Campaign funding hypocrisy: Obama and Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I clearly remember when I first became truly alarmed during Obama’s 2008 campaign. Originally I didn’t know much about Obama, and slowly but surely began to notice warning signs that he might be worse than the garden-variety liberal Democratic candidate he was trying to present himself as being. But the real red flag occurred in June of 2008 when he abruptly changed his mind about public campaign financing.

Now, that incident probably doesn’t stick in the minds of many people now. Nor did it then. But I wrote at the time:

Yesterday Obama channeled Emily Litella and said “never mind,” taking back his earlier promise to accept public financing for his campaign if his opponent would as well…

Well, so what? Promises, shmomises…

…as soon as Obama saw that the money flowing his way was far beyond what he could get if he adhered to his agreement, he reneged.

It’s not just that he reneged, either”“it’s how he reneged. Who’s to blame, according to Obama? Why, John McCain and the nasty Republicans, that’s who. James Joyner writes that this charge of Obama’s does take “a bit of gall.” I’d say it takes substantially more than a bit, as well as a heavy dose of the whining, blaming, audacity in which the holier-than-thou Obama tends to specialize…

The most important thing about it, though, was that his supporters made excuses for what he did, or praised it. I noticed that they did not seem the least bit perturbed:

…once again, he’s relying on the American people not to know or care””and, if the comments by his supporters are any indication, he could be right…

In early July of 2009, after just a few months of President Obama, I revisited this turning point and added the following:

[Right after Obama’s switch on campaign financing]…something even more perturbing to me than what Obama was doing or even how he was doing it…was the reaction to him. The mainstream press (with only a few exceptions) seemed to take it in stride, mentioning it but not making a fuss about it, seeing it as a pragmatic decision. But what of Obama’s supporters? Would they not feel betrayed by his hypocrisy on campaign financing? After all, wasn’t his perceived trustworthiness, his business-as-unusual persona, a great part of what attracted them to him in the first place? Would this lack of integrity not make the scales fall from their eyes?

Once again, with just a few exceptions, the answer was a resounding “no.” It was merely seen as a clever move, a sign that Obama was a winner rather than a loser.

Yet another thought then came to me””the idea that this action of Obama’s had been a sort of test””not of him, but of us. In weighing whether to go ahead and refuse public financing, he had probably calculated that the extra money he’d have access to if he broke his pledge might be the key to his winning. So, although it would give his opponents further ammunition with which to criticize him, and might offend his base by showing that he was just a pol like any other after all, he felt it was probably worth the gamble. But his public’s reaction told him that there had been virtually no risk at all, and gave him a green light for future reversals and other cynical moves.

From this experience, Obama learned to his pleasure (I don’t know whether it was to his surprise) that the press was so thoroughly behind him, and his many supporters so hypnotized by his spellbinding charisma, that he no longer had to be quite as careful as before. Audacity was going to pay off, big time.

So, why am I going on and on about something that happened all those years ago? As you might imagine, something Donald Trump did recently made me think of it:

Now that Donald Trump is the presumptive nominee, it’s almost shocking how quickly his tune has changed on the corrupting influence of big money donors. SURPRISINGLY (to Trump voters), it turns out that he doesn’t mind them at all and places no value on being independent from them. After all the railing he did about how the other candidates were “owned” by their financiers and special interests, he finds zero problem with the whole system now.

That’s from Leon H. Wolf at RedState. And in the comments section there we have this:

This amounts to a sociological experiment where the question posed is, “What if I abandoned any pretense of Honor or Shame, and behaved in an entirely pragmatic manner, saying whatever will move me forward in any given moment without regard for past statements, actions or any hypocrisy to be proved thereby?”

If Trump has a business plan for this election, this would be part of it. He has clearly decided not to care about anything a decent human being would value. He is taking a completely amoral approach, and believes the Media will continue to allow it because he brings them ratings.

I assume I don’t have to point out the parallels to Obama. I would only add to that comment the fact that Trump believes (correctly, it seems) that his supporters will continue to allow it—and even praise it—because they see him as the only alternative to the even-more-hated Hillary, or because they actually applaud the approach itself.

In other words, it’s okay because he’s our audaciously lying hypocrite with a sycophantic following. And in this act of Trump’s he’s a hypocrite and/or liar in more ways than Obama was when he broke his finance pledge, such as:

(1) Trump’s acceptance of Adelson’s enormous sum of money is an indication (and not the first one) that Trump may also have been lying about the extent of his own financial assets

(2) Trump’s trashing of other candidates for accepting donations and therefore being the puppets of their donors was apparently just so much empty propagandist blather on his part (and as one of the major talking points used early on by his most activist supporters, their apparent silence on this matter now speaks volumes about their own hypocrisy, too)

Obama paved the way for a man like Trump to get as far as he has. People sometimes say that, and they often mean a number of things—including the idea that Trump is needed now as a corrective to Obama. But I think that Obama demonstrated something to any candidate who will follow, which is that the American people will now accept things they wouldn’t accept in a candidate just a short while ago.

