Pro-Trump vs. Never-Trump blogging

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace has a fascinating piece about the decisions bloggers and other pundits on the right have had to make in the era of Trump.

Fascinating to me, anyway. He writes:

Some time ago I faced the choice of doing an anti-Trump-but-pro-conservative blog, or getting on board with Trump…

But when I was contemplating the idea of a blog that was allegedly pro-conservative while simultaneously being against the key player (flaws and all) of the actual on-the-ground real-world conservative movement, I realized: This makes no sense.

What’s the audience for that? How many readers would that attract? How narrow a window would I have to shoot for, simultaneously opposing the president and the putative leader of the conservative movement while also allegedly being a bright red TruCon gung-ho for conservative political victories?

Wouldn’t any conservative political victory redound to Trump’s benefit? And wouldn’t my opposition to Trump mean that I would not welcome such victories?…

Add into this the fact that most blog commentary involves very attitudinal snark and denigration of one’s political opponents. It doesn’t have to involve that, but the practical reality is: It almost always involves that.

I faced the same dilemma during the primaries and prior to the election in 2016. But I didn’t really see it as a question for me. That’s because my philosophy is if you’re not going to speak your mind on your own blog, why blog at all?

Of course, it helps that my traffic isn’t all that big. I mean, it’s not tiny, but it’s probably a small fraction of Ace’s, and although I make some money on this blog the amount is also probably a small fraction of what someone like Ace makes blogging. Naturally, I’d like both those numbers to increase, but (as he also points out) “very attitudinal snark and denigration of one’s political opponents” seems to be the way of most (not all) high-traffic blogs, and that’s not my forte (or my interest, or my inclination) either.

In fact, this paragraph of Ace’s might just be the problem with yours truly, although I hope I’m more interesting that that:

And now what’s the audience down to? You can either write in such a careful and emotionless way that you aren’t read as snarking at your intraparty rivals — but that would probably result in a dry and overly-milquetoast blog, with few readers.

When Trump was a candidate, I was honest about my opinion that his track record and style as a private citizen indicated there would be big trouble. If he were to be nominated, I thought he’d lose the election. And if he were to be elected, I thought he’d break his conservative promises and/or be power-mad and/or wreak havoc in foreign affairs. But I always said I’d be happy to be proven wrong, and I always said if he somehow were to become president I would evaluate him on his actions thereafter.

I think my position during the campaign was supported by the evidence at the time, and I’m happy to report that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by his actions since the election. But if that trajectory puts me in some sort of “careful and emotionless…overly-milquetoast” category—well then, that’s the way it is.

But the dilemma for bloggers and pundits has been (and remains) real. I lost a lot of readers during the campaign, about 1/3 of my previous traffic. My income from the blog declined, as well. Some have come back, but far from all. Of course, those developments might also reflect the fact that people are tired of politics and its bitterness, and turned off from Amazon (from which I derive a certain percentage of my blog income).

Who knows? But in the final analysis, I gotta be me. I yam what I am. Yadda yadda yadda.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an article on the RedState firings of a lot of anti-Trump bloggers, the topic that sparked Ace’s post. I read RedState quite often, and I have to say that—for me, anyway—one of the big problems with the writing of some of the people RedState fired (I don’t read them all, but I’m familiar with some of them) is that they seemed reflexively anti-Trump, seeing nefarious things about him even in the most innocuous things.]

The Cosby verdict and the law

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand in 2004.

The MeToo movement is happy, flooding Twitter with tweets such as these:

Do I think Cosby is guilty? Most likely.

Do I think the trial was fair, and that Bill Cosby got justice? I have grave doubts, and that’s what this post is about. Continue reading →

SCOTUS has been hearing arguments on the Trump travel order

The New Neo Posted on by

How will the Court rule? You can see various tweets discussing it here.

I’ve long been impressed by how much of the speculation about future SCOTUS decisions, based on how the oral arguments go, turns out to be wrong. But for what it’s worth, most people seem to think the Court will rule for Trump. I certainly think the Court should rule for Trump, based on the law. But we all know that’s not always the way things go.

