Reporting on the Mueller Report

The New Neo Posted on by

As far as I can tell, the Mueller Report is exactly and precisely as expected.

Here’s the summary by Professor Bill Jacobson at Legal Insurrection:

Trump won. Big League. People are [poring] over the details of the report, but the top line is that Mueller found no collusion and would not reach a determination on obstruction.

You can find the entire report (redacted version, of course) here as well as at the Legal Insurrection post I already linked.

Also as expected, the report says it does not “exonerate” the president. Actually, it couldn’t possibly do so, for reasons I’ve stated many times, most recently in my post from two days ago entitled “Anticipating the Mueller Report, in which I wrote this:

It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase…

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

The Democrats will do what they will do, of course.

And here Bill Barr explains to a word-challenged reporter what “unprecedented” means:

And about “obstruction of justice”:

One of the Democrats’ basic problems is that “attempting” to obstruct the investigation doesn’t make a lot of sense. If Trump had really wanted to obstruct the investigation, he could simply have terminated it. And Mueller acknowledges that the administration fully cooperated with the investigation in every way. So the “attempts to obstruct” come down to Trump expressing outrage at the fact that a baseless, partisan investigation was hampering his administration. Arguably Trump should have brought the Mueller farce to an end, but he didn’t.

Nothing will stop the Democrats from going on and on about it, except the next story that emerges that gives them hope of destroying Trump.

Here’s a great cartoon found at that Powerline link:

[ADDENDUM: Here’s a whole slew of articles from National Review.]

Let’s hear it for Norman Podhoretz, the original neocon

The New Neo Posted on by

Norman Podhoretz is eighty-nine years old and still going strong, not to mention sharp as a tack.

Case in point, this interview. Unfortunately, the Podoretz interview itself is behind an impregnable paywall, so that link is to a post at Ace’s that contains lengthy excerpts from the interview such as this one:

So for a while I was supporting Marco Rubio and I was enthusiastic about him. As time went on, and I looked around me, however, I began to be bothered by the hatred that was building up against Trump from my soon to be new set of ex-friends. It really disgusted me. I just thought it had no objective correlative. You could think that he was unfit for office–I could understand that–but my ex-friends’ revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him.

They called them dishonorable, or opportunists, or cowards–and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, and various others. And I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump. By the time he finally won the nomination, I was sliding into a pro-Trump position, which has grown stronger and more passionate as time has gone on…

…[S]ome of them have gone so far as to make me wonder whether they’ve lost their minds altogether. I didn’t object to their opposition to Trump. There was a case to be made, and they made it–okay. Of course, they had no reasonable alternative. A couple of them voted for Hillary, which I think would have been far worse for the country than anything Trump could have done.

But, basically, I think we’re all in a state of confusion as to what’s going on. Tom Klingenstein has made a brilliant effort to explain it, in terms that haven’t really been used before. He says that our domestic politics has erupted into a kind of war between patriotism and multiculturalism, and he draws out the implications of that war very well. I might put it in different terms–love of America versus hatred of America. But it’s the same idea.

Please read the whole thing.

By the way, when Podhoretz uses the phrase “my soon to be new set of ex-friends,” he’s harking back to a book he wrote in 2001 entitled Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer.

Interestingly enough, Irving Kristol was another early neocon. Kristol senior is now deceased, but Bill Kristol is his son. And in a strange (or maybe not-so-strange) parallel, John Podhoretz (another NeverTrumper, although I’m pretty sure he’s not nearly as strongly so as Bill Kristol) is Norman Podhoretz’s son.

As someone remarked in one of the comments to a piece on Norman Podhoretz’s interview, I wonder what Thanksgiving conversation is like at the Podhoretz house.

Victor Davis Hanson on the progressive revolution

The New Neo Posted on by

Hanson writes:

The reelection of Obama had convinced progressives that he had discovered electoral magic: record voter registration, turnout, and block voting of “minorities” that could overcome the old Perot, Reagan Democrat, silent majority, and tea-party dinosaurs in the critical swing states. This chemistry, they thought, would be inherently transferrable even to multimillionaire white establishmentarians like Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden (but only if they were reeducated and thus made the necessary confessionals about their own white privilege and shared disdain for “deplorables” and “the dregs of society”).

