On the silence of the liberal media

The New Neo Posted on by

From Roger L. Simon at PJ:

Obama is beside the point. They [the liberal media] don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it.

So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that?

No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.

I sort of agree and sort of disagree. I think the MSM is deeply disappointed in Obama, and deeply reluctant to say so. But I doubt they’re as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question themselves and their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system. That takes a great deal of courage and integrity, particularly for people with entrenched and vested interests—such as the Times editors and their ilk, as Roger points out—who would therefore be extremely reluctant to do it.

So no, my hunch is that they’re not especially ashamed of themselves. And I’m pretty sure there’s very little real soul searching going on, except perhaps to try to figure out how better to engineer things for Hillary or Elizabeth Warren or whoever emerges as the next liberal nominee.

No, I’m afraid what the Times is doing is ass-covering. They can’t think of a way to spin Obama’s abysmal failures any more (they do have certain standards, although those standards are pretty low), so they are silent.

They’re also very accustomed to setting the news agenda, and think they can get away with ignoring news they don’t like. That Times slogan “All the news that’s fit to print” takes on new meaning, doesn’t it? Up till now I’d always assumed they were conveying the idea that they cover the news thoroughly (they’d like us to think they cover it objectively, too, but that’s an absurdity). But did you ever wonder what sort of news isn’t “fit to print”? Why, it’s news that would hurt liberals and help conservatives, that’s what news. And it doesn’t matter if that news constitutes the biggest scandal since Watergate—potentially even bigger than Watergate.

At the time of Watergate, I never for a moment stopped to wonder what would have happened had Nixon been a Democrat and done exactly the same thing. Well, now I don’t have to wonder.

[ADDENDUM: Please see this Onion article for some comic relief:

More than a week after President Barack Obama’s cold-blooded killing of a local couple, members of the American news media admitted Tuesday that they were still trying to find the best angle for covering the gruesome crime…

“What exactly is the news hook here?” asked Rick Kaplan, executive producer of the CBS Evening News. “Is this an upbeat human-interest story about a ‘day in the life’ of a bloodthirsty president who likes to kill people? Or is it more of an examination of how Obama’s unusual upbringing in Hawaii helped to shape the way he would one day viciously butcher two helpless citizens in their own home?”

“Or maybe the story is just that murder is cool now,” Kaplan continued. “I don’t know. There are a million different angles on this one.”]

You can bet on it: the left will be exploiting the rifts on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

And they’ll be laughing all the way. Be on the lookout for it.

That’s the main reason I’ve written so much about those flyers and robocalls in Mississippi. My primary (pun intended) motivation is not to defend the Cochran campaign. I’m keen on neither Cochran nor Barbour, although in the general I would vote for Cochran over the Democrat if I lived in Mississippi. But I probably would have voted for McDaniel in the primary.

You may not care who put out either the flyer or the robocalls, because you’re mad at Cochran for cynically reaching out to the Democrats in order to win, Democrats who will almost certainly not vote for him in the general. You may also not like him because he emphasizes how much federal money he’ll get for the state, which is hardly a conservative stance. Of course, that’s usually a way to win in a general election—it’s just human nature—and conservatives in a state like Mississippi need to face the possibility that without such a promise, the race might go to a Democrat, who will most definitely promise it and will deliver if he/she can.

Now, conservatives usually respond that it doesn’t matter; if Republicans have to make such promises in order to win races, then there’s no difference between the two parties. But you know what? There is a difference, especially on major issues such as appointing judges, and foreign policy, and what legislation is brought up for a vote (Harry Reid as Majority Leader means all legislation dear to conservatives will be automatically blocked).

And so another big question that races such as the one in Mississippi present is: what to do about certain facts of human nature? Conservatives often blame liberals for ignoring human nature when they plan their Utopian state. But conservatives ignore it, too, just in a different way. Conservatives often want people to be nobler than they are (“Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above”), and want the majority of people not to gravitate to a candidate who brings pork to their state. I agree; I’d really, really, really like that, too. But I don’t think it’s true.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I think that the in-fighting between so-called establishment Republicans and conservatives, while ideologically understandable (I share it, and usually am on the Tea Party side), is strategically destructive in the short haul. And I think this country is very very much in danger in the short haul, and if we lose in 2014 and 2016, you can just about kiss goodbye any hopes of saving the rule of law. And that will make it harder in the long haul.

And so I am very discouraged by the eagerness of so many conservatives to hop on the bandwagon of hating Cochran and Barbour for these calls and flyers. The left really, really, really likes you to do that, wants you to spread those rumors, and would especially like for conservatives in Mississippi to stay home in November. Unfortunately, that would hurt all of you and everything you stand for.

