Some interesting facts about Walt Whitman

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not a Whitman fan (no, that’s not one of the interesting facts), although I like some of his poems. But looking at his Wiki entry I noticed the following items, which somehow seemed worth mentioning:

When Whitman was 6 years old “he was lifted in the air and kissed on the cheek by the Marquis de Lafayette during a celebration in Brooklyn.”

Whitman’s formal schooling ended at the age of 11.

The first edition of Leaves of Grass was self-published, although it had this nifty engraving as the frontpiece:
whitmanengrave

Whitman was in his mid-thirties at the time, but he kept on revising Leaves of Grass as long as he lived.

Whitman worked at the US Attorney General’s office in DC right after the Civil War, where his job was “interviewing former Confederate soldiers for Presidential pardons.”

In 1871 “it was mistakenly reported that [Whitman had] died in a railroad accident.” He hadn’t.

In 1872 he gave the commencement speech at Dartmouth.

He lived at his brother’s house in Cambden, NJ, for about a decade after that, and it was there that he received a visit from Oscar Wilde.

People claim he was gay. People claim he was bisexual. He claimed he had 6 illegitimate children. No one really has a clue what his actual sexual history was, although I assume that he knew.

Taking impeachment “off the table”

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “RickZ” wrote the following today:

We gave the RINOs the Senate in 2014, only to be told from the get-go that ”˜impeachment is off the table’. That was bad enough, but to give everything Choom Boy wanted was beyond the pale; President Give Iran The Bomb doesn’t even have to veto any bills, which speaks volumes about the eGOPs being ”˜an opposition party’.

I’m not highlighting that in order to pick on RickZ. In fact, I agree with him in many ways. Let me list a couple:

I don’t think the GOP has been aggressive enough in fighting Obama. I think both Boehner and McConnell are, if not RINOs exactly, then certainly lackluster and insufficiently motivated to take on either Obama or some of the big issues, both in their rhetoric and personalities and by action. I think much of their hesitancy comes from their desire to please big money donors, a desire shared by the vast majority of Congress. This is a political fact of life inherent in the fact that money is ordinarily needed to get elected and stay elected, and money has an attraction even beyond that.

That said, it’s not true that Obama hasn’t had to veto some bills. One bill that House and Senate did pass but Obama has vetoed was Keystone, a vote which occurred in February of 2015, just one month after the Republican Congress came to power. They were able to accomplish this feat of getting it to the president’s desk for the simple reason that the bill had enough Democratic support to get it past the 60-vote Senate threshold. The Republicans even tried to override Obama’s subsequent veto, although the attempt failed because they couldn’t get enough Democratic votes to reach 2/3. This would almost certainly be the fate of most override votes in this Congress, which doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be tried.

I’ve already said my piece on Corker-Menendez and explained why I think it helps fight the Iran deal rather than being some sort of deceptive kabuki theater that facilitates it. So here I’ll just add that Corker-Menendez is a bill that was passed by House and Senate, and which Obama would dearly have loved to veto. But he did not do so because he knew his veto would be easily overridden. Unfortunately, very few bills are going to get that degree of Democratic support, or even enough to pass the 60-vote threshold in the Senate.

Yesterday the House passed a bill that would withhold certain funds from sanctuary cities. Obama has already threatened to veto it, and his veto probably could not be overridden because of lack of enough crossover Democratic votes. This, unfortunately, would be the fate of most such bills with Obama in the White House. I don’t know whether the particular bill has enough Democratic votes in the Senate to get past the cloture rule—it would need six crossovers to reach the requisite 60 to stop cloture, and it would need seven more than that to override a veto.

And if McConnell were to change the Senate rules and say that suddenly they only needed a simple majority to pass bills there, it wouldn’t help to override a presidential veto anyway, which would still need a 2/3 vote. All that would happen is that the Republican Senate would have thrown away a rule and be subject to a huge amount of criticism in order to get more bills on Obama’s desk that he would then veto. Is it worth it?

Talk about kabuki theater! Yes, it would satisfy the angry conservative wing, but it would accomplish nothing other than paving the way for the Democrats. Why do I say that? Because in order for doing away with the 60-vote rule to actually accomplish anything in terms of legislation, a party has to have both a majority in the Senate (and House) and a president of the same party as that majority, so that bills won’t be vetoed. Historically speaking, the Democrats have been in that position since the FDR years far more often than the Republicans have.

Then there’s the other statement in RickZ’s comment. It goes like this: “We gave the RINOs the Senate in 2014, only to be told from the get-go that ”˜impeachment is off the table’.” I’ve read that sort of thing often, but it is in error, I believe. First of all there’s a simple timing error, which is that Boehner’s statement about impeachment was made before that election of 2014. The second error is a failure to take notice of why Boehner said it and what he actually said.

