This headline promised more than it delivered

The New Neo Posted on by

The headline reads: “Snakes force Liberian President George Weah out of office.”

So I wondered was it snakes, as in the Liberian version of Nancy Pelosi or Robert Mueller or Adam Schiff? And office, as in the presidency?

No:

Press secretary Smith Toby told the BBC that on Wednesday two black snakes were found in the foreign affairs ministry building, his official place of work.

All staff have been told to stay away until 22 April.

“It’s just to make sure that crawling and creeping things get fumigated from the building,” Mr Toby said.

“The Ministry of Foreign Affairs hosts the office of the president, so it did an internal memo asking the staff to stay home while they do the fumigation,” he said.

The office of the president has been based in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs since a fire in 2006 gutted the nearby presidential mansion.

A FrontPage Africa news website video shows workers trying to attack the snakes when they appeared near the building’s reception.

“The snakes were never killed,” Mr Toby said. “There was a little hole somewhere [through which] they made their way back.”

Isn’t that just like a snake.

The Mueller Report, the persistence of Russiagate, and the conspiracy theory phenomenon

The New Neo Posted on by

The reactions to the Mueller Report on the part of the press and the Democrats have been exactly as expected—ignoring collusion and focusing on supposed obstruction—and Mueller gave them plenty of red meat to energize them in their continued campaign.

Lots of people on the right are talking about what’s going on, but my favorite go-to-guy for anything legal, Andrew C. McCarthy says it soberly but says it best (and all the more meaningfully because McCarthy used to respect Mueller, was a long-time friend of his, and is no big fan of Trump) in an article entitled “Mueller completely dropped the ball with obstruction punt” [emphasis mine]:

The most remarkable thing about special counsel Robert Mueller’s 448-page report is how blithely the prosecutor reversed the burden of proof on the issue of obstruction…

Most important, the special counsel found that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that the president’s frustration wasn’t over fear of guilt — the typical motivation for obstruction — but that the investigation was undermining his ability to govern the country. The existence of such a motive is a strong counter to evidence of a corrupt intent, critical because corrupt intent must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt in an obstruction case…

In his report, Mueller didn’t resolve the issue. If he had been satisfied that there was no obstruction crime, he said, he would have so found. He claimed he wasn’t satisfied. Yet he was also not convinced that there was sufficient proof to charge. Therefore, he made no decision, leaving it to Attorney General William Barr to find that there was no obstruction.

This is unbecoming behavior for a prosecutor and an outrageous shifting of the burden of proof: The constitutional right of every American to force the government to prove a crime has been committed, rather than to have to prove his or her own innocence.

This is what I’ve been harping on for quite some time—that the anti-Trump Russiagate conspiracy theorists are requiring him to do something impossible, which is to prove his innocence. This is a violation of our entire system of law, but they don’t care, because their eyes are on the prize, which is to destroy Trump. The Mueller Report isn’t going to stop them, and wasn’t ever going to stop them, and in fact has given them plenty to go on with its “outrageous shifting of the burden of proof.”

McCarthy continues:

This is exactly why prosecutors should never speak publicly about the evidence uncovered in an investigation of someone who isn’t charged. The obligation of the prosecutor is to render a judgment about whether there is enough proof to charge a crime. If there is, the prosecutor indicts; if there is not, the prosecutor remains silent.

If special counsel Mueller believed there was an obstruction offense, he should have had the courage of his convictions and recommended charging the president. Since he wasn’t convinced there was enough evidence to charge, he should have said he wasn’t recommending charges. Period.

Anything else was — and is — a smear. Worse than that, it flouts the Constitution.

Outrageous. And yet that’s where we are.

The left and other anti-Trumpers would convict Trump of anything and everything, and forget about the Constitution they profess to hold dear (at least, some of them profess it; some think it’s just something a bunch of oppressive old white men wrote).

Now Trump is basically accused of thoughtcrime. He thought about maybe doing some things that would have at the very least interfered with the process of the investigation (such as firing Mueller), but desisted. As McCarthy writes:

…the special counsel’s evidence includes indications that the president attempted to induce White House Counsel Don McGahn to fire the special counsel (in June 2017), and then (in January 2018) to deny that the president had made the request.

Mueller’s report further suggests that the president dangled pardons…

Trump never fired Mueller, although he could have and arguably it would have been perfectly constitutional and legal to do so (and certainly more than understandable, especially since Trump knew that Trump was innocent and was probably in the process of being framed). He didn’t do things he was supposedly contemplating for a while, and whether he decided not to do them on his own or whether some aide or other convinced him not to is quite irrelevant. He didn’t do them, and he cooperated fully and completely with the investigation.

