I’ve not yet written a post about the new coronavirus…

The New Neo Posted on by

…worrying the world. The reason is quite simple: much of what we know so far is fragmentary and suspect. The media loves to fan the flames of panic, anyway. But some is just lack of basic understanding as the authorities try to track its spread, plus skepticism about whether Chinese authorities have been forthcoming on this topic.

Out-of-control pandemics are the stuff of scary movies, but there are many times in human history when they have occurred. The 20th Century’s most enormous and out-of-control pandemic occurred right at the end of World War I and involved flu (I wrote about it here), the scope of which is difficult to comprehend even now. It is a terrifying prospect.

But each time a new flu comes along – and they come along with great frequency, often in China because of the vast urban populations and the close contact with animal vectors – it is hyped as the next enormous pandemic. Some day that may become true. But so far the flu pandemics of recent years, although they can do great damage (I had a friend who nearly died of H1N1, for example), have never reached anywhere near the scope of the 1918 pandemic. Fortunately.

So I will bide my time and see what happens before I hit the panic button that lies close at hand.

In the meantime, to learn about flu origins and China, see this from 2017:

Many Chinese people, even city dwellers, insist that freshly slaughtered poultry is tastier and more healthful than refrigerated or frozen meat. This is one of the major reasons China has been such a hot spot for new influenza viruses: Nowhere else on earth do so many people have such close contact with so many birds.

At least two flu pandemics in the past century—in 1957 and 1968—originated in the Middle Kingdom and were triggered by avian viruses that evolved to become easily transmissible between humans. Although health authorities have increasingly tried to ban the practice, millions of live birds are still kept, sold and slaughtered in crowded markets each year. In a study published in January, researchers in China concluded that these markets were a “main source of H7N9 transmission by way of human-poultry contact and avian-related environmental exposures.”…

These areas—often poorly ventilated, with multiple species jammed together—create ideal conditions for spreading disease through shared water utensils or airborne droplets of blood and other secretions. “That provides opportunities for viruses to spread in closely packed quarters, allowing ‘amplification’ of the viruses,” says Benjamin John Cowling, a specialist in medical statistics at the University of Hong Kong School of Public Health. “The risk to humans becomes so much higher.”

More here from 2004:

All flu viruses probably originate in birds, and the best environment for making the jump to humans is one where densely packed people live closely with birds and animals.

“In Asia we have a huge animal population, a huge bird population and two-thirds of the world’s people living there,” said Klaus Stohr, chief influenza scientist at the World Health Organization.

The population of China alone is bigger than that of the whole of Africa, and 80 percent of the new human flu strains the last few decades appeared in China first.

Did the new coronavirus originate in birds? We don’t know:

On 31 December 2019, a novel strain of coronavirus, officially designated as 2019-nCoV by the World Health Organization, was reported in Wuhan, China, as responsible for the 2019–20 Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. By 24 January 2020, 25 deaths have been reported and 547 confirmed cases. The Wuhan strain has been identified as a new strain of Betacoronavirus from group 2B with an ~70% genetic similarity to the SARS-CoV. The virus was suspected to have originated in snakes, but many leading researchers disagree with this conclusion.

More on the disease’s origins:

The initial cluster of pneumonia-like cases showed up in the city of Wuhan mid-December, and most of those patients had some tie to a wet market there—a place where people sell both live and dead animals, including exotic species, from snugly-abutting stalls.

Though nothing has been confirmed, epidemiologists suspect that the novel coronavirus crossed over into humans somewhere inside the market, which has been shuttered since January 1. Tracking down the right viral culprit is paramount to preventing future interspecies spillover. In 2003, when SARS ipped through the same area of China, the outbreak was fully contained only when civet cats, which had passed the virus along to humans, were removed from the region’s markets.

A national task force of Chinese researchers working swiftly to isolate and sequence the virus shared a draft of its genome in a public database earlier this month.

The article goes on to say that a theory based on the DNA evidence indicated that the virus may have originated in snakes, but there’s been tremendous disagreement with that idea:

“It’s complete garbage,” says Edward Holmes, a zoologist at the University of Sydney’s Institute for Infectious Diseases and Biosecurity, who specializes in emerging RNA viruses, a class that includes coronaviruses like 2019-nCoV. Holmes, who also holds appointments at the Chinese CDC and Fudan University in Shanghai, is among a number of scientists who are pointing out—in virology forums, science Slacks, and on Twitter—what they deem to be major flaws in the paper, and calling on the journal to have it retracted. “It’s great that viral sequence data is getting shared openly in real time,” says Holmes. “The downside is then you get people using that data to make conclusions they really shouldn’t. The result is just a really unhelpful distraction that smacks of opportunism.”

