After Mueller: what now?

The New Neo Posted on by

I just published a post that reflects my belief that the left and other Trump-haters (as opposed to mere Trump-critics) won’t be able to stop going down the road they’ve been on ever since Trump became president.

But there is another way they could go, at least theoretically:

I think trout will swim down Great Ormond Street (see reference) before those who’ve been beating and beating this drum will ever admit to wrongdoing or even error. But I guess we’ll see. In the meantime we have:

As for those who actually perpetrated the mess, those in the FBI and DOJ and Steele and others instrumental in spinning the web of intrigue, they should pay in some way but will they? The American public has been steeped in outrages, like the metaphorical frog in boiling water, and perhaps it has grown indifferent to such things. However:

Now, Mueller’s investigations leave one major mission unfinished: meting out justice to the intelligence, congressional, FBI and DOJ officials who appear to have used a political dirty trick to falsely weave an unproven narrative of Russia collusion.

Unverified political opposition research never should be treated as actionable intelligence or Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) evidence, as it was in this case.

Just hours before Mueller’s report arrived, new evidence emerged of just how egregious the FBI acted in the early days of the Russia probe.

Fox News’s brilliant reporter Catherine Herridge obtained new text messages Friday showing Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe and his chief lawyer, Lisa Page, were discussing credibility issues and “bias” about a key human source whose work was to support the FISA warrant used to first spy on the Trump campaign in October 2016.

Those credibility issues likely were hidden from the judges who approved the warrant of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page (no relation to Lisa Page). As I have reported, the FBI also possesses emails showing concerns with the evidence it was going to use to support the FISA warrant.

The article goes on to list some of the other important failures to disclose in the application for the FISA warrant, which is required to disclose any exculpatory evidence and yet did not. Then:

Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.

An upcoming DOJ inspector general’s report should trigger the beginning of that accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials.

I wouldn’t suggest sitting on a hot stove till that happens, though.

I keep wondering what the political fallout of this will be. Will it cause a significant number of voters who still trust the media and the Democrats to turn on either or both? I simply don’t know. I will say that I’ve long been impressed (and I don’t mean that in a good way) by the ability of most people to stick to their beliefs in the face of what would seem overwhelming evidence that they need to make a change.

The never-ending Mueller investigation ends, but once the needle goes in…

The New Neo Posted on by

…it never comes out.

The Russian collusion allegations have gone on about as long as the Trump presidency, the Mueller investigation nearly as long. These things, and the hopes they both reflect and engender, have sustained the left and never-Trumpers of all parties for a long long time. They are like a drug, and as with any drug, one can become addicted or at least dependent.

An addiction begins to end when the drug is withdrawn, but the addict can and often does substitute another. Democrats have been preparing the new drug, much like the old one: Congressional investigations. And if the Mueller report isn’t released to the public they will say there is something (or perhaps many things) that is being hidden, something important. If it is released to the public they will comb through it, much as they did with Sarah Palin’s garbage, looking for a smoking gun (mixed metaphor, I know) or at least a faint whiff of smoke. No doubt they will find something to feed their habit.

They don’t just believe Trump is guilty; they know he’s guilty. And if he’s guilty, what difference does it make if he was framed? And if the frame doesn’t work, keep looking for the real crime they absolutely know is there. And if they can’t find it, try another game of innuendo and smear. They are doing noble work.

Yes, I know that some are operating even more cynically than that. This latter group doesn’t believe Trump is really guilty of anything except some marital infidelities, having a big mouth, winning an election he should have lost, and trying to dismantle the structure they’re carefully built up for a long long time. But there are a goodly number who are convinced, even now, that Trump is the most uniquely evil man to ever hold the presidency, right up there with the demonic tyrants of history, and must be stopped.

Nope, no emergency at all

The New Neo Posted on by

At the border:

Deportation officers are cutting loose more than 1,000 illegal immigrant family members a day, setting them free into border states as the surge of migrations overwhelms the government’s ability to handle them, officials revealed Thursday.

