Bill Barr opines

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill Barr gave a long interview to Jan Crawford, and you can find a transcript here and the recording here.

I haven’t read the entire thing nor have I listened to it, but Ace has taken the time and trouble to do so, and he’s excerpted some of the most interesting parts.

Even before this, I’ve liked just about everything I’d seen and heard from Barr so far. He’s exhibited a rare combination of traits: clarity and simplicity of expression, a straight-shooter who goes to the heart of the matter without being in the least offensive or careless. He’s precise without getting bogged down in arcane legalese. You can see all of this demonstrated in the interview, as well, and if you want the shorter version (it’s not short, though) go to Ace’s post.

My favorite quote is this one, although there are so many favorites it’s difficult to choose just one:

AN CRAWFORD: But when you came into this job, you were kind of, it’s like the US Attorney in Connecticut, I mean, you had a good reputation on the right and on the left. You were a man with a good reputation. You are not someone who is, you know, accused of protecting the president, enabling the president, lying to Congress. Did you expect that coming in? And what is your response to it? How do you? What’s your response to that?

WILLIAM BARR: Well in a way I did expect it.

JAN CRAWFORD: You did?

WILLIAM BARR: Yeah, because I realize we live in a crazy hyper-partisan period of time and I knew that it would only be a matter of time if I was behaving responsibly and calling them as I see them, that I would be attacked because nowadays people don’t care about the merits and the substance. They only care about who it helps, who benefits, whether my side benefits or the other side benefits, everything is gauged by politics. And as I say, that’s antithetical to the way the department runs and any attorney general in this period is going to end up losing a lot of political capital and I realize that and that is one of the reasons that I ultimately was persuaded that I should take it on because I think at my stage in life it really doesn’t make any difference.

Much more at the links.

Politics: do you care?

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to care much less about politics. I think I know why that was. I was younger and there was a lot more activity in my life (school, motherhood, taking care of a house, career stuff, all that jazz). But it wasn’t just that. It was mostly that the two parties were much closer to each other (or certainly seemed to be) in philosophy and in particular in attitudes towards this country and its people as a whole. So although it mattered and although I cared somewhat, most of the time it didn’t seem to matter all that much.

That has changed, and now I care deeply. And I think more people care these days, and that is one of the reasons political discussions have become so heated and people have gotten so angry at each other for their politics, angry in the personal sense, although I don’t engage in that at all (except now and then as the recipient of the anger).

But ever since I’ve been in the blogosphere—and that’s a long long time—I’ve noticed there are people who say they don’t care because both parties are the same. Now, you can say that both parties are dumb, or venal, or too in love with the deep state, or any number of things of that sort, because they certainly have things in common. But they are not the same, and the consequences of electing one over the other matter. Does anyone really think the country and the world would be in the same condition today if Hillary Clinton had been elected rather than Donald Trump? I don’t.

So I think most people care, and most people who don’t care don’t care for one of the reasons I just explained: they are distracted by other things in life, and/or they think the two parties and whatever candidates they’re offering this time around are essentially the same.

This post was sparked by something I saw in Ann Althouse’s comments section. It was written by Althouse herself, and it goes like this:

You’d probably be surprised if you knew how little I care about who wins the various elections I write about.

Now, that’s interesting. I note that she didn’t write that she didn’t care at all, so I suppose she might care but just not as much as one might expect from someone who spends a great many hours a day writing posts that often pertain to politics and elections. But it seems to be a disclaimer about caring a whole lot, which I find puzzling. Maybe she means it to be puzzling; I don’t see much of an explanation in the thread, although I didn’t read every word.

But this isn’t about Ann Althouse; I just use her as an example and a springboard for discussion. Why care? Why write about politics or even talk about politics if you don’t care very much who wins? Isn’t the outcome of a big election more important, for example, than who wins the World Series or who wins the other things people care so deeply about?

I’ve had discussions with people in recent years who say they don’t care about politics, even though they talk about it a lot. “I don’t have a dog in this race” they say (the sports analogy). Usually the reason given for being so blasé is that they don’t have kids or grandkids, and they themselves aren’t young anymore, so there’s no reason to care. I care, and it’s not just tied to my family or how much longer I may have left on this earth. I hope to continue to care.

How about you? My guess is that the readers of this blog may be somewhat self-selected for caring. But what do you think?