Have you noticed how much of the news lately seems to have to do with law and legal issues? One reason is that “lawfare” is a favorite way the so-called Resistance has been fighting tooth and nail against Trump. In that bitter battle, at the SCOTUS level, the actions of McConnell in the waning days of the Obama administration to block his ability to nominate a SCOTUS justice loom large.

The McConnell-hating “Congressional GOP and the Democrats are all alike”-stating wing of the right often forgets things like that.

[NOTE: I wrote more here on the subject of McConnell and how he blocked Garland and helped confirm Gorsuch—and, by the way, how the blocking of Garland may have helped elect Trump.

It used to be that presidents pretty much got their judicial nominees approved. That was pre-Bork; the Bork battle began a long slide to the point we’re at now, where both sides play hardball.]

Trump: guilty till proven innocent…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and of course there is no way he is innocent no matter what proof might be offered.

Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy on the subject:

Byron York’s Washington Examiner column takes up the question of whether, where Donald Trump is concerned, the “generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head.” The matter at issue is the so-called Steele dossier, the Clinton-campaign-sponsored compilation of opposition-research memos that the author, former British spy Christopher Steele, masqueraded as intelligence reports. Byron collects commentary from left-leaning political, academic, and media doyens, all arguing that the dossier’s sensational allegations carry a degree of credibility because, though unverified, they have not been proven untrue.

It is a depressing fact that most people who hate and fear Donald Trump would see nothing wrong with that sort of argument. After all, they want to “cut down every law” to “get after the Devil.” And Trump is the Devil.

McCarthy again, on the Steele dossier’s allegations and their credibility:

The dossier did not drop out of the sky five minutes ago. Many media outlets had it long before it was finally published 17 months ago, refusing to run with it because they well knew that doing so would be irresponsible. The FBI has had Steele’s reports for nearly two years. As former deputy director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee, the bureau made elaborate efforts to corroborate it. What’s more, the FBI and Justice Department have come in for fierce criticism for failing to verify dossier allegations that were included in the surveillance applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). They have great incentive to show corroboration if it exists, but they haven’t.

The provenance of the document (about which the FISA Court was kept in the dark) strongly counsel against crediting its assertions. It is partisan opposition research generated for the purposes of a heated, acrimonious election campaign. Its allegations were leaked to the media for partisan purposes, and journalists, notwithstanding their unabashed anti-Trump biases, have not been able to corroborate it, either. We know that Steele, who is banned from entering Russia, relied on third- and fourth-hand hearsay from Russian sources who, for the most part, have not even been identified. And (as I’ve recounted here), Steele himself does not stand behind what he has written. In court proceedings, he has taken the position that the dossier is a collection of bits of “raw intelligence” that are “unverified” and “warranted further investigation” before anyone should have publicized or relied on them.

So the proponent of uncorroborated assertions, upon being sued for libel, has not just declined to defend them but has undercut their reliability. How could fair-minded people, then, repeat these allegations as if they had standing?

The president’s opposition has clearly decided there is no duty to be fair-minded in matters Trumpian. When I ask about this, there’s not so much a defense as a deflection: Well, is Trump’s commentary fair-minded? No, it’s often wrong and way over the top. But I’m not making Trump’s behavior the standard by which I measure mine, so it’s odd to me that people who detest him do so.

McCarthy is a very smart—even brilliant—lawyer. But it’s not the least bit “odd” that people who detest Trump use this sort of rhetorical ploy when they have no other way to counter McCarthy’s arguments. Because there is no valid way to counter his arguments. The force of logic, tradition, and law is behind them.

But the Devil must be cut down.

The state vs. Alfie Evans’ parents

The New Neo Posted on by

Like Charlie Gard before him, British toddler Alfie Evan’s situation highlights not just questions of medical ethics, but the power of the state over the individual.

I wrote about Charlie here. Alfie Evans’ situation differs in some details, but it’s essentially similar.

