The FBI, the DOJ, and the soft coup against Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ll make this quick, and I may revisit the topic in a future post, but this is well worth reading on the subject of the FBI’s and DOJ’s actions against Trump:

There are new revelations about what took place in Washington during the extraordinary period from May 9, 2017, when President Trump fired FBI Director James Comey, to May 17, 2017 when Trump-Russia special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed.

The short version is: The reports were true. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein really did discuss wearing a wire to secretly record the president. Rosenstein and others did discuss invoking the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office. And the FBI did adopt an aggressive new investigation strategy, targeting the president himself, almost instantly after the Comey firing…

“It’s just like we thought all along,” said one House Republican upon hearing the news. “If McCabe’s account is true, it confirms what we thought, that Rod Rosenstein was serious when he talked about wearing a wire and invoking the 25th Amendment. Rosenstein should be under oath answering our questions. We need to know who was in the room and what was said.”

Covington teens exonerated by Diocese report

The New Neo Posted on by

The Diocese of Covington has issued a report:

The Diocese of Covington proclaimed Wednesday that Covington Catholic High School students recorded on viral videos during a school trip to Washington, D.C., did nothing wrong after releasing a report prepared by a private investigation firm.

Attorneys for the diocese hired Greater Cincinnati Investigation to look into the incident…

Four licensed investigators from the firm interviewed 43 CovCath students, nine faculty chaperones and four parent chaperones; sought out third-party witnesses; and reviewed social media posts, news articles and videos. They said they spent about 240 man hours on the investigation.

Investigators reported that they were unable to obtain surveillance video from the Lincoln Memorial. Sandmann offered a written statement, rather than an in-person interview. A person who posted several videos online didn’t respond to them. Neither has Phillips, despite investigators showing up at his home and leaving a note.

Not surprising that Phillips didn’t respond. His day in the sun has ended for now, and he may wind up paying the piper whatever he happens to have, which probably isn’t all that much.

In a letter to CovCath parents, Bishop Roger Foys wrote that the investigation “has demonstrated that our students did not instigate the incident that occurred at the Lincoln Memorial.”

“I am pleased to inform you that my hope and expectation … that the results of our inquiry … would ‘exonerate our students so that they can move forward with their lives’ has been realized,” Foys wrote.

Despite the initiation perception by many people online, the students actually “were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening,” Foys wrote. “Their reaction to the situation was, given the circumstances, expected and one might even say laudatory.”

The entire letter written by Foys can be found here.

Note, however, that Foys had initially added to the excoriation of the boys when he had issued this statement at the outset of the fracas:

We condemn the actions of the Covington Catholic High School students toward Nathan Phillips specifically, and Native Americans in general, Jan. 18, after the March for Life, in Washington, D.C. We extend our deepest apologies to Mr. Phillips. This behavior is opposed to the Church’s teaching on the dignity and respect of the human person. The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.

It turns out that “appropriate action” was to praise them.

Now, I don’t actually expect Bishop Foys to have praised the teens initially; there wasn’t enough information available yet to go that far. But there was nowhere near enough information available to condemn them, either. And yet that’s what the Diocese did, jumping on the liberal propaganda bandwagon.

So I’d like him to answer this question: Why did you do it? And did you learn something for the future, and if so, what?

Bishop Foys had already issued an apology on January 25. This is what he wrote:

We apologize to anyone who has been offended in any way by either of our statements which were made with good will based on the information we had…

We should not have allowed ourselves to be bullied and pressured into making a statement prematurely, and we take full responsibility for it…

I especially apologize to Nicholas Sandmann and his family as well as to all CovCath families who have felt abandoned during this ordeal. Nicholas unfortunately has become the face of these allegations based on video clips. This is not fair. This is not just.

I don’t expect Bishop Foys to have aired his entire thought process in public, but I really hope that he inwardly explores how it is that someone of his stature succumbed so very easily to what he calls “bullying” and “pressuring.” He’s not a child. Shouldn’t he have the ability to withstand those things? Isn’t there a contradiction between his saying that he made the initial statements “with good will” and saying he succumbed to bullying and pressure in making them?

And isn’t it just plain wrong for Bishop Foys to assert that “the information we had” indicated culpability on the part of the Covington teens? After all, all they did was smile on the video. Everything else was based on the word of Nathan Phillips, who even the simplest and most cursory bit of research would have revealed to have been a longtime activist and instigator and possible liar. Why believe his testimony over anything else,and so soon? Why succumb to the Twitter mob?