Some of these changes have been apparent for a while. For example, I can remember (and it wasn’t all that many years ago) when a divorced candidate was impossible or highly unlikely (Reagan broke that mold, and he’s the only one till now). I can also remember when a candidate who admitted to taking illegal drugs was going nowhere (Bill Clinton tiptoed up to that line but didn’t cross it; Obama crossed it). The first is relevant to Trump; the second is not (he has never used drugs or alcohol). And I can remember when, although candidates certainly lied and/or made promises they couldn’t or wouldn’t keep, they were wary of breaking those promises so unapologetically and so obviously during the campaign itself, because they thought the American people wanted a president with more integrity than that—or at the very least, one who appeared to have more integrity than that.

In 2008 Obama demonstrated that with enough chutzpah a candidate could say up is down and 2+2 is 5, do it during the campaign itself, could go back and forth and reverse what he’d said previously, and it didn’t necessarily matter. The American people had become cynical enough, hardened enough, uninformed enough, amoral/immoral enough (some or all of the above), that it would praised as a clever move.

We have reaped what was sowed.

And even Obama did not create this situation in the electorate. He merely exposed it, and showed those who would come after him how to exploit it.

EgyptAir flight disappears over Mediterranean; probable crash [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

Very disturbing news:

A search is under way for an EgyptAir flight from Paris to Cairo which has disappeared with 56 passengers and 10 crew on board – including one British national.

The fate of the plane is not yet known and officials have said it is too early to rule out any possibility, including terrorism, but all those on board are now feared to have died.

French President Francois Hollande said “unfortunately the information we have … confirms to us the plane came down and is lost”, suggesting it crashed near the southern Greek island of Karpathos where the search is focused.

Air control lost contact with the plane just as it was entering Egyptian air space. The pilots sent no distress signal, and Greek defense minister Panos Kammenos said the plane “swerved ’90 degrees left and then 360 degrees to the right’ before vanishing.”

Ominous. In addition to the terrible and tragic loss of life, this seems to have been a sudden and catastrophic event. Unlike the Malaysian airplane that went missing two years ago and has never been found or its crash explained, this one went down in an area that is far easier to search, and at a known time. Already the plane’s emergency beacon has been sending a signal. My guess is that authorities will find the black boxes and get a lot more information.

Will the mystery then be solved? And will it end up being terrorism, or highly suspected terrorism, including the possibility of terrorism on the part of the crew, as already may have occurred in the case of EgyptAir Flight 990 in 1999?

UPDATE 4:30 PM

Some wreckage from the plane has been found. The leading theory right now is terrorism—specifically, a bomb—although that is very speculative and could end up being incorrect.

Degas and the dancers

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Open Blogger at Ace’s.]

When I was a child I used to greatly admire Degas’ dancer paintings. My family had a reproduction of one of them, and I used to study it and marvel at how well it expressed how ballet dancers stand, pose, and move.

Most artists cannot draw ballet dancers. To the unschooled observer their attempts might look just fine, but a trained dancer (that’s me, for example) knows what’s off, and there’s almost always something that’s not right.

Degas gets it right. Of course, ballet has changed since the time he painted, but not that much, and if you look at old photos or very old movies you will see how well he managed to match what he was seeing. His dancers in repose have the weariness of the physically spent, and yet even then they retain the exaggerated turnout of their ballet training. In movement, there’s the grace and the strain. You can see their unnatural postures and the slight but somehow beautiful deformation of the leg and feet, the hyper-extended knees (I’ve got ’em) and the rolling in of the arches that sometimes happens in spite of dancers’ best efforts not to give in to it.

Degas was probably the most intensely accurate observer of movement who ever painted. He isn’t looking for the light and decorative, as most painters of ballet dancers are. His dancers have weight and awkwardness and stress, and they go beyond the pretty into the true. I have yet to see a Degas ballet painting—and there are many, many—that isn’t superior to every other painting of dancers I’ve ever seen.

Some of my Degas favorites are charcoal sketches, some are full-fledged paintings. I especially like his renditions of dancers fussing with their shoes or their garments, something dancers are constantly doing in real life:

adjustslipper

twoballetdancers

There are so very many it’s hard to choose, but I’m very fond of this one adjusting her shoulder strap:

shoulderstrap

This next drawing in particular demonstrates Degas’ exceptionally keen eye for movement. It’s not really pretty; can you see the slight strain in the shoulders and necks of the dancers, trying their best for height of the raised leg and extreme turnout of both that one and the supporting leg and foot? It’s very very common for dancers to take the strain into the upper body like that, and yet it’s subtle. Degas fully captures it:

alaseconde

You may be very familiar with Degas’ statue of a young dancer, with her fabric dress and the ribbon in her hair. Although the sculpture is very popular now, it was controversial in Degas’ time; the story can be found here. I imagine that she’s resting a bit as she watches the teacher set the next combination:

Little_dancer

Reflections on the primaries and the 2016 election

The New Neo Posted on by

Hey—haven’t I reflected on the primaries enough?

Perhaps.

But I’m going to reflect a bit more. After all, since Indiana, I’ve barely talked about them at all, and they’re still going on.