Suddenly, everything seemed possible as woke activists, à la French Revolution, accelerated the possible into the already passé…

By spring 2019, we were light years beyond the revolution’s beginning in summer 2008 — and heading into hard-socialist territory and beyond.

Indeed, the once edgy community-organizing Obama himself had become a tragicomical figure. He spent a bit of his post-presidency warning against a “circular firing squad” of Democratic cannibalism but otherwise was hell-bent on becoming worth $100 million in “I built that fashion”—and was never again heard uttering another “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money” sermon…

…few leftist revolutionary cycles ever halt in mid course, whether in 1789 France, 1917 Russia, 1946 China, or 1960 Cuba. The philosophy is always that today’s radical is yesterday’s sell-out to be replaced by tomorrow’s genuine far harder leftist…

Hanson’s essay is very good, as always. But I think he’s missing something. That “something” is the patience of the left, which has been working on this not just since 2008 but for a long long long long time, on many fronts and levels. Say what you will about the left, but they certainly have perseverance.

I wonder, also, whether Obama’s recent warnings are of the practical sort,—as in “Shh! Don’t show your cards; you need to be a little more sly and quiet about what you really believe and what your goals are, or you won’t get elected”—or whether he really is at least somewhat less radical than the current crop.

But yes, leftist revolutions always end up eating their own—sometimes sooner rather than later.

Just one question: Has Michael Moore looked in the mirror lately?

The New Neo Posted on by

Perhaps not:

Or maybe Moore is just speaking of himself in the third person, as some people are wont to do. Then again, perhaps a white person who turns against “white people” become an honorary person of color and therefore escapes the “white people” taint. And a “privileged white person” who turns against “privileged” white people likewise gets some sort of points he/she would otherwise not have in the intersectional sweepstakes.

Again: rules of the blog

The New Neo Posted on by

Boy, I go away for a while and the comments get taken over by squabbling. I don’t mind a small amount of it, but no more than that. So, to repeat a post I wrote some years ago on the same subject—

I don’t have time to constantly police this blog for personal fighting. But I find it takes away from the point of the blog when that sort of thing comes to dominate too much in the comments section.

I don’t mind a little of it; I realize it’s inevitable, and I understand that a blog comments section isn’t an especially genteel place, nor should it be. But I do mind when it goes on for a while. I don’t have time to determine who’s right and who’s wrong in any given altercation, nor do I believe it should be my job, although sometimes I try to do it.

Defending oneself is fine, but if the defense includes an unprovoked attack, that’s not okay and will be deleted if I see it. If it goes on and on, I will consider banning the offender.

We really should be focusing our energies on the truly important issues facing us. That doesn’t mean everything has to be serious—certainly not!—but I’m adopting a less tolerant attitude for this sort of repetitive personal sniping.

Rebuilding Notre Dame: is it an art museum, a tourist attraction, or a cathedral?

The New Neo Posted on by

I suppose at this point, realistically speaking, it’s something of all of them. I wouldn’t have even asked the question if Notre Dame hadn’t burned, but now that the rebuilding is being planned, it seems relevant.

As commenter “Snow on Pine” wrote this morning:

Stein’s question was, were the people crying on the streets in Paris crying primarily over the loss of a building that was, in essence, an exquisite art museum and testament to their past—a crowded tourist exhibit, or were they crying primarily over the destruction of a building that was perhaps the chief symbol of their living Christian faith?

Similarly, was Macron’s pledge to rebuild Notre Dame a civic pledge to rebuild what is basically an art museum, or was it an act of faith, a pledge to rebuild perhaps the chief symbol of the Christian faith of the people of France?