And why say that you were bullied into it, at the same time (actually, in the very same sentence) that you state that you take full responsibility for succumbing to that pressure? There is something about his use of the word “bullied” for what happened to him that seems highly inappropriate to me. Bishop Foys is a powerful man of mature years (73), not a little schoolchild. He is supposed to be spiritually advanced. If he can’t resist bullying—and in particular if that lack of resistance to bullying causes him to pile on and participate in the bullying of innocent teenagers—then he needs to discover a way to resist it, and pronto.

Two formerly perfectly good words of which I’ve become heartily sick…

The New Neo Posted on by

…are “dialogue” and “conversation.”

Unfortunately, the left has turned the first into Orwellian Newspeak for I will harangue you for your failings as a member of a privileged or doubleplusungood group and you will sit there and listen respectfully without defending yourself, and the second into we are going to talk about some leftist agenda/issue that’s been talked about a thousand million times before but I’m claiming we need to talk about it some more in the guise of the aforementioned dialogue (see first definition).

Now, let’s have a conversation about that.

The philosophy of transgenderism

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a piece in Commentary I found quite intriguing, about the supposed philosophy behind transgenderism. Here’s what I see as one of the article’s main theses:

As the Princeton philosopher Robert George has written, today’s trans activists hold “an understanding of the human being – an anthropology – that sharply divides the material or bodily, on the one hand, and the spiritual or mental, on the other.” And more than that, they posit that the mind is superior to the body – a radical but logical extension of Rene Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am.” For their part, both George and Anderson characterize the trans anthropology as a contemporary version of Gnosticism, the ancient Christian heresy. But it is also a postmodern anthropology, in that it is on a warpath against traditional sexual categories as well as objectively knowable truth. The trapped mind, the activists say, trumps the Book of Genesis and modern biology. Can it?

That’s not only interesting, but I think it’s a good point and mainly true of the transgender movement, at least its many and vocal activists. However, I don’t think it’s the whole story (not that the author says it is), for two main reasons. The first is that I think one must draw a line between transgenderism as a radical movement—one with political and philosophical aims, roots in the left, and that is “on a warpath against traditional sexual categories as well as objectively knowable truth”—and individuals who are on a much more personal road, with personal histories and motivations, people who are not necessarily political or activist and who just want to live a life with less suffering. Such people mostly see transgenderism as a way out of some personal dilemma (although the political winds deeply affect them, whether they know it or not), and for some transgenderism seems to end up fitting the bill and for some it does not.

My second reason is that I am under the impression that at least some transgender activists believe that trangenderism does not represent a strictly mind/body dichotomy, but can be a misfit between one body system (the chromosomes, genitalia, and hormonal output) and another (the feminization or masculinization of the corporeal brain affecting but not constituting the incorporal mind), and that the brain/mind gender identification should win over the genital/hormonal/chromosomal one.

Whether or not this brain-transgendered idea is a true depiction of the way the body works is not at issue in this post. The author of the linked article discusses the research on it, which is certainly not probative or anywhere near it. But the point is not whether it’s true or not—the point is that some transgendered people believe there is an empirical basis for believing that transgenderism (or gender dysphoria) is physically based in the brain, and not just a triumph of noncorporeal mind over corporeal matter.

[NOTE: Former transgender activist Jamie Shupe—who never had the surgery, lived as a woman (with hormonal assistance) for quite some time, and then won a lawsuit to be designated as “non-binary”—has declared himself a man. It’s quite an article describing one man’s long and winding road, and involving both mind and matter.]

AOC must think this announcement from Governor Newsom is really badly timed

The New Neo Posted on by

New California governor Newsom appears to be pulling the plug on California’s high-speed rail:

During Gov. Gavin Newsom’s first State of the State speech Tuesday, he surprised listeners by announcing he would put the quest for high-speed rail connecting San Francisco and Los Angeles championed by his predecessor far on the back burner.

Instead, Newsom offered a consolation prize: high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced.

“Let’s level about the high-speed rail,” Newsom said. “Let’s be real, the current project as planned would cost too much and, respectfully, take too long. Right now, there simply isn’t a path to get from Sacramento to San Diego, let alone from San Francisco to L.A. I wish there were.”

I wishes were fishes…

Again, you can see the emphasis on the aspiration of it all. But, at least for the moment, Newsom is letting that old dream-downer, reality, intervene.

Newsom isn’t abandoning high speed rail entirely, however—and after all, some of the proposed line has actually been built. He says:

“Abandoning the high-speed rail entirely means we will have wasted billions and billions of dollars with nothing but broken promises… and lawsuits to show for it,” Newsom added, explaining he wouldn’t want to send the $3.5 billion in federal money the project has been granted back to the Trump administration.

But then—but then—the article ends with this:

By afternoon, however, Newsom’s office said that he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite his comments during his State of the State speech.