In Oregon yesterday, the only man left standing in the GOP race won about 67% of the vote (as of this writing), but the size of the vote for two candidates who have already suspended their campaigns—Cruz at 16.7 and Kasich at 16.4, representing the conservative and moderate wings of the party—shows the lack of acceptance of Trump among many voters, despite the GOP regulars slowly coalescing around him as nominee.

One thing I’m very grateful for at this point is that I don’t have to suffer through any more of those suspenseful primaries, where I fear a Trump victory and hope for one of his rivals (a whole succession of them over time) to win, only to see those hopes dashed. Quite early in the primary season, and certainly by Super Tuesday, I was pessimistic after seeing the continuing phenomenon of Trump victories (mostly with about a third of the vote), particularly when the field was way too big and I suspected if it narrowed down soon enough there would be someone to stop him. My frustration built and built until I wanted to shriek to most of them to DROP OUT and stop playing this game of Chicken.

But Chicken it was, for way too long. And we’ll never know what, if anything, might have been different if a great many had dropped out a long time ago. Now we have the surreal experience of seeing Donald Trump edging very close to the magic number of 1273 which he will almost certainly attain, and then he will indeed be the 2016 presidential nominee of the Republican Party. This has certainly been the most “interesting” primary season of my entire life, and I’ve seen quite a few.

Its “interesting” quality is not limited, however, to the GOP side, although that’s the one I’ve been covering most diligently. I’ve assumed for a long long time that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee, because that party’s system is very different from the way the Republicans go about these things. For the most part, proportional primaries rather than winner-take-all, plus those super-delegates, put the party much more firmly in control than the shell-shocked and clueless GOP has been this year.

But despite all that, the Democratic Party’s firm hold on things looks almost as wobbly as the Republicans’. This speaks of a phenomenon that transcends parties and is a sign of the times and the voters. Call it the Howard Beale electorate, very very angry and fed up with everything. We know what that has meant for the Republicans. For the Democrats, it means the surprising strength of socialist Bernie Sanders, who last night won Oregon and forced a photo finish in Kentucky.

It may not end up mattering; it’s almost certain Clinton will be the nominee. But it indicates the depth of the trouble in the Democratic Party, as well. Have you noticed, too, how every single candidate—probable nominees Trump and Clinton, and Democratic challengers Sanders and even Biden—are rather long in the tooth for presidential contenders? To me, that signifies an exhaustion in each party. The GOP had plenty of younguns, and many of us thought one of these fresh young faces would get the nod, but they didn’t. And there’s nary a fresh young face in sight for the Democrats, at least not at the moment.

Despite the pending coronation of Hillary, the discord among the Democrats is very very real:

Sanders showed no intention of dialing back his fight against Clinton or urging his supporters to fall in line. His spokesman said Sanders is considering seeking a recount in Kentucky, where Clinton was clinging to a lead of a half percentage point.

“We are in until the last ballot is cast,” Sanders told supporters at a rally in Carson, California, saying he believes he can win the June 7 primary in the nation’s most populous state. “We have the possibility — it will be a steep climb, I recognize that — but we have the possibility of going to Philadelphia with the majority of the pledged delegates,” Sanders said of the July nominating convention. He said in early general election poll match-ups he does “much better against Trump” than Clinton…

…Some Sanders backers threw chairs and shouted down speakers during the [Nevada] convention, at which Clinton was awarded a majority of delegates, in a dispute over rules. The chairwoman of the Nevada Democratic Party was subjected to threatening messages on her voicemail…

Sanders responded with a statement saying that Democratic leaders must “understand that the political world is changing and that millions of Americans are outraged” at the political and economic establishment…

Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz told CNN on Tuesday night that Sanders’ response “added more fuel to the fire.”

The Nevada state Democratic Party said in a statement that the Sanders campaign was being “dishonest about what happened Saturday and is failing to adequately denounce the threats of violence of his supporters.”

“We believe, unfortunately, that the tactics and behavior on display here in Nevada are harbingers of things to come as Democrats gather in Philadelphia in July for our National Convention,” the state party’s lawyer wrote in a formal complaint to the Democratic National Committee.

What do they expect from socialists? Just as the alt-right wants to take over the GOP, the ultra-left sees its opportunity in the Democratic Party. They are like parasites seeing their chance to take over a weakened host, and both activist groups aren’t going to play by the usual rules.

It is indeed ironic that, just as Sanders suggests, he does better than Clinton in polls that match each one against Trump. And yet Sanders will almost certainly not be the Democratic nominee. Likewise, way back when, Rubio and several other GOP candidates did consistently better against Clinton than Trump did in polls taken before Trump had clinched the deal. This is another irony of this season—the eventual nominees that will be pitted against each other, Trump vs. Clinton, have consistently polled weaker against each other then many of the other contenders in their parties.

It’s only May and there are six more months to go before the election. Can you believe it? It seems to have been going on for so very long already. A lot—a lot—can change in those six months. The more Clinton weakens, the more Trump will rise.

For me, the election is likely to be somewhat anti-climatic, because I cannot rejoice at the victory of either candidate, and one of them will win. I keep trying to imagine how I’d feel at a Clinton victory (dreadful) and how I’d feel at a Trump victory (dreadful, but perhaps a mite less dreadful?). It’s that “mite less” that could get me to actually vote for him, although I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to make a decision until I’m standing in that voting booth holding my barf bag in my hand.

