In all the verbiage about Kim Davis’ refusal to issue marriage licenses to same sex couples and her subsequent jail sentence, there’s been a great deal of muddled thinking as well as a great many accusations.
The best article I’ve seen so far on what is actually happening with Davis is this by Eugene Volokh, who places the case squarely in the context of legal precedent involving employment law and religious objections to elements of a job. He discusses what type of excuses are allowed and under what circumstances.
One of the points Volokh makes caused me to go “Aha!,” because it clarified Kim Davis’ position in a way that indicates quite strongly that she isn’t out to deny gay people marriages. So those who call her a bigot should take a look at this (not that most of them will, because it would spoil the agenda):
…[I]t seems to me that Davis has a much stronger claim under state law for a much more limited exemption. Davis’s objection, it appears (see pp. 40, 133, and 139 of her stay application and attachments), is not to issuing same-sex marriage licenses as such. Rather, she objects to issuing such licenses with her name on them, because she believes (rightly or wrongly) that having her name on them is an endorsement of same-sex marriage. Indeed, she says that she would be content with
“Modifying the prescribed Kentucky marriage license form to remove the multiple references to Davis’ name, and thus to remove the personal nature of the authorization that Davis must provide on the current form.”
Now this would be a cheap accommodation that, it seems to me, a state could quite easily provide. It’s true that state law requires the County Clerk’s name on the marriage license and the marriage certificate. But the point of RFRAs, such as the Kentucky RFRA, is precisely to provide religious objectors with exemptions even from such generally applicable laws, so long as the exemptions don’t necessarily and materially undermine a compelling government interest.
And allowing all marriage licenses and certificates ”” for opposite-sex marriages or same-sex ones ”” to include a deputy clerk’s name, or just the notation “Rowan County Clerk,” wouldn’t jeopardize any compelling government interest. To be sure, it would have to be clear that this modification is legally authorized, and doesn’t make the license and certificate invalid. But a court that grants Davis’s RFRA exemption request could easily issue an order that makes this clear.
Indeed, Kim Davis has filed a federal complaint against state officials under, among other things, the Kentucky RFRA. And, as I noted, one of the proposed accommodations that she herself has suggested, albeit in the federal stay application, is the simple removal of her name.
Seems reasonable to me, and it also seems to support the argument that she is motivated by freedom of religion issues.
Violette Verdy is now in her early 80s, but in her heyday as a soloist with the New York City Ballet I saw her dance many times and loved her performances, particularly in the role she created as the girl in green in Jerome Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering,” set to the music of Chopin. I’ve written before about Verdy in that role, describing her “fluid charm, subtle humor, and exquisite musicality.” “Dances” is an ensemble piece, and her role is one of the smaller ones, but what she did with it was simply astounding. I’ve seen other people perform it since, and watched a few more of them recently on YouTube, and no one compares to Verdy.
In fact, no one even comes close. Although I love the ballet, it’s almost painful to watch other people dance it.
How did she do what she did? Not a great technician by current standards (although she was known for fast footwork that was also incredibly precise), she had none of the rubbery extensions of today’s dancers. Her leg never got raised much more than a little over 90 degrees, for example. Her brilliance—her genius, actually—was in timing, nuance, style, and sparkling wit. She was like champagne, and when you watched her dance, you felt buoyed up.