It was in the summer of 2014. The election would be occurring that November, and the Democrats were sounding the fear drumbeat of “If you elect a Republican Congress, they will impeach President Obama!” Democrats were trying to increase party turnout in the election, which they knew would be crucial for them, and also raise money for the campaign. That was the context of Boehner’s reply:

“It’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House,” Boehner said at the weekly House GOP leadership press conference.

“This whole talk about impeachment is coming from the president’s own staff and coming from Democrats on Capitol Hill. Why? Because they’re trying to rally their own people to give money and show up in this year’s elections,” Boehner said…

“We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Boehner said.

Note the word “plans,” a well-known weasel word that means only “right now we are not actively planning to do it.” It isn’t any sort of promise to never do it. And not planning to do so was understandable because, without 2/3 of the Senate in order to convict, impeachment in the House would also be kabuki theater. The only effect it would have (other than to placate those conservatives who would enjoy the show) would be to rally support for Obama and the Democrats.

The Republican Congress has now been in session for seven months. You may think they are just playing along and pretending to stand for something, and perhaps you’re correct. I certainly see that possibility; I don’t trust them. But what I see is something a bit different: a Republican Party composed of some people like that and some who are devoted to conservative principles and trying their best, but stymied by a combination of factors, most importantly a president who will veto everything that comes to his desk that he dislikes unless Congress has the magic 2/3 to override, a total that is extremely hard to reach. Even if Congress’ GOP were composed of 100% principled conservatives (which of course it is not), they would still have to face this choice: do you pass bill after bill after bill that Obama will veto (and do it by jettisoning the 60 votes for cloture rule in the Senate) only to have Obama veto those bills? Is that really the best use of the limited time you have available to you?

Every time I write about this general topic I get accused of being a RINO myself, or of wanting to protect them, or of being insufficiently angry at them. I can assure you that I am none of these things (not that everyone will believe me). I have no particular party loyalty and I’m not even a member of the party. I didn’t leave one party to join another or to march in lockstep with them. I am angry that more has not been done; how could anyone not be? But when I look at the facts, I can’t deny them. This is the situation we face: less than 60 votes in the Senate and a president who has no reluctance whatsoever to use his veto pen if he needs to (although when Democrats controlled the Senate he didn’t need to), and a public that will probably turn on Republicans for any sort of government shutdown in response.

I think that the best use of conservative energy among the electorate would be to elect more conservatives to Congress. If conservatives can take over the leadership of the Republican Party in both houses of Congress, than you won’t have Boehner and McConnell to kick around any more. But whoever gets in there, the most helpful thing would be to also elect a Republican president, preferably a conservative. There are a lot of candidates to choose from who fit that description.

Hillarywear

The New Neo Posted on by

I had a post on Carly Fiorina today, and so here’s one on Hillary Clinton. Equal time.

it occurs to me that Hillary’s got some very odd fashion tastes.

Now, I know it’s hard to grow older in the public eye (not so easy in the private eye, either). We who are of a certain age remember Hillary as a fairly young woman from almost twenty-five years ago, and the difference between a woman in her early-to mid 40s and one in her late 60s is formidable. It’s not just the face (although there’s that), but also the body. There is a certain almost inevitable thickening, especially around the waist, even in those most assiduously devoted to working out.

Thus, I have nothing but sympathy for Clinton in that regard.

But why, oh why, does she choose so many awful and really strange outfits? I’m not just talking about the ubiquitous plain pantsuit; I’m talking about bizarre duds. Is she easily bored? Does she simply not have a clue what to do? Does she have a stylist? She certainly could afford one. Or is her stylist nuts?

Case in point: what is this? Chutes and ladders?

hillaryweirdjacket

And what’s up with this protozoa coat?

protozoacoat

Those are not just bad outfits for Hillary. Those are bad outfits for anyone, anywhere.

[NOTE: Yes, I know this post is frivolous. In my opinion, it’s not frivolous enough.]

Key Iran deal documents…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are missing from the information submitted to Congress, and Senators Corker and Cardin have written John Kerry to request them.

Maybe they should ask Hillary to check her server. Just in case.

More here.

“Most transparent” yada yada yada.

