Some questions about the caravan

The New Neo Posted on by

Who organized the caravan?

Who is helping these people along the way?

What will happen when they reach the border?

I could give you links to articles purporting to answer the first two questions, but I think that none of them are worth the paper they’re printed on (which is no paper at all). You can find a lot of links to them in this roundup at Ace’s, however, if you’re interested in seeing some.

I think it’s clear, however, that the caravan is not a group of people that arose spontaneously and organically, and are foraging for food along the way. Someone is helping them.

The Trump administration has said that they will not be allowed into this country:

“You will not be successful in getting into the United States illegally, no matter what,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday. “I repeat: The caravan will not cross our border into our southern states under any circumstances.”

Pompeo has been working with the Mexican government and the United Nations agency responsible for refugees to arrange for the migrants to be stopped before they reach the Rio Grande. He challenged criticism that the Trump administration has taken a harsh line with refugees by lowering the number of annual admissions, but also defended a zero-tolerance policy for the current caravan.

“We are determined that illegal entry into the United States from this caravan will not be possible,” he said.

The all-important “how?” question has not been answered, however.

As I’ve said before, it seems quite likely that the timing of this is connected with the coming election. However, I’m not at all sure it will come to a head before that.

Political violence, left and right

The New Neo Posted on by

In recent days the left has increasingly been promoting the idea that violence in the service of politics is perfectly okay, even recommended.

When a leftist tried to assassinate a bunch of Republican members of Congress on a baseball field about a year and a half ago, and came very close to succeeding, it was only covered relatively briefly considering the incident’s severity, and the political motivations of the perp were sometimes minimized or denied.

Now there has been a series of what looks like pipe bombs delivered to the homes of various people on the left, mostly in the New York area. We know nothing about the perp or perps, but one can assume it’s someone on the right.

Fortunately, authorities have intercepted the packages and no harm has been done to anyone. They were sent to the homes (or mailboxes) of Soros, Clinton, Obama, as well as the CNN offices. Except for the latter, as far as I know these addresses are rather difficult to come by. It’s a bit puzzling how they were obtained, although no doubt it can be done by a determined person. Also, since I think most people would assume that all the targets have lots of security, it was always highly likely that such devices would not pass security.

Which is exactly what happened:

“The packages were immediately identified during routine mail screening procedures as potential explosive devices and were appropriately handled as such,” the Secret Service said in a statement.

Well, maybe the perp is sort-of-smart (smart enough to get the addresses) and yet sort-of-stupid (stupid enough to think the bombs would actually get to their targets). Or maybe the perp was just trying to frighten people. Maybe—although I doubt it—it’s even a false flag operation, like so many of the racist incidents on college campuses that turn out to be hoaxes.

We don’t know. The timing—two weeks prior to the election—indicates a desire to influence it, but that doesn’t tell us who did this.

At some point, I fear someone is going to get hurt. It could be someone on the left. It could be someone on the right. But there’s a contagion effect that goes on and is very worrisome.

Sad announcement from Sandra Day O’Connor

The New Neo Posted on by

At 88, she writes that she has been diagnosed with dementia, probably Alzheimer’s.

“I will continue living in Phoenix, Arizona surrounded by dear friends and family,” she wrote and added, “While the final chapter of my life with dementia may be trying, nothing has diminished my gratitude and deep appreciation for the countless blessings of my life.”

A dementia diagnosis is one of the most difficult possibilities in later life. I think everyone “of a certain age” is frightened by the prospect. Every time we forget something or do something absent-minded the specter rises. And for someone like O’Connor, whose intellect was a very big part of her nature, the future losses may loom especially hard.

On the other hand, as she says, she is surrounded by family and has lived a rich, full life. This has to help somewhat, although not enough. I wish O’Connor and her family well in dealing with this terribly trying period of her life.

In doing some research on O’Connor, I also came across a website for an organization she founded. The goal is the teaching of civics to young people. I have no idea whether it’s politically neutral or not, but at first glance (and I didn’t spend much time there) the aim appears to be to teach about how government functions without getting into specifically partisan messages.