It wasn’t just Russia that ran a disinformation program to influence our elections…

The New Neo Posted on by

…although Trump and his aides had nothing to do with the Russian effort in 2016, as even Mueller was forced to admit.

Iran ran one, too, particularly in 2018:

This is the biggest revelation of its kind, highlighting Iran’s ability to influence the media and spread misinformation to shape U.S. public opinion. The FireEye’s research shows how Iran created an elaborate set-up to penetrate the U.S. social media landscape to wage psychological warfare. Will the liberal mainstream media, still looking for the smoking gun in Russian collusion more than two years on, put the same spotlight on Islamic Republic of Iran for this act of blatant hostility?

I think that last question is a rhetorical one. If it can’t be pinned on Trump, or even theoretically pinned on Trump, the answer is “no, of course not.”

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if other countries engage in efforts of the Russian and Iranian type. In fact, I assume some do. Do these efforts actually influence anyone? I doubt that all that many people are affected, but certainly nowhere near as many as the disinformation campaign mounted by much of the homegrown US media.

Meryl Streep says women can be toxic, too

The New Neo Posted on by

To anyone with an ounce of sense (which certainly isn’t everyone), the point Meryl Streep makes is quite self-evident:

Actress Meryl Streep criticized the use of the term “toxic masculinity,” arguing that toxicity is a trait that afflicts both sexes as women can be “pretty f**king toxic too.”

Appearing on a cast panel ahead of the season two premiere of Big Little Lies, Streep made the comments in response to a male audience member who said he enjoyed the primarily female-targeted show.

“Sometimes, I think we’re hurt,” Streep said. “We hurt our boys by calling something toxic masculinity. I do. And I don’t find [that] putting those two words together … because women can be pretty f**king toxic.”

“It’s toxic people. We have our good angles and we have our bad ones…We’re all on the boat together. We’ve got to make it work.”

Ordinarily I could not care less what some actress says, and I barely pay attention to Streep, although I’m under the impression her politics are generally the same as those of most of Hollywood: liberal/left. But it’s interesting to me that she’s saying this now, because it may possibly indicate that quite a few Democrats, liberals and leftists alike, find the war on men a bridge too far.

Streep has been married to the same man for 40 years; there’s definitely something to be said for that. She has four grown children; three are women and one is a man. She’s got some skin in this game, as do most women.

Is it a trend? Let’s hope so.

Dershowitz is completely fed up with Mueller

The New Neo Posted on by

From Dershowitz [emphasis mine]:

The statement by special counsel Robert Mueller in a Wednesday press conference that “if we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said that” is worse than the statement made by then-FBI Director James Comey regarding Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign…

Comey was universally criticized for going beyond his responsibility to state whether there was sufficient evidence to indict Clinton. Mueller, however, did even more. He went beyond the conclusion of his report and gave a political gift to Democrats in Congress who are seeking to institute impeachment proceedings against President Trump…

Until today, I have defended Mueller against the accusations that he is a partisan. I did not believe that he personally favored either the Democrats or the Republicans, or had a point of view on whether President Trump should be impeached. But I have now changed my mind. By putting his thumb, indeed his elbow, on the scale of justice in favor of impeachment based on obstruction of justice, Mueller has revealed his partisan bias. He also has distorted the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system.

To Dershowitz—who, whatever his politics (and he remains a Democrat as far as I can tell) is a strong defender of liberty and the safeguards against abuse of power by the legal system—that latter offense, “distoring the critical role of a prosecutor in our justice system,” may even be worse than the first offense, because it is systemic. When you destroy a system of protection, there is danger to everyone, not just to partisans.

Dershowitz continues [emphasis mine]:

Virtually everybody agrees that, in the normal case, a prosecutor should never go beyond publicly disclosing that there is insufficient evidence to indict. No responsible prosecutor should ever suggest that the subject of his investigation might indeed be guilty even if there was insufficient evidence or other reasons not to indict. Supporters of Mueller will argue that this is not an ordinary case, that he is not an ordinary prosecutor and that President Trump is not an ordinary subject of an investigation. They are wrong. The rules should not be any different.

Remember that federal investigations by prosecutors, including special counsels, are by their very nature one-sided. They hear only evidence of guilt and not exculpatory evidence. Their witnesses are not subject to the adversarial process. There is no cross examination. The evidence is taken in secret behind the closed doors of a grand jury. For that very reason, prosecutors can only conclude whether there is sufficient evidence to commence a prosecution. They are not in a position to decide whether the subject of the investigation is guilty or is innocent of any crimes.