Over the last three months, about 107,000 family members were caught at the border and then released, with ankle monitoring devices or check-in schedules and the often vain hope that they will show up for their court hearings and deportation.

Worse yet, officials say, they have had to pull deportation officers off duty in prisons and jails, where they were arresting criminal migrants, and deployed them to the border to help the Border Patrol release all the families.

“The current crisis that is occurring at the southwest border, the numbers that we collectively as a nation are seeing … is absolutely unprecedented,” said Nathalie R. Asher, acting executive associate director for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s deportation division.

I suppose that those who advocate for illegal immigrants will find these statistics non-alarming, perhaps even pleasing. I don’t think the majority of Americans—and that includes legal Hispanic immigrants—would be any too pleased about the same developments. But I’m not at all sure the news will reach most of them.

And if it does, the left has an answer:

Immigrant advocates suggested the releases were intended to sow confusion at the border and further President Donald Trump’s argument that there is a national emergency there.

“They are doing this deliberately so they can release a ton of people at once and create chaos,” said Efren Olivares, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, which sent lawyers to the McAllen bus station to monitor developments. “The government is trying to do this.”

The election of 2020

The New Neo Posted on by

No, I don’t have a crystal ball, and I’m not going to predict a winner. Hey, I don’t even know which Democrat is likely to be the nominee. And a lot can happen in the world between now and Election Day 2020.

But I will say this: if Trump ends up being re-elected, the Democrats will go stark raving mad. I know, I know; you think they already have, but believe me you ain’t seen nothing yet compared to what would be likely to happen if Trump wins a second term.

And if he were to win a second term by winning in the Electoral College and losing the popular vote once again, the Democrats will go stark raving mad squared.

I will make another prediction: Democrats will do what they can, legal and/or illegal, to make sure that Trump loses by such huge margins in blue states and blue cities, that even if he wins the Electoral College he will lose the popular vote and give them a talking point for abolishing the Electoral College.

We were very fortunate in 2004 that it wasn’t a repeat of 2000 and all the fallout from the fact that in 2000 not only did Bush win without winning the popular vote, but the Electoral College votes were balanced on a razor-thin edge that required SCOTUS intervention. In 2004, Bush won not only the Electoral College but also the popular vote, and although the election was close it was not so close as to be disputed in any real way.

The closer that elections are—and many in recent years have been exceedingly close—and the more often a Republican wins without the popular vote, the more motivation there is for the Democrats to advocate abolition of the Electoral College (see this). It’s not rocket science; it’s logical.

And since for the most part the Democrats control the voting in our biggest cities—not only because they have such large margins in those cities but because the entire apparatus of each city is set up by Democrats—if they want to skew things even further towards larger Democratic majorities through their rules about voting, or if they want to conveniently “find” more votes if they need them, or to allow vote “harvesting” and the like, they can do it fairly easily because of that control. And the more that votes in blue cities in blue states get skewed towards more and more votes for Democrats, the more the popular vote will swell for the Democratic presidential candidate without the Electoral College being affected, and the more likely it will be that even if the Republican nominee wins in the Electoral College, he or she will lose the popular vote. This would give the Democrats talking points galore for its abolition.

Musings on the Electoral College

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “titan28” wrote:

It’s depressing that so many Republicans don’t understand the brilliance behind the electoral college mechanism in voting for a chief executive. The Founders at no time believed in the wisdom of direct democracy. The electoral college was and remains an excellent hedge.

And commenter “Art Deco” wrote in response:

There’s nothing brilliant about it. It was a compromise between competing plans. It’s a convention and that’s all.