The left is laughing at you. I continue to think they engineered those flyers and robocalls, knowing full well what the reaction of the right would be, and I think it highly probably that you are being played. In addition, looking beyond the Mississippi race, I don’t think enough people on the right are on the lookout for Democratic dirty tricks, and that the right will be played again because of it.

By the way, Democratic groups have claimed that they are the ones who put out those anti-Tea Party flyers and robocalls, for what it’s worth. Believe me, Cochran and Barbour did enough for you to be angry at them without attributing these particular things to them when you lack knowledge of whether they did it or not. Why not stick to the facts, to what you actually know that Cochran and Barbour did?

And remember that, if you’re looking for angels in politics, you’re not going to get them. You’ll probably get Democrats instead.

[NOTE: Sometimes I see this argument, which we’ve had before, as the one between Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. I see myself as Panza, by the way, in case that’s not already abundantly clear.

Also, a lot of you will say that you’ve heard the points I’m making before, and you are heartily sick of them and of compromising your principles over and over and getting kicked in the teeth. But it doesn’t make the arguments any less true or less urgent. Remember, also, that I’m talking about the general, not the primary. In the primary, unless a Tea Party candidate is a nut case, I would almost always support that person.]

On the fifth anniversary of FredHJr’s death

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: For those of you who don’t know who FredHJr was, please see this and this, as well as these.]

Unbelievable that it’s been five years since commenter FredHJr died suddenly and tragically.

It was very tragic for his family. But tragic for this blog, too, because he was an invaluable and irreplaceable member of our community, a “changer” who knew a lot about the Left and was a keen observer of politics, history, religion, culture—of life itself. I still think about him often, wondering what he’d have to say about everything that’s happened in these last five years.

One thing I don’t think he’d say, though, is that he was surprised by any of it. In light of this, I offer the following excerpts from some of Fred’s comments here. Note the dates, which show how early he caught on. Fred had a succinct and distinctive way of putting things, didn’t he?

This comment is from October 18, 2008, just a few weeks before Obama was elected president for the first time:

It’s the Marxist/Leninist ethics of expediency. No regrets. Whatever it takes to discredit anything the other side does and excuse the sins of your own side.

Part of Neo’s original point was that this reveals a lot about who is about to take power and how they will wield it against the rest of us. They get away with it and many will not at all be troubled by it because they are shaped by the post-modernism, cultural Marxism that they imbibed during their formative and educational experience. If we as a people cannot name this accurately and expunge its corrosive influence over our lives, then down into the wages of perdition and disaster we go.

This one was written just a couple of days later:

I will tell you from personal experience of the depths of deceitfulness of the Marxists. From about 1977 until 1987 I was an academic Marxist and only rubbed elbows with the activist kind on an occasional demonstration. I was into books and theory, debating within my own mind the various critiques that the respective positions would level at each other. The few times I was gathered on those very social of occasions that demonstrations are, when I would try to strike up a conversation with others, the activist leaders would INSTRUCT ME to never identify myself as a Marxist. I was never to use the word “socialism” and never to have conversations about socialist theory. I was instructed to refer to myself and the others as “Progressives.” I was admonished a few times when I more or less did whatever the hell I wanted and said whatever I wanted to say.

I had violated a speech code. And did so flagrantly. I was a headstrong, stubborn young man who also was not fond of being deceptive. I am still that way, although I am now 53 and more inclined to keep my mouth shut when in the company of people who would take a dim view of my being a traitor to the Left…

I wish I could scream into these kids’ brains that they are being lured on by enormously evil liars.

I am not afraid of the Obamabots for calling Obama a socialist. I know the provenance of his ideas thoroughly and I know exactly who the formative influences were in his settled thinking. They were Socialists and they espouse socialism.

About a week later, on October 28, 2008. The election is getting closer:

Barack Obama is not a natural leader. Community organizers are facilitators and manipulators. Manipulators may try to be leaders, but they lack a core of courage and integrity and enables them to make difficult choices and sacrifices of a high moral nature.

Obama is part of a nexus of interests. What the American dopes who will put him in office are getting is a NETWORK of alliances and interests, running the gamut from Finance (Soros) to academia to media to law. Thus far, in order to appeal to the Middle Muddle he has been packaged as a moderate or centrist. But once in office the venomous swarm of this network will burst out of the nest and devour the host. You wait and see. And I’m not eager for the moment to say “I told you so.” I really would it be the case that it never happens at all. Why? Because the lives of tens of millions of human beings hang in the balance of this and mushroom clouds on the horizon. I put the value of human life far above my own frustrated rantings.