The are very few videos on YouTube of her dancing, and the few that exist are mostly of poor quality. But watch these two rather short ones and the stills and film in them will give you some idea—a poor idea, but better than nothing—of the amazing musicality and clarity and exquisite Gallic charm of her dancing (alas, no “Dances at a Gathering,” though, and in the second video the music that is used does not match the excerpts, unfortunately):
Here is one of the only visual records I can find online of her “Dances” performance, a multiple exposure still that appeared in Life magazine. There is something very special, particularly in the two middle pictures, about the weightedness of her stance and yet the lightness of her entire being. Her dancing always, always, always said something (that’s why Balanchine said to her that she spoke with her feet; she did):
Why am I writing about Verdy now? My memory was jogged when a reader sent me an excellent article about her that appeared in The Nation July 30. The author describes the musicality of her dancing in this way:
In his 1969 Dances at a Gathering, set to Chopin piano pieces, Robbins cast her as a woman in green who appears halfway through the ballet, an isolated figure who dances for her own pleasure, giving herself airs, reveling in her own charms, perhaps remembering past conquests. With small pauses, sudden changes of emphasis, flashing glances, and alternating staccato and legato movements, Verdy was able to evoke a wide range of emotions, both real and affected: insouciance, self-importance, vulnerability, an underlying loneliness. The woman in green became a multidimensional character, despite appearing onstage for only a few minutes…
…[N]ot all dancers are particularly musical. They are trained to listen and count and follow certain cues, to start with the first note of a phrase and end with the last, but this is a superficial definition of musicality. A musical dancer helps you to see and feel the music in your own body; a dancer with a superior musicality goes even further, playing against the music, entering into a conversation with it, bending it to her own wishes. This is the kind of dancer Verdy was. Such musicality is innate. Verdy already had it as a child; when she heard music on the piano, “I just had to participate, I had to do something about it,” she told an interviewer. Having studied piano and violin, she had a grasp of the structures that underpin music: rhythm, the mood evoked by certain tonalities, the workings of counterpoint, the excitement of syncopation. And she understood phrasing, the changes in topography that give music its character. “It’s like speaking,” Verdy told me. “If you’re going to emphasize a certain thing, then you can slide over something else. Phrasing is a recognition of the values of talking, of thinking; it’s an evaluation, an itinerary.” Like her explanations, Verdy’s dancing was articulate.
Verdy was married briefly but had no children, and at the end of the article she describes herself as “more or less by myself. I’m a bit of an odd number now.” Funny thing, that’s exactly the trajectory of her second variation in Robbins’ “Dances at a Gathering”—after a series of relationships, she ends up alone, still dancing.
Her solo…[was] a showpiece of her extraordinary musicality set to a quick Chopin étude (op. 25, no.4), [and] remains a challenge for ballerinas to this day.
You said it! A challenge that you will see illustrated next.
First we have an excerpt from a tape of the entire ballet performed by the Paris Opera Ballet. You’d think they would display some of the same elements in their dancing that Verdy had, since they are French, too. But I don’t see any of it in the soloist who performs her part. It’s all very ho-hum; straightforward, on-the-music, and the charm factor—the smile, the lightness, the wit, the flirtaciousness—is completely missing.
However, as you watch the dance (which is only about two minutes long) it is as though you can see the ghost of Verdy’s movement peering through the choreography, which highlights all of her strengths—quick changes of direction, unexpected movements that are not bravura but involve port de bras (arms, that is) and the face and the eyes, gestures that say something (or should say something. I don’t want to continue to trash the dancer performing it; let’s just say that she’s not Verdy):
Now we have another dancer attempting it, this time a dancer from New York City Ballet, the company the ballet was originally choreographed on, so you might expect them to continue the tradition best. Well, she’s better than the dancer from the Paris Opera, I think, because she gets the quickness and sharpness of the movement somewhat better (I believe she’s a bit more petite, which helps). But she is too concerned with making graceful and classic lines with her poses, too careful. She doesn’t have that freedom and abandon-within-control quality that Verdy had, or that ability to be with the music without being right on top of it; to be the music:
Lastly we have the Pacific Northwest Ballet of Seattle. It’s an excellent ballet company, but not usually thought of as a world-class one like the first two. Nor does it have advantage of being French or of being the place where Robbins first choreographed the ballet. However, in the very short excerpt from Verdy’s dance you see in this video, I came to the conclusion that the dancer here might just be the best of the three at this particular variation. It’s from Verdy’s second dance in the ballet rather than the first one that’s shown in the other videos, and again there’s the unfortunate matching of the wrong music. But no matter. You can still see a tiny glimpse of something like Verdy’s delicacy and effervescence. This is the dance where various gentlemen come by, she tries to charm each one, but ends up alone:
I know that video or film of Verdy doing the role must exist. And I know where it must be—in the Lincoln Center Dance Library, which has records of vast numbers of ballets that are not allowed to be shown commercially because of the musicians union. Yes, the musicians union. People can go to the library and watch them there; I’ve never done it, but I know it can be done. Maybe I should. I would dearly love to see it again, even if only in two dimensions. Because that’s the only way it can be seen now, except in the mind’s eye and memory.
Andrew McCarthy has not been a fan of Corker-Menendez, to say the least. Today he has an article in National Review that lucidly explains how the bill can be taken to its logical conclusion by living up to its provisions, under which Congress can state that Obama has not lived up to his side of the bargain.