It used to be that the state would intervene when parents (or other private citizens) wanted to treat their children (or other relatives) in ways that didn’t measure up to a standard of care. For example, there were people whose religion forbade blood transfusions, and sometimes the will of the parents about that was overridden in order to save a child’s life. But the emphasis was nearly always on the state’s interest in treating and saving rather than letting die.

This time (and in the case of Charlie Gard) the state is intervening to stop parents from treating, or from preserving a life the state has decided contains too much suffering, although there’s no indication that Alfie Evans is especially conscious of much of anything.

One would say the case is about money in a country in which the state is in charge of health care, except that here there are other resources that have been offered to the parents. Italy has offered to take him, the Pope has lent support, and yet the parents have been forbidden by the British court to leave the country.

This is a reminder that the liberty tradition across the pond is not as strong as it is here. And yet what happens “over there” often wends its way over here, and there have been hints of that in cases such as that of Jahi McMath. As I wrote here:

A better analogy to the Charlie Gard case [and that of Evans] is that of Jahi McMath, involving a minor child and a dispute between Jahi’s family and her hospital and doctors over the definition of brain death and when life support should end. However, the McMath case was settled by an agreement between the child’s family and the hospital in which the family was allowed to take her from the hospital and continue life support.

If the Charlie Gard case had occurred in the US, however, the legal emphasis differs. In the UK, disputes between parents and doctors are brought to court under an objective best interests of the child standard. But in the United States, in similar cases the best interests “tend to be resolved in favor of parental rights,” according to Dr. John D. Lantos, director of Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. And, when courts do overrule parents’ wishes in the US, they usually do so to order care over parental objections rather than the opposite.

The different legal standard in the UK was further described by Claire Fenton-Glynn, legal scholar at the University of Cambridge:

“English law”¦does not see parents as having the ”˜right’ to make decisions on behalf of their children. The concept is called parental responsibility: That is, the parent has a responsibility to make decisions, to look after the child,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t give them rights; parenthood gives them responsibilities.”

And lawyer and ethicist Seema Shah describes the differences between American and British law this way:

Legally, though, US courts are following the same best-interest standard as the UK, but the way it works here, at least in practice, is that “courts are deferring to parents,” Shah said.

By the way, Jahi is still alive (although in a profoundly nonresponsive state) and in a lawsuit filed by her parents there are ongoing battles about whether she is brain dead or not. These cases are not only heartbreakingly sad but they tap into areas of medicine that are unsettled, such as the definition of brain death, as well as philosophical and religious questions about the meaning of life and suffering.

Those questions have no universally agreed-on answers, and I’m not offering any. I see these cases as dealing more with the question of how much the state can intervene to curtail the liberty of parents—not the liberty to cause the death of their child, but the liberty to try to sustain the life of their child. It seems unconscionable to me that they are not allowed to leave the country and avail themselves of whatever hope is left.

At the moment, Alfie is breathing on his own (with some oxygen support, perhaps intermittent?) and the legal battles continue. For example:

In Wednesday’s appeal hearing, Alfie’s legal team argued that the hospital’s original end-of-life plan was based on suppositions that the toddler needed oxygen to survive, Kiska said. The fact that Alfie lived on even without ventilation support was a material change in circumstance and served as grounds for renewing the matter.
It is in Alfie’s best interest to travel to Italy, where doctors are ready to care for him, the legal team argued in court…

Professor Dominic Wilkinson, a consultant neonatologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital and director of Medical Ethics at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, said, “In Alfie’s case, none of the foreign experts have offered any new treatment or any new outlook for Alfie. The Italian specialists have apparently indicated that they believe that his care should be palliative.”…

Sometimes, the sad fact is that parents do not know what is best for their child,” Wilkinson said. “They are led by their grief and their sadness, their understandable desire to hold on to their child, to request treatment that will not and cannot help.”

I would add that Sometimes, the sad fact is that doctors do not know what is best for anyone. They are led by their hubris and their power, and their understandable desire to hold on to that power, to deny treatment that may not help although they have no way to absolutely know whether it will or won’t.