Preliminary analyses of the genetic data released by Chinese authorities suggest that 2019-nCoV is most closely related to a group of coronaviruses that typically infect bats. But for a variety of reasons—including that it’s winter and bats are hibernating—many scientists suspect that some other animal moved the virus from bats to humans.

We don’t know. And the other thing we don’t is how many humans will be infected, and what the death rates will be. Flu tends to kill a not-insignificant percentage of its victims, but usually the vast majority survive. In 1918, the flu was especially deadly not only because it infected huge numbers of people worldwide, but because it killed a higher percentage of those sickened, it often killed them very quickly, and it seemed to focus on an unusual group: 20- to 40-year-olds.

Let’s hope this one is much tamer, although the behavior of Chinese authorities doesn’t indicate business as usual for the flu. Then again, maybe they are just especially determined not to let this one get out of hand. Let’s very much hope it does not.

Nervous intensity

The New Neo Posted on by

Speaking of the ballet “Agon” – and we were – I noticed this quote from the man cast in the original, Arthur Mitchell, about the qualities of his partner Diana Adams:

Diana’s nervous intensity made the whole pas de deux work because it’s not so much the difficulty of the steps or how flexible you are, it’s the precariousness.

I hadn’t seen that when I wrote the post. But that’s a succinct way to put what I was driving at.

But I wonder whether today’s audiences see or care about the difference. For one thing, you can’t notice a difference if all you’re seeing is today’s often-heartless technical wizardry, in which all sense of what I called “vulnerability” and Mitchell called “precariousness” has departed. Maybe even the idea that “precariousness” would be a value in ballet is foreign to today’s audiences. Maybe they choose technique over everything else.

But one of the values of YouTube as I see it is that it allows new generations to see for themselves and compare, even if it’s only in two dimensions rather than three. I often notice with all the performing arts – and that incudes music – that there are many young people commenting at YouTube who seem to notice and mourn what has been lost, while many others are just puzzled by the technical imperfection of the olden days.

I certainly am one who mourns what is lost. Starting several decades ago, I became far less willing to attend theater, for example, as well as movies and dance. Not only had prices skyrocketed, but quality was uneven at best and often much worse than that, even for highly-praised productions. Art exhibits are suspect too, not only the newer art generally but the relentless PC message of the words posted on the walls to explain even (or perhaps especially) the older art.

No doubt some would say I’m out-of-date, and/or remembering a past that never was. Perhaps these feelings really are part of getting older, and then old. But I think I’m talking about something very real, something that can be seen with the eye and felt with the heart.

Agon: no contest, no struggle

The New Neo Posted on by

“Agon” is the name of a ballet choreographed by George Balanchine, with music by Stravinsky. It premiered in 1957 and was revolutionary at the time, but nowadays it doesn’t seem so strange. It featured a pas de deux between a man – Arthur Mitchell in the original, who happened to be black – and a white woman, Diana Adams, and the interracial aspect was part of its novelty and daring in 1957. Now it would hardly be noticed.

But none of that is my concern. What I’m interested in is the change in performance style and technique between then and now. “Agon” was always part gymnastics, in which the woman’s body is twisted and pulled into poses that are elegant and yet extreme. But in 1957, although ballet dancers were very flexible, they were not so remarkably and almost freakishly pliant as they are today, and that changes this ballet. When the woman’s body was not so loose there was something in the choreography to be struggled against, a heightened tension and stress. Now there is no such thing.

What I see when I view this ballet now is a more athletic exercise, and a gymnastic rather than balletic one at that. Your mileage may differ.

Here’s a dance critic who agrees with me:

In today’s “Agon,” I think, you will see less vulnerability and more boldness, more sex and less pain. Balanchine, by asking so much of his ballerinas, won for them great freedom and mastery, but, some nights, it seems that they traded something—shading, poignance—in the process.

Not just “some nights” – I’d say all nights.

The dancer in this video, Maria Kowroski, makes it quite explicit when she says (starting around 1:50) “Everything came very natural to me” when she learned the ballet.”I didn’t feel like I’m struggling.” Well, I suppose one doesn’t have to feel the struggle in order to convey the sense of struggle that should be there. But it helps. She not only doesn’t seem to feel that sense or convey that sense, but she doesn’t even seem to realize that she should convey it in this particular ballet, the meaning of whose title is not just “contest” but also “struggle.”