McCarthy’s argument goes like this (but please read the whole thing):
While maddening, the Corker bill is not an abject congressional surrender to Obama and Tehran. It is a conditional surrender. It would grant Obama grudging congressional endorsement of the deal in the absence of a now unattainable veto-proof resolution of disapproval, but only if Obama fulfills certain basic terms. Obama has not complied with the most basic one: the mandate that he provide the complete Iran deal for Congress’s consideration. Therefore, notwithstanding Washington’s frenzied assumption that the 60-day period for a congressional vote is winding down, the clock has never actually started to run. Congress’s obligations under Corker have never been triggered; the Corker process is moot.
As I have previously outlined, Obama has withheld from Congress the Iran deal’s key inspection and verification provisions…
It is not enough to say that Congress has no obligation to proceed with the Corker review process. It would, under the act, be impermissible for Congress to do so…
As I have been arguing for weeks, Congress must scrap the Corker process and treat Obama’s Iran deal as either a treaty or proposed legislation. Consequently, I could not agree more with my friend Jim Geraghty that the Senate should regard the deal as a treaty and vote it down decisively ”” as I’ve pointed out, senators don’t need the president’s cooperation to do this; their authority to review international agreements as treaties comes from the Constitution, not from Obama.
As I said, the article is well worth reading in its entirety. However, the basic point is that Congress has not abdicated its right to vote on the Iran deal as a treaty (something I’ve also been saying for quite some time), and it can and should do that. However, that does not mean that Obama or the Supreme Court would consider it a treaty and that the down vote would have any force in that regard; it would not. What it would do is something else:
The courts are unlikely to referee a dispute regarding the relative power of the political branches to bind the nation to international agreements ”” even though the judges may have to get involved to the extent the sanctions affect the rights of private parties. No, the reason to reject the Iran deal as a treaty is to lay the groundwork for the next president to abandon the deal. That involves putting other countries on notice, immediately, that the U.S. statutory sanctions are still in effect; that Obama is powerless to lift them permanently; that the next president is likely to enforce them; and that countries, businesses, and individuals that rely on Obama’s mere executive agreement as a rationale for resuming commerce with Tehran do so at their peril.
That’s it.
Will Congress listen to McCarthy’s counsel? As I read his article, I was saying to myself, “Yes, yes, do it!” But at the same time I was wondering whether McConnell would be saying “yes, yes!” as well, and the sad thing is that I don’t think there’s much chance of that, which is why I detest the current GOP leadership in Congress. I would like to be pleasantly surprised by them, although I very much doubt it will happen.
[NOTE: I have a busy day today and not too much time for blogging at the moment; maybe more later. This is a huge topic and one requiring a fair amount of research to treat properly in a post.
This is not that post. This is a quick introduction to the question.]
A great many Christians seem to be arguing that we Westerners have a duty to accept all the refugees coming from war-torn countries such as Syria, or those in economic distress such as illegal immigrants from Mexico, whether the “we” be individuals here or in Europe. I’ve read many such arguments on blogs in posts and comments, and have seen them offered by talking heads on TV.
To me as a non-Christian, it is a puzzling argument. To me it seems that the prescription to give to charity, to help the needy, never requires that one help all the needy to the point of beggaring yourself. Nor does it require putting yourself in personal jeopardy. In other words, although Christianity has long admired the saintliness of martyrdom, it does not require it of individuals and certainly not of societies.
There is a saying, “charity begins at home” that has these origins:
The notion that a man’s family should be his foremost concern is expressed in 1 Timothy 5:8, King James Bible, 1611:
But if any prouide not for his owne, & specially for those of his owne house, hee hath denied the faith, and is worse then an infidel.
John Wyclif had expressed the same idea as early as 1382, in Of Prelates, reprinted in English Works, 1880:
Charite schuld bigyne at hem-self.
So it seems clear that helping everyone in need is not possible in the real world. Nor does helping people require that you take them into your own home, either in small numbers or large.
Another principle to remember is that generally any behavior that is rewarded will increase in frequency. So, issue an open invitation to your house saying that all who come will be fed and clothed there and given money, and see what happens if you broadcast it throughout the entire world.
In the case of immigrants from a country such as Syria, the current refugee crisis is a golden opportunity for a significant number of terrorists to come in among them. The more immigrants arrive the more difficult it will be to properly vet them (if indeed there’s any effort at all to do so). In addition, a great number of bona fide refugees fleeing a harsh situation in Syria are nevertheless sworn to the cultural and religious overthrow of the West through the demographic change of which they will be part.