Vietnam then and now: the turning

The New Neo Posted on by

Michael Totten has an excellent article on Vietnam today. The country is a capitalist (or at least mostly-capitalist or semi-capitalist) success story and Ho Chi Minh’s worst nightmare:

Hanoi’s economy looks and feels entirely unregulated; the city bursts with activity. Though luxury boutiques, technology stores selling Apple products, high-fashion clothing outlets, and international food chains are easy to find, individual street-front proprietorships predominate. The state still owns or controls some of the largest companies, but the vast majority of businesses are too small to be centrally managed. On a single block, I saw the following for sale: Vietnamese flags, Ho Chi Minh T-shirts, candles, incense, bolts of cloth, used clothing from the U.S., fake money to burn in offerings to ancestors, Angry Birds toys, exotic fruit, meat skewers, iPhones, tea, jewelry, Italian shoes, French pastries, spices, herbs, motorcycle helmets, bootleg CDs, bootleg cigarettes, Japanese BBQ, carpets, funeral boxes, silk, paintings, and bootleg paperbacks with misspelled blurbs on the back.

The city is extremely business-friendly…

But there were many years of suffering after the war:

After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, Hanoi, capital of a now-unified, Communist Vietnam, was a bombed-out disasterscape. Residents lived under an egalitarian reign of terror. The grim ideologues who ran the country forbade citizens to socialize with or even speak to the few foreign visitors. People queued up in long lines past government stores with bare shelves to exchange ration coupons for meager handfuls of rice. The only traffic on the street was the occasional bicycle…

Saigon, the South’s former capital, suffered when the North took over. “All the schools were shut down,” says Tuong Vi Lam, who vividly remembers when her side lost the war. “My aunts and uncles were in college and they had to quit. They just couldn’t get there. Property was confiscated and given to northerners. Communist propaganda was even put in our math books. We had questions like this: ”˜Yesterday a soldier killed three Americans and today he killed five. How many Americans did he kill total?’ The books don’t have those kinds of questions anymore, but they did for five or ten years.”

Vietnam was finally independent and unified, but it fared no better than the Soviet Union, North Korea, or Cuba””and almost everyone knew it, including many in the Communist leadership.

At some point it became clear even to the Communist leaders of the mid-80s—who were not as doctrinaire as their Soviet or Chinese counterparts, according to Totten (a point I think is key to the transformation to come)—that something had to lighten up. And that’s how the thaw began.

Now let’s go to the man who is our present Secretary of State, John Kerry, when he was addressing the Senate Council on Foreign Relations in 1971 on the subject of Vietnam:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace,..

…if you read carefully the president’s last speech to the people of this country, you can see that he says, and says clearly: “But the issue, gentlemen, the issue is communism, and the question is whether or not we will leave that country to the communists or whether or not we will try to give it hope to be a free people.” But the point is they are not a free people now under us. They are not a free people, and we cannot fight communism all over the world, and I think we should have learned that lesson by now…

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more. And so when, in 30 years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say, “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

Well, Vietnam has had a turning, but not the one that Kerry envisioned. It has turned back to capitalism for the most part, and seems very very happy to do so. Apparently those peasants weren’t so content just to work in the rice paddies, and seem to have somehow divined the difference between Communism and, if not democracy exactly, then at least capitalism. Turns out that they cared.

And they really, really like Americans. From Totten:

Vietnamese anti-Americanism scarcely exists. What we call the Vietnam War, and what they call the American War, casts no shadow””especially not in the South, which fought on the American side, but not even in Hanoi, a city heavily bombed by the United States. I saw no evidence that the U.S. (or anyone else) ever bombed Hanoi. All the damage has apparently been repaired, and most Vietnamese are under the age of 30””too young to remember it, anyway…

Today, both the Vietnamese people and government””in the north as well as the south””view Americans as allies.

Capitalist allies.

Let’s try to get Carly Fiorina into the debates

The New Neo Posted on by

Carly Fiorina may not end up being the Republican nominee, but she’s one of the most impressive candidates around in terms of her ability to respond to questions in a forthright and cogent manner, state conservative principles, and do it all with serenity and a smile while never shying away from pointed criticism of her opponents—and that includes the best way of dealing with the record of Hillary Clinton that I’ve seen.

And of course, in this age of identity politics, it would be good to have Fiorina on the debate stage as an example of a conservative Republican woman.

But she’s never held political office and has little name recognition. I keep mentioning her to people as someone to watch, and virtually no one has ever heard of her (I know a lot of LIVs). And yet I keep seeing comments all around the blogosphere from people who say the equivalent of “I had never heard of her before, but the more I listen to her the more I like her.”

So here’s my suggestion: send as many people as you think can stomach it a little blurb about her and a link to a short video showing her in action. You can choose you own video—there are many on YouTube. But I suggest this, this, this, or this.