On the same day:

Those who think that the media does not have any ideological agenda invested in Obama’s candidacy, save their own pecuniary interests, is not familiar with the academic culture in the universities out of which the journalists come to the real world.

They won’t savage Obama’s failures or the crises that will attend. They will try to spin it so as to minimize the damage.

On the next day:

The real Obama will stand up starting in January. I find that to be rather depressing, given what I know him to be and what Pelosi wants.

I did the due diligence that my vote requires. It isn’t my fault that over half the nation was stuck on stupid. I am especially disappointed in two demographics: the college age crowd and single, white females. They want socialism, and get it they shall.

This one is from a couple of weeks after the 2008 election:

The Big Epistemological Flaw in Socialist Thought:

Look up the technical term from philosophy called “telos.” It means the logical endpoint of the cosmology inherent in any body of thought. The telos of socialism is Utopia. And that’s the flaw. Originally, when I was a Marxist and Liberation Theology adherent, it was the Pelagian vision which attracted me. But Michael Novak saw it right away back in the Seventies and published many articles wherein he critiqued socialism as incompatible with human nature. His critiques were the ones that I always kept in the back of my mind, because I was always striving to see if there was a way in which human nature could be malleable enough to change and be compatible with collectivist goals. It could not be done, and I tried investigating every conceivable angle. The coup de grace came AFTER I broke with the Left in 1987, which break happened because I came to realize that the socialist experiments before my eyes did not create the New Moral Man. What I later did was some intensive reading into human psychology, genetics, and neuroscience and discovered that evil will always be there. Selfishness will always be there. There will always be sociopaths, messing up the tidy plans to make Heaven come down to Earth. Evil has an organic basis. There is a titanic cosmic battle between the Creator and The Evil One. This thing is way bigger than we are and what our minds can comprehend.

Right around the time of Obama’s first inauguration (Fred sometimes referred to Obama as “Obonga” in a reference to his pot-smoking youth):

Sometimes I think that with Obonga’s ascendancy we are reaping divine retribution, being given over to our worst impulses, for the eight years we savaged this good and decent man [Bush]. We were lucky to have him at that moment in history.

I must admit that I am rather pessimistic these days. In my Leftist days, years ago, I was anthropologically an optimist. When I left the Left I was realist. And now I am pessimistic about humanity and about the long term endurance of our civilization when I look at what most of humanity has done to [Bush]. It shows most people have very bad judgment and even worse morals.

In June of 2009, three days before Fred’s death:

It’s in the open now, what BarryO is up to. He is going for it all, and going to govern from the Hard Left.

All of this is no surprise to me. Those of us who did our homework knew it would be this way.

Krauthammer says the same thing I’ve been saying for months: don’t pay attention to what BarryO says; pay attention to what he DOES.

Same day:

The only kind of enemy that Obama is capable of waging war against are us capitalist pig dog conservatives. Otherwise, he’s a pussy. And with his internal enemies, even there he uses proxies to do the dirty work.

This is a guy who does not like to get his hands dirty. He is not a leader in any way that I can discern. Which is why I think he will be even more unpopular with the military than he was during the election campaign.

If you were a foreign enemy you would think that manna from heaven just dropped into your lap, complete with honey coating.

Posted the next day, this one refers to Obama’s Cairo speech:

There are overtones of appeasement in Obonga’s speech. You can almost picture him as the dog that gets on its back and shows its belly in submission.

I’ll stop there. These are chosen somewhat randomly, as you can see, because they cluster in time. Almost everything I looked at that Fred had written was on target, but I thought these in particular showed how early and how well he understood what was happening.

RIP Fred, and may your family be comforted in their grief. We miss you.

[NOTE: There are other commenters here who may have died, and I would like to mention them too, but for no one else did I actually get official word of the person’s death. One commenter who comes to mind is “strcpy,” who announced that he was very ill and then disappeared shortly thereafter, about three years ago. I wrote him an email but never heard back, and I fear he’s gone. But I don’t know for sure.

There may be others, as well. I wouldn’t necessarily find out; sometimes people just stop commenting, but it stands to reason some of them will have died. So I’ll take this opportunity to say RIP for all of them, whoever they may be.]

Obama demonstrates Alinsky’s rules number 5 and 6

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh, those stupid climate deniers, they think the moon is made of green cheese:

For the White House it’s about getting the liberal base excited for the midterms. It’s a confidence that climate change has shifted in voters’ minds. It’s a broader play against congressional Republicans as obstructionists.