So, how far does your obligation to help go, and to accept the stranger into your home? Does it extend to those who want to take over your dwelling?
I am not completely familiar with the tenets of Christianity, to be sure. But I can’t imagine that it requires such self-destruction in the name of good. To me, it seems that limits are necessary, and the proper topic for debate is the question of where to draw those limits.
As in this country, the Western European and EU leaders are unresponsive to the people on the topics of immigration and of refugees. I can assure you that the speakers here will not have their lives affected by the problem in the same way the local hoi-polloi will, so they can afford to give them stern lectures about their bigotry [Hat tip: Gates of Vienna, where there is also an English transcript]:
Meanwhile, the WaPoreports that not all the leaders in Hungary are getting with the program:
The European Union’s sharpening divisions over a spiraling refugee crisis broke into the open Thursday with two leaders strongly disagreeing in public over whether the asylum-seekers were threatening “Europe’s Christian roots.”
That was the language used by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as he warned Europe against allowing in mostly Muslim families.
Presently there’s a complicated standoff in a Hungarian train station where a train of refugees has been halted, and this sort of back-and-forth is going on:
Orban, Hungary’s nationalist leader who has spearheaded attempts to turn back the migrants, said Thursday that he had little choice but to seal his nation’s border with razor wire, soldiers and a high fence.
“We Hungarians are full of fear, people in Europe are full of fear, because we see that the European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not able to control the situation,” he said in Brussels in a raw joint appearance with European Parliament President Martin Schulz. Orban and Schulz, a veteran politician from Germany, made no attempt to paper over their differences or their distaste for each other.
The Hungarian leader blamed Germany for the crisis, saying that its open-door policy toward Syrian asylum-seekers was propelling a wave of migrants to undertake dangerous journeys toward Europe’s heart.
It is similar to our own strife, especially last summer when the child refugee crisis seemed to reach a head. One difference is that we don’t have to deal with the interaction among all the countries of Europe, too; our own political factions within this country are enough, thank you very much. However, what happens in Europe doesn’t stay in Europe; it affects the entire West.
Here’s more from Europe:
Schulz called Orban’s approach “wrong.”
He warned that the splits emerging during the refugee crisis could do lasting damage to the 28-nation alliance, which was founded on a spirit of consensus and burden-sharing.
“This is a crucial moment for the European Union,” Schulz said. “A deeper split of the union is a risk we cannot exclude.”
They’re facing problems even bigger than a split in the EU. However, the split is indeed very real, and it seems to mostly involve Eastern vs. Western Europe:
Orban’s fears are shared by many Eastern European nations, which have pushed hard against any attempt to require them to take in asylum-seekers. Slovakia has said it will accept only Christians.
I don’t know, but it may just be that Eastern Europe has more experience with Muslim takeovers (at least since Ottoman times; here’s a map of the Ottoman Empire at its height). It may also be that Christianity is stronger in Eastern Europe than in Western. Britain is an anomaly in that it seems more resistant than the rest of Western Europe to this influx of Middle Eastern refugees.
Here’s another EU official:
“For a Christian, it shouldn’t matter what race, religion and nationality the person in need represents,” European Council President Donald Tusk said Thursday, launching into Orban before the two met in Brussels. Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, proposed resettling at least 100,000 refugees across Europe.
Tusk is a Pole, but he represents the Western European point of view. However, I’d like to ask Tusk the following question: what if a major teaching of large groups within that religion is that it is at war with Christianity and Western values and seeks to replace them, if necessary by demographics such as emigration, or by the sword? What then? Is all of that still irrelevant?
By now you’ve probably all read the story of Kim Davis:
A federal judge ordered Kim Davis ”” the defiant Kentucky county clerk who has cited her Christian faith in refusing to issue marriage licenses to gay couples ”” to jail Thursday afternoon for refusing to carry out the duties of her position.
Davis has become a symbol of religiously motivated disobedience after the landmark Supreme Court decision legalizing gay marriage in June ”” she’s said she is acting under “God’s authority” when she repeatedly turns gay couples away.
But you may not be aware of the reasonable accommodations that other jurisdictions have made for officials with a similar dilemma:
In Utah, North Carolina, Texas and other states, local governments are shifting responsibilities so that employees who object to gay marriage do not have to be involved with wedding licenses at all. In this scenario, the objectors’ co-workers or other government officials rotate to handle the task, allowing clerks who object to fade into the background and not participate.
