already), so I’m just acknowledging it here without getting too deeply into it.

What I see is that people are impatient, annoyed, frustrated, all too ready to lay blame. And I’m not saying there isn’t blame to be laid. I’m frustrated and annoyed, too. My goal here—as I’ve said before—is not to be some Ryan shill. But if I’m going to blame him—and I’m willing to do so because I have no dog in the Ryan race—I want to do so for reasons that are actually based on reality rather than propaganda. I see so much propaganda from left and right, and so much vulnerability to it (yes, the right is just as vulnerable as the left), that I feel compelled to at least raise these questions.

I’ll give the last word to The Atlantic, which published an article somewhat related to this theme. The Atlantic staff is hardly a bunch of Ryan-supporters, of course, but they make a good point here, and not just about Ryan but about a lot of Republicans this election cycle:

Except that, thus far, Ryan’s beloved agenda””the one his wonkish heart has been dreaming of and laboring over and counting on to define his speakership””has been something of a PR bust, yet another sad casualty of this election cycle’s Trumpsanity.

Just look at what happened at the rollout of the agenda’s first plank: Ryan’s pet anti-poverty plan. The speaker and seven colleagues crossed the Anacostia River to commune with the impoverished, overwhelmingly minority residents from the “bad” side of Washington. But after all the speechifying, the only thing reporters wanted to talk about was Donald Trump’s latest outrage, regarding the Mexican heritage of Judge Gonzalo Curiel. And so the big news to come rolling out of the event was Ryan’s “textbook” racism comment.

“The first six questions were about Trump,” AshLee Strong, Ryan’s spokesman recalled to me. The leader’s office has come to expect that sort of thing, she admitted. “Still, it seemed like an odd time to be hammering at Trump.”

For the second rollout (theme: national security), Ryan wasn’t taking any chances. He held the June 9 event at the Council on Foreign Relations, and lawmakers did not take questions from the press, only members of the council. But even then (and despite Ryan’s best efforts), the topic du jour was Trump, and the news stories to emerge focused not on the difference between Republicans’ governing vision and a Democratic one””which is kinda the whole point of the “A Better Way” theme””but on the gulf between Ryan and his own party’s presidential nominee…

There’s more, but you get the idea.

This actually isn’t Trump’s fault, not really. It’s the media, it’s the public, and it’s just the way of the world and in particular of the press. Someone like Trump gets our attention, whereas sober policy does not. Someone like Trump can be easily spun to reflect poorly on Republicans and it’s something people will read, whereas Ryan talking about how he wants to fix things presents more of a challenge. Is there any wonder the Trump news drowns out the Ryan news? Is it any wonder that the Ryan news, when covered at all, is often covered in such a way that it will hurt him with both left and right?

Happy Father’s Day!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This a slightly edited version of a previous post of mine.]

It’s Father’s Day. A sort of poor stepchild to Mother’s Day, although fathers themselves are hardly that. They are central to a family.

Just ask the people who never had one, or who had a difficult relationship with theirs. Or ask the people who were nurtured in the strength of a father’s love and guidance.

Of course, the complex world being what it is, and people and families being what they are, it’s the rare father-child relationship that’s entirely conflict-free. But for the vast majority, love is almost always present, even though at times it can be hard to express or to perceive. It can take a child a very long time to see it or feel it; but that’s part of what growing up is all about. And “growing up” can go on even in adulthood, or old age.

Father’s Day—or Mother’s Day, for that matter—can wash over us in a wave of treacly sentimentality. But the truth of the matter is often stranger, deeper, and more touching. Sometimes the words of love catch in the throat before they’re spoken. But they can still be sensed. Sometimes a loving father is lost through distance or misunderstanding, and then regained.

There’s an extraordinary poem by Robert Hayden that depicts one of these uneasy father-child connections—the shrouded feelings, both paternal and filial, that can come to be seen in the fullness of time as the love that was always, always there. I offer it on this Father’s Day to all of you.

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house.

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Red flags: protection vs. liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

Omar Mateen was adorned with red flags, absolutely festooned with them.

We already know that law enforcement was warned about Mateen, investigated him, and decided there was nothing they could do because he had not acted on his beliefs.

But were you aware of this?:

According to Omar Mateen’s fifth-grade classmates, the 10-year-old future terrorist was once suspended for two weeks after he threatened to bring a gun to school and kill all of his classmates.