I also suggest sending the email to liberals, too, as long as they’re not way on the left, and to any low information voters you know. Women are probably particularly good recipients, since I think many are interested in a woman candidate but aren’t as keen as they’d hoped to be about Hillary. Fiorina is the female anti-Hillary.

[ADDENDUM: And then there’s the old tried-and-true, donate money, as well as the Facebook “like.” Also, you might want to urge other people who like Carly to be part of the email campaign.]

The Planned Parenthood videos

The New Neo Posted on by

The Planned Parenthood videos have brought home an ugly reality that has less to do with Planned Parenthood and its policies and more to do with abortion itself.

Abortion, both legal and illegal (and I remember the days of illegal abortions quite well), rests on some very harsh facts: a human fetus is being killed through the decision of its mother. I’m not debating the pros and cons of abortion itself here (I’ve expressed my views already in the post I just linked to, and in others).

Abortion not only rests on that fact of destruction of a human fetus, but what makes most women who have an abortion able to do so is denial (partial or complete) of that fact and all it entails. And the Planned Parenthood videos, in discussing the dismembered body parts of aborted fetuses, rips apart (I use that metaphor purposely) that denial.

The denial has reached such epic proportions that writers such as Janet Harris advocate for the triviality and ease of the moral decisions involved in abortion, because the procedure can more easily be promoted if women are able to block out what is actually happening. I have never said—and am not saying here—that a decision about an unwanted pregnancy is either easy or simple. It is extremely serious, and one of the functions of the Planned Parenthood videos is to drive that point home through their graphic nature as well as the repugnantly cavalier attitude of the health professionals who are speaking on them.

And another thing about Donald Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

You may notice that I haven’t covered the Trump phenomenon too much, although I wrote a couple of articles about the issue of illegal aliens and how many crimes they are committing.

But in some fundamental way Trump doesn’t interest me. Right now he’s riding high, and if he wins the Republican nomination (which I don’t think he will) he’ll be interesting me big time, although I will see it as a bad bad (and losing) move for Republicans in a year when getting a very good candidate in there and actually winning is of paramount importance. Trump is not that candidate.

But I think I understand the Trump phenomenon. He channels the very considerable anger on the right at the way things have been going during the Obama years and even prior to that. To me, he seems like a version of Ross Perot, albeit a very different one. Perot was a successful businessman, a little wacky but full of energy and bold and amusing talk, and he (like Trump) drew the votes of people who were dissatisfied with the whole political shebang and all the PC tiptoeing around that most candidates feel they must perform.

He also made it possible for Bill Clinton to be elected president by acting as a spoiler, as these candidates tend to do.

But oh, he was colorful (although if you look at Bill’s face, he is not particularly amused):

I wrote a post in 2011 about Trump, and here are some excerpts from it:

Commenter “Daniel in Brookline” calls Trump a gadfly. It’s a word I’ve thought of often in connection with him and the Obama presidency, one that was originally used by Socrates to describe himself.

Here’s an explanation of what Socrates meant when he used the term [punctuation and spelling corrected]:

Socrates liken[ed] himself to a GADFLY (a horsefly). Just as a gadfly constantly agitates a horse, preventing it from becoming sluggish and going to sleep, so too Socrates, by moving through the city stirring up conversations in the marketplace, prevents the city from becoming sluggish and careless and intolerant.

It fits pretty well, although Trump’s most assuredly no Socrates. More and more, he also reminds me of a jester, although not one directly in the employ of the Obama court.

Why a jester? Well, he combs his hair funny. But mostly it’s because he fulfills this function of the traditional jester:

In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters, who sometimes dressed as other servants were dressed, but generally wore a motley (i.e. parti-coloured) coat, hood with ass’s (i.e. donkey) ears or a red-flannel coxcomb and bells. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests.

Jester/fools could say things no one else could say, ask questions no one else could ask, because they had little to lose and were given license to tweak. Trump has already voiced the unspeakable birther concerns, and now he gets into the very un-PC question of how Obama gained admittance to the two Ivies, Columbia and Harvard.

The post then segued into a discussion of those issues. But the description of Trump stands, I think, although I’d amend it now to say that Trump is more the GOP’s jester at the moment. By “jester,” I don’t mean to make a mockery of him, because (as the above quotes indicate) a jester’s function was not solely a light one, there was a weightier function and purpose to what they did. The same for Trump vis a vis the Republicans.

Time has been kinder…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to Jenny than to Oliver, don’t you think? At 76 and 74:

lovestory

I hated that movie, and I’m not the least bit sorry.