I happened to see something on the news last night that quoted a survey which found that only about a third of Americans can name the three branches of government. That’s how low the teaching of civics in this country has sunk. Shameful.

World Series tonight

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s the Red Sox vs. the Dodgers, and it’s scheduled to start at 8:09 PM. But there may be a rain delay.

The Sox won the Series in 1918 and then didn’t win it again till 2004. People who weren’t Sox fans for those frustrating lean years can hardly imagine how it was for those of us who were. I started being a sometime fan in the late 60s and an intense fan in the 80s, and the years between that and 2004 were enough leanness for me.

Well, Cubs fans probably understand, I suppose—they had quite a bit of a dry spell themselves between 1908 and 2016, although I don’t think they were quite as “creative” about their losses as the Sox.

After 2004 and the Sox’s Series win, which was a fabulous high that didn’t dissipate for months, I discovered to my surprise that I was now satisfied. I stopped watching the Sox’s regular season cold turkey, although I always tuned in when they were in contention in the playoffs.

So here I am, paying attention again.

[NOTE: Please see this post for the story of how I became an intense baseball fan—and why.]

Dershowitz may WalkAway…

The New Neo Posted on by

[CORRECTION: OOPS! I apologize for not checking the date of the article. I was assuming it was new because I just heard about it, but it’s actually quite old (February, 2017). So the original body of this post is old news.

However, interestingly, it turns out that Ellison was made Deputy Chair rather than Chair in the results of that election. I guess that was okay with Dershowitz, although it seems like it was a compromise that avoided the real issue—which is that he ascended that high in the Democratic Party at all, considering his history. In fact, it turns out that the “Deputy” position was newly-revived in 2017, just for him:

The Deputy Chair of the Democratic National Committee is a position within the United States Democratic Party that was re-established by Tom Perez in February 2017 after the 2017 DNC Chair race, won by Perez.

After a close victory over Minnesota Congressman Keith Ellison, Perez appointed Ellison as Deputy Chair in an attempt to lessen the divide in the Democratic Party after the contentious 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, which saw conflicts between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.[1] Perez was seen as being more in line with the Clinton wing, while Ellison was more in line with the Sanders wing.

So back then (and I obviously missed the news at the time, although I knew that Ellison had not been elected Chair) it was an attempt to welcome the leftist wing of the party into the fold at the highest levels and appease it. Fascinating. We know how much “progress” has been made since then.

Dershowitz may not have officially WalkedAway after that, but he’s certainly alienated a great many of his fellow Democrats since then.]

…if Keith Ellison is elected the Democrats’ chairman:

My loyalty to my country and my principles and my heritage exceeds any loyalty to my party. I will urge other like-minded people — centrist liberals — to follow my lead and quit the Democratic Party if Ellison is elected chairman. We will not be leaving the Democratic Party we have long supported. The Democratic Party will be leaving us!

The reasons Dershowitz gives are Ellison’s alliance with the anti-Semitic Farrakhan and Ellison’s own expressed anti-Semitism and anti-Israel votes. Dershowitz adds:

The DNC has a momentous choice this weekend. It can move the party in the direction of Jeremy Corbyn’s labor party in England, in the hope of attracting Jill Stein Green Party voters and millennials who stayed home. In doing so they would be giving up on any attempt to recapture the working class and rust-belt voters in the mid-western states that turned the Electoral College over to Donald Trump.

Jeremy Corbyn today could not get elected dog catcher in Great Britain. I do not want to see the Democratic Party relegated to permanent minority status as a hard-left fringe.

I certainly agree with the danger of the Democrats’ hard-left turn. Then again, I think Dershowitz is fooling himself to think that this turn didn’t happen long ago, and was merely somewhat hidden with dissembling rhetoric.

Dershowitz has been expressing views outside the Democratic party line for quite some time now, and I think it’s cost him a lot (I’m written many times on this blog about him). But he is not yet ready to really leave. He adds something that takes away from his declaration:

If [Ellison] is elected, I will quit the [Democratic] party after 60 years of loyal association and voting. I will become an independent, continuing to vote for the best candidates, most of whom, I assume, will still be Democrats. But I will not contribute to the DNC or support it as an institution.