From the New Yorker piece:

Arthur Mitchell has said that when he and Adams first performed the “Agon” duet, it looked different from today’s renditions. For dancers of that period, the steps were very difficult, he said, and Adams was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to do them. This made her seem vulnerable. She might also have been nervous about the duet’s sexual frankness.

Here’s the original. You will probably notice almost immediately the markedly reduced flexibility demonstrated by Diana Adams (typical for her time), but also the different emotional quality that critic Acocella describes. This clip shows a bit more of the pas de deux than the first one did, but neither video is long:

[NOTE: I agree with Acocella about how difficult it used to be to view old performances like that, years after the fact. One had to go to a special dance library such as the one at Lincoln Center, and the films had to be viewed there and neither taken out nor duplicated. Now there’s YouTube and an abundance of them – although I believe there are still many that are only available at the library.]

[NOTE II: And by the way, this is not one of my favorite ballets. I can take it or leave it. But I find the then-vs.-now aspect of ballet very interesting.]

The impeachment trial: truth, lies, and narratives

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s often been said that left and right in this country are watching different movies. We do indeed tend to read different sources of information in which different things are covered and emphasized and others ignored. But regaridng the impeachment trial, we are watching (or in most cases, not watching) the same movie, and seeing two realities.

That doesn’t mean the two “realities” are equally true, however.

When I was in law school, I learned ways to argue for almost any position. That’s what lawyers do if they are to serve their clients – argue the case to the best of their ability. So lawyers are adept at making arguments out of almost nothing at all, and can use emotion or rhetoric or any number of tricks to create what appears to some people to be a sound argument when it’s really all smoke and mirrors.

That doesn’t mean, however, that a thinking person can’t listen to one argument vs. another argument and decide one is correct the other is bunk. Sometimes it is just that clear. But it’s not clear to everyone. People can be swayed by arguments without much behind them, if those arguments happen to touch on certain things that matter to the listener, and fit in with the listener’s pre-existing biases.

In a regular courtroom, our system of law tries to build in rules that encourage a jury to come to the best verdict, one that reflects not prejudice or emotion or a reaction to rhetorial devices, but instead is based on scrupulously validated evidence. Those rules are many and complex, but they include – as an added safeguard against miscarriages of justice – a presumption of innocence for the defendant. Justice does not always triumph, but the idea is to encourage that triumph by those rules.

If has also often been said that an impeachment trial is not an ordinary trial, although it uses the same word. The point of an impeachment trial is different: removal from office. And although the Constitution dictates that a high crime/misdemeanor is supposed to be the charge, there is really nothing to stop the House from disobeying that directive, as we have seen with the Trump impeachment. The voters in the trial portion are neither jurors nor judges, they are senators who will vote to impeach or not, and although they are supposed to be objective they are political actors deeply and personally involved in the trial’s outcome.

I cannot even imagine listening to Schiff and Nadler and not recoiling in revulsion from their obvious lies and the tremendous weakness of their case. Just to take one small example:

“They said things over and over again that are simply not true,” Cipollone added. “One of them is there is no evidence of Donald Trump’s interest in burden sharing.” Yet Burden-sharing was discussed in the transcript of the call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25. The lawyer quoted directly from the transcript of the call.

Democrats, on the other hand, see and hear something quite different, cheered on by the gushing MSM:

The excessive fawning by pundits and reporters over a middling speech by a middling congressman was just insufferable.

If you think I exaggerate, take Greg Miller, a national-security correspondent for the Washington Post, who contended that Schiff is perhaps the most “underestimated” politician California has ever produced, and “will leave a mark on history, exceeding nearly all contemporaries.”

Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time magazine — and now an advocate for overturning the First Amendment — declared: “When we get back to teaching civics in this country—as we must do—Adam Schiff’s sweeping, beautifully-wrought opening argument, should be on the syllabus.”

CNN chief legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, an ostensibly unbiased observer, prefaced his remarks by saying, “I don’t want to sound like a partisan,” before praising a “dazzling” performance — the second-best courtroom appearance he’d ever witnessed. “Adam Schiff knows the facts. That is something that you can’t fake,” Toobin told the panel.

The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin disagreed with both, insisting that Schiff had delivered “the most brilliant legal presentation I have heard. None comes close. The tone, the facts, the anticipated defenses. I am in awe.”