Remember that in this case no one is asking the British doctors to treat the child against their own medical judgment, and no one is asking the country to pay for the medical treatment of the child. Italy has volunteered to take on the burden. This is what makes the case so frightening—the courts are reaching into matters they have no business controlling. But it is the general nature of institutions to try to increase their power, is it not?

[NOTE: In connection with this, I suggest you take a look at my series of posts on ethicist Peter Singer. Very chilling.]

What does the special election in Arizona mean?

The New Neo Posted on by

Whatever conclusions you draw from it, I don’t think the news is good.

The Republican Debbie Lesko won; that’s true. But she won by a far smaller margin than she had every right to expect, considering the district’s history, according to most articles you will read:

Republicans have a 17 percentage point registration advantage in the district. President Donald Trump won there by 21 points in 2016. Democrats didn’t even field a candidate there in 2014 and 2016.

Special elections tend to be low-turnout affairs, attracting only the most loyal voters. Normally, that sounds like a recipe for the older, more conservative voters who are the core of Arizona’s 8th Congressional District, which includes the Sun Cities.

Even adjusting for the anti-incumbent mood that can prevail in midterms, Lesko delivered a lackluster finish in the Republican-heavy district…

Republicans held onto the seat after pouring more than $1 million to protect a solidly Republican seat under normal circumstances.

Democrats spent almost nothing.

That runs counter to the pattern of recent special elections won by Democrats, in which the Democrats outspent the Republicans, pouring vast resources into each battle. They must have felt this one was really hopeless for them, and yet Lesko won by only 5 points. That’s worrisome.

On the other hand, I tried to get an idea of turnout compared to an ordinary year, because special elections are notorious for being skewed because of their small turnout. The best I could come up with was that the turnout in the special election was about half what it was in 2016. So there’s plenty of room to say that this is completely unrepresentative of what will happen in 2018.

But I think that’s inappropriately optimistic. Perhaps a better comparison would be to non-presidential election years such as 2014, but that wasn’t a really competitive year, either, because there was a popular incumbent, Trent Franks, and turnout was relatively low perhaps because it was a foregone conclusion that he would win.

All the coverage I’ve seen of Lesko’s victory states that the 8th is an overwhelmingly, solidly, massively Republican district, and has been for years. That’s why the closeness of this election seems shocking and meaningful. For example, from FiveThirtyEight:

The area has traditionally been extremely Republican, having voted for John McCain by 22 points in 2008, Mitt Romney by 25 points in 2012, and President Trump by 21 points in 2016.

But at the Wiki entry for the 8th, I discovered something that seems to go very much against that prevailing “wisdom,” at least when you get to the Congressional level. Yes, the GOP candidates were preferred for president, but not for members of the House of Representatives. The 8th—for those with short memories—was Gabrielle Giffords’ district until she was nearly assassinated.

Democrat Giffords was the 8th’s member of the House beginning in 2006, when she won by a twelve-point margin. Her opportunity had come because her very popular GOP predecessor, Jim Kolbe, had retired. It is instructive to learn about Kolbe, because of what it tells us about the district:

Kolbe was a leading moderate Republican. This served him well; although his district included most of Tucson’s Republican-leaning suburbs, the brand of Republican politics practiced in Southeast Arizona has traditionally been a centrist and independent-minded one. …

While Kolbe had usually coasted to reelection, it had been expected to be very competitive if he ever retired. (Bill Clinton had narrowly won the district in 1996, and George W. Bush narrowly edged out Al Gore and John Kerry in both of his presidential bids.) Graf won the five-candidate primary on September 12, 2006. Kolbe refused to endorse Graf, who lost to Democrat Gabrielle Giffords in the November 2006 election.

And Graf—who had challenged him in the primaries, and became the GOP candidate in 2006, was far more conservative. Graf’s loss to Giffords indicates a moderate “swing” brand of Republican thinking in the 8th rather than any sort of rock-ribbed conservatism. Giffords was re-elected in 2008 by a similiar 12-point margin, and again in 2010 (a solidly GOP year) by a much smaller margin, about 1.5 points. But she won, even in a year that represented an enormous red wave.