He assumes they will still be Democrats? Why on earth would he assume that? It’s an example of what I have previously called “the birthmark” of political identity:

…[T]he groups to which we belong–social, ethnic, religious, racial, class, professional, recreational, familial, political–all are pieces in the puzzle that creates our sense of identity. The majority of people are probably most comfortable when they perceive the elements within them as cohesive, and are uncomfortable when they see them as clashing with each other. But all sides–Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, “progressives” and anarchists and libertarians–take on an affiliation which becomes a basic part of personal identity and is consequently often very difficult to give up.

An excellent illustration of this phenomenon is Democrat Zell Miller, who gave a speech nominating G.W. Bush at last year’s Republican convention. This earned him the enmity of most of his fellow Democrats, who considered him a traitor to the party.

Many people wondered aloud why Zell Miller had not switched parties in light of his strong alignment with the Republicans and his staunch opposition to the Democrats. A “conservative Democrat” seemed to be a sort of oxymoron.

Miller’s answer? That he was born into the Democratic Party and considers his party label to be “like a birthmark”–innate, and difficult to eradicate.

I am virtually certain something similar is part of Dershowitz’s makeup. He is profoundly torn between his own identity as a Democrat—which to him is identified with “the good”—and what he cannot help but see with his own eyes. I don’t make light of the conflict. It is why a mind can be a difficult thing to change, and a party affiliation as well.

I also don’t think the Democratic Party cares what happens to Alan Dershowitz. Whether he supports them or not won’t change a thing for them, and his threats will have no effect on them. I don’t know whether they’ll elect Ellison or not—he has other baggage at the moment—but I do feel very strongly that if they don’t it won’t be because of any threats by Dershowitz.

[Hat tip: commenter “Julie near Chicago.”]

Trump, the unlikely populist (redux)

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I watched about ten minutes of Trump’s latest rally speech. It struck me that he hasn’t changed all that much from the last (and first) time I watched one, over three years ago (can it really be that long?) If anything, he’s both more relaxed and more strident, but he was already relaxed and strident back then, too.

When I wrote that post I just linked, the one from three years ago, I hadn’t yet seen much of Trump. I’d never watched his TV show or paid much attention to him prior to his entry into politics. But I’ve certainly made up for lost time since then, haven’t I?

I think most of what I wrote on viewing that first speech still holds, and it strikes me that the things I mentioned are among Trump’s great political gifts and contribute significantly to what makes him unique as an American politician (at least, compared to others I’ve observed in my lifetime), and are a goodly part of what so confounds Trump’s opponents and enemies and ties them into furious impotent knots.

So I’m going to reproduce the gist of that post of mine from August of 2015, with some recent additions in brackets. Here it is:

Trump giving a political speech is not like anyone else giving a political speech. He’s in his element in front of a crowd. And even in Alabama [or Texas, or anywhere], the New York shtick that you would think wouldn’t play so well there seems to be something they love when Trump does it. People are really really really sick of feeling impotent as Obama has thumbed his nose at them and lied to them, as the GOP has either disappointed or outright betrayed them [something which has somewhat changed lately for a lot of people, as the GOP has shown more spine], and as PC thought has taken over our values, education, the press, some churches, and many novels and movies [this aspect has, if anything, worsened].

Trump seems immune from PC considerations and also from the ubiquitous need to be beholden to conventional donors. He has the advantage of his familiarity to the public and his relaxation in front of the camera gained from years of being a showman and a TV personality. Trump has a populist appeal—you could see it very clearly during his speech—but he’s a rich-as-Croesus populist who doesn’t trash the rich as so many populists do; au contraire. Nor does he apologize for being mega-rich himself; he brags [bragging about his riches has now been mostly replaced by bragging about his record as president].

