Is this the end of the FBI?

The New Neo Posted on by

I certainly don’t think this is the end of the FBI.

One of the problems with the last ten or so (or more) years is that Americans are somewhat like the frog that’s boiled so slowly it doesn’t notice [see NOTE below], in terms of federal government heavy-handedness, power, and lack of integrity. Things that I believe would have shocked the adults of my youth, or even the adults of my mid-adulthood, invoke shrugs, yawns, and/or excuses today among way too many people.

It doesn’t seem—at last, according to this report—that agency insiders are happy with Comey’s performance so far. Aside from Comey’s off-putting air of self-righteous superiority, he has the distinction of being disliked by a fair number Hillary supporters as well as Trump supporters (probably the only way in which he is non-partisan). The Hillary supporters think he caused her to lose the election, and the Trump supporters’ reasons are quite obvious.

Here’s a sampler:

“Good lord, what a self-serving self-centered jackass,” the official said. “True to form he thinks he’s the smartest guy around.”

A current FBI official said it was bizarre that Comey seemed so pleased with the whole episode. “It’s how happy he looked on TV while cashing in on the biggest mistake in history. His mistake,” they said. “Jim Comey made that mistake. We all just wonder what could have been and what we could’ve done to change it.”

I’m assuming that last remark about “the biggest mistake in history” is from a Hillary supporter, although it’s hard to know for sure. My guess, though, is that Comey is smiling for several reasons. The first is that the spotlight is on him, where he wants it. The second is that his book will probably make a considerable amount of money. The third is that he is smug about being responsible—through his post-firing leak that started it all—for the ongoing Mueller investigation, which he dearly hopes will ultimately trap and destroy his nemesis, Donald Trump.

What’s not to smile about?

An additional source, who works frequently with the FBI, said they had refused to watch the extended cut of the interview altogether. “Didn’t watch it””I don’t care, he’s basically a scumbag. I don’t know how they’re letting him write a book in the middle of an investigation that he’s part of. I wonder if he had his book cleared by the intelligence community? He’s supposed to but I bet he didn’t.”

The former FBI director was fired by President Trump on May 9, 2017. Comey responded by leaking his memos about conversations with Trump to The New York Times, which kick-started the special counsel investigation led by Comey’s predecessor, Robert Mueller…

FBI sources who did not support Comey’s decision to announce the reopening of the Clinton email investigation still stood by him at the time and were outraged at the way in which Trump fired the director. He learned of his dismissal after reading it on a television screen inside the Los Angeles FBI building where he was speaking to agents.

Those same current and former FBI agents and officials””and others””did not respond well to Comey’s interview Sunday night.

Support for Comey has dwindled as those who worked closely with him and initially supported him began to see his book and his public interactions””including Twitter selfies in Iowa””as self-serving and gauche, four sources said.

Their anger has grown in recent months as agents have come to see Comey as the reason for the “current shitshow”¦ that is the Trump presidency,” one former official, who voted for Trump, explained.

Then again, what are all these FBI agents doing talking to the reporters at the Daily Beast? Luckily, it’s not about classified information, but still.

[NOTE: Modern scientific sources report that the alleged phenomenon is not real. In 1995, Professor Douglas Melton, of the Harvard University Biology department, said, “If you put a frog in boiling water, it won’t jump out. It will die. If you put it in cold water, it will jump before it gets hot””they don’t sit still for you.” Dr. George R. Zug, curator of reptiles and amphibians at the National Museum of Natural History, also rejected the suggestion, saying that “If a frog had a means of getting out, it certainly would get out.”

In 2002 Dr. Victor H. Hutchison, Professor Emeritus of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma, with a research interest in thermal relations of amphibians, said that “The legend is entirely incorrect!” He described how a critical thermal maximum for many frog species has been determined by contemporary research experiments: as the water is heated by about 2 °F, or 1.1 °C, per minute, the frog becomes increasingly active as it tries to escape, and eventually jumps out if the container allows it.]

Aha! It had to happen—the real Onion weighs in on Comey

The New Neo Posted on by

Just a few hours ago I wrote about some of the news du jour as being too much like the Onion for comfort. One of those news items was Comey’s interviews and book, about which I said:

Oh, how the mighty have fallen””and this latest fall from grace was accomplished by Comey’s very own hand, in the writing of his very own book (assuming it wasn’t ghostwritten; one never knows)…

The style reminds me of nothing more or less than a women’s romance novel; I half expect for someone’s bodice to be ripped off by the end of the chapter.

But when I wrote that, I didn’t realize that the Onion had already spoken earlier today. It’s just a photo and a headline, but it goes like this:

Comey: ”˜What Can I Say, I’m Just A Catty Bitch From New Jersey And I Live For Drama’

And I see that Althouse wrote:

I feel like I’m reading about a 20-year-old female fictional character. Is this what the inside of Comey’s head looks like or is this some psychological narrative concocted, with ghostwriting help, for the American reading public?

Althouse’s entire post is worth reading, by the way, if you really want to get inside the mind of James Comey.

The Not-The-Onion news of the day

The New Neo Posted on by

Look, I take my humor wherever I can find it these days.