I cannot answer the question. I do know that the people in the streets of Paris who were crying as they saw the fire were sad and shocked. It was probably about a number of things, some of which they may not have thought much about previously, such as what exactly Notre Dame the building means to them and to France (not necessarily the same) at this point. Was it mostly the Catholic faithful assembled there, praying and singing? And what percentage of the whole does this now represent?

In a previous post from 2016 on the loss of Christian faith in Europe, I quoted the 19th Century British poet Matthew Arnold, and in this 2006 post I quoted the British Philip Larkin in his 1955 poem “Churchgoing” on the subject of churches in an age of waning faith. He describes a cycling trip in England, where he stops to rest at a church much smaller than Notre Dame:

Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,
Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new-
Cleaned or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
“Here endeth” much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into…

France is presently engaged in deciding exactly what Notre Dame is to France and its people these days. Personally, I hope it’s built the way it was—minus the flammability, if possible. But I don’t have any say in the matter.

Will the Left have a say?:

Over the course of the past few centuries, the cathedral has played a role in major historical events, from the coronation of kings to the crowning of Napoleon to the requiem mass of President Charles de Gaulle. And Notre Dame has served as a symbol of not just French historical identity, but Catholicism in general. “It has a double meaning,” says Jean-Robert Armogathe, a French Catholic priest and historian who served as the chaplain at Notre Dame from 1980 to 1985. “It has been the center of Catholic life and of France for 800 years.”…
But for some people in France, Notre Dame has also served as a deep-seated symbol of resentment, a monument to a deeply flawed institution and an idealized Christian European France that arguably never existed in the first place. “The building was so overburdened with meaning that its burning feels like an act of liberation,” says Patricio del Real, an architecture historian at Harvard University. If nothing else, the cathedral has been viewed by some as a stodgy reminder of “the old city — the embodiment of the Paris of stone and faith — just as the Eiffel Tower exemplifies the Paris of modernity, joie de vivre and change,” Michael Kimmelmann wrote for the New York Times….

Although Macron and donors like Pinault have emphasized that the cathedral should be rebuilt as close to the original as possible, some architectural historians like Brigniani believe that would be complicated, given the many stages of the cathedral’s evolution. “The question becomes, which Notre Dame are you actually rebuilding?,” he says. Harwood, too, believes that it would be a mistake to try to recreate the edifice as it once stood, as LeDuc did more than 150 years ago. Any rebuilding should be a reflection not of an old France, or the France that never was — a non-secular, white European France — but a reflection of the France of today, a France that is currently in the making. “The idea that you can recreate the building is naive. It is to repeat past errors, category errors of thought, and one has to imagine that if anything is done to the building it has to be an expression of what we want — the Catholics of France, the French people — want. What is an expression of who we are now? What does it represent, who is it for?,” he says.

Twitter has been loaded with even more vitriol, as is the nature of Twitter. I certainly hope that Twitter isn’t “who we are now.”

Anticipating the Mueller report

The New Neo Posted on by

The fuller Mueller report is supposed to be released on Thursday. It’s a no-brainer to say the Democrats will react as though it indicates Trump was guilty of obstruction at the least and perhaps more, no matter what it actually says. The longer version will give them ample opportunity to nitpick over each word and phrase.

Here’s Byron York on the matter, with a list of five things the report won’t resolve. Most of them won’t be resolved because they cannot be resolved; short of finding someone else’s fingerprints and DNA in a murder case, plus a confession, a person can’t be proven innocent (maybe not even then). Russiagate is not a case involving that sort of forensic evidence anyway, and more importantly, Trump’s opponents have no intention of ever accepting any finding that doesn’t implicate him.

William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has more, with predictions. Please read the whole thing.

Notre Dame is heavily damaged but will survive

The New Neo Posted on by

There are many many stories on the Notre Dame fire and the aftermath so far. For example:

Some will call it a miracle. According to Notre Dame’s heritage director, only one piece of architecture inside the sacred building has been damaged.

Laurent Prades told The Associated Press that the high altar, which was installed in 1989, was hit and harmed by the cathedral’s spire when it came crashing down in the flames. “We have been able to salvage all the rest,” said Prades, who witnessed the recovery first hand overnight.