Is Trump expanding the GOP?

The New Neo Posted on by

The answer, according to this piece at Politico, is only a little bit, and nowhere near the amount Trump brags about or the numbers that would matter.

I’ve been pointing out something similar for months. However, much as I find Donald Trump deplorable, I am not going to say he can’t at some point draw more voters to his side, including voters who might ordinarily vote Democratic. The fact that we haven’t really seen that happen yet doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen, and the more Trump tacks to the left the more of them he may draw.

Which is in some ways a Pyrrhic victory for the right, isn’t it? If Trump wins Democratic votes by out-RINOing any RINO we’ve ever known, what does that make him? Doesn’t it make him—a Republican-in-name-only liberal Democrat with some odd populist/nationalist quirks?

I also don’t see Trump-crossover formerly Democratic voters as voters who will “expand the GOP,” anyway. To the extent that they do exist or could exist or will exist, they would be Trump voters through and through, attracted by his very unique persona. They would be drawn to either his brashness or his insults or his immigration policy or the blows he’s dealt to the GOP, rather than being drawn to the GOP itself—unless the GOP is going to be made over in his image.

That latter, of course, is what the alt-right would like to happen—or rather, they’d like the GOP to be made over in their image, with Trump as mere temporary figurehead.

Thomas Sowell on the grim prospects that face us

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Alan F.”]

Thomas Sowell is probably the conservative writer I respect the most. I discovered him during my political change process, and his clarity of thought and economy of expression helped to give me a philosophical framework for the political point of view that was coming to seem more simpatico to me than the one I’d previously held. Throughout the years I can’t think of a topic on which I’ve disagreed with him.

Sowell is a changer. In his youth he was trained as an economist and was a man of the extreme left, but he abandoned the leftist point of view when facts seemed to contradict his belief system. He is black, was raised poor and academically brilliant, and I highly recommend his autobiography A Personal Odyssey (and just about any book he’s ever written). At 85 he hasn’t given up thinking, writing, and caring about the future of the country and the world.

And so he’s written another column that elegantly and simply—and sorrowfully—expresses what I feel now, facing the choice of Hillary Clinton vs. Donald Trump. Please read the whole thing—it’s not long. Read it, and weep.

I might quibble—just a little bit, anyway—with one thing Sowell says, though. When I read “This year’s general election will offer a choice between a thoroughly corrupt liar and an utterly irresponsible egomaniac” my first thought was “Okay, which is which?” Yes, I know the answer, but I could make an argument that that sentence should be amended to “This year’s general election will offer a choice between a thoroughly corrupt liar and utterly irresponsible egomaniac, and a thoroughly corrupt liar and utterly irresponsible egomaniac.”

UPDATE: David Horowitz says he wrote that “renegade” headline

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is an update to this previous post of mine.

I didn’t intend to spend my blogging hours today writing about David Horowitz vs. Bill Kristol—and so, apologies for this narrow focus. I actually had other things in mind, and I expect to get around to them tomorrow. But this particular brouhaha got my goat, because it’s an example of the sort of rhetoric I see so often, deplore, and basically can do very little about.

Sigh.]

David Horowitz has now made it crystal (pun intended) clear that he is responsible for the word “renegade” in the title of his piece critical of Bill Kristol. And Horowitz is not the least bit apologetic about it:

To answer one oft-repeated question, I did write the headline with the “Renegade Jew” phrase and Breitbart chose to run it as-is. Some illiterate anti-Semites have picked up on the phrase without understanding it. Some neo-conservatives have called me names as well, displaying their own brand of inarticulate hate without bothering to respond to the actual argument of my piece.

So to clarify: I understand that a lot of conservatives are still skeptical about Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. I respect their skepticism when it is attached to reasonable arguments, since no candidate is perfect and no one can know the future…

But the primaries are over and Donald Trump is now the nominee. That means he is the only obstacle to the party of Obama and Hillary and Huma Abedin, of the Iran deal and the appeasement of Islamic Jew-hatred beginning with the Hamas terrorists of Gaza and the Fatah terrorists of the West Bank…

Splitting the Republican vote and electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews in an hour in which their backs are to the wall. Hence the designation renegade for those who are planning a third-party run, and for which I make no apologies.

Where to begin?

First of all—although I’m pretty certain David Horowitz does not read my blog and is not referring to me—quite a bit of the criticism of Horowitz’s article was not inarticulate and did not involve name-calling. Nor were those anti-Kristol readers who reacted to the article with anti-Semitism “illiterate,” for the most part. Horowitz seems to be failing to understand (or at least to acknowledge) the very real objections a person might have to his article, as well as the effect a headline like that would inevitably have on the significant segment of Trump supporters and Breitbart readers who are only too happy to post anti-Semitic comments, and that his headline would inevitably act as a releaser for the latter.

