“The Democrats have made Trump a sympathetic character”

The New Neo Posted on by

I want to highlight this comment by “JFM”:

The Democrats have made Trump a sympathetic character.

That sums up something I’ve been thinking for quite some time, and especially since the impeachment hearings began.

Trump has always been a brash guy, a loudmouthed New Yorker, born in privilege (pardon the “woke” word, but it applies here) and wealth, and parlaying that wealth into more wealth by wheeling and dealing and writing books and generally promoting himself. You either liked him or hated him (or like me, were indifferent to him and pretty much ignored him) prior to his running for office.

But one thing you didn’t do is sympathize with him or find him to be some sort of victim. I just don’t think that would have entered anyone’s mind.

And that situation continued for a while after his election. He was definitely one to blow his own horn, and to give as good as he got to his enemies.

But over the years, the actions of the Democrats and what has come to be called the “deep state” have dramatically increased the number of people who feel Trump has gotten a raw deal. They have accomplished what would have been thought nearly impossible, which is to make Trump seem a persecuted person, the victim of unfair and powerful forces out to get him.

I haven’t seen a poll on whether this change of public opinion has really occurred, but it’s what I observe in comments around the blogosphere and elsewhere. And it can’t be good for the Democrats.

The desire to humiliate: they impeached Trump in order to make him wear the scarlet “I”

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve noticed that many of the justifications for impeaching Trump involve some sort of gloating that now he must bear the shame of having been one of the few presidents in our history who have been impeached. In other words, they want him to wear for all time a scarlet “I”.

But did it ever occur to them that it might look to a lot of people – even including historians of the future – like a scarlet “M” for “martyred”?

If you impeach someone for trivial reasons, or based on lies, or both, how does that make the impeached person look bad?

Hadn’t you better make sure that your accusations appear to be sound? Framing someone or over-reacting to something that person has done makes you seem hysterical, mendacious, scheming, histrionic, fake. And piously intoning how sad and reluctant you are as you do it, when it’s crystal clear that’s just a pose and you are joyful, doesn’t make you look good and your target look bad, either.

George Burns once said, “If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made.” Well, the Democrats can’t fake sincerity, and I don’t think they’re got it made.

The impulse is the one so clearly stated by Robert de Niro, who recently said this:

“It would feel kind of good to punch him. Not hurt him. Just punch him in the face,” said [Michael] Moore. “Just cathartic.”

De Niro responded, “I’d like to see a bag of shit right in his face. Hit him right in the face like that, and let the picture go all over the world. And that would be the most humiliating thing.”

He added, “He needs to be humiliated. He needs to be confronted, and he needs to be humiliated by whoever his political opponent is.”

De Niro explained that he would like to see the 2020 Democratic candidate tear Trump down, even if it’s not in an “obviously physical way.”

“The people have to see that. For him to be humiliated,” De Niro said.

Yes, we get it: humiliated. What a primitive impulse De Niro is describing, that of the schoolyard bully. Why would we think less of Trump and more of De Niro and/or the thugs carrying out such a wish? Or even expressing such a wish? The only person De Niro is humiliating here is himself, but he can’t even see that.

And I maintain that public humiliation is a large part of the impetus behind all of this. And so far it’s just not working – except as a boomerang.

Boris Johnson wishes the Jews of Britain a Happy Chanukah

The New Neo Posted on by

Johnson:

“To all our Jewish friends, neighbors, and relatives, wherever you are in the world, let me wish you a very happy Hanukah,” said Johnson…

…Today, as Britain’s Jews seek to drive back the darkness of resurgent anti-Semitism, you have every decent person in this country fighting by your side.”

“Because Britain would not be Britain without its Jewish community.”

Some biographical notes on Boris Johnson’s own rather diverse heritage: did you know that Johnson had a paternal great-grandfather named Ali Kemal who was a Turkish writer and politician during the Ottoman Empire?:

Kemal was a journalist who travelled widely and took his holidays in other countries. On one of several visits to Switzerland, he met and fell in love with an Anglo-Swiss girl, Winifred Brun, the daughter of Frank Brun by his marriage to Margaret Johnson. They were married in Paddington, London, Middlesex, on 11 September 1903.

Early in his life, Kemal had acquired strong liberal democratic convictions, which caused him to be exiled from the Ottoman Empire under Abdul Hamid II, but immediately after the end of the Sultan’s personal rule in July 1908, he became one of the most prominent figures in Ottoman journalistic and political life. Because of his opposition to the Young Turks who had made the revolution, he spent most of the following decade in opposition.

Much more at the link, but I think it’s interesting that Boris Johnson is also a journalist as well as a politician.