In the rest of the comment, Art Deco is not advocating its abolition. However, I take issue with the idea expressed in the part I’ve excerpted. Compromises are not necessarily “conventions and that’s all.” The second does not follow inevitably from the first. Most compromises “between competing plans” contain elements of each plan, and these different plans have principles/visions/philosophies behind them. What’s more, compromises are not ordinarily just “two from Column A and two from Column B,” a pastiche of unrelated elements with no guiding principle behind that pastiche and the balance achieved (or not achieved, as the case may be).

In the case of the Electoral College, the compromise was between (among other things) the populist democrats (small d) and the federalist republicans (small r). It preserves the importance of states as entities, while giving states different weights, mostly but not entirely according to population. That’s a summary, of course, and there are a lot of other elements present today that differ from those the Founders were contending with—-such as, for instance, back then there was the need of the North to make sure the South’s disproportionate number of slaves didn’t give the South more power, and also voting was limited to white male property-owners. Federalism was also preserved more than it is today by the fact that senators were not chosen by popular vote.

Anyway, the Electoral College compromise was hardly meaningless, and abolishing it would mean that one side—the populist democracy side vs. the republic side—-has won. This would almost certainly have large consequences.

As Kevin D. Williamson wrote yesterday in National Review:

The American order is complex — it is much more sophisticated than “democracy,” which assumes that nothing stands between the individual and the national state except aggregation, that might (defined as 50 percent + 1) makes right. The American order is based on the idea that the United States consists of many different kinds of people in many different kinds of communities, and that each of these has interests that are legitimate even when they conflict with the equally legitimate interests of other communities. The densely populous urban mode of life is not the only mode of life, and the people of the urban areas are not entitled by their greater numbers to dominate their fellow citizens in the less populous rural areas.

The basic units of the United States are, as the name suggests, the several states. The states created the federal government, not the other way around. The states are not administrative subdivisions of the federal government, which is their instrument, not their master. In this, the United States is fundamentally different from countries such as the United Kingdom and Japan, which have unitary national governments under which provincial distinctions are largely irrelevant.

In our system, the states matter. Under the Democrats’ vision, some states matter: California, Texas, Florida, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Ohio, which, without the institutions of federalism, have among them the numbers and the power to effectively dominate the rest of the country.

At the time of the Founding, the people of the smaller states did not desire to enter into a union in which they and their interests would be dominated by the larger ones. The people of the smaller states still do not wish to be politically dominated by the larger ones. For that reason, the interests of the states as such — not mere aggregates of voters — are taken into consideration. The Senate, as originally organized, existed to preserve the interests of the states as such against the opportunism and predation of the more populous House of Representatives — and against the ambitions of the executive, too. Turning the Senate into an inflated version of the House was one of the progressives’ first great victories against the Constitution of the United States and an important step toward the sort of mass democracy that our constitutional order is explicitly designed to prevent.

I wonder how many American voters these days are aware of any of this. And if the answer is “not too many,” that’s no accident. It behooves the left not to teach these things, or to only teach them as though the history was merely an effort by white men to screw everybody else.

Changing the rules of the American political game

The New Neo Posted on by

The Democrats have long been intent on trying to make sure that Republicans never win another election. Rather than figuring out how to do this through argument or through amassing a solid record of accomplishments, they have figured out that the best way to do this is to change the rules.

Change the rules about immigration, illegal immigration, and/or who can vote and at what age and how they must prove eligibility, so that voter demographics favor Democrats more and more strongly. Abolish the Electoral College. And my current favorite, that oldie-but-goodie pack the Supreme Court:

…[S]everal presidential candidates are calling for an increase in the size of the Supreme Court. Nine justices are too few, apparently. In a proposal that seems straight out of the writers’ room at “The West Wing,” Beto O’Rourke wants the court apportioned by party, with five Democrats and five Republicans, and an extra five chosen by the 10 partisan ones.

Does anyone believe even for a nanosecond that if Hillary Clinton had been elected and had gotten to appoint the last two SCOTUS justices, that the Democrats would be floating that particular notion?