Even if it’s in the real, live, very unfake news. And even if that unfake news sounds like the sort of fake news that used to air only in the satirical Onion.

But this Chick-fil-A-as-creepy-alien-invader-of-NY story doesn’t seem to contain all that much that’s tongue-in-cheek. What is Chick-fil-A’s horrible failing, according to the New Yorker article? Seems to be that the owners are Christians and don’t hide that fact, and that although they treat gay people just fine, they sometimes donate to causes that are against gay marriage for religious reasons.

Oh, and then there is their ad campaign, which seems to feature the joke (it’s a joke folks, so lighten up!) of cows saying to eat more chicken:

… [Chick-fil-A] franchises still hold an annual Cow Appreciation Day, offering free food to anyone dressed as a Cow. Employees dance around in Cow suits…They’ve been inducted into the Madison Avenue Walk of Fame, and their Facebook following is approaching seven figures. Stan Richards, who heads the ad agency that created the Cows, the Richards Group, likened them to “a guerrilla insurgency” in his book, “The Peaceable Kingdom”: “One consumer wrote to tell us the campaign was so effective that every time he sees a field of cows he thinks of chicken. We co-opted an entire species.”

It’s worth asking why Americans fell in love with an ad in which one farm animal begs us to kill another in its place. Most restaurants take pains to distance themselves from the brutalities of the slaughterhouse; Chick-fil-A invites us to go along with the Cows’ Schadenfreude.

The essay begins with this:

New York has taken to Chick-fil-A. One of the Manhattan locations estimates that it sells a sandwich every six seconds, and the company has announced plans to open as many as a dozen more storefronts in the city. And yet the brand’s arrival here feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. Its headquarters, in Atlanta, are adorned with Bible verses and a statue of Jesus washing a disciple’s feet. Its stores close on Sundays. Its C.E.O., Dan Cathy, has been accused of bigotry for using the company’s charitable wing to fund anti-gay causes, including groups that oppose same-sex marriage. “We’re inviting God’s judgment on our nation,” he once said, “when we shake our fist at him and say, ”˜We know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage.’ ” The company has since reaffirmed its intention to “treat every person with honor, dignity and respect,” but it has quietly continued to donate to anti-L.G.B.T. groups. When the first stand-alone New York location opened, in 2015, a throng of protesters appeared. When a location opened in a Queens mall, in 2016, Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed a boycott. No such controversy greeted the opening of this newest outpost. Chick-fil-A’s success here is a marketing coup. Its expansion raises questions about what we expect from our fast food, and to what extent a corporation can join a community.

One response:

https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/984888495230644225

The other story about which I had some trouble initially telling satire from reality involves James Comey. Oh, how the mighty have fallen—and this latest fall from grace was accomplished by Comey’s very own hand, in the writing of his very own book (assuming it wasn’t ghostwritten; one never knows).

But I had to look twice to understand that this excerpt from Comey’s book was not a spoof (please also scroll down here and read the responses):

I really hardly know what to say about this, except that it’s another example of giving people enough rope. When Trump supposedly called Comey a nutjob, it sounded like enormous hyperbole. But as time goes on and we see more of Comey unplugged, it appears that if not a nutjob then he’s certainly eccentrically and exaggeratedly full of himself (in that department he makes even Trump look comparatively modest).

In addition to the revelation about the all-important blue shirt, there’s this, which is an all-too-real excerpt from Comey’s book (which I haven’t read and probably never will read):

[Trump’s] face appeared slightly orange ”¦ with bright white half-moons under his eyes where I assumed he placed small tanning goggles, and impressively coifed, bright blond hair, which upon close inspection looked to be all his. ”¦ As he extended his hand,” Comey adds, “I made a mental note to check its size. It was smaller than mine, but did not seem unusually so.”

The style reminds me of nothing more or less than a women’s romance novel; I half expect for someone’s bodice to be ripped off by the end of the chapter. It’s hard to spoof something that already sounds satirical, but Alexandra Petri gave it a go in the WaPo:

I have been called a human humblebrag. I certainly couldn’t speak to the truth of that statement, except to say that where I come from, we don’t like bullies and their mean words. Bullies are mean and small, not like myself (I stand 6-foot-8, with a head of lush dark hair and eyes that pierce into the souls of everyone I encounter, like the eyes of a hawk who has read Reinhold Niebuhr (I wrote my thesis on Reinhold Niebuhr.)).

I would venture to say that I am the protagonist of my own life and perhaps the lives of many others. Certainly, no one else has as yet stood up to take on this grave responsibility, and it was my honor to rise to this challenge. It is a little embarrassing to describe myself: I stand, as mentioned, about 6-foot-8, like an oak with a firm sense of right and wrong and large, capacious hands. When I first seized Donald Trump’s, I took a mental note (and later, a physical note; I maintain scrupulous contemporaneous notes) that they had vanished into mine, like a dormouse curled up inside an oven mitt. But most hands do that when confronted with mine, except President Barack Obama’s, and ”” I hope ”” Reinhold Niebuhr’s, if we ever meet, in this life or the next.

[NOTE: Again with the Reinhold Niebuhr.]