Here’s what’s called “the Utah compromise”:
…which carves out personal exemptions for government officials while extending housing and hiring protections to LGBT people. In Utah, county clerk employees who don’t want to marry gay people can privately notify the government of that and then appoint someone else in the community to handle all marriage licenses.
“There are good reasons to try to allow people who have been in these jobs for a long time to be able to keep their jobs,” Wilson says. “That’s a really noble thing to do in our culture, especially at a time of deep division.”
Kim Davis says she will not resign, because then she “would have no voice for God’s word.” Apparently she has weighed the possibilities, and has decided to take a public stand rather than go quietly.
I’m not sure why her office doesn’t do some version of the Utah approach, but I read (can’t find the link now, unfortunately) that in that jurisdiction she is required to sign off on other clerks, or be some part of the process in some way, and she refuses to do that. She is an elected official and can’t be fired. She can only be impeached, but that would take time and the cooperation of the legislature. Thus, the stalemate.
Why on earth send her to jail? Apparently the judge was well aware that any fine would probably be paid by donations, and would not constitute enough of a deterrent. So Davis becomes a martyr for the cause of traditional Christian belief and freedom of religion, although I think there would have been better ways to handle it on all sides.
This is clearly a bona fide religious objection of Davis. She is merely espousing a point of view that was standard until a very short time ago, leading up to the SCOTUS decision in Obergefell which was rendered only in June 0f 2015 and was a close one at 5-4. Anyone who doesn’t acknowledge that Davis’ protest is motivated by sincere and traditional religious beliefs that have been unquestioned for millennia is either lying or fooling him/herself. But the same sex movement seems determined not only to get their marriage rights, but to compel participation and relabel any reluctance to comply as bigotry, and to do that they must stomp on religious freedom. This is part of the war that the left has been waging on religion for a long, long time.
You see a lot of it in posts and comments section on many blogs on the left; just go to any of them and it’s easy to find a combination of hatred and ridicule of Davis and celebration at her sentence. The fact that until just a couple of years ago, many leftists and liberals (among them Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) stated their opposition to gay marriage—and in Obama’s case, in 2008 he cited his Christianity as a reason—is dropped down the rabbit hole of revisionist memory, in the general and accustomed leftist manner.
Back then, the same leftist/liberal anti-religious pro-same-sex-marriage advocates were not calling Obama a bigot and a hater. At least, if they were, I certainly haven’t read about it. But Kim Davis, who so far has not been reported to have breathed a word of actual bigotry towards gay people—is obviously a bigot to those same people. Her bigotry is so obvious that the author of a column such as this one merely has to assert it for it to be so, and to compare her to George Wallace:
…[T]his uncivil civil servant [Davis] isn’t a religious freedom fighter. She’s a homophobe, pure and simple.
And note how the author gets around the issue of the fact that Wallace never mentioned religion as a justification for his actions:
…[E]ven the shameless Wallace didn’t try to hide his bigotry behind the Bible.
So, Wallace was better than Davis, because he didn’t lie about religion in order to explain his bigotry.
To make my own opinion on all of this clear: I don’t agree with Kim Davis on gay marriage. I’m not a Christian of any sort, much less a fundamentalist one. As a public official, she needs to carry out her duties, which now (unexpectedly and as a result of a seismic change) include issuing gay marriage licenses, or she needs to resign or to face the consequences, which could include jail. I don’t think she should have been sent there; I would have much preferred that the state or the county or the municipality or the judge had figured out a creative solution to this one. But I applaud her willingness to be jailed in order to defend her principles and her religious beliefs. To me, this is clearly a principled stand and a form of civil disobedience in the classic Thoreauvian sense.
So the proper analogy is to Thoreau, not Wallace. But that’s not one you’ll be hearing from the left.
Sean Davis (no relation to Kim) makes an excellent point about the left’s hypocritical inconsistency in the Davis case:
Davis’s arrest was met with cheers by same-sex marriage advocates who for some reason did not demand imprisonment of officials who lawlessly issued gay marriage licenses in clear contravention of state and federal laws. Take, for example, Democrat Gavin Newsom, who is currently the California lieutenant governor. Back in 2004, when gay marriage was banned under California state law, Newsom openly defied the law and used his power as the mayor of San Francisco to force taxpayer-funded government clerks to issue gay marriage licenses…
Just like Kim Davis, who is an elected Democrat, Newsom justified his lawlessness by citing his own conscience and beliefs about right and wrong rather than deferring to the actual laws of his state.