And that is why, whatever a person’s feelings are about president Trump, all people should be outraged at this. But they are not; not at all. And that’s a terrible sign of the ignorance of the populace, and the partisanship that would overrun basic guarantees of liberty to us all.

I keep putting this video out there, but it keeps (unfortunately) being relevant:

Of course, the way the impeachment rules are written in the Constitution, it’s pretty clear that the House can impeach by saying a president committed a certain high crime/misdemeanor, and if the Senate is willing to convict, the president will be removed from office. But that’s a separate issue from the one here, which is that a special counsel should say only what Dershowitz indicates: whether there is “sufficient evidence to commence a prosecution” and if so, what that evidence might be. To suggest there is insufficient evidence but that the prosecutor can’t prove innocence, and therefore the political remedy is to impeach, goes way beyond whatever a special counsel should be doing and is an abuse of power.

Another nail in the coffin of women’s sports

The New Neo Posted on by

Here we have another example of a phenomenon that’s become more common lately [emphasis mine]:

A transgender woman who competed as a man as recently as last year won an NCAA women’s track national championship on Saturday.

Franklin Pierce University senior Cece Telfer beat the eight-woman field in the Division II women’s 400-meter hurdles by more than a second, with a personal collegiate-best time of 57.53…

As recently as January 2018, Telfer had been competing as an athlete for Franklin Pierce men’s team as Craig. Telfer finished eighth in a field of nine in the Men’s 400 meters at the Middlebury Winter Classic in Vermont.

The NCAA allows male athletes to compete as women if they suppress their testosterone levels for a full calendar year…

According the NCAA’s Transgender Handbook, “According to medical experts on this issue, the assumption that a transgender woman competing on a women’s team would have a competitive advantage outside the range of performance and competitive advantage or disadvantage that already exists among female athletes is not supported by evidence.”

Does anyone believe that last bit, including the “medical experts” themselves? I’ve read some of their arguments, and they just don’t hold up (I discussed it somewhat here and here). Simply put, particularly if a person has gone through puberty as a male (and most of these athletes have), then some of the changes are quite permanent and cannot be reversed by taking hormones or suppressing hormones afterward.

However, of course not all trans women are going to beat all the biological women against whom they compete. The trans woman must be a really good athlete to begin with. But once that is accomplished, that person has a tremendous advantage that is conferred not by training alone or natural talent alone but by virtue of having been a male. The reason we divide competitions into male and female divisions in the first place is because there is an undeniable advantage to being male, and if women competed against men then virtually all the qualifiers and not just the winners would be male. People seem to want and like women’s sports, too, and so we have different divisions just as we do within each sex for weights in boxing, for example.

The only reason transgender women don’t totally dominate women’s sports is because there aren’t so many yet who are highly-trained athletes, and because allowing transgender women to compete against biological women is also not a universal at present.

Mueller’s parting shot

The New Neo Posted on by

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection writes this about Robert Mueller’s final remarks (supposedly final) on the guilt or innocence of Donald Trump:

Robert Mueller’s statement today could have served only one purpose — to breath life into Democrat attempts to commence impeachment proceedings against Trump.

Mueller didn’t add any substance to the 400-page report, and most of his statement was related to procedures…

The substance of the statement on Russia collusion/conspiracy was brief and shut the door…

But most of the substance was on obstruction. Mueller reiterated that the Office of Special Counsel could not clearly determine that Trump did not commit a crime, or it would have said so. “‘If we had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so.”

This is a completely unfair standard and not what prosecutors normally due — investigations are not to find that a person did not commit a crime, but to find if the person did commit a crime.

More important, Mueller made clear that he considered the Special Counsel’s Office bound by DOJ policy against charging a sitting president with a crime, so his office never reached a determination one way or the other. Mueller made clear that under the Constitution, there were other mechanisms for dealing with a president accused of wrongdoing. Without mentioning impeachment proceedings, Mueller certainly must have intended to suggest it.

If that is Mueller’s view, that his office’s hands were legally tied from even reaching a decision, then why investigate at all? And why issue an opinion that he could not find “with confidence” the president was not guilty? Mueller could have expressed an opinion on guilt short of charging the president, much as he expressed an opinion that he could not find the president clearly not guilty.

In other words, Mueller declared orally what the Mueller Report had declared in writing and in a great many more words: Despite the usual legal standard of innocent until guilty, we require Trump to have proven his innocence and he could not do this [impossible] task. Therefore, impeach him!