It’s mind-boggling, and yet it’s not. The first element here is confirmation bias. The second is that even I must admit that, given what Schiff had to work with – essentially, nothing but innuendo and lies – he made the most if it in rhetorical terms. It’s hard to see how a better argument could have been made, given the same utter lack of evidence of wrongdoing, the presence of evidence that contradicts the reasons for the impeachment, and the absence of a requisite crime, as well as the high degree of suspiciousness in the actions of the Bidens regarding Ukraine.

So these commentators actually might be in awe of the fact that Schiff managed to use rhetoric to create some sort of case out of nothing.

But I think the heart of it for the MSM is that it’s a good thing the public has mostly tuned out, because then the MSM can create its own narrative, as it so often does. If their readers haven’t been watching Schiff, except for a few moments here and there, and mostly get their news and opinion from the MSM, then the media can act as though Schiff made the incontrovertible, undeniable case for Trump’s guilt that Schiff himself insists he made, and none of their listerners will be the wiser.

Hey, shouldn’t the Democratic candidates who are senators…

The New Neo Posted on by

…recuse themselves from the impeachment trial because they are running for president as Trump’s opponents, and his removal through a “guilty” verdict would benefit them greatly politically?

Actually, that’s true of all the senators in the sense that, whether they support a guilty verdict or not, and whether they are running for president or not, they have a vested and personal political interest in the outcome. It will affect them, pro or con.

I’m not seriously suggesting they should recuse themselves. I’m merely pointing out one of the many absurdities of the Democrats’ position towards Trump’s Ukraine call when they assert that it is suspect because investigating Hunter Biden could harm Joe Biden politically and thus help Trump politically.

All politicians make decisions for many reasons, and one of them is almost always for personal political benefit. The real question is whether the person has the constitutional and/or statutory power to make that decision, and whether the person follows the proper procedure in carrying it out, and whether there are independent reasons and arguments for wanting it done.

There are two big stories…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I’m not going to cover in exhaustive detail today. But here are some links.

The first story is about the 2016 White House meeting with Ukainian officials to discuss Burisma and Biden, and its significance.

The second is the FISA court’s determination that at least two of the FISA warrants for the Carter Page investigation were invalid.

That could certainly help Page win any lawsuits he might be contemplating.

More:

The FISA court order also noted that it is a federal crime for any federal official to “intentionally…disclose[] or use[] information obtained under color of law by electronic surveillance, knowing or having any reason to know that the information was obtained through electronic surveillance not authorized” by law. The following sentence of Boasberg’s ruling is redacted, raising questions about whether the government used any information obtained pursuant to the now-invalid Page surveillance warrants in other cases.

So, will this ultimately affect the validity of some of the convictions that followed from evidence obtained during those investigations? And will anyone big who signed off on those warrants get into any significant legal trouble as a result?

I think the answer to the last question is “no.” The answer to the first one is “perhaps.”

Nadler on the offense

The New Neo Posted on by

Representative Nadler managed to insult some of the people one would think he’d like to persuade:

The House Democrat made a critical error early in the trial of President Trump. He didn’t just say that Republican senators, who voted to begin the proceedings without calling witnesses, were part of a cover up. He said they had committed treason: “So far, I’m sad to say, I see a lot of senators voting for a coverup. Voting to deny witnesses and obviously a treacherous vote. A vote against honest consideration of the evidence against the president. A vote against an honest trial. A vote against the United States.”

Murkowski and Collins were not amused.

More:

A Republican senator told me before the trial began that the conduct of the House managers would play a major role in forming senators’ judgments. Nadler’s eruption proved the point. The contemptuous attitude of Democrats toward Republicans, and the pass-the-buck mentality that drove the House to impeach Trump before the evidence was in and inter-branch disputes settled by the courts, give GOP senators every reason to vote on the charges sooner rather than later.

But that “contemptuous attitude” and “pass-the-buck mentality” had both been in prominent display long before the Schiff and Nadler show moved to the Senate. Had the moderate GOP senators not been paying attention all this time? Is it only when they personally are insulted that they start taking offense?

Obama campaigned on being kinder and gentler to Iran

The New Neo Posted on by

In a recent thread, a discussion of Obama’s Iran policy came up. Here’s one remark:

Obama’s brave new idea amounted to surrendering to an enemy. His method was to re-brand them as a non-enemy, without any clear reasoning as far as I could tell. I could not believe it and still don’t understand it. He reached out secretly to this enemy, we now know, and then he engineered a “deal” that gave them the terms they asked for, with nothing in return; and not only did he not pursue this as a normal treaty, which would have required Congressional approval, he closed the “deal” without even putting anything in writing.