If you look for evidence of gay rights advocates chastising Newsom for his blatant lawlessness, you won’t find it. Because it doesn’t exist. You similarly won’t find any evidence of these principled law enforcement purists chastising California state officials for refusing to enforce or defend the Prop 8 ballot initiative in California, which was passed overwhelmingly by California voters.
The piece goes on to list other examples. There are many, including this:
Perhaps natural marriage advocates should abandon their religious liberty arguments and instead declare whole cities to be marriage sanctuaries. That strategy has worked splendidly for open borders advocates.
Don’t sit on a hot stove until it happens. Consistency of argument and assumption of goodwill on the part of the Christians opposing gay marriage went out of the window a long time ago for a very vocal majority of same-sex marriage proponents online, and I assume they are relatively representative of the whole.
[NOTE: This essay sparked a memory for me. As a teenager, I was part of a class that was assigned Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience to read in my junior year of high school, along with Leviathan by Hobbes. Not bad for a public high school in New York, although it was in the honors classes rather than part of the regular curriculum. But still, I wonder whether this sort of thing happens much anymore. Anyone with teenagers have an answer to that question?]
I noticed that several people had raised the above question in the comment section of this post, and answered it in the affirmative.
Well, I’d never say “never,” but I don’t see it happening except in a very limited set of circumstances, all of which are unlikely to occur, IMHO. Unlikely, but hardly impossible.
The first circumstance is that she would probably drop out (or be forced to) if she is indicted. The Obama DOJ would do that, but only if he orders it, and he would only do that if he finds an alternative Democratic candidate he thinks has a good chance of winning instead. The reason? As much as he detests Hillary, and as cold-bloodedly ruthless as he can be (see “Alice Palmer”), he knows that he needs a Democratic successor as president in order to properly solidify his “legacy.” A Democrat can veto anything the Republicans might try to do, whereas a conservative Republican could actually attempt to lead the legislature to repealing Obamacare and could undo the Iran deal. Whatever the chances of those things actually happening under Republican leadership, Obama wouldn’t want to chance it.
The second way Hillary could drop out is if she drops precipitously in the polls and/or when the primaries start. But most of the Democrats I know still like her, so I don’t see that happening unless some enormously shocking new revelation comes out, and perhaps not even then.
A third possibility is if her health declines dramatically—for real, not as an excuse.
John Hinderaker has written a must-read piece on how a group of lawyers in academia is undermining the fight against terrorists. It’s based on this article by William Bradford:
Bradford writes that radical Muslims have targeted “an interconnected ”˜government-media-academic complex’ of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues” for anti-American psychological operations. But his real target is academia”“specifically, the anti-Western law professors he defines as the “critical law of armed conflict academy” (“CLOACA”). As always when the word “critical” is used in the context of legal theory, these academics are bitterly anti-American…
It’s one of the more depressing things I’ve read lately, and that’s saying something. But it also explains certain interesting fixations of Obama’s, such as the need to close Gitmo and release its terrorists out into the world.
[UPDATE 9/4/15: It’s been called to my attention that Bradford’s article contains misrepresentations and mischaracterizations, as well as prescriptions that are way over the top, all of which undermine its credibility and reliability.]
In all the focus on Hillary’s server and what she knew or should have known and how it will affect her politically, a very important question is somehow being given short shrift, and that’s how serious were the security breaches?
There are indications that the answer might be, very:
So America’s intelligence agencies are assuming that every communication of America’s Secretary of State for months or more was read by our adversaries. Isn’t that likely to amount to one of the worst intelligence breaches in American history? And here’s the kicker. Even if we got lucky and the Russians and Chinese didn’t actually intercept some or all of Hillary’s emails, our intelligence agencies now have to behave as if they did. Doesn’t that mean that we are now making massive changes to the sources and methods of our intelligence? Are we now withdrawing valuable agents? Are we trying to replace methods that cannot be easily replicated? Are we now forced to rebuild a good deal of our intelligence capabilities from the ground up? Are we not suffering tremendous intelligence damage right now, regardless of what foreign intelligence services did or did not manage to snatch from Hillary’s server””simply because we are forced to assume that they got it all?
Hey, I’ve got an idea—let’s make this woman president!
They finally did it. The bastards destroyed Palmyra’s Temple of Bel.