And for Obama, it’s a good time. Wednesday night, Obama ripped into his opponents in front of a League of Conservation Voters crowd so friendly that some were pumping their arms in the air as he spoke.

“It’s pretty rare that you encounter people who say that the problem of carbon pollution is not a problem,” Obama said. “In most communities and workplaces, they may not know how big a problem it is, they may not know exactly how it works, they may doubt they can do something about it. Generally they don’t just say, ”˜No I don’t believe anything scientists say.’ Except, where?” he said, waiting for the more than accommodating crowd to call back, “Congress!”

Obama smiled ”” not his big toothy self-satisfied grin, but his stick-it-in-the-ribs smirk.

The rules:

* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”

This approach works, by the way. Most liberals I know think Republicans are scientific troglodytes.

SCOTUS rules against Obama’s recess appointments: so what?

The New Neo Posted on by

Unanimously.

That unanimity is highly unusual, and it shows how very egregious Obama’s actions were when he made appointments to the National Labor Relations Board while the Senate was in what’s known as pro forma sessions, and tried to treat it as though that constituted a recess.

It’s a little bit of a check to Obama’s power grabs. Emphasis on that “little bit,” because the irony is that it doesn’t really matter any more. The Democrats finessed that, playing the Republicans for fools for trusting them.

Here’s how it went down:

[Canning’s] impact was lessened, though, when the Senate Republicans agreed last July to allow a full slate of five of President Obama’s nominees to the NLRB as part of a deal to avert a change in the chamber’s filibuster rules. Big Labor had leaned hard on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to confront the GOP over the NLRB vacancies.

Reid then went ahead and eliminated the Senate filibuster for most presidential nominations anyway in November, ensuring that a minority of 40 lawmakers cannot prevent a vote.

The two actions effectively addressed the two major issues at the heart of the case: whether the NLRB had a working quorum and whether the president can get his appointees considered by the Senate.

The Supreme Court’s ruling does settle some of the constitutional issues surrounding presidential appointments as well as the validity of the disputed NLRB’s rulings. But the things that Big Labor really wanted, it already has.

The cynic in me wonders whether, if these things hadn’t happened and the SCOTUS ruling mattered more, the liberal judges would have ruled as they did, or whether they would have found a way to give Obama what he wanted.

And of course, if Republicans get control of the Senate in 2014 and then the presidency in 2016, the Democrats may regret the end of the filibuster for appointments.

If.

More thoughts on Mississippi, the flyer, Cochran, and politics

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to clarify something about my reaction to the Mississippi primary campaign, and about my reaction to people’s reactions to it.

I agree with those of you who say that the Cochran campaign acted badly, whether it put that flyer out or not. But I definitely care who put out the flyer, because I like to base my opinions on facts, not suppositions, as much as possible.

I realize I’ll probably never know who put out the flyer. But I emphasized the question in earlier posts because most people I’ve seen who are angry about Cochran and the campaign seem most incensed about that flyer, the one directly trashing the Tea Party.

And more importantly, most people seem to have assumed they knew who put it out and who made the robocalls even though it is possible that they are being manipulated by the left to think even worse of Cochran and company than they already did. If you’re not aware that the left could be purposely widening the rifts on the right in order to help engineer their own victory, then I think you should start looking out for it. Whether it happened in Mississippi or not, it definitely happens.

The primary rules in Mississippi allow crossover votes. Sometimes in a situation like that the opposing party tells its voters to vote in the other party’s primary in order to manipulate the election to override the wishes of that other party. In the case of this particular campaign, something different seems to have happened: Cochran used the open primary rules as a way to appeal directly to the interests of Democratic voters in getting benefits from the federal government, not just what you’d call “pork” but also things such as federal aid to education. Whether this was right or wrong, I submit that it was inevitable that it would happen some day, given the open primary rules. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened before (and maybe it has happened before; I certainly haven’t followed every open primary closely enough to say).

The Cochran campaign in Mississippi directly courted the support of the Democratic Party in the state. But the Democrats in Mississippi had their own independent reasons for wanting to give Cochran an assist, even without his asking. In Mississippi, the Republican ordinarily wins. In this race, Cochran was unquestionably the Republican most likely to support continuing services the Democrats wanted continued. Tea Party candidate McDaniel, if elected, would be more likely to try to stop those services. And since one of them, Cochran or McDaniel, was almost certainly going to win in the general, Democrats quite naturally wanted it to be Cochran. So some of these things—the robocalls, the flyers, and the rest—could easily have been put out by Democrats on their own. And even if Cochran had wanted to stop them (and I’m not saying that he did want to stop them), he probably couldn’t have done so, because they had their own agenda.