Andrew McCabe: leaks, lies, and IG reports

The New Neo Posted on by

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe lied to the FBI not once, but over and over and over (or “lacked candor,” which is quite the euphemism).

The number of self-serving lies McCabe told (as well as some well-placed leaks), the number of people he told them to, as well as the number of times he told them is rather shocking even if you’re already cynical:

Here are some of McCabe’s excuses, shall we say, as outlined in the [recent IG] report, with both direct quotes and narrative:

“”‰”˜Did not recall ”¦ no idea ”¦ ”˜I don’t remember’ ”¦ he was confused ”¦ ”˜I don’t know what she’s referring to’ ”¦ ”˜not that I’m aware of’ ”¦ he could not remember ”¦ ”˜I don’t really want to get into discussing this’ ”¦ ”˜on further recollection, I remember authorizing’ ”¦ ”˜so, I misspoke’ ”¦ claimed ignorance ”¦ ”˜I was surprised ”¦’”‰”

The first few times the IG’s sleuths talked to [McCabe], it was informal. Then they realized he was behaving like the Clinton stooge that he is ”” lying his rear end off. They finally put him under oath on May 9, 2017. Does that date ring a bell? It was the day Trump fired Comey and McCabe became acting director of the FBI. It’s mentioned, without comment, in a footnote on Page 15. Who says the IG doesn’t have a sense of irony?

Here’s some more of the ways the IG describes McCabe: “provided a starkly different account ”¦ significant questions whether (McCabe) testified truthfully ”¦ none of the circumstantial evidence providence support for McCabe’s account ”¦ no other senior FBI official corroborated McCabe’s testimony ”¦ we do not credit his claim ”¦ we did not find this to be a persuasive explanation.”

Stewart A. Baker considers it ironic in a different way:

The Justice Department Inspector General’s report on Andrew McCabe, the fired Deputy Director of the FBI, is as scathing as press reports say. According to the Inspector General, McCabe leaked dirt on the Justice Department, then misled FBI Director James Comey about the source of the leak, then misled leak investigators over and over again. It’s hard to read the report and feel that McCabe’s firing wasn’t earned. And yet, for all that, there’s a bit of low tragedy in McCabe’s tale. For he was disgraced not because he was evil, but because events conspired to turn his talent for regular old government information management into a fatal flaw.

What McCabe did is probably indistinguishable from the kind of lying and half-lying that happens in every corner of government every day of the week.

Now, there’s a depressing statement if I ever heard one. So, McCabe is just your garden variety average everyday lying ass-covering mediocrity of a bureaucrat, who rose to heights at the FBI according to the Peter Principle.

That doesn’t stop the WaPo’s Max Boot from trying (and failing) to place McCabe in some larger “context” that supposedly makes it all okay—that context being that, despite McCabe’s mendacity and wrongdoing, Trump had it in for him from the start.

One of the things Boot mentions is a story that’s been reported many times—that McCabe was fired in a way that meant he lost his pension:

But it’s highly unlikely that[McCabe’s] conduct, however unethical, was the sole reason Attorney General Jeff Sessions took the highly unusual step of firing him just 26 hours before he would have retired with his pension. “In 99 percent of cases, a federal employee is not at risk of losing a pension, even when fired,” reports Government Executive magazine. McCabe was treated more harshly than Robert Hanssen, an FBI agent-turned-Russian spy whose wife is able to collect part of his pension even while he is serving life in prison.

Well, guess what? McCabe remains able to claim plenty of retirement benefits (see this), although they will likely not be as huge as he originally expected:

…[A]fter working at the FBI for just 22 years, McCabe’s pension package was valued at a whopping $1.8 million. And even if he loses that, as someone who is covered by the Federal Employees Retirement System, he’ll still get a pension. It’ll just be smaller than his FBI pension, and he’ll have to wait until 60 to collect it, but it will be generous nonetheless.

Please remember, McCabe was fired on recommendation of the FBI’s own Office of Professional Responsibility. It wasn’t vindictiveness…

As one of the federal government’s 2.2 million employees, McCabe’s pension is subsidized, insured and mostly guaranteed by taxpayers, part of a generous benefits package ”” covering health insurance, paid leave and, of course, retirement ”” available to all federal workers.

Along with having 401(k)-type pensions with a generous “employer” match, federal workers also get a defined-benefit pension, to which they contribute less than 1% of their pay. Oh, and they also receive health coverage when they retire. And Social Security.

And then there’s Mark Penn, an interesting character who used to work for both Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. He’s one of those Democrats who really do seem to be moderate (or perhaps Republicans-lite). Here’s what Penn has to say:

The first report from the inspector general of the Justice Department came out Friday and it documents in meticulous detail how the FBI’s former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, lied ”” on audio tape and under oath ”” denying a role in a self-serving leak that he, in fact, personally managed. His response? He may sue Trump for defamation.

As these deep staters turn into paid talking heads profiting through books, speeches and clicks, they undermine any notion that they acted professionally instead of politically while in office, and the evidence continues to mount that the foundation for turning the country upside down for the last year was most likely two parts politically tinged hubris and one part sketchy evidence.

I’ll leave it at that for now.