What’s more (as I pointed out in my first post on the subject), one of the problems with Horowitz’s critique of Kristol is that Kristol is trying to find a candidate that will act not as a mere spoiler, but who might actually have a chance of a win. Kristol has said as much:

We could get on almost every ballot, Texas passed yesterday, North Carolina is this month, almost every other state is June 27… You could get on the ballot with the right money and organization. Anderson got on all the ballots in 1980, Perot in 1992. Could you win? If you could have an attractive candidate who could get on the debate stage in October — which would mean you’d have to be at 10-15% at that time. And then you get on the debate; Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, and let’s say Ben Sasse… Attractive 44 year-old senator from Nebraska… Could a lot of Americans say, whoa, we can do a lot better than Clinton or Trump, I think it is possible…

Obviously if it were easy independents would be running every four years, I think it is possible.

This year, with two remarkably disliked candidates from both major parties, it is particularly possible.

But the Horowitz article treats it as impossible. However, I can easily imagine that a lot of votes that would otherwise go to Hillary might go to this third-party candidate, a possibility Horowitz does not acknowledge. Dissatisfaction with Clinton is nearly as high as dissatisfaction with Trump, and I personally know a lot of people on right AND left who would dearly love to have a viable alternative to both.

What’s more, if we’re going to evaluate the two candidates on their Israeli stances only (one focus of Horowitz’s argument), it’s not really clear who is more pro-Israel. Take a look at articles on the subject; there’s a lot of disagreement there. And of course, both candidates are not known for keeping their word, so there’s that consideration as well. If you want to read some articles that allege Trump would not be good for Israel, there’s this from an Israeli paper that leans left, and this from Commentary (on the right). That last article cites two statements Trump made on the campaign trail that cast doubt on what his attitude towards Israel really is or will be:

Though Trump’s foreign policy statements are generally all over the map as he improvises positions that are, at one and the same time, extremely aggressive (his threats to kick ISIS’s ass) and neo-isolationist (pull back from war on Islamist terror while conducting trade wars), he has been consistent about his stance on the peace process. There he has repeatedly vowed that he would be “neutral” with regards to Israel and the Palestinians. He also expressed doubts about whether Israel was ready to take risks for peace.

Such a position makes Trump an outlier among Republicans. Virtually every other GOP presidential candidate and the overwhelming majority of Republicans in the House and the Senate have affirmed their support for Israel in a way that makes clear that they believe the U.S. strongly backs Israel against the repeated Palestinian refusal to make peace. If anything, Trump’s stance strongly resembles the policy position taken by the Obama administration over the last 7+years.

I’m not writing this post to solve the question of who would be better for Israel, Clinton or Trump. My point here is that it is disingenuous of Horowitz to claim that it is a settled question and that the answer is indisputably that Trump would be good and Hillary bad for Israel, and that any Jew who would support a third-party candidate instead of Trump is a “renegade” betrayer of Israel.

Note also that the headline of Horowitz’s piece doesn’t call Kristol a “renegade” Republican, its says “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” and so let’s look at that last sentence of Horowitz’s follow-up piece (not the original) in light of that:

Splitting the Republican vote and electing Hillary is a betrayal of the Jews in an hour in which their backs are to the wall. Hence the designation renegade for those who are planning a third-party run, and for which I make no apologies.

As I’ve said above, Kristol thinks it very possible that a third-party candidate could win, so he does not see himself as on a path to “electing Hillary.” I’ve also just pointed out that it’s not a foregone conclusion that Trump’s election would be better for Israel anyway. But in addition, if you focus on the title of Horowitz’s original piece plus those two sentences from his follow-up piece that I just quoted, there’s a further problem. Horowitz is not merely attacking “those who are planning a third-party run” as betrayers of the Republican Party and of Israel—he is attacking Kristol specifically as a Jewish betrayer. What’s more, in the article’s title it is unclear whether the Jew Kristol has betrayed Israel or the Republican Party. In fact, since the words “Renegade Jew” are preceded by the words “Republican Spoiler,” a reader might easily and rationally conclude from the headline that what Horowitz means to say is that Kristol is a Jew who has betrayed Republicans and their nominee Trump, not a Jew who has betrayed Israel. That certainly seems to be the way a lot of the anti-Semitic readers at Breitbart took it, and there’s nothing “illiterate” about their doing so.

One more thing before I get off this particular horse. In Horowitz’s original article, he gives the following example of what he considers to be a poor reason Kristol has given for not supporting Trump:

In addition to alleging that Trump is lacking in principles and character, Kristol claims that the Republican candidate is a crackpot conspiracy theorist, a disqualifying trait. Kristol’s evidence is a remark Trump made on the eve of the Indiana primary suggesting that Ted Cruz’s father might have something to hide about his alleged acquaintance with Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald…

…Comments Kristol: “What’s horrible is a leading presidential candidate trading in crackpot conspiracy theories.”

So it might be if Trump were actually putting forward a conspiracy theory.

But what we have here, obviously, is not a theory but some Trumpian campaign mischief – not dissimilar in form to his earlier suggestion that because Ted Cruz was born in Canada he might not be able to actually run for president even if he were to win the nomination. These were both campaign tricks ”“ dirty tricks if you like ”“ to throw a rival off balance and gain an advantage.