Actually, I’m not that keen on the play “Love Letters” by A. R. Gurney, either, the vehicle in which they’re about to star. I’ve seen his play “The Cocktail Hour” too, and was underwhelmed.

Is it real or is it Memorex?

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night as I was getting ready for bed I saw a little black speck floating around in the left side of my vision and I thought Great, another floater to add to the collection.

I’ve got a lot of floaters in both eyes, and have ever since I was in my 40s. Most of the time I can ignore them, although they are more prominent under certain light conditions. It’s a bit like looking through a slightly dirty windshield. Although it’s really not all that bad, I certainly have no desire for it to get worse, and I was worried last night that that had happened.

Until a few moments later, when I realized that the little black speck was a tiny flying insect (perhaps a gnat?). It was external to me, not internal, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Sometimes I get fooled like that.

As a result of my back injury I have some nerve damage in both feet. For years it was really, really bad, featuring a host of what’s called paresthesias, which are strange sensations that sometimes feel like something external—heat, cold, burning—but that actually arise from disordered nerves rather than anything that’s happening out there in the world.

I had several in particular that were very, very odd. One was a sensation of extreme heat, so much so that my feet would turn bright red and even felt hot to the touch, whether or not the outside weather was hot or cold. Another sensation was of hypersensitivity—I had to wear very smooth socks, for example, because any other kind felt terribly scratchy, almost like straw. Another sensation was the feeling that I had a blister on my foot, but when I would visually examine the spot there was nothing to be seen. One of the oddest phantom feelings was that there was a small piece of Saran Wrap clinging to the bottom of my bare foot, sticking to it annoyingly. But when I’d bend down to find it and peel it off, there was nothing there but my foot itself.

So I learned to ignore it. And then one day, after enduring the annoying sensation for several hours, I bent down to look at it and discovered that there was a small piece of Saran Wrap clinging to my foot.

What does the hard left have in mind for America?

The New Neo Posted on by

The other day there was an intense discussion in the “leadership” thread about tyranny. It culminated in commenter “The Other Chuck” writing this. The first part (in italics) is a quote from a previous commenter:

[If President Lincoln had actually been a Tyrant he] would have killed all of the Southern leaders, every single family clan, and most of the ones who thought Lincoln a Tyrant, would be buried in the ground. Just as Hussein is planning to do and already has.

Obama/Hussein as you call him, is planning mass execution and “already has”? My God, you are so extreme and bonkers I’m surprised that you haven’t self-destructed by now.

“The Other Chuck” then announced his attention to stop commenting at the blog.

People come and go here all the time, as they wish. But I think the substantive issue “Chuck” raised is an important one. I don’t think Obama has murdered anyone. But my answer is that tyrants—true tyrants—rarely advertise what they will do in advance of getting power, and even in their initial years in power they don’t necessarily resort to violence if they don’t have to.

That’s what makes it difficult sometimes to tell in advance what a person in power will do, and how far that person will go in terms of brutality until he/she does it. The world is replete with instances of this, but the ones that come immediately to mind for me are Castro and Ayatollah Khomeini (I wrote about the promises of the latter, and how different they were from what he actually did when he got the chance, here). And you won’t find Hitler’s name on any orders for death camps, either.

It’s not common for leaders to comes to power saying they are going to murder a lot of people, especially in their own country. No, the Reign of Terror happens afterwards, sometimes a substantial number of years afterwards.

And such things certainly were contemplated by the 60s radicals described in this famous tape:

Note, also, Grathwohl’s mention of “Columbia” as a training ground for radicals.

However, those events were about fifty years ago, and the sort of violence described in the tape hasn’t happened. In my opinion, that’s because the tactics of the left changed, not its willingness to do whatever it might take.

Instead of the re-education camps Grathwohl describes in the tape, 60s radicals such as Bill Ayers turned nearly the entire country’s educational system into one big re-education camp. And then there are the training programs that have become rather commonplace, such as the movements to educate about the dangers of “white privilege” and micro-aggressions and the like. Leftist radicals came to understand that the sort of violent measures described on the tape would not be required because their aims could be reached in more peaceful ways that would be both subtle and effective, and would mostly occur under the radar, forestalling the “counter-revolution” until the damage was already done.

I think the Left here is still capable of almost anything. The real question is whether “almost anything” will be necessary. I think that sort of violence will most likely not be necessary, although I believe it would be instituted if it were deemed necessary.

It’s a kind of fire and ice proposition, an Orwellian Nineteen Eighty-Four versus Huxleyian Brave New World dichotomy. For years now I’ve thought that Huxley was the better prognosticator for how statism would triumph, at least in the West.