Although the extremity and audacity of the Iran deal was extraordinary, it’s not as though Obama didn’t hint right from the start of his term, and even while campaigning, that he was going to make nice to the mullahs. He was short on detail and long on vagueness. But still, it was alarming.

For example, see this from May of 2008:

Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday accused Sen. Hillary Clinton of echoing the “bluster” of President Bush when she said the U.S. would be able to “obliterate” Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel.

“It’s not the language we need right now, and I think it’s language reflective of George Bush,” Obama told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

Clinton made the statement about Iran on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Tuesday.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran [if it attacked Israel],” Clinton said. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”…

…”[I]t is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we’re shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we’ve seen out of George Bush,” [Obama] said. “And this kind of language is not helpful.”

Among other things, it’s an interesting (and I believe significant) example of Obama’s emphasis on the power of language. I believe the mullahs already understood that if Obama became president it wasn’t just language that was going to change, it was the depth of the US’s commitment to defending Israel, and their need to fear the US in general.

Then in March of 2009, Obama sent a message to Iran:

The message for Iran’s leaders at this “season of new beginnings” was a reprise of the approach he signalled in his inaugural address: commitment to engagement – and in an emollient tone that again contrasted sharply with that of George Bush, who included the Islamic Republic in his “axis of evil”.

“This process will not be advanced by threats,” the president said, hinting perhaps that Americans as well as Iranians needed to take that lesson on board. “We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

Despite avoiding the tangled nuclear dossier – specifically Iran’s refusal to halt uranium enrichment – Obama did warn that “terror and arms” did not sit well with the “real responsibilities” that went with Iran’s “rightful place in the community of nations”.

The White House and state ­department are looking at a range of other ways to reach out to Tehran. It has been invited to an international conference on Afghanistan later this month and the US wants to see it co-operate as US forces prepare to leave Iraq.

Note that last bit, which offers a big clue as to one reason Obama was so eager to be friends with Iran: he had promised to leave Iraq, and he was going to give the Iranians carte blanche to become the policemen there in the wake of our withdrawal.

It also signals once again his reliance on words to create a new reality. “Mutual respect”? Dream on.

But there were deeper reasons for Obama’s softening on Iran. Was it the influence of Valerie Jarrett, as so many people have said? I don’t think so. I think they were on the same page about Iran, but arrived at their views independently. The left has been sympathetic to Iran and the mullahs right from the start, and even helped them achieve power (although the left believed that the left would ultimately be the beneficiaries, and would be the ones in power there after the shah left). For Obama, a man of the left, there was nothing particularly “evil” about Iran, and allying more with it was a natural thing to want to do.

Not only would Iran help him withdraw from Iraq, but ultimately negotiating some sort of peace deal with Iran would be a feather in his cap, a great personal accomplishment that would go down in history books. It would vindicate his view of foreign policy and the enormous value of diplomacy, even with a state such as Iran. It would also establish him definitively as the un-Bush, the guy who defeated the entire idea of “cowboy diplomacy.” And it would further ingratiate him with Western Europe.

There really was no downside, as far as Obama could see.

Obama’s presidency: a watershed?

The New Neo Posted on by

In one of yesterday’s threads, the conversation veered into a discussion of whether the Obama administration was a major turning point or just a continuation of basic trends in the Democratic Party with nothing all that special or different about it. If you haven’t seen the back-and-forth, it starts around here and goes on for quite some time.

I think it’s some of both. Obama was indeed a continuation of long-time trends – many limited to Democrats, but some shared by both parties: identity politics, increasing government control/spending, encouragement of illegal immigration, polarization, promising one thing and delivering another.

But he also brought his own very special elements, some of which have since been picked up by the party as a whole and by certain members of it in particular. He showed the Democrats how far it’s possible to go without being completely rejected by the American people. Obama was elected while hiding his leftism (at least somewhat, unless a person knew a lot about his background and could read between the lines of some of his statements), but while in office he demonstrated it much more fully and was still re-elected and is still revered by huge numbers of people. Democrats lost ground and lost control of the House in 2010, but there’s been a fair amount or recovery and they once again control the House and have hopes of gaining the Senate in 2020.

Prior to the Obama administration, I think Democrats were frightened to show their leftist hands or to go too far too fast; now they are much more bold than they were.