But Boris Johnson’s heritage is more diverse than that. He had a maternal great-grandfather who was a Russian Jew:

Johnson’s maternal great-grandfather was a Russian Jewish immigrant named Elias Avery Lowe. Lowe was not a practicing Jew but was descendant of a strictly Orthodox Jewish rabbi from Lithuania…

Throughout his political career, Johnson has been a strong advocate for Israel. Writing for The Jewish Chronicle, Daniella Peled reported in 2007 that Johnson is, “an enemy of politically correct anti-Zionism and immensely proud of his own Jewish ancestry.” She quoted Johnson saying, “I feel Jewish when I feel the Jewish people are threatened or under attack, that’s when it sort of comes out. When I suddenly get a whiff of antisemitism, it’s then that you feel angry and protective.”

In addition to his Jewish ancestry, Johnson has even stronger ties to Israel through his Jewish stepmother, Jennifer Kidd Johnson, who married his father Stanley in 1981.

In 1984, Johnson, age 20, and his sister Rachel spent six weeks in Israel, volunteering on Kibbutz Kfar Hanasi, approximately 22 miles north of the Sea of Galilee in northern Israel.

Quite a contrast with Corbyn.

[NOTE: Here’s a look at Kemal from an Armenian perspective. Interesting. That article also mentions that Kemal was “the son of a Circassian slave and a Turkish business magnate.” And if you want to know something about Circassian slaves, see this:

A large percentage of officials in the Ottoman government were bought slaves, raised free, and integral to the success of the Ottoman Empire from the 14th century into the 19th. Many slave officials themselves owned numerous slaves, although the Sultan himself owned by far the most. By raising and specially training slaves as officials in palace schools such as Enderun, where they were taught to serve the Sultan and other educational subjects, the Ottomans created administrators with intricate knowledge of government, and fanatic loyalty…

Circassians, Syrians, and Nubians were the three primary races of females who were sold as sex slaves in the Ottoman Empire. Circassian girls were described as fair and light-skinned and were frequently enslaved by Crimean Tatars then sold to Ottoman empire to live and serve in a Harem. They were the most expensive, reaching up to 500 pounds sterling, and the most popular with the Turks.]

Lebkuchen again!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: Regulars here may remember that most years I put up a family Christmas recipe. And here it is again, with a slight but important change in the size of the baking pans.]

This recipe was brought over from Germany sometime in the mid-1800s, and was my favorite of all the wonderful treats cooked by my great-aunt Flora, a baker of rare gifts. She and my great-uncle were not only exceptionally wonderful people, but to my childish and wondering eyes they looked very much like Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus.

The name of the treat is lebkuchen, but it’s quite a different one from the traditional recipe, which I don’t much care for. This is sweet and dense, can be made ahead, and keeps very well when stored in tins.

Flora’s Lebkuchen:

(preheat the oven to 375 degrees)

1 pound dark brown sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1/2 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
4 oz. chopped dates
1 cup raisins
1 tsp. orange juice
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1 tsp. almond extract
1 tsp. lemon juice

Sift the dry ingredients together (flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon).

Beat the eggs and brown sugar together with a rotary beater till the mixture forms the ribbon. Add the orange juice, lemon juice, and extracts to it.

Add the dry mixture to it, a little at a time, stirring.

Add the raisins, dates, and walnuts.

Grease and flour two 8 X 8 cake pans [NOTE: In previous years I sometimes said 9 X 9, but 8 X 8 is actually much better and makes for a far moister product.] Put batter in pans and bake for about 25 minutes (or a little less; test the cake with a cake tester at 21 or 22 minutes to see if it’s done yet). You don’t want it to get too dark and dry on the edges, but the middle can’t still be wet when tested.

Meanwhile, make the frosting.

Melt about 6 Tbs. of unsalted butter and add 2 Tbs. hot milk, and 1 Tbs. almond extract. Add enough confectioner’s sugar to make a frosting of spreading consistency (the recipe says “2 cups,” but I’ve always noticed that’s not exactly correct). You can make even more frosting if you like a lot of frosting.

Let cake cool to at least lukewarm, and spread generously with the frosting. Then cut into small pieces and store (or eat!).

Enjoy!

Scott Johnson of Powerline makes a good point about the MSM and Russiagate

The New Neo Posted on by

Here it is, on the topic of the fact that media reports were almost uniformly wrong about Russiagate, the Nunes vs. Schiff memo, the Steele dossier’s reliability, and so much else:

If reporters were burned, they should be angry, and corrections should be forthcoming. If there isn’t an effort to reverse the wrong coverage, it will look like certain outlets (particularly cable channels) were complicit in knowingly giving oceans of airtime to shaky stories. It’s a bad look either way, but door number two is worse.