Still another demonstration of the fact that liberals think it’s perfectly okay to be racist towards black conservatives

The New Neo Posted on by

They’re Uncle Toms, or minstrels, or whatever the epithet du jour is.

And this somehow proves that it’s those on the right who are the racists.

The logic is impeccable.

Bree Newsome, an artist and activist, described [Diamond and Silk, two black female Trump supporters and social media celebrities] in an interview as “a modern-day minstrel show” aimed at “white conservatives who want to believe Trump can’t be racist or they themselves can’t be racist because there are these two black women named Diamond and Silk who are constantly rooting for Trump.”

Ms. Newsome said their performances relied on “stereotypical images of black women” that would not be celebrated on conservative media if they were not Trump supporters.

Keith Boykin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University and a former White House aide to President Bill Clinton, offered a similar critique.

“If these two women, the way they speak, the way they talk and act and behave, were saying anything that was contradictory to Trump, the Trump supporters who defend them would be the first to attack them,” Mr. Boykin said.

Mr. Boykin said their conservative fans, who are often quick to note their race and gender, “only want to listen to the people who reaffirm their narrow, limited vision of what blackness is all about and how black people should perceive white people and specifically how they should perceive Donald Trump.”

As a commenter on this Althouse thread pointed out, that last phrase—“only want to listen to the people who reaffirm their narrow, limited vision of what blackness is all about and how black people should perceive white people and specifically how they should perceive Donald Trump”—is a spot-on description of the left, not the right

Or as the commenter wrote: No mirrors in that house, nosirree.

Minstrel shows, of course, were white people pretending to be black in order to make fun of black people for supposed stupidity, so the accusation doesn’t make sense in terms of Diamond and Silk, who are black. However, minstrel shows were sometimes (rarely, but sometimes) performed by black people under the direction of whites, once the genre got going.

But Diamond and Silk don’t lampoon black people at all, and of course they are black, and there’s no white person pulling their strings. They’re smart, they’re funny, and they happen to support Trump, although I’m sure the people criticizing them think those things cannot coexist—smart, funny, support Trump—whether in black people or in white people, but especially in black people.

But Diamond and Silk are unquestionably black people, who are acting of their own free will, because we still are a nation that values liberty. For now.

Me and TurboTax, TurboTax and me

The New Neo Posted on by

Every year around this time I’m busy with my taxes. I like to joke that I may just be the person in the US with the highest ratio of tax complexity to income, because although I don’t make much money I have to fill out a lot of tax forms beyond ye olde 1040.

Self-employed and business owner, with multiple (relatively small) sources of income. Some investments with interest or dividends, a few modest capital gains and losses, and until recently I itemized my deductions. Then there’s the state.

Well you might ask: why not an accountant? I’d be paying quite a bit for not a whole lot, except of course some savings in time and stress. Also (and this may be the real reason), each year I learn (or at least, I think I learn) from the previous one, and each year I think it’ll now be a piece of cake to do this all myself.

It never is a piece of cake. More like chewing on hard crusts of stale bread, over and over and over.

But this year I made a decision. This year I’d buy TurboTax and use that. It made perfect sense. The ads (and even some actual human beings—friends—I talked to) said TurboTax would simplify things mightily and wasn’t very expensive at all. So I decided to do a little research online to decide what version to buy.

Well, it turns out that took a while. Many hours, actually, because first you have to answer some questions, and TurboTax informed me that I needed the most extensive and expensive version, which would be (I’m doing this from memory) something like $119 at the time. That seemed a bit steep, and maybe unnecessary; it was predicated on my being a business owner, but my business taxes are actually a very simple part of the equation for me.

So the next step was seeing what forms are actually supported by the different versions, because I know what forms I need to use. That took me quite some time to find; the information was buried rather effectively, but I finally found it after a rather frustrating search. Turns out that the not-quite-as-complicated and less-expensive version (“Premier”) would do quite nicely for me.

So that was the beginning of my sense of unease about TurboTax and its recommendations. That unease would only increase.

I decided to buy the downloaded version, because it would be a bit more secure. But when I bought it (from Target, which at that moment seemed the cheapest way to go), the website automatically added more sales tax than it should have. The irony was not lost on me: I was trusting TurboTax to be accurate about my federal taxes, but the process had already made an error about sales taxes.

I spent a tedious amount of time trying to correct that error, waiting on hold with Target (or someone somewhere in Asia answering the phone for Target), who ultimately said there was nothing they could do, but would refer me to some other team there. The amount of money involved in the error was relatively small, but by that time I’d worked up quite a head of steam about it, and spent another lengthy time on hold with the new people, who immediately admitted they’d done me wrong.

But they couldn’t fix it, either. They referred it to some other group which supposedly would give me the refund in a week or so. Fine. But I’d already spent approximately four or so hours on things related to TurboTax, and I hadn’t even looked at the actual program yet. How far could I have gotten with my taxes in that amount of time, doing them by myself in the old-fashioned way?

I took the next step, which involved downloading the TurboTax program. It didn’t work. I tried everything I could think of; still didn’t work. I Googled it and read the instructions for if you encounter downloading problems; very complex and still didn’t work.