It was under Obama’s watch and with his encouragement that the Democrats did something never done before [see *NOTE below]: passed a major bill revamping a basic part of American life (health insurance) without bipartisan support and with the barest of majorities. Prior bills of that sweeping a nature had either had significant bipartisan support or overwhelming majorities from one party, or both. Before Obamacare, politicians were afraid of the backlash if they did something like that without overwhelming support, but Obamacare taught them that if they could squeeze something in somehow, even without such bipartisan consensus or overwhelming support, it had a good chance of standing. Yes, they suffered a bit in 2010, but they held the presidency and continued with that “fundamental transformation” of the US.

Obama did something similar with the Iran deal.

Those are just two examples, but there are others, and I think their significance was and is huge. Not only was each – Obamacare and Iran – a big thing in terms of its immediate and longer-term consequences, but the entire package showed the Democrats that the process could be successful, and applied to future topics.

Obama was helped in accomplishing this by some personal characteristics of his, including but not limited to: his smoothness and calm demeanor, his voice, his looks, his appeal as the first black president, his use of blame and excuses, his identity politics, his Alinsky background, and his boldness in realizing what was possible.

The Trump administration is the backlash. The impeachment is the counter to that. This is a deadly serious engagement, played for high stakes despite its seemingly farcical nature.

[*NOTE: One possible exception was Medicare Part D. You can look at its long and complex legislative history here. But although it was an important bill, it didn’t have the same sweeping scope as Obamacare. Part D was more of an extension – although a large one – of an already-existing program, Medicare.]

The Biden case

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by John Solomon is well worth reading:

[Joe] Biden’s memo argues there is no evidence that the former vice president’s or Hunter Biden’s conduct raised any concern, and that Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin’s investigation was “dormant” when the vice president forced the prosecutor to be fired in Ukraine.

The memo calls the allegation a “conspiracy theory” (and, in full disclosure, blames my reporting for the allegations surfacing last year.)

But the memo omits critical impeachment testimony and other evidence that paint a far different portrait than Biden’s there’s-nothing-to-talk-about-here rebuttal.

Here are the facts, with links to public evidence, so you can decide for yourself.

Fact: Joe Biden admitted to forcing Shokin’s firing in March 2016…

Fact: Shokin’s prosecutors were actively investigating Burisma when he was fired…

Fact: Burisma’s lawyers in 2016 were pressing U.S. and Ukrainian authorities to end the corruption investigations…

Fact: There is substantial evidence Joe Biden and his office knew about the Burisma probe and his son’s role as a board member…

Fact: Federal Ethics rules requires government officials to avoid taking policy actions affecting close relatives…

Fact: Multiple State Department officials testified the Bidens’ dealings in Ukraine created the appearance of a conflict of interest…

Fact: Hunter Biden acknowleged he may have gotten his Burisma job solely because of his last name…

Fact: Ukraine law enforcement reopened the Burisma investigation in early 2019, well before President Trump mentioned the matter to Ukraine’s new president Vlodymyr Zelensky…

Many details at the link.

Schiff: in the eye of the beholder?

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “Ray” asks: “Maybe it’s just me, but does Schiff look like a pathological liar?”

The answers: no, it’s not just you. And yes, he does.

When I look at Schiff, I see the same thing. He looks – shifty. But I wonder whether I’d have the same visceral reaction to him if I didn’t also hear (or more likely, read) the words coming out of his mouth and know that he is lying so often, and about such consequential things, and with such a large audience to influence, and with so little pushback from the MSM.

And I also wonder what my Democratic friends see and hear when they look at him and listen to him. It’s a funny thing, but his name has never come up in the few political discussions I’ve had with friends and/or relatives in the past year or so. Other names have come up:

[T]he evening after the debate I was with two women who are both Democrats. They were discussing the debate, which they’d both watched. I have no idea whether their viewpoints are typical of the Democratic voter, but both agreed that it was a wonderful debate in which all the candidates sounded good and acquitted themselves fabulously.

I didn’t participate in the discussion, but being present for it reminded me once again how large the divide is between liberals and conservatives. I cannot imagine, even if I were still a Democrat, looking at that field and thinking even a single one of them was wonderful, much less all of them. I would be depressed if I were a Democrat. But whatever that difference is between me and those friends is probably a big part of the reason I no longer am a Democrat and haven’t been one for nearly two decades.