Cochran should have condemned them, of course. I’m going to assume he didn’t do so, because I haven’t read anything about it. If he had condemned them, though, he would have alienated the very people he needed in order to win. That’s the ugly reality of the situation.

I have never understood the rationale for open primaries. It has long seemed to me that they are simply invitations for various kinds of manipulations and shenanigans of a devious nature (perhaps that’s the reason both parties seem to like them so much). I expect that politicians, being politicians, will take advantage of those opportunities. I would love to see each state close its primaries, although that wouldn’t eliminate all the problems; politicians are creative about finding their way around things, and where there’s a will there’s a way. But although Cochran and McDaniel should have had to duke it out about issues that would appeal to their Republican constituents only, the primary rules in Mississippi are unlikely to be changed in the foreseeable future.

That’s the source of my frustration, and has been for many years. Politicians are never going to be angels or anything like it. Most of them are going to be conniving, power-hungry narcissists, and if they don’t start out that way they will end up that way. So I’m for changing the rules to make it harder for them to screw around with things.

None of this would make me want to run out and vote for Cochran in the general if I lived in Mississippi, to say the least. But I would probably do it rather than allow his Democratic opponent to go to the Senate. The stakes are just too high right now, and the danger of letting the Democrats keep the Senate too great. It is counterproductive to reward Democrats for what Cochran did.

I don’t pretend that it’s an easy decision. Those who would like smaller government (and I count myself among them) are in a bind. We don’t want to be enablers of the likes of Cochran. I say to fight them tooth and nail for the nomination. But fighting them too hard once they are nominated opens the door to something even worse.

I’ve got a question about that anti-McDaniel flyer accusing the Tea Party of suppressing the black vote

The New Neo Posted on by

Those of you who’ve followed the Republican primary in Mississippi are upset about Cochran’s outreach to Democrats. I agree it was a bad move. A great deal of the more intense anger about his campaign focuses on this abominable flyer supposedly put out by the Cochran forces:

flyer1

I have a question: do you know who put out that flyer? I have found not one scintilla of information to tell me. It was not Cochran’s official campaign. It is not signed by any organization at all, not a PAC or anyone else.

Perhaps Cochran was indeed behind it—which would make his actions even worse, because the thing is awful. But I would like to know who’s behind it. Because when I first saw it, it immediately occurred to me that it is just the sort of thing the left would put out, for two purposes:

(1) They didn’t want to face the possibility of the more conservative candidate McDaniel winning the nomination and quite possibly the election; they’d rather work with the more moderate Cochran, so they would favor anything that would help nominate Cochran instead.

(2) Making people on the right think that Cochran put out the flyer would sow tremendous dissension within the Republican Party and hurt Cochran in the general if he had managed to win the nomination.

The flyer is a win/win for the left, and it wouldn’t have been an expensive operation at all. It also uses language that just happens to have the ring of the left, “The Tea Party intends to prevent blacks from voting on Tuesday.” So I welcome any information about who actually put it out.

Again, it might indeed have been Cochran’s people, or supporters of him, which would have been dreadful. But at the moment I am very very suspicious that it may have other origins, and that, if so, the right is being played.

The disaster that is Obama’s foreign policy

The New Neo Posted on by

Be afraid. Be very afraid (from Walter Russell Mead):

A group [ISIS] more radical than al-Qaeda, better organized, better financed, commanding the loyalty of thousands of dedicated fanatics including many with Western and even U.S. passports? And this group now controls some of the most strategic territory at the heart of the Middle East?

Welcome to President Obama’s brave new world. After six years in office pursuing strategies he believed would tame the terror threat and doing his best to reassure the American people that the terror situation was under control, with the “remnants” of al-Qaeda skittering into the shadows like roaches when the exterminator arrives, Obama now confronts the most powerful and hostile jihadi movement of modern times, a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes.

Please read the whole thing.

As I wrote yesterday:

Some will say “Let them kill each other; it was bound to happen.” I say this was not inevitable at all, and an ounce of prevention would have been worth a megaton of a cure that won’t be provided anyway…

What’s more, ISIS has designs on us. Make no mistake about it. And [victory in Iraq] empowers them greatly in terms of money, support, arms, people, and territory.