Leslie Hall ”” one of Mateen’s classmates at Marisopa Elementary School ”” told TMZ that Mateen was a bully and frequently harassed both students and teachers.

Mateen reportedly told a group of students that he planned on bringing a gun to school to kill everyone there, a threat which “was not received as a joke.” Multiple former classmates confirmed the incident to TMZ.

Or his high school behavior?:

Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s troubled school days included an incident where he was charged with battery and another where a school official said he was suspended for cheering the Sept. 11 attacks two days after they took place.

On Thursday, the Martin County School District released records showing Mateen was suspended 15 times when he attended junior high and high school from 1999 until 2003. At least two of those suspensions were the result of violent incidents.

Mateen’s final suspension was on Sept. 13, 2001, and was issued by a school administrator named Evelyn Stettin. In a conversation with Yahoo News on Thursday, Stettin said Mateen was suspended for celebrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which occurred two days earlier.

He was very pleased to see it happen,” Stettin said of the attacks. “We took him out of class, and we were trying to, you know, talk with him, and we had a school psych present, but basically he didn’t show any remorse. Nothing. I mean he was pretty happy it happened.”

Stettin said school officials discussed Mateen’s reaction to the terrorist attacks with his parents. She suggested Mateen’s parents were unconcerned by the incident.

“We spoke to the parents and they didn’t really do very much about it, let’s put it that way,” Stettin recounted.

And this guy Mateen was later accepted to become a prison guard, and then a security guard:

When he applied for the Department of Corrections job, Mateen had to explain a 2001 criminal charge for battery and disturbing a school function.

In a one-page handwritten letter to prison officials, Mateen said he was charged following a May 2001 fight with another student in his math class at Martin High School. The letter, dated Sept. 26, 2006, says the disruption charge was later dismissed and that he received probation for the battery charge.

Mateen was later let go for other reasons. And I suppose that, in the absence of other evidence, that note of his could have been convincing. It does happen, after all; people do reform, they do see the light. But put it all together—which no one did—especially the 9/11 cheering, and you get a very bad picture of an explosive human ready to go off, and already in sympathy with Islamic terrorists.

And he later fulfilled that early potential through action, with terrible consequences.

The problem is that, even knowing all this, it’s unclear what could have been done to have prevented it. We don’t do preventive detention for thoughtcrime or speech in the absence of criminal acts. Mateen was born here as a citizen and could not be deported. You might say that his parents should not have been let into this country back in the 80s (that’s the ideological test for immigration that I’ve suggested before), but once it had already happened it couldn’t be remedied without violating his rights as a citizen.

Whether it’s a terrorist or a “regular” mass murderer, when you look back there are almost always these sorts of signs, often beginning in childhood. For example, how often do we hear of a mass murderer that he had long been perceived as a dangerous person, and yet until he (it’s most often a “he,” so I’m not being sexist here) acts out some violence there is little to be done that wouldn’t compromise liberty, because any proactive remedy is likely to be overused and/or misused against others.

Remember how the Soviets misused their mental health system to incarcerate dissidents.

How do we separate the truly dangerous from those who are verbally threatening but won’t do much? How can we do it without compromising our basic liberties? We must figure out how to protect ourselves, but protection and liberty are often at odds, and it can be very difficult to know where and how to draw the line when a threat of this magnitude presents itself. But the threat is to liberty itself, in the end.

Quite a conundrum.

What did Paul Ryan really say about suing Trump over his proposed Muslim immigration ban?

The New Neo Posted on by

In the debate about Paul Ryan’s supposed threat to sue Donald Trump if Trump were to issue an executive order banning Muslim immigration, let’s start with what Ryan said—not what we imagine he said based on our pre-existing opinion of Paul Ryan, or what some pro- or anti-Trump blog or media outlet said he said, but what he actually said. Here’s the first exchange, which originally occurred on June 14:

QUESTION: Speaker Ryan, you said that Donald Trump’s call for a ban on Muslims coming into the country was not (inaudible). Chairman McCaul has said that (inaudible) rhetoric (inaudible) helps the recruiting of ISIS. Was Donald Trump wrong to double-down on his Muslim…

Paul D. Ryan: No, I stand by my remarks. I’ll bet you do, too, as well. I do not think a Muslim ban is in our country’s interest. I do not think it is reflective of our principles not just as a party, but as a country. And I think the smarter way to go in all respects is to have a security test and not a religious test.