Professor Jacobson goes on to indicate he thinks this forces Pelosi’s hand and makes it necessary for her to give in to the baying impeachment hounds in her party. I still don’t think so, although that may indeed end up being the case. I think she’s too politically savvy for that and knows how unpopular such a move would be among the general public. She also knows that the Senate would make short shrift of it:

GOP senators say that if the House passes articles of impeachment against President Trump they will quickly quash them in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has broad authority to set the parameters of a trial.

While McConnell is required to act on articles of impeachment, which require 67 votes — or a two-thirds majority — to convict the president, he and his Republican colleagues have the power to set the rules and ensure the briefest of trials.

“I think it would be disposed of very quickly,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

The original impeachment idea was that Trump would do so many awful things, or that the attacks against him would be so successful—or both—that a great many GOP senators would join in the vote to convict him after impeachment. It sure doesn’t look as though that would happen. Even Mitt Romney, who appears to detest Trump, has gone on record saying “no.”

[ADDENDUM: Links to more can be found here.]

Christopher Steele won’t cooperate with the investigation by US Attorney Durham

The New Neo Posted on by

Christopher Steele, author of the dossier that played a key role in the Trump-Russia inquiry, will not assist Attorney General William Barr’s investigation of the investigators, according to a new report.

…[T]he British ex-spy “would not cooperate” with nor answer questions from U.S. Attorney John Durham, whom Barr has tasked with reviewing the origins of the counterintelligence investigation into President Trump’s presidential campaign and the way that the Justice Department and FBI conducted the inquiry.

…The report said Steele “might cooperate” with DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s independent investigation, signaling a shift in Steele’s thinking.

Is it just me, or does anyone else think that Steele is a real person but that “Christopher Steele” is not his real name, and that we know little about him? When the entire episode first came out, it struck me that the name sounded like a character in a romance novel.

Martin Luther King’s feet of clay

The New Neo Posted on by

It came to general public notice quite some time ago that the revered civil rights leader of the mid-20th Century, Martin Luther King, had many flaws as a person. He was a womanizer who was serially unfaithful to his wife. He was most likely a plagiarist, and also veered ever more leftward politically as he grew older (of course, some would consider that last bit a feature, not a bug).

As I wrote in this previous post:

I have some trouble with the hagiography of Martin Luther King. I agree that he was a great man who did a great thing for which he should be duly honored: he was an inspirational figure in the non-violent civil rights movement in this country, as well as a remarkable speaker…

As for the rest of it—well, I think it can be summed up by saying that King was a flawed human being—that is, a human being. Perhaps MLK himself would be the first to agree; he was a preacher, after all, and he knew a lot about human sin and error…

Does that diminish his achievements? I don’t think so, if we keep it in perspective. I’ve always been more interested in real human beings who accomplish great things despite their own weaknesses than I am in a pretended (and mostly unachievable) perfection.

I wrote that in 2012. But what’s been alleged now is worse—if true:

…[N]ow, David Garrow, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for his biography of King, has unearthed previously classified FBI documents showing that King was genuinely sexually depraved. From the Times of London (behind subscriber paywall):

“In another incident said to have been recorded by FBI agents, King is alleged to have ‘looked on, laughed and offered advice’ while a friend who was also a Baptist minister raped a woman described as one of his ‘parishioners’.

Details of the assault are believed to have been captured on tapes that are currently being held in a vault under court seal at the US National Archives.”

Although King isn’t alleged (as far as I can tell) to have raped anyone, the incident described is terrible on many levels and goes beyond infidelity. Laughing at rape and offering advice while watching it (and I assume the advice wasn’t “STOP IMMEDIATELY!”)—not to mention the fact that here we have clergy sexually abusing parishioners—would have been universally condemned long before the #MeToo movement made much lesser things objectionable.

More:

At the same hotel the following evening, King and a dozen other individuals “participated in a sex orgy” including what one FBI official described as “acts of degeneracy and depravity.

When one of the women shied away from engaging in an unnatural act, King and several of the men discussed how she was to be taught and initiated in this respect. King told her that to perform such an act would ‘help your soul’.”