Now connect up Mead’s essay with this article by Michael Totten, featuring an interview with Lee Smith about Smith’s recent book The Consequences of Syria. Here’s Smith:

My essay is an account of the Syrian civil war, which began in March 2011 as a peaceful protest movement. As Syrian President Bashar al-Assad fired on unarmed opposition members, the uprising eventually became a rebellion as the opposition took up arms, and the conflict escalated into a full-scale civil war. That’s one aspect of the book.

The other part of the book concerns the Obama administration’s Syria policy, which has been one of neglect and mendacity. The administration has repeatedly misled the American public, the American media, and allies around the world about its intentions…

As I explain in The Consequences of Syria, there’s evidence suggesting that the administration feared that helping topple Assad, an ally of Iran, might have angered the Iranians and pushed them away from the negotiating table, and getting a deal with Iran was the White House’s chief goal in the Middle East…

It’s hard not to conclude that the administration’s Syria policy is a sub-set of its Iran policy. Many people were baffled for a long time, including me, that the president didn’t seem to see Syria strategically, as a way to weaken Iran. Retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis said that toppling Bashar al-Assad would constitute the most severe blow against the Iranian regime in 25 years. A number of administration officials seemed to recognize the same thing””from former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and ex-CIA director David Petraeus. Only the president seemed to not recognize that or to see Syria in a strategic framework. What we now realize is that the president does see Syria in a strategic framework. He sees that the Syrian regime is an important ally of the Iranians and doesn’t want to be seen toppling the regime for fear of angering the Iranians…

What we’re seeing instead is a United States in retreat in the Middle East. So I don’t see what the accommodation would look like. It’s not a grand bargain with Iran, but an American fire sale, with the US virtually giving away its assets. The US is retreating from the region and leaving it in Iranian hands…

When people worry that Sunni Islamists want to create a caliphate in the Middle East they seem to forget that we already have a clerical regime in Iran. What they’re afraid might happen has already happened. And the concern coming out of Tehran isn’t sharia, but the fact that a nuclear weapons program in the hands of an expansionist regime gives them a dangerous say in the flow of energy resources through the Persian Gulf. They don’t have to actually use a bomb to destabilize the region and raise the price of energy around the world. That’s the danger””that Iranian hegemony in the Persian Gulf will affect how Americans, and our trading partners, live.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is an already-existing Islamist power, with an army, a navy, an air force, a ballistic missile program, a nuclear weapons program. They have a diplomatic corps as well as a terrorist apparatus. Al Qaeda doesn’t have any of that. Iran is the key strategic threat in the Middle East for American interests and American allies…

These are the consequences of Syria. Iranian expansionism. Destabilization of the region though transfers of population. And a test case for American power.

The administration has failed that test. Our friends are confused, angry, and perhaps destabilized while our enemies are emboldened and strengthened.

The Mead essay focuses on the rise of ISIS and the dangers it presents to us. The Smith essay does the same for Iran. Trouble us, they’re both right: both entities are getting stronger and both are very dangerous to us and the world.

If either of them win we’re in big, big trouble. But isn’t it inevitable that one will win? People who say “stay out of it” think somehow they’ll destroy each other. But I can’t offhand think of a war where that has happened. Ordinarily there are winners and losers. It seems that, whatever happens in the Middle East as a result of all this, we are the losers.

And it was a self-inflicted wound.

The other IRS case

The New Neo Posted on by

You may have heard that the IRS was fined $50,000 for improperly releasing to the left the names of donors to a pro-traditional-marriage group called NOM in 2012, material that ended up being published and used in the 2012 election.

Sounds like a victory over the IRS, doesn’t it? If you think that, think again. This case shows how hard it is to prove anything against the IRS, and what techniques the IRS and the Obama administration’s DOJ will use to defend the IRS.

The law in this case allows harsh penalties:

Unauthorized disclosure of confidential tax information is a felony offense that can result in five years in prison, but the Department of Justice did not bring criminal charges.

So forget criminal charges, which would be the only thing that could deter such actions in the future.

And why would the IRS care about paying the plaintiffs a piddly $50K for actual rather than punitive damages? That’s chump change to the IRS—and what’s more, unless there’s something I’m not yet aware of, it seems to me that it is actually you and me, the taxpayers, who pay the IRS’s bills. What other money does the IRS have? Why should we pay any penalties whatsoever for IRS mistakes, whether they be intentional crimes or unintentional violations? Such a remedy for this offense is absurd and downright Orwellian.