After that, Arizona underwent redistricting, but (at least, as far as I can tell from that link) it went in the direction of making the 8th (and most of the rest of the state’s districts) more Democratic rather than less.

That’s the fuller picture of the 8th district over the last decade-plus. It’s a picture I have yet to see painted in any of the articles I’ve read on the subject of yesterday’s special election. However, I came across it after only a few minutes of Googling and reading. Interesting, no?

Let me just say once again…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that I would not like to be standing next to Melania Trump, inviting comparisons.

The woman can wear anything and look good. This outfit, for example. I really like the asymmetrical suit jacket, but the whole thing is so over the top that most people couldn’t get away with it. And yet it looks just fine on her (except maybe just a teeny bit tight in the derriere—but why quibble?):

The media focused on the hat. But the hat is just the most dramatic top-it-all-off element in an outfit that’s already dramatic—an all-white suit, severe hairdo, and what looks to be lavender pumps with mega-high heels.

Later that night at a state dinner, Ivanka looked great in another dress that most women could not even come close to wearing successfully. It helps to be nearly 6 feet tall and gorgeous:

Yeah, I know. Fashion is trivial. But I like it.

The NY Times’ fake fake news

The New Neo Posted on by

No, that doubling of “fake” is not a typo. Irony, they name is NY Times.

On Saturday the Times published a story entitled “Is Facebook’s Campbell Brown a Force to Be Reckoned With? Or Is She Fake News?”. The story has quite a few swipes at Brown which seem to amount to “she has conservative ties.” For example:

Others see her as a more insidious figure ”” a telegenic personality with close ties to conservative figures who can offer Facebook’s outreach the veneer of journalistic credibility.

And:

Ms. Brown, who became a school-choice activist with close ties to conservative politics after her TV career, is emerging as a fiery negotiator for her vision of Facebook as a publishing platform,

Here is another bit from the article, as it reads now:

…Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product ”” a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming ”” to be a breaking news destination.

But originally, that sentence had also contained an actual example of the sort of “far-right conspiracy programming” that has been “flooding” Watch. Originally it read like this:

…Ms. Brown wants to use Facebook’s existing Watch product ”“ a service introduced in 2017 as a premium product with more curation that has nonetheless been flooded with far-right conspiracy programming like “Palestinians Pay $400 million Pensions For Terrorist Families” ”“ to be a breaking news destination.

Well, guess what? That type of programming is—get ready—true. And it’s been known to be true for a long, long time.

And although the idea of truth may be mutable in the post-modern relativistic world of the university, the newspaper world is still at least somewhat subject to fact-checking. That means that the Times was ultimately forced to issue the following retraction, which you can find if you scroll down to the end of the very long article:

Correction: April 23, 2018

An earlier version of this article erroneously included a reference to Palestinian actions as an example of the sort of far-right conspiracy stories that have plagued Facebook. In fact, Palestinian officials have acknowledged providing payments to the families of Palestinians killed while carrying out attacks on Israelis or convicted of terrorist acts and imprisoned in Israel; that is not a conspiracy theory.

But never fear, the Times soldiers on with the “far-right conspiracy programming” accusation about Watch, even though it can no longer seem to offer a single example of the fake news it wants to spotlight. But I would wager that the vast majority of its readers don’t require examples and take the Times’ authority on faith.

The black bloc: Et tu, Kanye?

The New Neo Posted on by

Oh-oh. Kanye West, one of the most visible of music superstars, married to media personality Kim Kardashian, has praised political changer Candace Owens (aka “Red Pill Black”; I have written about Owens previously here).

The Twitter hordes have descended on him for this act of independent thought, and he has fought back:

Tom Arnold has deleted a tweet of his, but it originally told Owens to “suck racist dick”. Now he just calls her an “alt-right race pimp.”

This sort of thing and the possibilities it suggests must be staggeringly frightening to the left. If they ever lost the black bloc of voters, or even a significant portion of that monolithic group, the left would have a great deal of trouble winning elections. That is their fear, and it is a valid one.