We all knew it was coming in May when ISIS conquered the ancient Roman-era city an hour’s drive east of the Syrian city of Homs…
In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan. They used dynamite. They used anti-aircraft guns. It took them weeks of dedicated effort, but they finally got the job done.
They destroyed those statues for one reason only: they were not Islamic.
One of my best friends was so aghast he told me that the United States should invade Afghanistan. I said he was nuts. We’re not going to invade a country on the other side of the planet because some primitive yahoos blew up some statues. And I was right. We did not invade of Afghanistan because some primitive yahoos blew up some statutes.
But I’ll never forget what he said next.
People who commit cultural genocide will mass-murder humans. War is inevitable.
Six months later, the United States invaded Afghanistan after the most devastating attack on American soil in history.
I was right. But so was he.
The Taliban’s cultural genocide was just a prelude to what would come later.
Of course, with ISIS, the cultural destruction is not a prelude; we already know their propensity for genocide and mass murder of a magnitude that makes the Taliban look like Quakers. It’s just that we can’t figure out what to do about it, or maybe we’re too weary to try, or perhaps some potentially suicidal combination of the two.
[NOTE: Here’s an article on the life and death of Khaled al Asaad, the 81-year-old archaeologist of Palmyra who was beheaded by ISIS a few weeks ago. RIP.]
…Hillary sent classified information, too. Except it wasn’t marked “classified” at the time:
The extent of the redactions in e-mails sent by Clinton and others, including ambassadors and career Foreign Service officers, points to a broader pattern that has alarmed intelligence officials in which sensitive information has been circulated on non-secure systems. Another worry is that Clinton aides further spread sensitive information by forwarding government e-mails to Clinton’s private account.
But it also highlights concerns raised by Clinton and her supporters that identifying classified material can be a confusing process, and well-meaning public officials reviewing the same material could come to different conclusions as to its classification level.
Lately, Clinton keeps repeating that she didn’t send material marked classified. That’s certainly a lawyerly claim—and I don’t mean that as a compliment. She should not have been even using a private email and a private server (especially one stored in some closet) for any of her official correspondence, and she certainly shouldn’t have been sending questionable material through that system. For example, information on the location of North Korean nukes?:
One of the most serious potential breaches of national security identified so far by the intelligence community inside Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private emails involves the relaying of classified information concerning the movement of North Korean nuclear assets, which was obtained from spy satellites.
Multiple intelligence sources who spoke to The Washington Times, solely on the condition of anonymity, said concerns about the movement of the North Korean information through Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured server are twofold.
First, spy satellite information is frequently classified at the top-secret level and handled within a special compartment called Talent-Keyhole. This means it is one of the most sensitive forms of intelligence gathered by the U.S.
Second, the North Koreans have assembled a massive cyberhacking army under an elite military spy program known as Bureau 121, which is increasingly aggressive in targeting systems for hacking, especially vulnerable private systems.
I am not the Secretary of State. But even I know that’s not the sort of thing you send through your private email. It’s not the sort of thing that has to be marked “classified” in a big font, with a skull and crossbones, for you to know it’s extraordinarily sensitive information. It’s the sort of thing, in the old spy movies, that the recipient would be told to eat or burn after receiving.
No way you can disagree with this, from Donald Trump:
[Jeb’s] doing very poorly in the polls, he’s a very low-energy kind of guy…
Bush comes across as the most boring teacher you ever had, a fairly decent sort but a big snooze. As he talks, you can almost feel the juices ooze right out of you.
Trump, of course, has a ton of energy. Whether you think he’s worth your vote or not (and for me it’s “not”; I much prefer several other candidates), he has an energizing, fun, lively quality.
Make no mistake about it: a great deal of politics rests on personality. It may seem irrational, but it really isn’t. We are always judging people in ways that we barely understand. Some of it leads us astray; I still find it mind-boggling that so many people trust Obama and think he’s basically a nice guy, when the opposite seems so apparent to me. But personality, and the energy it expresses, would logically carry over into other endeavors. That isn’t always the case—sometimes the most phlegmatic, calm people get a lot done, and sometimes the most peppy dissipate all that energy in restless, unfocused actions. But personality is still a guide, and people react to it.
One of the many reasons people detest Boehner and McConnell is this very same thing: lack of energy. They must have done something to get to their present positions—something rather Machiavellian, I’d imagine. But it certainly doesn’t come across in anything that would give people the impression that they will fight for them. They don’t just fail to walk the walk, they fail to talk the talk.