Now it had been about six hours of wasted time with TurboTax. I wanted a refund, and I had no intention of using the product. So I called Target again, and this time the person who answered the phone (after a long wait) was adamant: TurboTax was not refundable. Period.

I started ranting, or what I’d call ranting. This product was defective. I couldn’t load it. Don’t they stand by their product? The answer was “no.” After quite some time with this, I asked to speak to a higher-up. She refused to connect me. We got into quite a loop; me insisting, she resisting. Finally she said that if she even tried, “they” (the higher-ups) would not accept my call. I got to the point of just repeating “I don’t want to talk to you anymore; connect me to someone else” over and over.

So finally she did, and whoever answered the phone immediately agreed to give me a refund.

Then I took a several-hour break from the whole thing; had to decompress. When I returned to my computer, I found that in the interim my browser had crashed. When the smoke cleared, there on the screen was what had never been there before: “Welcome to TurboTax!” or some such message. The download had been successful; I have no idea how many hours it took, but it was definitely more than one or two.

My faith in the program was nil, but I was curious, so I went a little further. If the upshot was that it seemed to be working well, I’d eat crow, call Target again, and say I didn’t need the refund I’d fought for.

The next step was that I needed to update, said the instructions, even though the thing had just loaded. And then (you may have guessed it) the updates all failed, some of them with big warnings in red saying things like “Critical update failed!”

Not exactly trust-inducing.

Next were some questions. Very elementary questions like—where can last year’s tax return be found on your computer? Well, of course mine wasn’t even on my computer; I’d done it all by hand. But TurboTax, in its less-than-infinite wisdom, didn’t have “nowhere” as a choice. Their assumption was that of course you had your taxes somewhere on your computer; doesn’t everyone? It took some time for me to figure out how to work around that, and then get going with the next few questions.

The next questions were all geared to helping TurboTax figure out what forms I needed, but I already knew exactly what forms I needed, so it all was a waste of time. At this point what was my tally of time wasted with TurboTax—seven hours? eight? I didn’t know for sure, but I knew I’d had enough. And the stress had been greater than the stress of just doing my taxes by myself.

So I uninstalled the program from my computer and called it a day.

There, I feel better now.

My taxes are almost done, in less time than it took me to figure out that TurboTax wasn’t for me. I may even get the completed tax forms sent out before the last possible minute, although last-minute mailings are a personal tradition of mine. But TurboTax will not become one.

Roundup: McCabe; Cohen

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately there have been so many big news stories each day that there’s no way a single person can write about all of them. So I’m going to weasel out of this one (for now, anyway) and refer you to Ace on recent developments in the Andrew McCabe saga: see this. Another source is this, which contains a link to a copy of the IG’s report.

As far as the Michael Cohen affair goes, please see this, as well as this speculation by Andrew C. McCarthy on what might be behind the seizure of the attorney-client records. For 20 years McCarthy worked as a prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, which is the office involved here, and so he’s inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume there probably was a serious crime they were investigating that would justify the search. I’m not at all convinced, but I respect McCarthy enough to point out his article.

Red lines in Syria: if Russia really wanted Trump to win the election…

The New Neo Posted on by

…they certainly didn’t get their money’s worth:

U.S. and allied warships and warplanes in the eastern Mediterranean launched a fiery barrage of missiles at multiple military targets in Syria to punish the Russian-backed government in Damascus for its alleged use of poison gas against civilians last weekend, President Trump announced.

Trump authorized the punitive attack against President Bashar Assad’s government and sought to cripple its chemical and biological weapons facilities with what he called precision airstrikes. French and British forces joined the attack, Trump said in a televised address Friday night.

The Pentagon said about 120 missiles targeted a scientific center near Damascus that was used for research, development and production of chemical and biological agents; a chemical weapons storage facility west of Homs; and a separate chemical agent storage site and command post near Homs. Officials said no U.S., French or British casualties were reported.

“We are prepared to sustain this response until the Syrian regime stops its use of prohibited chemical agents,” Trump said.

If you Google the phrase “Syria problem created by Obama” (as I did), you’ll get a host of articles (mostly from late 2016 or early 2017), and many of them will be from liberal sites (for example, CNN and Reuters). They all say it was a mistake by Obama.

They also tend to call it Obama’s biggest foreign policy mistake, one that (in the words of the Reuters piece) “stains his legacy.” As far as I’m concerned, there are so many foreign policy mistakes that Obama made—including the entire overarching foreign policy philosophy and worldview that guided him—that I’d be hard-pressed to state the worst one. To me, his legacy is so “stained” it’s toxic. But Syria will do as the worst for the moment, if only because it’s one that even liberals and the left call an error, and a serious one at that.

Vox summed up the situation this way a year ago:

The Syrian conflict thus became more than just a civil war: It became a proxy fight between Iran and America’s Gulf allies, whose outcome was of vital significance for both sides.

It also quickly became a proxy standoff between Washington and Moscow.

Russia’s ties to Syria go all the way back to the Cold War: According to one scholar, the Soviets “essentially built” the modern Syrian military in the 1960s. Continued support for the Assad government gave the USSR its most reliable ally and proxy in the Middle East.