The percentage of voters who are black has hovered around 12 to 13 percent (the higher figure during the Obama years) recently. Those voters vote overwhelmingly Democrat, to the tune of over 90%.

But if you look at this chart you’ll see that it wasn’t always that way:

And there’s an interesting disconnect in the self-report of black voters:

Although 88% of African Americans voted for Democrat John Kerry in 2004, 44% consider themselves to have a moderate political viewpoint. Only 28% consider themselves liberal in their political views.

Those are old statistics, but I don’t think they’ve changed enormously. It does appear that, at least on paper, there’s room for quite a bit of movement from left to right among black voters.

That explains why the Democrats MUST hammer home the idea that Republicans are racist to the core, and why they MUST demonize people like Candace Owens in order to diminish and/or eliminate her obvious appeal. If the left doesn’t do that, they will probably never win another election except in the big blue cities.

[NOTE: This must be “Julius Caesar” day. I just noticed I used a reference to the play in the title of this piece, and a quote from the same play in my previous post today.]

Hillary’s “They were never going to let me be president”

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, it depends who the “they” was. It turns out that it was the American voters and the electoral system.

But this is also the woman who posited a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her husband in 1998, involving Monica Lewinsky and other scandals. Of course, no one forced Bill to have sex (or sort-of-sex) with the lady in question. But yes, the parties are in a battle in which dirty tricks and traps occur on both sides. This is nothing new. What’s new is the heavier involvement of the organs of government these days (IRS and FBI, for example). And although Hillary Clinton and the Democrats might think so (or tell themselves so, or tell us so), for the most part it’s not been marshaled by the forces of the right; it’s the left that’s been playing that particular game.

Hillary’s recent statement was reported to have been uttered on Election Night, as she was in the middle of getting the shock of her life So in that sense it’s quite understandable that she might blame some shadowy and nefarious “them” rather than herself. After all, she was not just losing, she was losing to a man everyone on her side (and many on both sides) held in tremendous contempt and thought would be easy to defeat. But:

Three hours later, the Rust Belt was awash in red, and somebody had to tell Hillary Clinton.

Robby Mook, the drained and deflated campaign manager, told his boss she was going to lose. She didn’t seem all that surprised.

“I knew it. I knew this would happen to me,” she said, now within a couple of inches of Mr. Mook’s ashen face. “They were never going to let me be president.”

People in politics have tremendous egos. They are not ordinarily big on self-blame, and Hillary is hardly an exception. So this utterance—which was made in private–was almost inevitable.

But I’ve noticed something else, a phenomenon that seemed to begin with Barack Obama in terms of presidents or presidential candidates: and that is that the old Trumanesque adage “the buck stops here” is dead and buried. I see this statement of Hillary’s as part of that change.

It goes with the modern sensibility of victimization that has become so popular on the left and in America as a whole. Nothing is anyone’s fault if that person is a member of some supposedly oppressed minority: it’s a result of discrimination. Obama started the “I’m a victim” drumbeat back when he was a candidate in 2008 (I noted the development quite early on (here, for example). And the entire party was prepping the ground for the blame game prior to the 2008 election in the event that Obama might lose. I wrote about that here:

…[T]he furor and rage that has been building all these years in the Democratic Party now gives us the fascinating although creepy prospect of an excuse for a possible loss being heavily pushed before a defeat has even occurred. This time the ever-present fraud allegations are combined with the far more toxic assertion that, if it occurs, Obama’s defeat will be the result of racism.

I don’t have to give you links; articles asserting this have been published in major periodicals at the rate of several a week for quite some time now. Sometimes they cite dubious interpretations of polls. Sometimes they merely state the case as though it is a self-evident fact. Sometimes they threaten””or fearfully predict, or both””race riots if Obama is not elected. But is there any question that, were Obama to lose, the main Democratic explanation will be that the perfection of Obama was rejected by the undeserving and racist American people?

That was written close to ten years ago, in September of 2008. It’s only gotten worse since then, much worse. And Hillary is going with that flow. No more “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene III, L. 140-141). Well, it’s not “stars” that people blame these days instead of themselves; it’s prejudice and conspiracies.