I am reluctant to bring up the subject of Schiff with any of these people, and one big reason is that I don’t want to hear them saying how wonderful he is. I’ve already heard a few people sing the praises of Nancy Pelosi, for example, a person who has made my flesh crawl for as long as I’ve known of her, and who gives me the same feeling of being in the presence of pathological lies that in her case are overlaid with a gooey and sanctimonious self-righteousness that adds to their sickening nature. When I’ve heard a friend praise her, I see – almost in the sense of a vision – a yawning gulf the size of the Grand Canyon opening up between us, and I despair that it could ever be bridged even if we were to have a long long conversation on the subject. I’ve had some of these discussions, and they rarely lead to anything other than puzzlement on both sides.

It is especially painful because some of these people are very close to me and I’ve known them nearly half a century or in some cases more. Some of them I can write off as being relatively apolitical, or as being non-analytical in terms of how they tend to see the world. But many seem to keep up with the news (the MSM, to be sure, but the news) and to be logical and intelligent in the way they approach most things. That makes it especially hard to understand the differences between them and me in terms of politics, even though I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand and analyze it. But when I confront it in actual experiential terms – in other words, if I were to hear how much they admire Schiff – that sense of dislocation, disappointment, and even at times despair becomes acute.

[NOTE: And don’t tell me “get new friends.” Much easier said than done. I tend to have more in common – other than politics – with people who turn out to be Democrats. And most of the people I’m talking about are dear friends and relatives, many of them lifelong and very precious to me. I would suffer even more from jettisoning them than from dealing with them and pretty much avoiding political discussions at this point. We’ve had many fruitless such discussions in the past and they are aware of my politics, so I’ve not been keeping it a secret.]

Iranphobia, Iranphilia, and the Jacksonian approach

The New Neo Posted on by

Jonathan Schanzer writes on ending Iran’s fictions:

Soleimani’s killing was, without question, the most consequential act of Trump’s presidency. It didn’t just punish Iran for the action of its proxies. After decades of the U.S. letting the Islamic Republic get away with murder, the Trump administration made it clear that America would no longer allow the regime to hide behind its militias…

As an author of [a US Army] study later summarized: “When evidence was becoming clearer that Iran was behind a deliberate and systematic series of attacks on Americans, the U.S. reviewed possible responses. The U.S. decided against a more aggressive response primarily out of fear of Iranian escalation.” In fact, when the Israelis actually had Soleimani in their crosshairs in 2008, the Bush administration asked them to stand down. All in all, the Pentagon assesses that at least 603 U.S. deaths in Iraq “were the result of Iran-backed militants.”

Upon ascending to office in 2009, Barack Obama almost immediately set into motion his plans for withdrawing a majority of U.S. forces from Iraq by 2011. Since the U.S. failed to solve the Iran-backed militia problem before leaving, our withdrawal precipitated a violent sectarian backlash against Iran’s Shiite proxies from Iraq’s Sunnis in the form of a new and brutal jihadist group: the Islamic State.

By 2014, the Obama administration quietly came to view Iran’s proxy groups as partners in the newly formed coalition to fight the Islamic State…

U.S. policy [under Obama] was also calibrated to accommodate the Iranians as we pushed for a nuclear deal from 2013 to 2015. After the deal was reached, there was no debating the role of these militias or the danger they posed to Iraqi sovereignty. There was even a veiled attempt to identify these groups as independent, not subservient to Iran. This was fiction…To add insult to injury, the militias were now funded, to one extent or another, by the $150 billion of frozen funds released by the Obama administration to Iran through the deal.

Under Soleimani’s guidance, Iran’s militias also operated well beyond Iraq…

…[W]ith his targeted strike on Qassim Soleimani, Trump upended this dynamic. In holding the terror master responsible for attacks carried out by his Iraqi proxies, the U.S. president torched the thin firewall that long hindered American decisionmakers from holding Iran accountable. And in so doing, he appears to have pushed Iran’s proxies to dispense with the fiction as well.

Unlike the presidents before him, Trump was unafraid of pulling back the Iranian wizards’ curtain and risking whatever Iran would do. That may be because of his faith in America and his faith in his own decisions, but it also sounds like to me like a realistic evaluation of Iran’s power or lack thereof, and its competence or lack thereof. Time will tell and the situation could change, but so far Iran appears to be reeling from the shock – not only of Trump’s audacity in undoing forty years of American policy in one fell swoop, but of their own military’s inability to know a passenger plane from a missile.

(That’s assuming the strike on Flight 352 really was a case of mistaken identity.)