“All the 18th-century steles, the pietas, frescoes, chapels and the big organ are fine,” he said. Among the most famous elements inside the cathedral, Prades added that the three large stained-glass rose windows have not been destroyed, though they may have been damaged by the heat and will be assessed by an expert.

That’s so much better than we were led to believe, which makes the reporting on the fire during the heat (literally) of the moment seem less than stellar (no surprise there). But truly, the fire did appear to be a much more destructive conflagration at the time.

Now the rebuilding will start:

Rebuilding the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris could take decades after it was gutted by a fire, experts warned Tuesday, even as its top priest expressed hope he could celebrate mass there within years…

France has experience of reconstructing cathedrals, including one in Reims that was severely damaged by shelling during World War I and another in Nantes that was gutted by fire in 1972.

Asked how long the rebuild could last, Eric Fischer, head of the foundation in charge of restoring the 1,000-year-old Strasbourg cathedral, which recently underwent a three-year facelift, said: “I’d say decades.”

“The damage will be significant. But we are lucky in France to still have a network of excellent heritage restoration companies, whether small-time artisans or bigger groups,” he told AFP.

Fischer said the ability to rebuild the colossal cathedral in a manner that respects its original form and character would depend on the plans, diagrams and other materials available to the architects.

Money has been pledged, plenty of it.

And of course, although authorities have labeled the fire as accidental rather than terrorism, the actual terrorists have celebrated it as “retribution and punishment,” of course.

I think this is a good time to point you to this post of mine, entitled “Europe and the Sea of Faith.”

Fire in Notre Dame

The New Neo Posted on by

[BUMPED UP and UPDATED]

This is a breaking story, so there isn’t much known about it (or its causes), but there’s a huge fire in Notre Dame in Paris and the roof and spire have collapsed.

UPDATE 5:54

Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral has been saved from “total destruction,” according to a French fire official, after a massive fire ripped through the structure on Monday and caused the roof and main spire to collapse.

While it will take another three or four more hours to contain the fire, the official said the two towers have now been saved. That news come as a sign of relief after one of the towers caught fire earlier in the evening. Earlier, a French Interior Ministry official had said that firefighters might not be able to save the cathedral.

About 400 firefighters have been fighting to save the building and its contents. I’ve read conflicting reports and don’t know whether the following is true, but one report mentioned that although the wooden interior is gone, the most precious artwork and relics had all been stored elsewhere.

There is really no news on the cause of the fire, although you can easily speculate that the two leaders are accident and terrorism. Whichever it is, however, the symbolism of the decline of a great culture and a great religion springs obviously to mind.

UPDATE 6:20

Here is a Twitter thread about the special difficulties of fighting a fire in a building such as Notre Dame.

UPDATE 11:58 Good news. Much of the inside of the cathedral appears to have survived.

Whatever happened to “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen?”

The New Neo Posted on by

If you go into politics, you should expect to be criticized. And if you say something in a speech or an interview, that statement is fair game.

Or at least, it used to be that way. One thing Americans didn’t want from their politicians and elected officials was whining and complaining that they were victims.

That all changed. Now, quoting a speech and criticizing it is doing a violence to a person. Now, any criticism of a person belonging to a minority group (other than white men, of course) is sexism or racism or a combination of all the “isms” that might apply.

Cases in point, of course, are Ilhan Omar and AOC, although they are hardly the only ones. Criticize what Omar said and you’re inciting violence against her. Take a look at this Twitter thread and you’ll see ample illustration of what I’m talking about.

It’s tempting to say this is a girl thing. But it’s not—it’s least, it’s certainly not solely that, although my guess is that it generally appeals more to women than men. But on that Twitter thread you’ll see men chiming in. And in fact, the first national politician I ever noticed doing it was Barack Obama. It struck me quite early on that complaining, making excuses, and in particular labeling any criticism by his opponents as racist (and/or allowing his surrogates to do it for him) was going to be standard for Obama’s campaign. You can see one typical post of mine on the subject here, written in August of 2008:

So, any reference to any physical characteristic of Obama is racist, because the only thing “typical white people” see when they look at a black person is that blackness. Although, if white Americans are as obsessed with race as Noah seems to think they are, how could they ever forget Obama’s race even if his body were never mentioned by the opposition?