In addition, the plaintiffs in a case such as NOM’s are required to prove actual intent rather inadvertent release of the confidential taxpayer information. In the NOM case, it appears that an IRS worker released information about NOM’s membership in response to a request by a gay activist named Meisel (such requests are legal, but the information concerning donor names is supposed to be redacted by the IRS and wasn’t). The information was then widely published by the left and used to campaign against Romney. At issue in the suit was who at the IRS sent Meisel the information, and whether that person’s failure to redact was an error or deliberate:

The IRS admitted that a staffer had improperly disclosed an unredacted copy of the tax information, but a federal district court judge dismissed most of NOM’s case earlier this month. Judge James Cacheris of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a June 3 opinion that NOM offered no evidence that the information was willfully disclosed or the result of gross negligence, and thus the organization could not recover punitive damages.

One thing that made it difficult if not impossible to prove willfulness was the fact that Meisel took the Fifth:

Testifying under oath in a deposition as part of the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, Meisel invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate himself and declined to disclose the identity of his “conduit.”

To get at that fact, Eastman said, the National Organization for Marriage has asked Attorney General Eric Holder to grant immunity from prosecution to Meisel.

Do not—I repeat, do not—sit on a hot stove waiting for that to happen.

So we see how it goes: tell the plaintiffs they must prove malicious intent on the part of the IRS without access to the ability to find out the relevant facts they would need to prove it, take the Fifth, have the DOJ refuse to do anything about it, and voila! Mission accomplished.

I’m curious, too whether that IRS worker kept a record of the transaction, and if that record was swallowed by a timely computer crash. I predict that we’ll never know.

Cochran’s win in Mississippi: what does it mean?

The New Neo Posted on by

I hadn’t closely followed the Mississippi Republican primary, even though I certainly had been aware that it involved a Tea Party candidate, McDaniel, challenging the incumbent Cochran. I tend to follow the old Buckley adage to support the most conservative candidate I think is viable—that is, who actually has a decent chance to win in the general. But I also know that can be very very hard to determine.

But I also am strongly against open primaries such as Mississippi’s, where members of the other party can cross over and influence the election. I’m especially stumped when I try to understand what the results of such an election might mean. How many Democrats voted in Mississippi yesterday, and why, and how did it influence Cochran’s win and McDaniel’s defeat, and what does that tell us for the future of the Republican Party? Darned if I know.

Josh Kraushaar has given it a go:

There was clear evidence that Cochran’s attempt to boost Democratic African-American turnout paid off in a big way. In Jackson’s Hinds County, where two-thirds of the population is black, Cochran won 73 percent of the vote, 7 points higher than his performance in the primary. Turnout was up significantly in heavily African-American counties in the Mississippi Delta, like Quitman, Sharkey, Humphrey, and Coahoma, where Cochran increased his primary-election margins over McDaniel. Over 347,000 voters cast ballots in the runoff, a higher total than in the primary””marking the first time in 30 years that has happened in any Senate race…

During the runoff, Cochran made overt appeals to the state’s sizable African-American electorate, including several television ads featuring the senator campaigning with black voters. The New York Times reported that the leading pro-Cochran super PAC, Mississippi Conservatives, paid African-American leaders to get out the vote for the senator in the runoff.

Black voters in Mississippi are not ordinarily conservative nor are they even Republican. Like most black voters everywhere in America, they are Democrats and Obama supporters. So if Cochran’s victory is really due to their support—and I assume it is—it tells us nothing about the Republican Party and its voters except they’re stupid enough to allow an open primary.

The rationale for an open primary, however, is that (a) it’s hard to make a primary truly closed, since people can usually change party affiliation anyway prior to a primary, although most people won’t bother; and (b) the general election features voters of both parties, so you want a candidate who appeals to both parties in the end. That latter philosophy sounds good on the surface, but in today’s extremely polarized politics it has begun to be suicidal, because voters from the opposing party can use the primary not to choose a candidate for whom they might actually vote, but to instead choose one for the purpose of sabotage. It would be nice to think that black Democratic voters in Mississippi crossed over because they’re actually fed up with Obama and the Democratic Party, and that Cochran’s appeal to them may have caused a real crossover to the right rather than merely a strategic one to harm the right, but until I have some proof of that I see absolutely no reason to believe it.

Meanwhile, Cochran probably increased the enmity conservatives have against him by using a somewhat cynical ploy to attract Democratic voters and win. This probably won’t help him in the general. Nor will McDaniel’s challenge to the results.

I hate these intra-party fights. I understand them and know why they happen and that they represent a very real practical and philosophical split within the party, but I hate them because I see them as a chance for the left to win in the end.

More from yesterday’s IRS testimony

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, now we know—at least, according to Koskinen—the answer to one of the questions I posed a few days ago about whether computer crashes were “a routine matter” at the IRS.