Trump has mastered not just the “art of the deal” but the art of giving a speech that sounds like ad-libbing stream-of-consciousness but is not. As he went along it occurred to me that what he is doing is cheerleading for America, reiterating over and over what he would do [and now, he adds what he already has done] for America and what he would do for the people he is speaking to, and fitting his words to their desire that America be what it once was. It’s the flip side of Obama’s hope and change: they hope that he can change things back to a time when America was great, and that’s his explicit message and the slogan on the very flyover-country-looking hats he wears and sells. This is a guy who knows marketing, and it’s no accident that the slogan is also pretty much what Reagan used in 1980 (Reagan put the word “let’s” at the beginning of the phrase, but otherwise it was exactly the same).

Trump is a happy warrior, or at least talks like one. “I will rebuild the military so it’s so strong and so powerful that we’ll never have to use it. No one will ever mess with us” is a typical utterance. He lists stuff—trade, health care, women’s health issues—and says “we’re gonna fix it.” And I guess people believe him, or at least believe he’s sincere about trying. How he’ll get around the impediments that stand in the way is unclear, but people don’t want clarity. They like his style. They like his spirit. [And now, of course, he has his record of political accomplishment to point to, so we know more about the “how.”]

“We have a great lack of spirit,” said Trump, and he’s right; and he’s out to provide it, and he does. He says he had thought Obama would be “a great cheerleader,” (hmmm, I thought; I just perceived him as a cheerleader a moment ago, and now he’s using the word). Instead, Obama is “a great divider.” But Trump? “I am going to make this country bigger and stronger and better and you’re gonna love it, and you’re gonna love your president…and you’re gonna be so proud.”

…[Trump] makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.

That was towards the end of the post, but I ended it by saying I didn’t understand the people who didn’t take Trump’s candidacy seriously. Even in August of 2015 I took it very seriously indeed, and thought all the other Republican candidates and the Democrats as well should be scared by his entry into the race, because someone with those skills could win both the nomination and the presidency. It wasn’t that I necessarily thought either would occur, but it was clear to me that they might occur and that the chances were not minuscule.

Well, history has told us it happened, and here we are. And Trump is still giving those relaxed and strident speeches demonstrating his political skills, and still drawing absolutely enormous crowds. Now, as I said, he has a track record to go with his braggadocio. This gives him added confidence and lends credence to what he says.

Trump said in that speech from three years ago that he wanted to be a uniter. The country is more bitterly divided than ever, but I don’t see that as primarily his fault. The Resistance was fully in place even before he took office, and they are determined to divide and conquer, to undermine everything he does, and to make it so that half the country doesn’t even really listen to him or hears a distorted version of what he is saying.

Trump is still drawing mammoth crowds. There are no doubt many reasons for that, but one thing about attending a Trump speech is that it’s fun. Of how many politicians can you say that?

The caravan moves on—and on

The New Neo Posted on by

“Sadly, it looks like Mexico’s Police and Military are unable to stop the Caravan heading to the Southern Border of the United States. Criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in,” Trump said in one tweet.

“I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergy (sic). Must change laws!”

Activists say the journey through of at least 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) through Mexico to the US border could take a month.

The timing is interesting. Our elections are only about two weeks from now, so the caravan should still be in transit at that point. Does the left—which helped organize the entire thing—think that’s good timing for them? In the tweet I quoted above, Trump seems to think the timing helps the GOP, at least potentially: “Must change laws!” Of course, Congress has been talking about that for decades without coming up with anything workable.

“We also are deeply concerned by the violence provoked by some members of the group, as well as the apparent political motivation of some organizers of the caravan,” Pompeo said in a statement.

Seems to me that this could cut either way. The caravan energizes the right, for obvious reasons—including the lawlessness and defiance and yes, the sense of entitlement expressed by many of the quoted caravaners in the news. But there are a lot of people on the left who feel it helps them, by playing on the sympathy of those who think the US needs to take everyone who tries to get here.

Of course, those who think the US needs to take everyone who tries to get here are probably already voting Democrat.

And speaking of mobs—are we allowed to use the word for caravan? A mob in transit?