That is never explained in Noah’s convoluted reasoning. After all, since Obama himself uses his own photo in his ads—wouldn’t this also remind people that (gasp!) he’s a black man?

What’s next? Is McCain to be banned from mentioning Obama at all?

There were plenty of other examples, but what they all had in common was that at the time the approach seemed new to me from a national political candidate. Perhaps there was something similar previously that I just never noticed, but if so I don’t recall it. I hadn’t followed Obama’s campaign for the senate seat in Illinois, but if I had to guess I’d say he didn’t use that approach (anyone with information on it, please offer it in the comments).

It seems to me that until Obama’s presidential campaign, stiff upper lips were required for national candidates of all sexes and all races, including candidates for Congress. For example, I don’t remember Elizabeth Dole—or for that matter, even Hillary Clinton—doing the “all criticism of me is sexism” thing prior to Obama’s national campaign. I don’t remember similar tactics from candidates such as Ed Brooke or Carol Moseley Braun or Shirley Chisolm. I think they wanted to show how tough they were, and Americans of the time demanded toughness in general from candidates.

Somehow Obama broke that mold. One of the very first posts I ever wrote about Obama was this one, in which I noticed candidate Obama’s general tendency to “offer up excuses too easily.” It was one of my first observations about him, and although the racial excuses hadn’t begun yet, the tendency to make excuses was noticeable because it was so very different, such a break from what had formerly been considered acceptable behavior from candidates. So the difference wasn’t just Obama or those who followed him—it was a change in attitude of the voters.

That change in attitude has been guided along not just by candidates, but by the leftists (feminists, socialists, thought police, and the like) in academia. Even college students are taught not to toughen up but to complain at everything that might hurt their feelings. The left can say pretty much whatever it wants and cry “Freedom of speech” if anyone tries to silence them, but the right is accused of not just all the various bigoted “isms” whenever someone on the left is criticized, particularly a person of any protected minority (or majority, such as women) group, but of actual violence.

The idea that speech is violence is current on campuses today and has been for quite some time. Candidates Omar and AOC and the rest are well aware that the public, particularly younger voters, have been primed and prepped to take such accusations very seriously. But it’s not just young people who now buy into this. It’s the entire left, which seems to constitute the an increasing majority of the makeup of today’s Democratic Party.

Is Russiagate worse than Watergate?

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, it is.

And not just worse; much worse.

Nunes has worked tirelessly for more than two years to expose what our masters in deep-state Washington would bury from the glare of public scrutiny: the evidence that the entire Trump-Russian collusion narrative was a partisan effort, first, to undermine the Trump presidential campaign and, when that failed, to cover up the effort while still working assiduously to destroy the Trump presidency…

As I have been saying for a couple of years now, this is the biggest scandal in American history. It dwarfs Watergate. Indeed, it challenges the fundamental integrity of our democratic—i.e., accountable—institutions. It challenges, too, the sacrosanct ideal of the separation of powers. Finally, it challenges the presumption of basic fairness and open competition without which our republic could endure in name only…

In a recent column for the Washington Examiner, Devin Nunes wrote that “It is astonishing that intelligence leaders did not immediately recognize they were being manipulated in an information operation or understand the danger that the dossier could contain deliberate disinformation from Steele’s Russian sources.” It is in fact so astonishing, he goes on to note, that it is positively incredible, not in the sense of amazing but in the root sense of not credible.

“It’s now clear,” Nunes says, “that top intelligence officials were perfectly well aware of the dubiousness of the dossier, but they embraced it anyway because it justified actions they wanted to take—turning the full force of our intelligence agencies first against a political candidate and then against a sitting president.”

Please read the whole thing.