Here’s Koskinen:

It is not unusual for computers anywhere to fail, especially at the IRS in light of the aged equipment IRS employees often have to use in light of the continual cuts in its budget these past four years. Since Jan. 1 of this year, for example, over 2,000 employees have suffered hard drive crashes.

That’s impressive, and not in a good way. Let’s do a little math: the IRS currently has about 89,000 employees. So in the last six months, approximately two and a quarter per cent of all IRS employees suffered hard drive crashes, or about 1 in every 50 people. Let’s just accept that as the truth, although I see no particular reason to believe anything Koskinen says and would prefer some corroborating evidence.

Here are my further questions for him, or preferably for some IT person at the IRS: is that the rate at which crashes always happen there, or has there been some sort of increase in crashes lately, perhaps since the investigation began? When did the six people under investigation in addition to Lerner have their hard drives fail? Was it within months or so of each other, weeks, days, hours, minutes? How many people were being investigated in addition to these six, and were they suspected of being important figures or were they just peripheral at best? None, any, many?

If there had been a total of three hundred and fifty people under suspicion/investigation as serious as that of these seven (that’s seven including Lerner), then the rate of computer failure we see here might begin to make some sense—that is, if I correctly recall my long-ago math course in combinations and permutations, which I probably do not. What are the odds of this happening?

Lastly, computers can have hard drive crashes and yet still retain recoverable data if a knowledgeable person digs hard enough for it. In fact, it’s my understanding that data recovery is usually possible under such circumstances. Lerner’s computer crash and that of the six others are distinguished by claims that no data survived. How common is that when computers crash? Or is it just common at the IRS for some reason, because they have special self-destructing computers? And speaking of destruction, were the hard drives of the other six then destroyed by the IRS, just as Lerner’s was?

Here’s a fine exchange from the hearing:

Koskinen referred several times on Monday to a lack of budget resources within the IRS, and raised the issue when asked why the agency didn’t do a better job keeping a backup of Lerner’s emails…

When Tennessee Republican Rep Scott DesJarlais asked Koskinen how much money it would take to replace the IRS’s computer systems in order to prevent another major data loss, he answered that it would cost between $10 and $30 million.

In a tense moment, DesJarlais then reminded him that the IRS paid $89 million in bonuses last year, including $1 million to agency employees who owed back taxes.

Issa added that the agency has an $1.8 billion information technology budget.

And then there’s this question, which is also one I had asked the other day in the addendum to this post:

Utah Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz asked Koskinen a question he couldn’t answer: Why didn’t the IRS restore Lerner’s emails from a six-month ‘disaster recovery’ backup tape?…

Agency guidelines require that “IRS offices will not store the official recordkeeping copy of e-mail messages that are federal records ONLY on the electronic mail system.”

The rules also require IRS offices to back up email messages to “a separate electronic recordkeeping system.”

Ah, but it depends on what the meaning of “store” is. Store for a month? A day? A moment?

How many illegal immigrants have been released by the government?

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is somewhat of a companion piece to my new article today at PJ.]

The administration is refusing to say how many illegal immigrants it’s released in the last couple of months, although it knows:

Senior U.S. officials directly familiar with the issue, including at the Homeland Security Department and White House, have so far dodged the answer on at least seven occasions over two weeks, alternately saying that they did not know the figure or didn’t have it immediately at hand. “We will get back to you,” the Homeland Security deputy secretary said Friday.

The figure is widely believed to exceed 40,000 since October…

Most of the immigrant families are from Honduras, El Salvador or Guatemala and cannot be immediately repatriated, so the government has been releasing them into the U.S. interior and telling them to report within 15 days to the nearest U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement offices. Despite promises for better transparency on immigration issues, the administration has been unwilling to say how many immigrant families it’s released ”” hundreds or thousands ”” or how many of those subsequently reported back to the government after 15 days as directed…

The administration did not immediately respond Monday to renewed questions about why it won’t reveal the figure.

Here are details of at least seven occasions since June 9 when senior U.S. officials declined to say how many immigrant families the government has released in recent months…

At the very moment I’m writing this, the Yahoo article to which I’ve linked has 11,410 comments, which is extremely high even for Yahoo. I’m certainly not about to read them all, or anywhere near most of them, but scrolling down and skimming them I can’t find any that don’t express outrage, usually of an extreme variety.

And yet it goes on. Congress and the citizens of the United States are like deer frozen in the headlights. They don’t know what is about to hit them, but they know it’s not good.