But this thoughtcrime offense is what the left is running with. And really, what choice do they have? The right sees them as looking foolish, but their fans see them as bravely leading the way. Ultimately they may end up destroying themselves (as Roger Simon points out in this piece). But for now I don’t see that they have any alternative but to keep going in the direction they’ve been going. It may be “time for Democrats to accept reality” (the title of this opinion piece by Elizabeth Harrington. But if they were to do so and move on, to what can they turn?

Some form of Russiagate has been their meat and potatoes for the entire Trump presidency. For a while it drove cable news and MSM ratings and readership, and although those rates have been falling lately, what else do the news purveyors (or the Democrats, for that matter) have? Joe Biden? AOC and the Green New Deal? Beto’s empty platitudes? The latest outrage from Ilhan Omar? So they turn back to the tried-and-true, seizing the lifeline Mueller gave them. And even though they know other things are coming—such as IG Horowitz’s report—they think if they repeat the Big Lie often enough it will somehow work its magic.

Maybe it will. I certainly don’t know. But I certainly hope not, because if that is the case we are headed for disaster.

Do the MSM and the Democrats believe their own conspiracy theories about Trump? I think that some do and some don’t, but the believers are quite numerous and it gives their drive more conviction. As with just about all conspiracy theories, we have the leaders and the followers, and the Democratic politicians and the press are the leaders here, and the Democratic voters are the followers. It helps if the leaders are true believers, but they don’t necessarily have to be.

Conspiracy theorists cling to their theories in the face of knowledge that contradicts those theories. Just take as one example the Kennedy assassination. I am pretty sure (based on previous experience here with my posts about the subject and the comments on those threads) that some of you ascribe to various such theories. They are very popular, have gone on a long long time, and have given rise to an enormous industry of books and many many websites to share and promote such theories. And they are 100% false.

I’m not going to argue it again; I refer you in particular, though, to this post of mine as well as this one. There’s much in there that’s relevant to now; the only difference is that the conspiracy theorists in the Kennedy case want to say that Oswald was innocent (or a co-conspirator) and that other people were behind him, and in Russiagate the conspiracy theorists want to say that Trump is guilty and to exonerate both themselves and the people who set Russiagate in motion.

On the question of whether the MSM believes its own Russiagate conspiracy theories, we have this relevant quote from Vincent Bugliosi about the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists :

The conspiracy theorists are so outrageously brazen that they tell lies not just about verifiable, documentary evidence, but about clear, photographic evidence, knowing that only one out of a thousand of their readers, if that, is in possession of the subject photographs. Robert Groden (the leading photographic expert for the conspiracy proponents who was the photographic adviser the Oliver Stone’s movie JFK) draws a diagram on page 24 of his book High Treason of Governor Connally seated directly in front of President Kennedy in the presidential limousine and postulates the “remarkable path” a bullet coming from behind Kennedy, and traveling from left to right, would have to take to hit Connally—after passing straight through Kennedy’s body, making a right turn and then a left one in midair, which, the buffs chortle, bullets “don’t even do in cartoons.” What average reader would be in a position to dispute this seemingly common-sense, geometric assault on the Warren Commission’s single-bullet theory?…But of course, if you start out with an erroneous premise, whatever flows from it makes a lot of sense. The only problem is that it’s wrong. The indisputable fact here—which all people who have studied the assassination know—is that Connally was not seated directly in front of Kennedy, but to his left front.

The point is that brazen lies don’t necessarily have consequences, and they convince many people. And if the truth doesn’t point the way one wants it to, unscrupulous people with a lot invested in their previous stories will turn to lies to bolster their credibility, and sometimes it works. They count on the relative ignorance of the public.

[NOTE: I may have more to say about this another time, but for now this post has gotten plenty long enough.]

Use it or lose it

The New Neo Posted on by

She’s not the dancer she used to be, I’m quite certain of that. Not even close. The legs are much weaker and not fully straight, the arch less pronounced, the turnout barely there, and her elevation is probably nil.

But man, what an achievement! This woman is 77, and her back is ramrod straight, her face beautiful without makeup, and the whole thing is just so impressive. I am convinced that, in addition to love of dance and an iron and indomitable will, one of her secrets is that she never stopped dancing in the first place:

Andrew C. McCarthy on Mueller, Barr, and obstruction

The New Neo Posted on by

Andrew C. McCarthy writes:

The attorney general [Barr] stated that the special counsel evaluated ten incidents with an eye toward whether they amounted to an obstruction offense. Barr elaborated that he and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein disagreed with Mueller on whether these incidents even could have amounted to obstruction as a matter of law.

It is important to grasp what that means, and what it doesn’t, because I’ve heard some inaccurate commentary. Barr was not saying that Mueller found one or more of these incidents to constitute obstruction; Mueller was saying that the incidents involved actions that could theoretically have amounted to obstruction.