Are there really recordings of this, and what was actually said? I don’t know. But King’s biographer David Garrow, the one now reporting these things, has until now been a person who admired King. This is from an American Greatness article by Rod Dreher:

I wish none of this were true, and perhaps we will learn when the recordings are eventually released that these claims are not true, but I very much doubt it. David Garrow’s reputation as a civil rights movement historian is beyond reproach, and as a Democratic Socialist, Garrow cannot be said to have political motives for trying to discredit King. Given his professional background and political convictions, one imagines that it must have been excruciating for Garrow to have written this. But Garrow is a historian, not a hagiographer. Besides, it’s better to face the painful truth and to deal with it than to remain sheltered by a canopy of lovely lies.

I have long observed not only how many great people—that is, people who accomplished great things in the public arena—have private flaws that are sometimes small and sometimes very large and numerous. Martin Luther King is one of the latter, apparently: flaws large and numerous.

But it’s worse in the case of King because he wasn’t just a public figure who accomplished great things. He was a minister as well as admired for his moral force. In his presentation to the world he exuded a strength and righteousness that seemed obvious and powerful. That’s why revelations of his massive feet of clay are so profoundly disturbing. If King could do this, how can we trust anyone? Should we trust anyone?

I think that, if these allegations are true, the message of the story goes like this:

People sometimes compartmentalize their lives, and the division into public and private lives is one common way to do this. It’s not that “never the twain shall meet,” but you certainly can’t count on the two lives being in sync.

Sex is a powerful force and particularly subject to this public/private dichotomy

Power often corrupts.

Look up to a person for what you know about his or her accomplishments, but don’t make assumptions about that person’s private character unless you know the person well. In other words, don’t idealize your heroes; keep it in perspective and retain some skepticism without becoming utterly cynical.

Germany: kippas off, kippas on

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s been a brouhaha in Germany over the wearing of the skullcap by traditional Jews:

At the weekend, Felix Klein, the country’s commissioner on anti-Semitism sparked uproar when he said in an interview with the Funke regional press group that he could not “advise Jews to wear the kippa everywhere all the time in Germany.”

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin voiced shock at Klein’s warning and said it was a “capitulation to anti-Semitism” and evidence that Jews are unsafe in Germany.

Late Monday, Klein reversed course after Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman intervened.

“The state must see to it that the free exercise of religion is possible for all… and that anyone can go anywhere in our country in full security wearing a kippa,” Steffen Seibert told a press conference.

How are they going to do that? Unless a cop or an entourage of cops follow every Jew around, I don’t see how it can be done. Let me add that, well over a decade ago, I was told by Orthodox Jews who visit Europe that they already were wearing innocuous secular caps over their kippas (in Hebrew, kippot) for safety’s sake. So it seems to me that Klein was actually voicing what a lot of kippa-wearing Jews had already been doing for quite some time.

More:

In his latest statement to Funke, Klein said: “I call on all citizens of Berlin and across Germany to wear the kippa next Saturday if there are new, intolerable attacks targeting Israel and Jews on the occasion of al-Quds day in Berlin.”

Al-Quds is an annual event against Israeli control of Jerusalem and will take place on Saturday.

Implicit in all of these remarks is that the majority of attacks on Jews are committed by Muslim residents of Germany rather than people of ethnic German descent, which is a strange irony (although a common one these days, I think).

Klein’s call for citizens to wear the kippa in solidarity with Jews reminded me of a story from World War II which turns out to have been apocryphal. You may recall it:

The legend of Denmark’s King Christian X and his wearing of the yellow star is our most stirring example of non-violent opposition to evil: ordinary citizens (following the example of a courageous leader) defy their military overlords by selflessly putting themselves in harm’s way to prevent the persecution of a defenseless minority. If only more people exhibited such moral fortitude nowadays, we reason, the world would be a much better place. Perhaps if more people had exhibited such moral courage back then, we think, the Holocaust might never have happened.

Although the Danes did undertake heroic efforts to shelter their Jews and help them escape from the Nazis, there is no real-life example of the actions described by this legend. Danish citizens never wore the yellow badge, nor did King Christian ever threaten to don it himself. In fact, Danish Jews never wore the yellow badge either (except for the few who were finally deported to concentration camps), nor did German officials ever issue an order requiring Danish Jews to display it.

Please read the whole thing.

The Danes actually did manage to rescue most of their Jews by ferrying them out to Sweden in 1943.

[NOTE: Please read my discussion of the differential treatment of different occupied countries by the Nazis, and how it made defiance less difficult in a country such as Denmark, which was allowed relative autonomy. This shouldn’t take anything away from the Danes, but it does explain a lot.]