Nice to know that Horowitz can read Trump’s mind, and that “obviously” Trump is not putting forth a conspiracy theory and is not a conspiracy theorist. But again, Horowitz is ignoring Trump’s history. The Cruz-father claim was hardly the only conspiracy theory Trump has promoted—and most tellingly, some of these theories were not just in the context of an election. Trump actually has been a conspiracy theorist for a long time, on several topics.

For example, in the beginning of the Trump candidacy I wrote about Trump’s “Bush lied” “Bush is evil” attacks that long predated his candidacy this year. Thus, they were not “Trumpian campaign mischief,” they appear to have been deeply held beliefs of a longstanding nature (not that mere “campaign mischief” would excuse a slander of that magnitude anyway). I documented the history of Trump’s conspiracy theorist accusations against Bush here if you want to see how many times Trump said this, beginning way back in 2008. Horowitz treats the topic of Trump and conspiracy theories as though it was limited to the recent accusations about Cruz’s father, which it most definitely was not.

And these things were not said by aides or operatives or PACs, they were straight from Trump’s own mouth. But there were other topics, too, on which Trump has been—if not inclined to conspiracy theories—then certainly eager to embrace wacky and dangerously unscientific ones, such as the autism/vaccine link, which he not only mentioned during this campaign year but which he seems to have believed in for many years.

I could go on, but it probably doesn’t matter. These verbal wars will go on, too, and a lot more people will read the accusations than will take the trouble to look into the facts.

“Renegade”: Breitbart continues its fall…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and slides right into the mainstreaming of subtle (and maybe not even so subtle) anti-Semitism.

David Horowitz wrote an article on Breitbart criticizing Bill Kristol for his nevertrumperism, and Breitbart titled it “Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew.” Two things to note. The first is that this was not necessarily (or even probably?) David Horowitz’s choice for a title, because it’s not usually the writer who chooses the title, it’s the editors, and the text of Horowitz’s article—though certainly critical of Kristol—doesn’t contain very much that would support the “renegade Jew” appellation. So although we really don’t know how involved Horowitz was in the title if at all, we certainly know that some editor or editors at Breitbart were. However, the Breitbart article has been republished at Horowitz’s own site, complete with title and no disclaimer, so it is safe to say that Horowitz certainly has not distanced himself from it.

The second thing to note is that if you look at the comments to the Breitbart piece, just a quick perusal will tell you how the title managed to unleash a gush of anti-Semitism. It doesn’t take much, really, and in this case some of the most rabid Trump supporters who hang out on Breitbart can easily combine their hatred and need to destroy anyone who would dare defy Trump with a latent (and sometimes not-so-latent) anti-Semitism.

None of this is an accusation that Trump himself is anti-Semitic, by the way. I actually don’t think he is. But I can safely say that some of his alt-right promoters and their followers are.

If you Google the word “renegade” you’ll find the following definition and synonyms:

noun
a person who deserts and betrays an organization, country, or set of principles.
synonyms: traitor, defector, deserter, turncoat, rebel, mutineer…

adjective
having treacherously changed allegiance…
synonyms: treacherous, traitorous, disloyal, treasonous, rebel, mutinous

Strong, strong word. And somewhat ironic, since Horowitz himself is a neocon (political changer, that is, from radical left to right, and who I’ve written about before on this blog) extraordinaire. Kristol, as the son of neocon elder statesman Irving Kristol (now deceased), was born into conservatism and as far as I know has been a conservative his whole life.

In the case of Trump support or non-support (and for the record, I am sympathetic to both sides at this point, now that Trump is almost certainly going to be Hillary Clinton’s opponent), Kristol has been against Trump from the start and very clear about it, and he’s searching for a possible third-party alternative he believes might actually be a viable candidate, not supporting Hillary Clinton.

This Slate piece pretty much sums up the oh-so-clever game that Breitbart (the site—not the man, who is deceased and cannot comment) is playing here:

In [the article]…Horowitz rails against Kristol and “a small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders” who are hoping to arrange a conservative third-party candidacy. A paragraph seemingly tacked on at the end accuses Kristol of putting world Jewry in danger by potentially splitting the Republican vote and empowering Democrats who are soft on radical Islam. It’s enough, perhaps, to give Breitbart plausible deniability [for the title]; the site can claim it’s calling out Kristol on behalf of Jews, rather than calling him out as a Jew.

Really, though, what Breitbart is doing here is playing a double game, covering anti-Semitism with a tacky sheen of philo-Semitism. To define someone as a “Renegade Jew” in a column about scheming elites written for an audience full of white nationalists is to signal to the sewers. The comments under the piece suggest that Breitbart’s readers got the message.

At present, as I write these words, there are 5360 comments to the Horowitz piece at Breitbart. I’m certainly not going to read them all, or even most of them. But I did skim quite a few and there is no doubt that although a great many are of the “we hate elitists like Kristol who would oppose Trump” type, quite a few are specifically in the anti-Jewish category. One example of the latter:

Trump rose up against the Jewish media and Jewish Hollywood and Jewsih power. HE is almost defined by his defiance of it. From Bill Kristol to Ben Shapiro to Bill Maher to Murdoch. They all hate and wil always hate Trump. Most are biding their time but soon very soon the back stabbing begins.