Prognostications on the House in November 2018

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve said before that I’m worried about the makeup of the next House of Representatives. The specter of Pelosi or someone politically similar as Speaker, the rise of the hard left, the end of ongoing investigations that I think are important, the impeachment plans—all those things are not happy prospects.

In addition, it’s profoundly depressing to think that so many voters seem to find those same prospects consummations devoutly to be wished. And that includes a lot of my friends and family.

But that’s not what this post is about. That’s just the intro.

The real subject of this post is the prediction of the House elections. Blue tsunami, blue trickle, red wave surprise—predictions vary, but it’s a mystery. Not only have I lost whatever lingering faith I ever had in the polls, but House races are notorious for being difficult to poll and difficult to predict—which doesn’t stop prognosticators from doing so, over and over and over again. You can hardly open a paper (or click on a website, which is the way I get my news) or visit a blog without seeing a prediction, usually of a blue wave. And yet, I don’t think anyone really knows. I think we’re all just guessing in the dark.

Why are House races especially difficult to predict? They require more delicate and precise sampling, because the districts are so often complicated by the dictates of gerrymandering. There are so many House elections—every single member of the House is up for re-election every two years, and quite a few races are hotly contested and seemingly close—that polling is expensive and often not done, or not done all that often. Also, unless you do an up-to-the-minute poll shortly before the election itself the polls can be quite meaningless, because the situation can change so rapidly. In addition, because it’s a midyear election with no presidential race, turnout is especially important because fewer people vote, and yet turnout is particularly hard to predict. For all these reasons I think most House polls and predictions are garbage-in/garbage-out, even more so than in a presidential year.

I find myself wanting to turn away from the news in general, but in particular wanting to turn away from any article about what will happen in the House come November 6, 2018. And you?

To all leftists and “Resistance” members

The New Neo Posted on by

Take it from one who knows:

As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out…

But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it…

So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,

To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,

To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President…

To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler…

you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.

You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like…

He proceeds to tell them what that world looked like.

The whole thing is well worth reading.

Jersey Boys: here and there and everywhere

The New Neo Posted on by

I saw a production of “Jersey Boys” recently in southern Maine at the Ogunquit Playhouse. It’s still going on, but apparently it’s sold out or almost sold out for the rest of the run—and no wonder, because watching it is a whole lot of fun for us codgers who were young in the 60s. In case you don’t know anything about the musical, it’s one of those sure-fire hits that traces the rise and fall and rise of a well-known rock group, in this case the Four Seasons.

I recall the Four Seasons and Frankie Valli, he of the extraordinary falsetto. But before I attended the show I couldn’t have told you, off the top of my head, the names of their hits. I knew that there were many, and I knew that I probably was familiar with an awful lot of them, but I couldn’t have conjured any of them up.

I didn’t read the program before the show, because I wanted to be surprised. But as they say, the hits kept coming. And coming and coming. And I knew all but one. Not just “knew” in some vague sense, but in the very specific sense of knowing all the words and all the intonations and rhythms of the originals.

From the evidence of the sing-along propensities of all the greyhairs surrounding me, so did just about everyone in the audience, too. The entertainers and the audience all seemed to be having a fabulous time, and so did I. If it wasn’t exactly being young again, it was something almost like it.

The actor who played Frankie Valli sounded extraordinarily like him, although this being 2018 the sound was ramped up past the point I would desire (and with more choreography and movement; the actual Four Seasons were usually more static when they performed). And of course, when I got home I went straight to YouTube, where I found this little sampler medley by the originals, the one-and-onlys. The guy at the keyboard, Bob Gaudio, wrote almost all their music:

The musical “Jersey Boys” was on Broadway from 2005 to 2017; that’s quite a run. Then it opened off-Broadway. But in the meantime it also went all over the world, including to places you wouldn’t necessarily imagine.

Here’s what seems to be the cast of the Japanese version. They have a little problem with some of the phonemes that don’t ordinarily occur in their language, but they still do a bang-up job:

Here’s a short clip of the production I saw, which sounded even better in person. It’s playing till October 28, but as I said, tickets are scarce:

This one’s about five years old. It’s about the search and audition process to find Frankie Vallis all over the world:

Election 2018: thinking about impeachment

The New Neo Posted on by

And the Democrats are indeed thinking about it.