QUESTION: Constitutionally, do you think Donald Trump, if he were president, could enact a ban on (inaudible)?

Paul D. Ryan:That’s a question — that’s a question about immigration law. And you can go into the 1952 Immigration and Naturalization Act to determine whether or not the president has that kind of discretion of not.

No threat to sue there. The lawsuit remark occurred in a HuffPo interview two days later:

In a sit-down interview in his ceremonial Capitol Hill office on Thursday, Ryan told The Huffington Post that Trump does not have “a blank check” with his endorsement. “I don’t know what that line is,” Ryan said, “but right now, I want to make sure that we win the White House.”

So, what he is saying is that even a Republican president cannot just do whatever he wants; that the imperial presidency needs checking on either side, but that his priority is to get a Republican president in the White House.

He continued:

On the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress, Ryan noted that Republicans were releasing part of their agenda on executive overreach that very day, and, in news that’s sure to please Trump, Ryan suggested that he and the House of Representatives were prepared to sue a Republican president if need be.

“I would sue any president that exceeds his or her powers,” Ryan said.

It’s unclear, however, if Ryan thinks Trump enacting a ban on Muslims entering the country would actually exceed presidential powers. “That’s a legal question that there’s a good debate about,” Ryan said, pointing to the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act.

So as far as I can see, it’s later writers who have been suggesting that Ryan said he’d sue Trump over Muslim immigration and then claimed to not be sure if a Muslim ban violates the law. But Ryan does not appear to have said that at all, at least not so far as I can tell from rather lengthy research trying to get a copy of the actual interview text (if you can find one, please let me know). What I see here is probably a clever piece of suggestive writing by the HuffPo author, suggesting that Ryan said what he said about executive overreach in a discussion “on the topic of Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his statements that he could enact such a policy without Congress.” What appears to have happened, as best I can reconstruct amidst the twists and spin, is that it was the interviewer who was discussing Trump’s Muslim ban, and Ryan countered by saying he reserved the right to sue any president for executive overreach, and that Congress agrees, and that it is not at all clear that Trump’s Muslim ban would be a case of executive overreach. But it seems that some conservatives fell into the “Ryan is an anti-Trump POS” trap.

What does Ryan appear to have actually said? I would love to get my hands on a transcript to determine that, but from what I’ve read it appears that he said what I’ve just summarized him as having stated. I would think most conservatives would agree with his general statement on restricting executive overreach when it occurs—unless they want a dictator who is our dictator, but then I wouldn’t think the word “conservative” should apply. As far as a ban on Muslim immigration goes, Ryan has expressed disagreement with it and prefers an ideologically-based ban (I am in agreement with that idea of a ban based on ideology, and have been for quite some time; see this post from last December).

This incident has been reported, however—and later spread around the blogosphere—as though Ryan had said something like “I disagree with Trump’s ban on Muslims and if he does anything of the sort I’ll sue him—and by the way I have no idea whether what he is proposing is legal or not.” What he apparently did say is more like this, “I disagree with Trump’s Muslim ban and I’d prefer a ban on certain ideologies,” and on a separate occasion: “I want a GOP president, but I’m prepared to sue one if he oversteps, as I would sue a Democrat who oversteps. But on the Muslim ban question, that needs researching because it may or may not be overstepping.”

Talking Points Memo, a blog on the left, titled its article about this, “Paul Ryan On Stopping A President Trump’s Muslim Ban: We’ll Sue Him!” That’s what they want you to think Ryan said. TPM almost certainly knows that pro-Trump and anti-Ryan blogs and pundits will pick up on it and spread the word around as though that’s what Ryan said, and that it will become accepted as truth. I’ve seen the right fall for this type of ploy many many many times: picking up on the spin of the left about someone on the right, and reacting in rage.

Look, you can hate Paul Ryan all you want, but hate him for something he actually did or said, not what the left says he said. And if you can find something from his own mouth that contradicts my reconstruction here of what actually happened, please present it. My goal is finding the truth rather than repeating the spin of others, or protecting or attacking Paul Ryan. I would hope that’s your goal, too.

[NOTE: One other related issue was discussed in the comments section recently. There were quite a few comments on the general subject, but I’ll stick to an exchange I had with commenter “Frog,” who brought up the Paul Ryan lawsuit question here by writing:

Paul (the goat from Janesville) Ryan says “We” will sue Trump as POTUS if he exceeds what the goat believes allowable about Muslims and Mexico. He sure hasn’t sued Hussein yet.