A concrete example may make this easier to grasp: the firing of FBI director James Comey. Before a prosecutor considered evidence regarding that incident, there would be a preliminary question: Could the president’s dismissal of an FBI director amount to an obstruction offense as a matter of law? If prosecutors were to decide that, even if the evidence showed corrupt intent on the part of the president, a president’s firing of the FBI director cannot constitutionally amount to an obstruction crime, then the prosecutors would not bother to investigate and make an assessment of the evidence.

What Barr is saying is that he and Mueller did not agree, with respect to all ten incidents, on whether the incident could legally amount to obstruction. What the attorney general therefore did was assume, for argument’s sake, that Mueller was correct on the law (i.e., that the incident could theoretically amount to obstruction), and then move on to the second phase of the analysis: Assuming this could be an obstruction offense as a matter of law, could we prove obstruction as a matter of fact? This requires an assessment of whether the evidence of each element of an obstruction offense – most significantly, corrupt intent – could be proved beyond a reasonable doubt.

I’ve noticed over time that one of the obstacles to the public’s making sense of things like the Mueller report—in addition to the press and politicians issuing tons of partisan spin on it—is that legal issues are involved that require a certain sophistication of logic and judgment. They are certainly not impossible to understand for a person without legal training. But their meaning is not immediately obvious, and therefore they very easily lend themselves to distortion.

One of the things I really really like about Andrew McCarthy is that he has a gift for writing clearly about such things in ways that should be easily understood—if people read what he writes. I doubt that even a small percentage of liberals read Andrew McCarthy, although I wish a lot of them did.

Reporting on the Mueller Report

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as I can tell, the Mueller Report is exactly and precisely as expected.

Here’s the summary by Professor Bill Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Trump won. Big League. People are [poring] over the details of the report, but the top line is that Mueller found no collusion and would not reach a determination on obstruction.

You can find the entire report (redacted version, of course) here as well as at the Legal Insurrection post I already linked.

Also as expected, the report says it does not “exonerate” the president. Actually, it couldn’t possibly do so, for reasons I’ve stated many times, most recently in my post from two days ago entitled “Anticipating the Mueller Report, in which I wrote this:

It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase…

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

The Democrats will do what they will do, of course.

And here Bill Barr explains to a word-challenged reporter what “unprecedented” means:

And about “obstruction of justice”:

One of the Democrats’ basic problems is that “attempting” to obstruct the investigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Trump had really wanted to obstruct the investigation, he could simply have terminated it. And Mueller acknowledges that the administration fully cooperated with the investigation in every way. So the “attempts to obstruct” come down to Trump expressing outrage at the fact that a baseless, partisan investigation was hampering his administration. Arguably Trump should have brought the Mueller farce to an end, but he didn’t.

Nothing will stop the Democrats from going on and on about it, except the next story that emerges that gives them hope of destroying Trump.

Here’s a great cartoon found at that Powerline link:

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a whole slew of articles from National Review.]

Let’s hear it for Norman Podhoretz, the original neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

Norman Podhoretz is eighty-nine years old and still going strong, not to mention sharp as a tack.

Case in point, this interview. Unfortunately, the Podoretz interview itself is behind an impregnable paywall, so that link is to a post at Ace’s that contains lengthy excerpts from the interview such as this one:

So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office–I could understand that–but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him.

They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards–and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on…

…[S]ome of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it–okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms–love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea.

Please read the whole thing.

By the way, when Podhoretz uses the phrase “my soon to be new set of ex-friends,” he’s harking back to a book he wrote in 2001 entitled Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Interestingly enough, Irving Kristol was another early neocon. Kristol senior is now deceased, but Bill Kristol is his son. And in a strange (or maybe not-so-strange) parallel, John Podhoretz (another NeverTrumper, although I’m pretty sure he’s not nearly as strongly so as Bill Kristol) is Norman Podhoretz’s son.

As someone remarked in one of the comments to a piece on Norman Podhoretz’s interview, I wonder what Thanksgiving conversation is like at the Podhoretz house.

Victor Davis Hanson on the progressive revolution

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson writes:

The reelection of Obama had convinced progressives that he had discovered electoral magic: record voter registration, turnout, and block voting of “minorities” that could overcome the old Perot, Reagan Democrat, silent majority, and tea-party dinosaurs in the critical swing states. This chemistry, they thought, would be inherently transferrable even to multimillionaire white establishmentarians like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden (but only if they were reeducated and thus made the necessary confessionals about their own white privilege and shared disdain for “deplorables” and “the dregs of society”).