Today, Syria remains one of Russia’s few reliable allies outside of the former Soviet republics, a vestige of Moscow’s former superpower status and a final military toehold in the Middle East.

I cannot help but recall the moment in the 2012 presidential debate that has been spotlighted here before—the one that just about every liberal outlet felt was an occasion to mock Romney and applaud the brilliant Obama:

And they call Trump dumb and dangerous.

Note the last thing Romney says in that clip: “after the election [Putin will] get more backbone.” Unfortunately, that didn’t happen in 2012. But as far as Russia and Syria go, it’s happening now.

Doing a 180 on NIMBY in LA and Seattle

The New Neo Posted on by

The city of Los Angeles is hoping that some people will say YIMBY—“Yes! In my backyard!”—to the homeless, for pay:

In August, the county Board of Supervisors approved a $550,000 pilot program to build a handful of small backyard houses, or upgrade illegally converted garages, for homeowners who agree to host a homeless person or family. Then in February, Bloomberg Philanthropies awarded L.A. a $100,000 Mayor’s Challenge grant to study the feasibility of backyard homeless units within the city limits.

Rents under the county’s pilot program would be covered by low-income vouchers, with tenants contributing 30% of their incomes. The county is also sponsoring a design competition, streamlining permits and providing technical aid and financing options.

While the idea of backyard homeless units might seem far-fetched, officials hope it could be a fast and relatively inexpensive way to house the most stable individuals among the 58,000 homeless people in L.A. County.

Note that last sentence: “the most stable individuals.” In other words, at this point there will be six of the units, so the county can pick and choose six “stable individuals” among the 58,000 homeless. My guess is that it won’t be hard to find six such people who are down on their luck and just need a break.

What this has to do with solving the problem of 58,000 homeless people, many of whom are mentally ill, disease-ridden, addicted, or some combination of those things, isn’t immediately apparent.

There’s been a similar project in Seattle. There, no person is placed in a backyard home without everyone on the block agreeing to it. The plan is to “put a homeless house on every block in Seattle.”

I say “good luck.” There are an awful lot of blocks in Seattle. But then again, there are an awful lot of liberals there who might want to compete for that particular virtue-signaling prize.

I actually think this can work for a few people in a few instances. But it will barely make a dent in the problem of the huge numbers of dysfunctional homeless people in many of our cities.

Trump pardons Scooter Libby

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the story.

I bet Trump has gained increased sympathy in recent months for those caught up in a politically vindictive net and charged with “process” crimes. Libby was certainly one of them.

Libby’s sentence had already been commuted by President Bush, so this is just an extension of what had already taken place:

…Cheney pleaded with Bush to pardon Libby, but the president would not go that far. He did, however, grant Libby a commutation that allowed him to avoid prison.

Near the end of Bush’s presidency, Cheney made another bid to clear Libby’s record with a full pardon, but Bush again declined.

It was never clearly established whether Libby discussed or confirmed Plame’s CIA affiliation to journalists. However, during the investigation, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage acknowledged he confirmed Plame’s CIA connection to The Washington Post before any of Libby’s reported interactions with reporters on the subject. Armitage, who said he was unaware of Plame’s covert work with the CIA, cooperated with the investigation and was never charged.

The investigation was conducted by a special counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, who also served as the U.S. Attorney in Chicago. After Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself because of the probe’s connections to the White House, Deputy Attorney General James Comey appointed Fitzgerald.

During and after the investigation, Libby’s allies complained that Fitzgerald charged Libby in order to justify the extensive probe into the leak. They also argued that it was unjust for Libby to have faced charges when the primary source of the leak, Armitage, never did.

Those arguments make sense to me, and I’m glad Libby was pardoned.

I also think this “get someone on a minor process crime if you can’t find anything else” business is easy (and tempting) to misuse, and that’s done quite regularly.

Here are two interesting (and timely) statements on the subject, although they come from about 30 and 80 years ago, respectively [hat tip: J.J. Sefton at Ace’s]:

Rich [Lowry] writing in the NY Post had this to say about Mueller and special prosecutors:

“…In his famous dissent in the Supreme Court case of Morrison v. Olson upholding the independent-counsel law in 1988, Antonin Scalia wrote, “Nothing is so politically effective as the ability to charge that one’s opponent and his associates are not merely wrongheaded, naive, ineffective, but, in all probability, ‘crooks.’ And nothing so effectively gives an appearance of validity to such charges as a Justice Department investigation and, even better, prosecution.”

Scalia relied heavily on a speech from FDR’s attorney general, Robert Jackson. The future Supreme Court justice warned against prosecutors picking a person, not a crime, to investigate.

It’s still worth quoting Jackson at length: “In such a case, it is not a question of discovering the commission of a crime and then looking for the man who has committed it, it is a question of picking the man and then searching the law books, or putting investigators to work, to pin some offense on him. It is in this realm” – the ability to pick and choose targets – “that the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies…”

Yes, indeed. You can find the larger speech from which the Jackson quote was taken here; I haven’t had time yet to read it myself. Jackson, who became a SCOTUS justice from 1941 to 1954, gave the speech in 1940. His name also rang a bell for me from the Nuremberg trials, and when I looked it up I saw that he was the chief US prosecutor there.