Here’s a comment to the Breitbart article that analyzes the phenomenon (although the commenter appears to think that Hororwitz himself wrote the headline—which, as I already said, is not necessarily correct):

I think most of the anti-semitic [comments at Breitbart] are real–but it’s less of a reflection on Trump supporters than it is on subset of Breitbart readers who are Trump supporters. Just read the comments in stories unrelated to Trump where a central figure (especially a liberal one) is Jewish. Unfortunately Horowitz [or Breitbart, or a combination of the two] opened up the floodgates here by playing the Jew card…

I expect that these floodgates will remain open.

This “renegade Jew” stuff is also a subset of another phenomenon we will see escalating with Trump’s candidacy and which is very familiar from Obama’s presidency and from politics in general, one that the mainstream media has long employed against Republican candidates running against their favored Democrats: that these opponents or critics are not just people who disagree, they are enemies whose reputations are to be destroyed.

[ADDENDUM: An update to this post can be found here.]

The last leaf on the 1800s tree

The New Neo Posted on by

There is only one person alive who was born before 1900, and she is Emma Morano of Italy.

My grandmother was born in the 1880s, and when I was a child I knew plenty of people from that century. Now there’s just one, who said yesterday—on learning that the torch had been passed to her with the death of the only other 1800s survivor: “My word, I’m as old as the hills.”

Articles about very old people always emphasize their life habits that may or may not have contributed to their longevity. My guess is that it’s mostly heredity. But for those who want to follow in her footsteps, Morano goes to bed early and gets up before dawn, and has eaten two eggs a day (one raw, one cooked) since the age of twenty. Good luck with that.

[NOTE: If you’re wondering about the title of this post, it’s from a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes that I discussed at length here along with the phenomenon of an entire generation slowly dying out.]

Crater Lake, crater lakes

The New Neo Posted on by

I recently went on a trip to Crater Lake in Oregon. I’ve been there before, and each time I’ve been impressed by its transcendent beauty and other-worldliness, and fascinated by its history.

The lake, in case you don’t know, is not only the deepest in the US, but of unusual clarity even for lakes of this type (which tend to be clear because they are not fed by streams). Here’s a photo I took of it:

CraterLakeLavaButte2016 021

One of the most fascinating aspects of Crater Lake is that it was formed about 7,700 years ago after an ancestral mountain (Mazama) experienced such a massive explosion of its innards that its outer shell could not support its own weight and collapsed, probably within a few hours or at most a couple of days. The natives of the area probably witnessed the spectacular sight of a mountain the size of present-day Rainier suddenly disappearing. No wonder they retain legends of an epic battle between a sky god and a god of the underworld, a struggle that destroyed the mountain and created the lake.

Volcanoes fascinate me, and caldera lakes (the proper technical term) are one of their loveliest and most mysterious manifestations, even if the mountain is gone (or never was; some caldera lakes result from eruptions of fairly low shield volcanoes).

Crater Lake’s setting and blueness makes it especially beautiful. But lakes of this kind are often extremely picturesque, as evidence by many websites that specialize in photos of them. I was stunned to discover there is even one in Germany, formed by a volcanic explosion 12,900 years ago. These days it looks tamed and domesticated:

laacherSee

Very different from many of its wilder cousins:

deriba

kerid

Kelimutu

The largest lake of this kind is Lake Toba in Indonesia. Ever hear of it? I hadn’t either, till now. It’s the remnant from a supervolcano that erupted some time between 69,000 and 77,000 years ago, and is thought to have been the “largest known explosive eruption on Earth in the last 25 million years.” That’s formidable.

And here it is:

toba

The setting and color is not as spectacular as Crater Lake, but the size sure eclipses it. Toba is 62 by 19 miles, whereas Crater Lake is a mere 6 by 5 miles, although somewhat deeper.

Restoring local control of education

The New Neo Posted on by

David French suggests that rejecting federal funding is the remedy if states wish to reclaim their right to be free of executive actions such as the Obama administration’s directive on school bathrooms [emphasis mine]:

Without an act of Congress, without a ruling from the Supreme Court, and without even going through the motions of the regulatory rule-making process, the administration issued a letter drafting every single public educational institution in the country to implement the extreme edge of the sexual revolution…

…We must fix our education system or slowly but surely lose our culture. Indeed, virtually every other conservative endeavor ”” whether it’s winning elections, transforming media, or infiltrating pop culture ”” will fail if the entire edifice of public education is arrayed against us. The system, however, can’t be reformed from within: It’s stacked top-to-bottom with progressive activists even in red states.

States should consider rejecting federal education funding entirely (Texas is considering doing just that). At the very least, charter schools should be completely disentangled ”” and not just from public employees’ unions but also from federal funds (in order to insulate them from federal influence); voucher systems should be dramatically expanded ”” giving every family the option to spend their share of tax dollars at the school of their choice; and private institutions and philanthropists should step up to provide needed funding. Indeed, private citizens don’t have to wait for government reform. Scholarship funds can expand the ranks of tuition-paying private-school students immediately, and coalitions of churches can provide substantial support for their communities’ best private schools.