The Electoral College is unlikely to be abolished in the conventional way because of the large number of states that would have to agree. But some states have figured out a way around that, or at least they think they’re getting around it. The mechanism would be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, a dull (probably purposefully so) name for a fairly radical idea:

The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) is an agreement among a group of U.S. states and the District of Columbia to award all their electoral votes to whichever presidential candidate wins the overall popular vote in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. The compact is designed to ensure that the candidate who receives the most votes nationwide is elected president, and it would come into effect only when it would guarantee that outcome. As of March 2019, it has been adopted by twelve states and the District of Columbia. Together, they have 181 electoral votes, which is 33.6% of the Electoral College and 67.0% of the 270 votes needed to give the compact legal force.

Interestingly enough, the vast majority of voters of both parties seem to favor the abolition of the EC:

A 2007 poll found that 72% favored replacing the Electoral College with a direct election, including 78% of Democrats, 60% of Republicans, and 73% of independent voters. Gallup polls dating back to 1944 have shown a consistent majority of the public supporting a direct vote.

It’s not even a recent trend, so we really can’t attribute the idea to modern education. I think the reason for these poll findings is that the benefits of the EC are difficult to see (although I think they are strong enough that it should be kept) and the populist emotional reaction to it is much more readily provoked.

I also think it’s one of those “be careful what you wish for, Democrats” things. It would be kind of funny if the mainly Democratic states which have enacted this law find that, in some election or other, their electoral votes end up being cast for a Republican even though the state has voted for the Democrat.

The Democrats are no longer proposing any of this rule-changing in a subtle manner. They tested the waters, and for whatever reason they now believe that playing to their leftist base is the way to go. My guess is that this leftist base has become the majority of the party, and the benefits to be gained by such enormous and transformative rule changes are judged by Democrats to be well worth any risk entailed in showing just how radical they have become.

However, one of the results of these proposals by Democrats is that they have solidified the right and even some of the middle in opposition against them. For example:

I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican.

Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there?…So I swallowed hard, took a leap of faith, and pulled the lever for the Donald.

That was then. This is now:

This gets us to the next installment of “Friday the 13th,” a.k.a. the Democratic presidential candidates. Kamala Harris, you say? You seriously want me to vote for Kamala Harris? And you say that Cory “Spartacus” Booker is just like Kamala, only better and balder? Are you kidding me? Pete Buttigieg? Ask me again when I stop laughing.

Bernie? Really? This grumpy near-octogenarian “public service” millionaire with three mansions is running for the presidency of the wrong country. All his best ideas have already been put into practice––in Venezuela…

Did someone say Warren? Warren, the first Cherokee candidate — that Warren? Doesn’t she now want reparations not just for African-Americans, but also for Native Americans? Where, oh where, is that lever to pull for Trump?…

…[W]e’ve got the triumvirate that truly runs the Democratic Party now––Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, and Tlaib. I see this nutterfest, and let me tell you, dear Democrats: I am motivated as hell. If ever given a choice (in this election or in other ones) between Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Tlaib, Pelosi, Warren, Harris, Booker, Biden, Sanders, or Trump, I will take Trump any day of the week.

I am a highly motivated Trump voter because the Democrats have motivated me up to my eyeballs. I have never been more motivated in my life, because the Democrats are terrifying me. I am locked, cocked, and ready to rock in that voting booth. I just wish I didn’t have to wait 20 months.

Labs are the most popular dogs…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and that’s been true for 28 years in a row.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love labs. They are generally so friendly and good with kids and just about anyone. But they are not my favorite breed, and I’d never own one.

They’re a lot to handle, really big and strong, and they have tails that can just about knock you down and feel like thick whips. They shed. They shed a lot. When you swim, they try to help you and can end up drowning you. Feeding them is an investment.