Suddenly, everything seemed possible as woke activists, à la French Revolution, accelerated the possible into the already passé…

By spring 2019, we were light years beyond the revolution’s beginning in summer 2008 — and heading into hard-socialist territory and beyond.

Indeed, the once edgy community-organizing Obama himself had become a tragicomical figure. He spent a bit of his post-presidency warning against a “circular firing squad” of Democratic cannibalism but otherwise was hell-bent on becoming worth $100 million in “I built that fashion”—and was never again heard uttering another “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sermon…

…few leftist revolutionary cycles ever halt in mid course, whether in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1946 China, or 1960 Cuba. The philosophy is always that today’s radical is yesterday’s sell-out to be replaced by tomorrow’s genuine far harder leftist…

Hanson’s essay is very good, as always. But I think he’s missing something. That “something” is the patience of the left, which has been working on this not just since 2008 but for a long long long long time, on many fronts and levels. Say what you will about the left, but they certainly have perseverance.

I wonder, also, whether Obama’s recent warnings are of the practical sort,—as in “Shh! Don’t show your cards; you need to be a little more sly and quiet about what you really believe and what your goals are, or you won’t get elected”—or whether he really is at least somewhat less radical than the current crop.

But yes, leftist revolutions always end up eating their own—sometimes sooner rather than later.

Just one question: Has Michael Moore looked in the mirror lately?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps not:

Or maybe Moore is just speaking of himself in the third person, as some people are wont to do. Then again, perhaps a white person who turns against “white people” become an honorary person of color and therefore escapes the “white people” taint. And a “privileged white person” who turns against “privileged” white people likewise gets some sort of points he/she would otherwise not have in the intersectional sweepstakes.

Again: rules of the blog

The New Neo Posted on by

Boy, I go away for a while and the comments get taken over by squabbling. I don’t mind a small amount of it, but no more than that. So, to repeat a post I wrote some years ago on the same subject—

I don’t have time to constantly police this blog for personal fighting. But I find it takes away from the point of the blog when that sort of thing comes to dominate too much in the comments section.

I don’t mind a little of it; I realize it’s inevitable, and I understand that a blog comments section isn’t an especially genteel place, nor should it be. But I do mind when it goes on for a while. I don’t have time to determine who’s right and who’s wrong in any given altercation, nor do I believe it should be my job, although sometimes I try to do it.

Defending oneself is fine, but if the defense includes an unprovoked attack, that’s not okay and will be deleted if I see it. If it goes on and on, I will consider banning the offender.

We really should be focusing our energies on the truly important issues facing us. That doesn’t mean everything has to be serious—certainly not!—but I’m adopting a less tolerant attitude for this sort of repetitive personal sniping.

Rebuilding Notre Dame: is it an art museum, a tourist attraction, or a cathedral?

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose at this point, realistically speaking, it’s something of all of them. I wouldn’t have even asked the question if Notre Dame hadn’t burned, but now that the rebuilding is being planned, it seems relevant.

As commenter “Snow on Pine” wrote this morning:

Stein’s question was, were the people crying on the streets in Paris crying primarily over the loss of a building that was, in essence, an exquisite art museum and testament to their past—a crowded tourist exhibit, or were they crying primarily over the destruction of a building that was perhaps the chief symbol of their living Christian faith?

Similarly, was Macron’s pledge to rebuild Notre Dame a civic pledge to rebuild what is basically an art museum, or was it an act of faith, a pledge to rebuild perhaps the chief symbol of the Christian faith of the people of France?

I cannot answer the question. I do know that the people in the streets of Paris who were crying as they saw the fire were sad and shocked. It was probably about a number of things, some of which they may not have thought much about previously, such as what exactly Notre Dame the building means to them and to France (not necessarily the same) at this point. Was it mostly the Catholic faithful assembled there, praying and singing? And what percentage of the whole does this now represent?

In a previous post from 2016 on the loss of Christian faith in Europe, I quoted the 19th Century British poet Matthew Arnold, and in this 2006 post I quoted the British Philip Larkin in his 1955 poem “Churchgoing” on the subject of churches in an age of waning faith. He describes a cycling trip in England, where he stops to rest at a church much smaller than Notre Dame:

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…

France is presently engaged in deciding exactly what Notre Dame is to France and its people these days. Personally, I hope it’s built the way it was—minus the flammability, if possible. But I don’t have any say in the matter.

Will the Left have a say?:

Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.”…
But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times….

Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

Twitter has been loaded with even more vitriol, as is the nature of Twitter. I certainly hope that Twitter isn’t “who we are now.”

Anticipating the Mueller report

The New Neo Posted on by

The fuller Mueller report is supposed to be released on Thursday. It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase.

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has more, with predictions. Please read the whole thing.