Still very timely, both quotes.

Why does hip-hop music get a pass from the #MeToo movement?

The New Neo Posted on by

Good question, I think. And it’s one being asked by Gabriel Hays in this article:

For the week of March 31st, 2018, eight of the top 20 songs in Billboard’s “R&B/Hip-Hop” chart were blatantly sexist and misogynistic. In these songs, women were portrayed as commodities or luxury goods — something to be owned or consumed and of no more importance than money, cars, liquor or drugs. Sexual lyrics are casually graphic and almost solely about women giving men pleasure.

In eight of the 20 songs, singers used the word “bitch” a total of 55 times, with 15 blatant instances of women being treated as sex objects. Cardi B, a woman and a wanna-be #MeToo activist, had a new Top-20 song about dominating “bitches” and giving them drugs…

Dr. Carolyn West, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington wrote in 2008 about the dangerous implications Hip-Hop culture poses towards young black women in particular. As far as rap music’s expansion from its urban roots to the corporate mainstream, West claimed, “What’s changed over time is the greater sexualization of hip-hop. Initially it started off as a revolutionary form of music. Now, large corporations produce images that sell, and there is a blatant link between hip-hop and pornography.”

Looking the lyrics of the recent top- 20, it’s hard not to recognize this pornographic material. West argued that “Black adolescent girls are being bombarded with graphic sexual images”¦ Black Entertainment Television, plays more than 15 hours of music videos per day.” Considering that rap has become the predominant music genre in the decade since, furthered by the enormous prevalence of social media in America today, it’s safe to say that even more youngsters are plagued by hip-hop’s negative connotations.

“Plagued”—and entertained, titillated, and influenced.

This has been evident since the genre began to proliferate in the popular music scene, several decades ago. Even before that, actually. Remember Tipper Gore’s campaign to require labels on rock albums to guide parents, back in the 80s? She was made fun of back then—and the lyrics were relatively chaste compared to what is commonplace today.

But the answer to Gabriel’s question is obvious, isn’t it? There are two reasons #MeToo has for the most part ignored the blatantly exploitative and misogynist lyrics of the genre, and why even a new female MeToo-ish rapper such as Cardi B doesn’t condemn it and in fact uses some of it herself.

The first is that it’s highly popular and popularity means dollars. This is the same thing operating in the movie and entertainment industry as a whole. Individuals might complain about the behavior of certain people in the field in private life, but most people who earn their living in entertainment don’t want to kill the cash cow that supports them. The result is that hypocrisy is evident and widespread; the disconnect between what’s condemned when done in private in the industry and the message conveyed in so many movies is profound. Same for violence, by the way.

The second is the same reason that misogynistic Muslim societies (for example, many Arab countries) get a pass on their mistreatment of women: protected groups generally get a pass from the left.

Taking stock of Never-Trumpers

The New Neo Posted on by

Two fascinating pieces came out recently about the phenomenon of the Never-Trumpers, now that it’s a year-plus into the Trump presidency.

The first is David Brooks’ (yes, he of the crease in Obama’s pants) essay in the Times, entitled “The Failures of Anti-Trumpism.” I have to hand it to Brooks, because it isn’t easy to admit defeat like this [emphasis mine]:

Over the past year, those of us in the anti-Trump camp have churned out billions of words critiquing the president. The point of this work is to expose the harm President Trump is doing, weaken his support and prevent him from doing worse. And by that standard, the anti-Trump movement is a failure.

We have persuaded no one. Trump’s approval rating is around 40 percent, which is basically unchanged from where it’s been all along…

A lot of us never-Trumpers assumed momentum would be on our side as his scandals and incompetences mounted. It hasn’t turned out that way. I almost never meet a Trump supporter who has become disillusioned. I often meet Republicans who were once ambivalent but who have now joined the Trump train.

Brooks goes on to give several reasons for this, which boil down to: (1) Never-Trumpers are often “insufferably condescending”; and (2) Trump still speaks to a certain disillusioned section of America. The first is a matter of tone, and the second a matter of empathy and communication.

But there is a curious omission on Brooks’ part, and I think it’s very telling. He doesn’t deal with what Trump has actually done up to this point: the judges he’s appointed, the tax cut he advocated that was passed, the ways in which he has limited illegal immigration (and will probably do more), and his tough stance in certain areas of foreign policy (including of course Israel).

Earth to Brooks: might Trump’s actual accomplishments in his first year have something to do with the fact that so many “Republicans who were once ambivalent…have now joined the Trump train”?

So, why does Brooks ignore that—which I believe is one of the biggest reasons Trump’s approval is, if anything, higher than when he took office? It’s certainly the reason why someone like me isn’t railing against him at the moment, although I did plenty of railing during the primaries. I had always said let’s give him a chance, I hope his performance as president is better than I think it will be, and that if it was I’d be pleased.

But Brooks and his ilk seem to evaluate politicians differently. What he (and they?) look for and admire seems to be style, first and foremost (the crease in Obama’s pants is a good illustration). Perhaps Brooks thinks that way because he thinks that style=substance, or at least is a very good indicator of substance. But I’ve not really found that to be true with any reliability, although of course sometimes the two do go together.