People who don’t understand Trump’s military policy, or who say he’s a bumbling stumbling moron who happens to get lucky with surprising regularity, don’t seem to know what a Jacksonian is. But the Jacksonian approach seems to be the key to Trump, as this article by Walter Russell Mead – written right around the time of Trump’s inauguration – makes clear:

Since World War II, U.S. grand strategy has been shaped by two major schools of thought, both focused on achieving a stable international system with the United States at the center. Hamiltonians believed that it was in the American interest for the United States to replace the United Kingdom as “the gyroscope of world order,”…something that would both contain the Soviet Union and advance U.S. interests. When the Soviet Union fell, Hamiltonians responded by doubling down on the creation of a global liberal order, understood primarily in economic terms.

Wilsonians, meanwhile, also believed that the creation of a global liberal order was a vital U.S. interest, but they conceived of it in terms of values rather than economics. Seeing corrupt and authoritarian regimes abroad as a leading cause of conflict and violence, Wilsonians sought peace through the promotion of human rights, democratic governance, and the rule of law…

The disputes between and among these factions were intense and consequential, but they took place within a common commitment to a common project of global order. As that project came under increasing strain in recent decades, however, the unquestioned grip of the globalists on U.S. foreign policy thinking began to loosen. More nationalist, less globally minded voices began to be heard, and a public increasingly disenchanted with what it saw as the costly failures the global order-building project began to challenge what the foreign policy establishment was preaching. The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian schools of thought, prominent before World War II but out of favor during the heyday of the liberal order, have come back with a vengeance…

For Jacksonians—who formed the core of Trump’s passionately supportive base—the United States is not a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment and oriented toward the fulfillment of a universal mission. Rather, it is the nation-state of the American people, and its chief business lies at home. Jacksonians see American exceptionalism not as a function of the universal appeal of American ideas, or even as a function of a unique American vocation to transform the world, but rather as rooted in the country’s singular commitment to the equality and dignity of individual American citizens. The role of the U.S. government, Jacksonians believe, is to fulfill the country’s destiny by looking after the physical security and economic well-being of the American people in their national home—and to do that while interfering as little as possible with the individual freedom that makes the country unique.

For Jacksonian America, certain events galvanize intense interest and political engagement, however brief. One of these is war; when an enemy attacks, Jacksonians spring to the country’s defense. The most powerful driver of Jacksonian political engagement in domestic politics, similarly, is the perception that Jacksonians are being attacked by internal enemies, such as an elite cabal or immigrants from different backgrounds. Jacksonians worry about the U.S. government being taken over by malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character. They are not obsessed with corruption, seeing it as an ineradicable part of politics. But they care deeply about what they see as perversion—when politicians try to use the government to oppress the people rather than protect them. And that is what many Jacksonians came to feel was happening in recent years, with powerful forces in the American elite, including the political establishments of both major parties, in cahoots against them.

Many Jacksonians came to believe that the American establishment was no longer reliably patriotic, with “patriotism” defined as an instinctive loyalty to the well-being and values of Jacksonian America. And they were not wholly wrong…

Although I disagree with some of what Mead writes – for example, I do see Jacksonians as believing that the US is “a political entity created and defined by a set of intellectual propositions rooted in the Enlightenment.” But my quibbles with him are relatively minor compared with my general agreements with his description of the worldview of the Jacksoninans.

Since Mead wrote the words I quoted above, events have only solidified the perception that there are “malevolent forces bent on transforming the United States’ essential character” who already have a great deal of power and who would like to obtain much more. And it seems to me that Mead was particularly good at describing the method in what to so many other people may seem like Trump’s madness, both in foreign policy and elsewhere.

About a year after that essay was written, Mead gave this interview, in which he said:

For “a scholar of foreign policy,” says Mead, who is today a distinguished fellow at the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute, watching Trump’s rise was sort of an out-of-body experience, a once-in-a-career moment “where these abstract typologies that you write about suddenly seems to be happening in front of you.”

Mead was also courted by Steve Bannon – for the short time Bannon was a Trump advisor. But Bannon made the error of thinking that because Mead could describe Jacksonians so well (and for the most part, although not entirely, without condescension or error), that he must be a Jacksonian. But Mead corrected him:

As he told Bannon, “Well, you know, Steve, I write about Jacksonianism. That doesn’t mean I am a Jacksonian,” Mead remembers telling the Trump strategist. Not only that, but “actually, I voted for Clinton in the election.”

Bannon, he said, was a “little bit shocked.”

That puts Mead squarely in the camp of people such as Alan Dershowitz, whom I respect because – although I disagree strongly with them politically – they seem to retain a sense of objectivity when they write about politics, and they try to be (and usually succeed in being) fair even to those with whom they differ. This should be standard operating procedure, but these days it is vanishingly rare.