When I wrote about the directive yesterday, I said (half tongue-in-cheek): “I sometimes wonder whether Obama is trying to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s chances of getting elected.” I don’t really think Obama wants to do that. I believe that he thinks the position of the left is strong enough that he can go forward—as he has so many times before—against the will of the American people, and the right will not be able or willing to undo it.

But why couldn’t a President Trump just simply reverse the order? Let’s ignore for the moment whether Trump would even want to, considering his mixed messages on the subject of transgender bathrooms in schools; let’s just assume for the sake of argument that he would indeed like to do undo it. That would seem an easy thing to do, wouldn’t it? A president could just issue another directive undoing Obama’s.

Well, that ignores a couple of things. The first is that this policy will have been in place for about a half year. Schools might be afraid to switch back and provoke lawsuits. But the other is that the way the letter was worded, it’s not actually an executive order straight from Obama. It was issued by the Departments of Justice and Education (the Civil Rights Division and the Office for Civil Rights, respectively).

Trump has said that he plans to reduce (or even dismantle) the Department of Education and return its functions to the local governments. That is something I happen to agree with as a step in the right direction (and Ted Cruz was extremely strong on this issue, as you can see from this). But the real power behind the Obama administration’s recent directive on school bathrooms (and much else that this administration has done) is the DOJ, and the letter frames the new policy as a civil rights issue (sex discrimination) under Title IX.

Which brings us to an important influence this administration has had on the DOJ: Obama has been conducting his own Gramscian march through that institution. As J. Christian Adams has been chronicling for quite some time, this administration has been busy transforming the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division into a leftist activist group:

In 2011, we produced the Every Single One series for PJ Media about an unprecedented wave of ideological hiring of leftist attorneys into the career ranks of the Justice Department. The series documented the partisan and radical background of every single one of the 113 new Justice Department lawyers hired into the Obama Civil Rights Division from January 2009 to January 2011…

With the help of PJ Media, we will now be updating that revealing report…Because we have obtained all of the resumes of the attorney hires in the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice since then.

And once again, every single one of them has an intensely ideological background…

…the Obama Justice Department has assembled a law firm of hundreds of fringe leftists to enforce a brave new vision of civil rights law.

Why the Civil Rights Division? Simple — it may be one of the most powerful components of the entire federal government. If a president wanted to “fundamentally transform” the nation, he would likely start with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.

The tentacles of the Division reach into virtually every crevice of American life. Federal statutes, under the banner of protecting civil rights, reach home lending, football stadium and theater seating, voting, elections, education, college admissions, apartment rentals, prisons, hiring practices, the use of English, special education programs, religious liberty, abortion clinic protests, arrests, law enforcement, voter rolls, insane asylums, state and local government hiring, swimming pool lift chairs, bathtub design, Spanish language ballots, school discipline, and even if boys can dress in drag in high school…

If a president wanted to transform a nation, he would unleash hundreds of crusading leftist lawyers who hold views far outside of the American mainstream and give them power to push the frontiers.

This is the crux of the matter, and it’s important information about which the vast majority of Americans are unaware. Could a Republican president reverse this trend?

Not easily. But if that Republican president were determined and knowledgeable, the following approach might help:

Many may have…assumed a new president can just snap his or her fingers in January 2017 and make it all go away. But alas, no. Most of the lawyers we featured in 2011 are embedded career civil servants and cannot be removed because of the restrictions of a merit protection system 100 years out of date.

…[But an] incoming president can also reassign Senior Executive Service staff to other areas of the Justice Department (or other executive agencies), and even far outside of Washington, D.C., where they can no longer engage in the political mischief and obstructionism that is their raison d’etre.

Importantly, many of the most recent hires we will name are still within their probationary periods as federal employees. When a new president takes the oath of office in January 2017, some of these lawyers will still not have vested.

Ted Cruz would have been just the person to accomplish this sort of thing, but that’s not going to happen (unless Trump is elected and appoints him AG). I have no idea whether Trump would have DOJ reform as a priority, and if so whether he would be able to appoint people knowledgeable enough to implement it. But one reason I have been reluctantly considering voting for him (despite my mammoth reservations about other aspects of his character and plans) is this issue, as well as others connected with SCOTUS appointments and of course illegal immigration. I have very little doubt that Hillary Clinton would either continue the Obama leftist hires (most likely), or at the very least would do nothing to disturb the agenda of the people who are now in place.

As I said in my post yesterday, I think that this directive of the Obama administration on transgender students in public school bathrooms is likely to anger a lot of people (even many liberal Democrats) about federal government intrusion into local control of education. The GOP has the opportunity to exploit that anger and emphasize that they favor localities regaining the upper hand in decisions involving the education of children. Whether it be Trump or other down-ticket GOP candidates, this is an issue that I think could resonate, and it is not tied to specific things such as what bathrooms transgender students will use or the curriculum of Common Core. It has to do with whether the federal government will further take over an important societal function—the education of children—that has traditionally been something over which parents and communities have wanted to exercise a great deal of control.