Now I’ll just tiptoe out of the room before the lab lovers come to give me not just a tail-lashing but a tongue-lashing…

Detainment during WWII

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday while looking at Ted Koppel’s Wiki entry for a comment I was writing, I came across this history:

Koppel, an only child, was born in Nelson, England. His parents, German Jews, had fled Germany after the rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazism. In Germany, Koppel’s father had operated a tire-manufacturing company. To help the British economy, the Home Secretary invited him and his wife to move the factory to Lancashire, England, where, he was promised, they would be protected in the event of war. They moved the factory there in 1936; but, when war broke out in Europe, in 1939, he was instead declared an enemy alien and imprisoned on the Isle of Man for a year and a half.

Koppel was born in 1940, shortly after his father was taken away. For income, his mother sold her personal jewelry and did menial work in London to provide for her infant son. When his father was released, he still was not permitted to work in England, nor would he allow his wife to work. In the years after the war ended, they gained some money from their confiscated assets and decided to leave for the United States.

Not surprising that they decided to come here.

Not only had I not previously realized any of that about Koppel’s history, I hadn’t realized it had been a policy of the British government to intern even some of the German nationals who were Jews running from the Nazis. I did know—and in fact had written a post about it—that in the US 11,507 German nationals were interned here during WWII. Follow the link to read about it, and how it differed from the much larger scale and much better known detainment of Japanese nationals (as well as their citizen children) during WWII.

Ted Koppel wakes from a long slumber and notices something about the press

The New Neo Posted on by

Ted Koppel says:

“I’m terribly concerned that when you talk about the New York Times these days, when you talk about the Washington Post these days, we’re not talking about the New York Times of 50 years ago,” Koppel noted to journalist and author Marvin Kalb earlier this month. “We are not talking about the Washington Post of 50 years ago. We’re talking about organizations that I believe have, in fact, decided as organizations that Donald J. Trump is bad for the United States.”…

“So [Trump’s] perception that the establishment press is out to get him — doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done; it is — but the notion that most of us look upon Donald Trump as being an absolute fiasco, he’s not mistaken in that perception. And he’s not mistaken when so many of the liberal media, for example, describe themselves as belonging to “the resistance”? What does that mean? That’s not said by people who consider themselves reporters, objective reporters of facts. That’s the kind of language that’s used by people who genuinely believe — and rather suspect with some justification — that Donald Trump is bad for the United States … and the sooner he’s out of office the better they will like it.”

Koppel added to Kalb that “we are not the reservoir of objectivity that I think we were.”

I find it bleakly amusing that Koppel thought the press was a “reservoir of objectivity” fifty years ago. Koppel is 79 years old, and he should know better. But at least he’s noticing something now, although as AOC might say, “Ted Koppel, who dis?”

And even now, Koppel is careful to include some language to indicate, to those who would excoriate him for his criticism of the press, that he’s really on the anti-Trump side: “doesn’t mean that great journalism is not being done; it is” and “by people who genuinely believe — and rather suspect with some justification — that Donald Trump is bad for the United States…”

Yeats was a goner for Gonne

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve written about the great poet Yeats before, and in this post I dealt at length with his attitude towards aging and sexuality. In it, I mentioned that he had a lifelong love for and fascination—you might say “obsession”—with the Irish activist, actress, and radical Maud Gonne.

Gonne was quite the looker, too:

Their relationship was nothing if not complex and convoluted. He proposed a number of times, she refused, but she loved him and thought they were soulmates (they shared a devotion to the occult, as well). She didn’t think they should have sexual desire for each other, but they did sleep together at least once (apparently). If you search for “Yeats and Gonne” you’ll get many many lengthy discussions of the ins and outs of their long, long mutual dance.

But this exchange in particular caught my eye:

When Yeats told Gonne he wasn’t happy without her, she replied:

“Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.”

I imagine that only made him want to marry her more.

And yet, indeed, the mostly-unfulfilled and yet extremely intense relationship was the wellspring from which a great deal of Yeats’ poetry came. Love that cannot be doesn’t cause people to be poets, much less great poets. But for someone who’s already a great poet, it certainly furnishes a lot of deep material.