If the blue wave materializes in the House—and it definitely might—the repercussions would be great. All the investigations the Republicans have launched into Democratic machinations in 2016 would end, and the full court press would be on to destroy the Trump presidency. Impeachment would almost certainly be on the table, as well, with the power to accomplish it without a single Republican vote.

Impeachment was never meant to be a party-line event. In fact, the Founders were very wary of its becoming a mere political tool of the legislature to destroy a president:

An early draft of the Constitution gave Congress the power to impeach and remove officers for “maladministration.” James Madison objected to this because the term was so vague that it would allow impeachment for any reason at all. As he put it, “so vague a term will be equivalent to a tenure during the pleasure of the Senate.” The term “maladministration” was then deleted from the draft and replaced by the phrase “other high crimes and misdemeanors.” This shows that the Framers meant for the phrase “high crimes and misdemeanors” to signify only conduct that seriously harms the public and seriously compromises the officer’s ability to continue. If the phrase is given a less rigorous interpretation, it could allow Congress to influence and control the President and the courts.

A great many of the arguments about impeachment involve the definition of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and what the Founders may have meant by that. But the phrase has come to mean pretty much anything a majority of the House members say it does, and therefore desisting from the use of impeachment for political reasons depends on their integrity.

Yes, integrity, which seems to be in short supply these days.

Back when Clinton was impeached, there was minimal crossing of party lines on two of the counts which succeeded, and a lot of crossing for the Republicans on two more counts which failed. The Republicans controlled Congress at the time:

Clinton was impeached on December 19, 1998, by the House of Representatives on grounds of perjury to a grand jury (by a 228–206 vote) and obstruction of justice (by a 221–212 vote). Two other articles of impeachment failed – a second count of perjury in the Jones case (by a 205–229 vote) and one accusing Clinton of abuse of power (by a 148–285 vote)…

Five Democrats (Virgil Goode of Virginia, Ralph Hall of Texas, Paul McHale of Pennsylvania, Charles Stenholm of Texas and Gene Taylor of Mississippi) voted in favor of three of the four articles of impeachment, but only Taylor voted for the abuse of power charge. Five Republicans (Amo Houghton of New York, Peter King of New York, Connie Morella of Maryland, Chris Shays of Connecticut and Mark Souder of Indiana) voted against the first perjury charge. Eight more Republicans (Sherwood Boehlert of New York, Michael Castle of Delaware, Phil English of Pennsylvania, Nancy Johnson of Connecticut, Jay Kim of California, Jim Leach of Iowa, John McHugh of New York and Ralph Regula of Ohio), but not Souder, voted against the obstruction charge. Twenty-eight Republicans voted against the second perjury charge, sending it to defeat, and eighty-one voted against the abuse of power charge.

I did some research to discover why the Founders had set the bar so low—a simple majority in the House—for impeachment proceedings to begin. I was unable to find the answer. But that low bar makes the impeachment process highly susceptible to political motives. The fact that it’s relatively easy to impeach and quite hard to convict—the latter requires a two-thirds vote in the Senate—does act as somewhat of a check, but only if the House is practical enough and patriotic enough to realize that hampering a duly elected president with impeachment proceedings that will never go anywhere is not in the best interests of the country. That’s one of the many reasons I was not in favor of Clinton’s impeachment, and my opinion on that has not changed over time (I’ve written about all the reasons I think the Clinton impeachment was a bad idea, and I’m not going to take it up again right now).

Impeachments that cannot possibly end in conviction are (among other things) attempts at hurting a president, and the temptation to do so is great in our very bitter political climate. The Republicans could have done the same to Obama when they controlled the House during the latter part of his administration, but they did not, although a lot of people on the right were clamoring for them to do so. I was not one of those people.

The midterm elections are in approximately two and a half weeks. I’ve said before that I’m anxious about them, and I continue to be worried.