Trump is uncouth, coarse, nasty, seemingly inarticulate (although on close observation he actually communicates bluntly and directly and rather effectively). In other words, Trump is oh-so-many things Brooks doesn’t like, and I don’t care for either. But style is far less important to me in a president than what that person does in terms of action and policy.

I still think that, all else being equal, I’d love to have a president with everything I wanted, including style (Churchill keeps coming to mind, and Lincoln would do nicely, although he was considered uncouth in his day). And I suppose it also depends on whether you see Trump not only as uncouth but as deeply corrupt and dangerous. I once thought corrupt/dangerous was probably true, but as time has gone on I’ve seen less evidence of it rather than more. But if it were true that Trump was corrupt (or more corrupt than the alternatives) and dangerous (or more dangerous than the alternatives) it would be a reason to oppose him mightily.

But Brooks doesn’t seem to be saying that’s what he thinks, or at least he’s giving no details, at least not in that column. He says Trump has done damage (but is it the Resistance that’s done damage?). He cites Trump’s incompetences (at what?) and scandals (but are they real, or trumped (!) up, and are they important?). But he offers no evidence in the column itself of the sort of corruption or dangerousness that would warrant the depth of the Newer-Trumpers’ opposition.

The second article is a riff on the first one. It’s by Jon Gabriel, an editor at Richochet. Here’s an excerpt from it in which he talks about his own decision to leave the Never-Trumper camp:

As any longtime reader knows, I was a Never Trumper throughout the election. But when the nation selected him, I laid down that label and accepted reality. Trump was my president for the next four to eight years, I earnestly hoped for his and my country’s success, and I would praise or criticize him based on his actions.

The all-important phrase (to me, anyway) is based on his actions.

Gabriel and I are different. He was a Never-Trumper right up till the election. I was never a Never-Trumper, but I was strongly against Trump during the primaries and mostly sad and grieving after his nomination—sad and grieving because I saw the end result as the election of Hillary Clinton. When Trump was elected I was surprised, although “surprised” is too mild a word for it. But just as with Gabriel, at that point “I earnestly hoped for his and my country’s success, and I would praise or criticize him based on his actions.”

That seemed an obvious course of action to me. I had done the same with Obama, and wrote about it, too, right after his election in 2008. It didn’t take long for me to judge Obama on his actions and find them very disturbing. That judgment of mine just kept growing and growing during his presidency, but at the outset I was willing to give him a chance and judge him just as I’d judge anyone.

Same for Trump. It seems like that’s what every thinking person would do and should do. Obviously, that’s not the case.

Maybe for me it’s easier because I already am on record as admitting I changed my mind about my basic political affiliation, and that I’ve been wrong about a number of things in the past. What’s another change of mind, particularly if the news is better than I expected?

Now, don’t misunderstand me; I like to be right and hate to be wrong. But I’d rather follow what I see as the truth than hold to the rightness of previous views that have been tested and found wanting.

There’s one more thing motivating the remaining Never-Trumpers on the right, and I believe it may be most important of all. We’ll call it the Trump Taint. They don’t want to be associated in any way with someone so declasse, so crude, so coarse, so vile. so un-intellectual. Their stomachs turn over at the thought. The fact that Trump is filthy rich doesn’t help; they’re more interested in the “filthy” part than the “rich” part, and wealth cannot redeem him.

In addition, during his career in real estate and business, Trump cultivated his plebian roots, which is somewhat funny because he grew up very wealthy. But great wealth is not what I’m talking about; Trump could have generations of wealth and still be nouveau, if you get my drift.

This dichotomy has long existed in American political life, and it’s not about money or lack thereof. Bill Clinton, who really did grow up on the somewhat wrong side of the tracks, was an appealing figure to the elite (elite Democrats, in this case) because he was highly educated and articulate. But LBJ (also a Democrat) was a coarse, bullying guy from Texas, and he displaced the assassinated, classy, Harvard-educated, witty, handsome JFK and was hated even by Democrat elites because of all that.

Sarah Palin was like a dress rehearsal for Trump. She went to the wrong colleges, came from the wrong place, had the wrong way of speaking, and so a great many on the right hated her. I haven’t done a study, but I bet the same people who had turned on Sarah Palin are the Never-Trumpers on the right today.

[NOTE: To save you the trouble of going to my earlier post to find that Brooks quote about Obama’s pants, here it is:

“I remember distinctly an image of”“we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”

That was about style. Brooks also was very impressed by Obama’s perceived erudition (the link in the first sentence is now a dead one, unfortunately):

“I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, “Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?” And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So I say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.”

It’s hard to know exactly what Obama said that was so dazzling. But since David Brooks has never written anything that indicates he’s any sort of deep thinker himself, perhaps the mere fact that Obama was familiar with the name “Reinhold Niebuhr” was enough to do the trick.

Fellow-intellectuals. I’m one too, but that’s not my criteria for politicians. In fact, I think it can be a handicap. Too much fox and not enough hedgehog.]

[ADDENDUM: By the way, the style/erudition thing is one of the reasons Jordan Peterson so confounds and frightens the left.]