My answer can be found here. At the time I wrote my reply to Frog, I had not yet found the original articles about Ryan and the lawsuit and what he said, and did not yet realize that Ryan had not actually threatened to sue Trump because of the Muslim ban. In my reply to Frog, I pointed out that Ryan was indicating a disagreement with any process that meant a president would be exceeding his powers. And then I took up the question of whether Ryan, as Frog wrote, “sure hasn’t sued Hussein [Obama] yet,” and the history of that:

Paul Ryan has been Speaker only since Oct. 29, 2015, which is about seven and a half months. But his predecessor—a man you probably detested as well, John Boehner—has sued Obama. The topic had to do with the same issue, executive action that was inappropriate and a violation of the separation of powers.

The history of the first Boehner lawsuit is here (it had to do with Obamacare). Then in 2015 Boehner said he planned to sue Obama again, this time for executive overreach on immigration. But (at least as far as I can determine) before it got to the Senate, the lawsuits by Texas and 25 other states against Obama got an injunction (in Feb. of 2015), and so Congress’ lawsuit was put on hold.

In addition, in late February 2016, Paul Ryan threatened to sue Obama if he closes Gitmo:

“We are making legal preparations if the president tries to break the law,” Ryan said on Wednesday.

The Wisconsin Republican said what “boggles” his mind is that Obama would be directing the military to knowingly break the law by transferring prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to U.S. prisons in an effort to close the detention center.

“Our law is really clear,” Ryan said, adding that it was Democrats who first wrote the language barring detainees from coming to American soil.

So, Boehner sued Obama over questions of presidential power re Obamacare, and came close to suing over the same issue with immigration but appears to have stopped because other lawsuits resulted in an injunction. Since Ryan has become Speaker, which was fairly recently late last October, he has threatened to sue Obama over the same issue of limiting presidential power, this time regarding closing Gitmo. This was a direct and specific threat to Obama by Ryan over that issue, unlike his very general recent statement reserving the right to sue a Republican president who overstepped, as well, the one that was spun by the liberal media into a specific threat to sue Trump over a specific issue.

By the way, Ryan’s threat to sue Obama over any executive order to close Gitmo may have worked, because (if you can believe Obama, which is always iffy) the White House indicated four days ago that Obama will not issue such an executive order.]

Criticizing Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been surprised at the number of people in the comments section who suggest it’s wrong at this point to criticize Trump, because all it does is help Hillary.

Note that they’re not usually suggesting that the content of the specific criticism is incorrect or in error, just that it’s strategically (or is it tactically?) counterproductive if the goal is to stop Hillary.

Well, that’s one of the goals. But I continue to think that truth is another goal, too, as well as airing opinions and ideas in the back-and-forth of discussion. Isn’t this what blogs are for? If I had wanted to become a mouthpiece for a certain candidate or a certain party, I would have done so long ago, but that’s never been my aim. No, my criticism of Trump comes from the idea that struggling towards the truth—weighing the pros and cons in the light of evidence—will ultimately lead us to the correct decisions, both for ourselves and for the country.

It’s not as though I influence tons of people, either. This is a great blog, and I do have a group of wonderful readers, but it’s only a few thousand, and most of you have pretty independent minds.

Another goal is yes, to stop Hillary. But we disagree on how best to do that. Most people here who don’t like Trump would vote for a Trump alternative. Trump supporters (enthusiastic or reluctant) who say a Trump alternative cannot win are saying something that might be right or wrong, but there is plenty of evidence (see this, for example) that this year really is different, and that there is enough bipartisan support for a potential alternative to both candidates that either a third-party candidate or a non-Trump GOP replacement has a fighting chance and would not be acting merely as a spoiler.

As commenter “Big Maq” writes:

…some keep arguing that Trump is somehow “acceptable” (despite his acknowledged flaws and the risk that comes with them) as a realistic alternative to Clinton.

It is an argument resting on an assumption that is soon to become self-fulfilling ”“ that the choice is a binary one.

Want to stop Clinton and avoid the problems with Trump ”“ we have two choices:

1) Support a GOP convention reversal (within the rules).
2) Support a third party.

That’s the reasoning. You may not agree, but those who criticize Trump feel that there is still time to avoid a certain disaster with him, whether he wins or loses—and they think it virtually certain that he will lose.