He’s right. If reporters were duped by the FBI and people such as Schiff, the MSM should be saying so and attacking those who deceived them, and trying to find out why it happened. The paucity of such articles, even now, suggests two things. The first is that it’s difficult for our self-righteous journalists to admit that they got this whole thing wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s hard because of both the natural human tendency to admit wrongdoing, as well as the fact that the truth goes in a political direction (defense of Donald Trump) that is anathema to them.

But the second is that they may indeed have known they were lying.

It’s another variant of ye olde “fools vs. knaves (or both)” question.

Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling gets a taste of the left’s medicine when she stands up for liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

At my son’s request, I read the first two Harry Potter books shortly after they first came out. They were okay as that sort of thing goes, but since I’m not keen on that sort of thing, I stopped reading them somewhere in the middle of the third book. The series just didn’t hold my interest, and I figured I’d sufficiently paid my Harry Potter dues – although my son felt I had shown remarkable dereliction of maternal duty.

I’ve also noted over subsequent years that J. K. Rowling, the books’ author, tended to voice the usual leftist line on many things. Rowling is a Brit and a writer, two reasons that stance didn’t surprise me.

But now that Rowling has stood up for liberty and freedom of expression against transgender orthodoxy, the hounds of war have been loosed on her – proving once again that, to the left, you’re only as good as your most recent party line:

She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.

The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are ‘not worthy of respect in a democratic society’. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.

This is a ruling by an employment tribunal and is not legally binding in terms of the British court system, but it’s a chilling development in line with some of the “pronoun” fights that have gone on in Canada and which catapulted Jordan Peterson into fame when he fought them in the name of liberty.

More about the Forstater case can be found here:

“It is a core component of her belief that she will refer to a person by the sex she considered appropriate even if it violates their dignity and/or creates an intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive environment,” [the judge] continued.

“The approach is not worthy of respect in a democratic society.”

Funny thing, but just a few short years ago this belief was standard and completely acceptable, and science agreed that transgender people never fully became a member (in the biological sense) of the sex to which they transitioned. More recently, transgender activists have openly pursued several goals on their agenda, and this is one of them: to force people to accept their view of things and to act accordingly or to have those people (or people such as Rowling who support their right to speak freely) pay a steep price in public shaming as well as suffer financial loss.

The United States has a legal tradition, as well as laws and presumptions, that favor the exercise and protection of free speech and liberty far more than anyplace in Europe (or perhaps even the world, although it’s Europe about which I know more). Although the curtailment of such liberty has been slower to come here, in part for that reason, there’s no reason to think it won’t happen here.

France’s rampant anti-Semitism

The New Neo Posted on by

I sometimes reflect on the fact that Hitler nearly succeeded in making Europe Judenfrei. He certainly succeeded in reducing the number of Jews there almost to the vanishing point.

But for the ones that remain, the present-day governments in Western Europe appear to be coming close to driving the remaining Jews away:

French political leaders often declare that fighting against anti-Semitism is of utmost importance; they say it every time a Jew is murdered in the country. The only anti-Semitism they seem ready to fight, however, is right-wing anti-Semitism. They seemingly refuse to see that all the Jews killed or assaulted in France since 2006 were victims of Muslim anti-Semites — and French political leaders never utter a word about it. They appear to hide Islamic anti-Semitism — embedded in the Qur’an and Hadiths and reinforced in the 1930s by the Nazis’ friendship with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini — under a Muslim hatred of the Jews based on a supposedly “legitimate” Muslim hatred of ‘Zionist crimes'”.

French political leaders also seemingly refuse to see another form of anti-Semitism that is on the rise: leftist anti-Semitism. It is precisely this leftist anti-Semitism that uses the mask of anti-Zionism to spread anti-Jewish hatred.

French political leaders also never speak about the way the French mainstream media talk about Israel, or about the consequences of those articles and reports. They constantly — and falsely — describe Israel as an evil country whose soldiers cavalierly kill Arabs on a daily basis and whose citizens “illegally occupy” territories (despite having been there for more than 3,000 years) that might belong to another people whom they cruelly deprive of everything.

French political leaders do not criticize anti-Israel articles and reports: the way most of them talk about Israel is just as anti-Israel as the worst anti-Israel articles. The government itself does no better…

The demographic transformation happening in France is also spreading throughout Western Europe, and the growing submission to Islam is being silently accepted by the ruling authorities almost everywhere. Political parties opposed to Islamization are pushed to the margins. Some Central European leaders – Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in Poland and President Miloš Zeman in the Czech Republic — are the only ones explicitly to reject the Islamization of their countries and take measures to curb Muslim immigration. They are often condemned by Western European leaders who want to force them to welcome immigrants by the thousands.