Is this a backtrack? Perhaps not exactly. I think what “fully committed” means is “fully committed in the aspirational sense—that is, he wishes we could do it, and he knows that a great many of the Democrats of California think he should be committed to trying.”

Looking for further explanation of the governor’s seeming reversal, I found this:

Governor Gavin Newsom’s office is clarifying statements made at Tuesday’s State of the State Address on California’s high-speed rail project.

The governor’s office confirms he is fully committed to building a high-speed rail line between San Francisco and Los Angeles…

Newsom said the project would cost too much and take too long. But his spokesman Nathan Click said he’s not walking away from it.

Some in the Bay Area believe the governor’s new approach isn’t derailing development.

“The idea is to keep the project going and to have the central valley connection from Bakersfield to Merced,” Bay Area Council President and CEO, Jim Wunderman said. “For a spine from which the rest of the system can grow.”

Hey, I have an idea! Let’s try it on a huge, nationwide scale. That’ll work.

Democrats on the Green New Deal: we didn’t really mean it…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and you Republicans are meanies for asking us to actually take a stand on this over-the-top and all-encompassing piece of socialist “aspirational” fantasy that our star ingenue AOC floated, revealing the far-leftist heart of today’s Democratic Party.

McConnell says he will call the Democrats’ bluff by bringing the GND to a vote in the Senate. Somehow, his Democratic counterpart in the House, Nancy Pelosi, doesn’t seem to be following suit on the proposal she referred to as the “Green Dream or whatever they call it.”

And Democratic Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, AOC’s co-sponsor of the bill, is stunned and angry that McConnell will be forcing the Democrats to actually vote on this monstrosity:

Before you laugh, or ask WFT?—or both—note that this Orwellian sort of thing—allowing us to vote on something we proposed is akin to silencing our voices—is not unusual on the left. That’s why Orwell became a household word, because he noted and described the phenomenon so well. There’s plenty Republicans do and say for which they can be criticized, but Orwellian speech is far more likely to be the province of the left.

The GND was so over-the-top and so very far left, so sweeping and so impossible, that one wonders why even AOC went so far. I wrote a previous post on the subject, in which I said:

Isn’t [the Green New Deal] very very extreme, so extreme it will alienate people? For the answer, just do what I did: spend a few hours reading MSM sites and seeing reactions from Democrats. It’s an education in how the GND is being responded to, and why the Democratic candidates have all hopped aboard the extremist green social justice jobs for everyone train.

Last night I watched a clip of some liberal spokesperson or other being quizzed by a conservative as to what she agreed with in the details of the GND. “Its spirit” was all she could come up with, but for her it was enough. She seemed embarrassed when asked about particulars and couldn’t endorse any, but she pooh-poohed—almost ridiculed—the need for details.

I doubt there are many Democratic politicians able to defend many (if any) of the GND manifesto’s specific provisions. And yet many have endorsed it…

This GND initiative is a counter to Trump, that troglodyte non-believer in AGW. The GND is not meant to be serious legislation for now, but to burnish the Democrats’ reputation as caring about climate change and the Republicans’ reputation for not caring. And the Democrats are counting on just about no one—except the right, and the far left—to read what’s actually in the GND.

So, the plan was to rally the leftist base, to rely on the MSM to cover for the extreme far leftist details, and to endorse the GND proposal’s spirit and contrast it to the supposedly anti-environmental spirit of the GOP. You can see evidence of that in Senator Markey’s tweet, in which he states this [emphasis mine]:

[McConnell] wants to silence your voice so Republicans don’t have to explain why they are climate change deniers. McConnell wants this to be the end, this is just the beginning.

In other words, we wanted you to notice the Republicans, not the craziness of our plan. And we still think there’s time to switch the emphasis over to that.

At this point, I think Markey has lost that battle. One reason was the extremity of the proposal and the fact that AOC spilled the beans on some of the details (such as getting rid of cow farts), which are risible. The second is that the right actually—bloggers and media and even some politicians like McConnell—have attacked this with ridicule, and the ridicule has stuck. Markey’s tweet—which probably sounded eminently reasonable to him, since he comes from the deep blue bubble of Massachusetts—is also risible, and I don’t think he even knows it.

But note Markey’s reference to the long game. I’ve often said the left takes the long view. And it’s always just the beginning; the fight must be fought anew every day.

[ADDENDUM: Ace points out this AP headline of art: “McConnell wields Green New Deal as bludgeon against Dems.” McConnell, cruel thug beating up innocent Democrats.]

9th Circuit rules that Trump can waive environmental constraints to build wall

The New Neo Posted on by

No, you’re not dreaming—the very liberal 9th Circuit ruled that a president has the power to expedite the building of a border wall by waiving certain environmental constraints:

From the ruling:

The three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which President Trump regularly likes to chide as too liberal, sided with him this time.