When fathers discover their children have a different biological father

The New Neo Posted on by

This is a disturbing article on a lot of levels, although it describes a phenomenon that’s not a great surprise: the fact that sometimes a man is married to a woman who cheats, and sometimes that cheating results in a child, and sometimes the man doesn’t know it’s not his biological child, and sometimes—now, with the advent of genetic testing—the man discovers the biological truth much later.

That’s a sad and difficult situation. The man can be devastated, and the child can be tremendously traumatized. The mother is ordinarily in big big trouble, although at least in that case it’s a trouble of her own making.

There is no simple or one-size-fits-all solution. Going to a really good family therapist could help, but really good family therapists are not so easy to find. If the family is religious, answers might be found there.

But the emotions that are stirred up can be explosive and exceptionally painful. For the man, the pain and outrage can go very deep. And with the growth of DNA companies and their use, this sort of situation is probably going to become more common.

But the particular story that’s tracked in the article I linked is disturbing for different reasons. The father, whose pseudonym is Christopher for purposes of the story, had long strongly suspected his wife had been unfaithful early in their marriage around the time their daughter (who was now 15) had been born. So for a decade and a half he had wrestled with the idea and even the deep suspicion that she was not his biological child.

That’s a bad situation to begin with, and one with which Christopher had obviously not made any sort of peace or gotten any resolution for an entire decade and a half. But before getting the test, he should have figured out exactly why he was requesting it, how it could change things, what he planned to do if the results showed the girl was not his biological child, and how it was likely to affect all parties involved, especially the completely innocent daughter. In his case, he had to know he was throwing a bomb into the mix, a bomb that might detonate. It’s very different, of course, when the DNA test is taken without any suspicion or foreknowledge of infidelity, and the news comes as a total shock, but that was not the case here.

This is Christopher speaking. He had wanted the test in order to find out whether his daughter was his biological child, although the daughter had no idea that was the motivation:

I knew my ex-wife was having affairs back then, and I couldn’t catch her. When I bought the test, my daughter went and told her mom [that they were taking the test; the daughter had no clue why her father wanted it], and then an hour and a half, two hours later, in the middle of the night, my ex gets up and she says, “I need to talk to you ’cause I had an affair. I think it was a two-year-long affair.”

The worst was to see the reaction of my daughter. She just cried and cried. It was like a nuclear bomb going off. It changed the dynamic for a long time between my son and her.

The marriage ended, as well.

When asked if the results of the test changed his relationship with his daughter, Christopher answered this way:

On the day that I found out, I was like, I wanted to reject her, because I said my boundary was I will not raise another man’s child from an affair. My mom put me straight. She was like, “She’s innocent in this. Don’t blame her.” So I consider her my daughter.

I commend Christopher for getting over the hump, because if he hadn’t, his daughter (and she is his daughter; he’s been her father her entire life) would have suffered even more than she already has. But there’s a remnant of his original thinking in the terms he still seems to use to refer to the fathers: biological father and birth-certificate father.

I’ve never heard that latter term before. It would make sense if we’re talking about an infant, a baby with whom the non-biological father has never really bonded, and hasn’t raised. But a fifteen-year-old? As Christopher’s own daughter said, “He just created me, but you’re my dad.”

Historically, the difficulty of knowing for certain who the father of any child is has made for some customs that restrict the movement of women and particularly their sexual behavior. Those days are gone, but even before their demise, there was always the possibility of infidelity and passing off another child as a man’s own. Now the opportunities are even greater, and the fear of this happening can be great as well. On top of all that, we have the ability as never before to actually determine whether a child is the biological offspring of a particular man.

This makes for a potential powder keg, and if anyone steps into it knowing (as Christopher knew) that the chances are good that the child is not his, he needs to prepare himself in advance for the consequences, and consider how the entire thing will affect the child he has nurtured all these years. It is a supreme act of slefless fatherhood to be able to put that child’s needs first.

I don’t have the answer to what’s best—each father must decide that for himself—but I do know that in a case like that, preparation is key.