Reports show, not surprisingly, that the rise in the number of Muslim immigrants has led to an even broader rise in anti-Semitism.

Here is what is meant by the “demographic transformation happening in France”:

Jews have become a shrinking part of the population — 0.6 % — and carry no political weight. The French Muslim population is quickly growing — to more than 12% of the total. It has become virtually impossible to win an election in France without now counting on the Muslim vote.

And it has become virtually impossible to discuss these things without being accused of the dread “Islamophobia.”

Some Democrats apparently think that the impeachment vote means that Trump is out of office

The New Neo Posted on by

My goodness:

It might be difficult to believe after weeks of talk about impeachment that there are people who still don’t understand the process, but on Twitter last night, “#ByeTrump” was trending because many believed that the House vote on impeachment meant that President Donald Trump was now removed.

Some had to be schooled then today when they found out to their surprise that lo and behold, Trump was still president and that no, being impeached is not the same thing as removal.

Although shocking, it’s not surprising. We’ve known for quite some time that the teaching of civics is nothing like what it used to be, and that many people schooled in the US grow up ignorant of even the basics of the way our government works. So, many people who seem to be politically active and involved – involved enough to tweet about politics on Twitter, anyway – appear to have thought that impeachment itself would remove Trump from office.

This isn’t just about Trump. Apparently, these people are so ignorant of the entire picture of how our government is designed that they think the Founders set things up so that one body of our legislature can remove a president by a simple majority vote. Poof, you’re gone!

I’ve seen analogies saying that idea about impeachment resembles what happens in the UK with a parliamentary vote of “no confidence.” But I beg to differ. Not only is it different because in the UK the executive is meant to serve only at the will of the legislature, but also because a “no confidence” vote occurs at the hands of the prime minister’s own party. The PM is always of the same party as the dominant party in Parliament (or a parliamentary coalition of relatively simpatico parties, with the PM’s own party having a plurality). So any “no confidence” vote is the result of a majority of MPs in the PM’s own party [ADDED NOTE, and see ADDENDUM below: and/or the coalition parties] turning against him/her.

That is night and day from what happened during the House impeachment vote, which represented the opposition party trying to throw the president out. His own party, the GOP, supported him 100%. The American system gives the House, when controlled by an opposition party, a perfect opportunity to try to weaken any president of the other party. Most Houses have resisted the temptation because they understand the danger of setting such a precedent (danger to them when the tables are turned) as well as the futility of it if they lack the votes of 2/3 of the Senate to convict. That’s why the Senate gets the last word, and it takes far more than a simple majority to get rid of a president.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s some further elucidation on no confidence votes in the UK and how they have worked in modern times, from a commenter named “London Trader”:

That’s not really how a no confidence vote works in the UK. First there are very rarely coalitions in the UK parliament. The only one in my lifetime was Cameron’s first term. There are occasionally minority governments but again not that frequently. The last parliament had a minority but the previous minority government was in the mid 1970’s I think. The only successful no confidence vote that I remember was in 1979 when Thatcher toppled the Labour government of James Callaghan. From memory he had a minority by that point because he’d lost his majority in successive bye elections from 1976 onward.

Here’s a description of a case in Israel in which a coalition partner of the PM’s own party forced a successful no confidence vote there against Shamir.

It is also clear that no confidence votes are extremely rare in those countries that have parliamentary systems and allow them.]

McConnell gives Pelosi some advice on the word “leverage”

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote, concerning Nancy Pelosi’s decision to hold back on sending articles of impeahment to the Senate: “This is the Democrats’ idea of “leverage”? Why would the Republicans care if Democrats never send the articles to the Senate?”

Now Mitch McConnell weighs in:

McConnell said Schumer wanted “a special pretrial guarantee” that “House Democrats themselves did not bother to pursue as they assembled their case.”

McConnell also criticized House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., for taking the “highly unusual step” of waiting to transmit the approved House articles of impeachment against Trump to the Senate.

McConnell said he didn’t understand the move by Pelosi and said, while cracking a smile, that he didn’t agree with the idea that delaying the transmission might give her leverage in dictating the rules of the Senate trial.

“I admit, I’m not sure what leverage there is from refraining from sending us something we do not want,” McConnell said. “But alas, if they can figure that out, they can explain it.”

Impeachment has jumped the shark.