The judges said federal law gives the administration broad powers to waive any laws in order to get the wall built.

“In short, the plain text [of the law] grants DHS authority to construct the prototype, San Diego and Calexico projects,” the judges ruled.

This is based on a statute passed during the Clinton administration, back in the olden days when even Democrats seemed to favor a wall.

To what do we owe this decision, that seems to run in a pro-Trump direction? I am certainly no expert on this case or this issue, but I think the difference between the decision here and in so many other decisions by the 9th Circuit is that they are ruling on an issue governed by a statute whose language and intent are so very unequivocal that it would be a bridge too far even for the 9th Circuit to find a way to rule otherwise.

I’m still surprised, though.

Border deal?

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve heard a lot of deal rumors. This is what’s being reported lately, as the Friday deadline looms:

House and Senate negotiators late Monday struck a bipartisan deal “in principle” that would dodge a second partial government shutdown by providing President Trump $1.375 billion in funding for physical barriers along 55 miles of the Rio Grande Valley.

The accord, which must pass the House and Senate and receive the president’s signature, resolved a weekend impasse over illegal immigrant detentions.

By Monday night, both sides were claiming victory in the talks, although the exact details of the agreement weren’t yet clear, and two of the major claims seemed to contradict each other…

Much of the disagreement over what was decided seems to involve whether there is a possible cap on the number of detainees and/or beds for detainees.

And this amount of money for the wall is chump change. So far, whatever the actual deal involves, the Trump camp says he hasn’t decided whether to accept it or not.

One thing that might happen—and that might not be a bad idea—is for Trump to take the money, avoid the shutdown, and get more money from another source, as many say he legally could:

A week ago [written on 12/24/2018], the White House put out a call to federal agencies to look for “pots of money” in their existing budgets that could be cobbled together to pay for border wall construction. Immediately, Sen. John Thune, the Republican whip in the upper chamber, shot down the idea of shifting funds from executive departments to the border, saying, “I’m not a big fan of moving money.” Like it or not, there are sources of revenue in the executive branch that the president has authority to use without congressional approval.

There’s been a lot of discussion of Trump declaring a national emergency, which is a much more problematic way to go. I think if he can do it without that it would be a far better resolution. I’m assuming that this is what he’s working on—shut down the shutdown itself, and get moving on the solution.

I watched some of Trump’s El Paso speech yesterday

The New Neo Posted on by

Unusual for me to watch a speech. I happened to come across it while channel surfing, and I noticed a couple of things in particular.

The first is that Trump seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He loves this sort of speech, similar to his stump appearances, with the crowd yelling back at him and a lot of ad libs. This characteristic of real enjoyment isn’t quite as common in politicians as one might think. He’s relaxed up there.

Trump makes the audience have fun, too. In fact, he alluded to this in his speech when he said something like “Is there anything that’s more fun than a Trump rally?” and the crowd roared back its approval.

One of the specific things Trump said that struck me—and that might become some sort of recurrent theme in his 2020 campaign—was something like “Democrats have to stop being so angry.” Democrats would of course counter with “We have an awful lot to be angry about,” followed by a list of what they consider injustices and outrages committed by Trump and the GOP, or at least what they think they can convince you to consider injustices and outrages committed by Trump and the GOP.

But “Democrats=angry” would be an interesting approach by Trump, one that might be effective. One of the reasons people liked Reagan was that he was happy and upbeat. Trump remains happy and upbeat as well for the most part, despite all the challenges he’s experienced as president. The Democrats are many things, but upbeat is not generally one of them—although I actually think that Obama’s conveying an upbeat message is one of the things that attracted people in 2008 to the “hope and change” mantra, and one of the things that attracts people even today to none other than AOC, who conveys energetic and optimistic faith in her most preposterous and destructive policy proposals at the same time she conveys pessimism about a future without those proposals.

Erick Erickson, former NeverTrumper, has a change of heart

The New Neo Posted on by

Never say “never”?

Erickson writes:

This week in 2016, I declared I would be “Never Trump.” A friend suggested I use a hashtag that had started circulating on Twitter, i.e #NeverTrump. The piece exploded and pushed me into a whirlwind of coverage. Despite lots of pressure, protestors literally on my front porch, and harassment directed towards my family, I did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. I voted third party.

Some of my concerns about President Trump remain. I still struggle on the character issue and I understand Christian friends who would rather sit it out than get involved. But I also recognize that we cannot have the Trump Administration policies without President Trump and there is much to like…

…In 2016, we knew who the Democrats were and were not sure of who Donald Trump was. Now we know both and I prefer this President to the alternative.