“He’s not Hillary” as a pro-Trump argument

The New Neo Posted on by

In an interesting discussion on this thread, commenter “Big Maq” responded to commenter “Cornhead” this way:

“He’s not Hillary.” ”“ Cornhead

Seems like an excuse now for anything wrt trump.

Just found this ”“ seems appropriate to that tired refrain:

“Then there are the folks who are mostly-in for Trump. Every day I hear people say on Twitter, “Yeah, he’s flawed but at least he’s not Hillary.” But what kind of standard is that? I’m glad Hillary’s not president. Truly. But if your yardstick for a Republican president ”” not candidate, but president ”” is now “He’s better than Hillary,” then you’ve filed down the yardstick to a couple inches. “Better than Hillary” strikes me as the minimum requirement for a conservative president, not an omnibus justification for anything he does.“ ”“ Jonah Goldberg

“He’s not Hillary” serves a lot of purposes as a rejoinder. If it’s a kneejerk all-purpose response to any criticism of Trump, meant to end the argument, then it’s a meaningless closed door to discussion. And I suppose sometimes it’s offered in that spirit.

But I think that it can also be (as I think it may have been for Cornhead) a reminder of the realities we faced. Once it became clear that Trump had clinched the nomination, it was a binary choice. Although some people held out hope for a while for a third choice that would gather steam (I held out some small hope for a bit), it became clear before Election Day that that was not to be.

One of those two people was going to be president, and every voter had to decide which one. It was an easy choice if the voter thought highly of one of them, but a far more difficult one if the voter thought they both were execrable, although in very different ways.

So “he’s not Hillary” can simply be a reminder of that stark fact. People often consider a present situation and complain about it without regard to the alternatives. So sometimes it’s good to point out what the real alternatives were. And so far, there’s little question that for a conservative voter, Trump has been better than Hillary would have been.

That doesn’t mean that the speaker gives blanket approval to everything Trump does. For example, “he’s not Hillary” could be the statement of someone who thinks the only good thing Trump has done is to nominate Gorsuch to the Court.

A more interesting question to me—although an extremely hypothetical and speculative one—is what some of the other leading GOP candidates such as Rubio or Cruz would have been doing as president, and how they would have fared in the office. We can argue about that—and we have—and we can argue about whether any of them could have won (and we have). But we’ll never know.

My opinion of Trump so far? (a) He’s not Hillary. (b) He’s been considerably better than I thought he would be, but my expectations were low. (c) It’s early, and he’s already shown growth and change compared to what we saw during the campaign. (d) I’m happy with some of his actions and unhappy with some of them, but I’ve written on this blog about the specifics and so I’m not going to list them here. (e) Trump is Trump, and his essential nature is mercurial and combative; he likes to surprise people, so it’s never possible to completely relax; and (f) He’s not Hillary.

Ballet and technique: the unbearable lightness of style

The New Neo Posted on by

If you’ve followed ballet as long as I have, you can’t help but notice vast changes in technique (I’ve written about some of them here and elsewhere). In general, the number and scope of physical feats has increased tremendously, perhaps exponentially. But there are tradeoffs, too.

I was going to write “there are tradeoffs in the non-physical part of ballet—the artistry.” But I wonder; is any part of ballet non-physical? Ballet is a strange amalgam, an art that is expressed almost totally in the physical/visual, because the instrument of art is the human body in motion. Singing and playing musical instruments are at least partly physical, but their main modality is sound. Painting and sculpture require physical control, and their main modality is visual as well, but a product is created that is separate from the artist and ultimately can stand on its own.

But as Yeats memorably wrote (in one of my favorite poems):

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

We can’t.

Which brings me to the subject of this post: changes in style in ballet over the years. In my lifetime, I’ve seen a few changes that I would characterize as good. For example, some of the truly schmaltzy over-the-top kitschy histrionics are gone. But one person’s schmaltz is another person’s souffle. And as a general rule, I think we’ve lost far more than we’ve gained in the sense of style, just in my lifetime.

Style—and artistry—have been sacrificed to technique, for the most part. I like to see physical feats, but if I want to see them for their own sake I’ll go to gymnastics. Ballet only becomes transcendent when style is wedded to technique, and although a certain level of technique must be present, it is meaningless without style.

So now, without too much further ado or comment, I’ll bring you some examples of a certain style that was found far more often in the past, that of ethereal lightness and quickness and joy. The clips I’ve cued up in this video are from the 60s, I believe (perhaps 1967?), and they’re not even of performances; they seem to be a sort of staged, in-costume rehearsal by some soloists with the Bolshoi:

Those two soloists were fairly typical of what I recall of the dancers of the time in their emphasis on the dance aspects of what they were doing. Interestingly enough, although ballet technique has become more advanced in the intervening years, one area in which it has declined is quickness. The tempi at which Russian dancers used to move could not be matched by most dancers today, and their speed was accomplished with an illusion of great lightness and ease.

The next clip illustrates those qualities, but unfortunately it cannot be embedded. I’m planning to analyze it in greater depth in another post, although the lack of embedding ability is unfortunate. The entire clip is part of “Walpurgis Nacht” from the opera “Faust,” and shows the revels of bacchantes and satyrs (probably recorded in the 1950s or perhaps the early 60s).

If you want to see it (and I hope you do), go here at YouTube and take a look at minutes 3:44 to 5:24, and then the pas de deux from 6:19 to the end. It is almost unbearably schmaltzy, old-fashioned, and easy to mock. But I think it’s also very wonderful, particularly the performance of the lead bacchante, the lady in red Raissa Struchkova, whose lightness and quickness cannot be rivaled by a single dancer today who comes to mind.

I think we’ve lost a great deal, although most people are unaware of what we’ve lost.

Adam Gopnik “tries” to resist Trump Derangement Syndrome

The New Neo Posted on by

He tries—but he fails.

Or is he just pretending to talk himself out of Trump Derangement Syndrome, while consolidating it for himself and his readers? He gives up the anti-TDS fight awfully easily, doesn’t he?

I understand, Adam. Believe me, I do. It takes no imagination at all for me to imagine being a liberal in your position, confronted with the shock of a Trump presidency. But you can try a little harder than this to resist:

We owe it to our country and to our sanity to go on a case-by-case basis, empirically evaluating each action as it takes place, and refusing to succumb to the urge to turn politics into a series of set responses””exactly the habit, after all, that we so often deplore in Trump and the people around him.

This is a perfectly reasonable assertion, and one that would count for a lot in pretty much any semi-normal circumstance. The problem is that it refuses to see, or to entirely register, the actual nature of Trump and his actions. Our problem is not Trump Derangement Syndrome; our problem is Deranged Trump Self-Delusion. This is the habit of willfully substituting, as a motive for Trump’s latest action, a conventional political or geostrategic ambition, rather than recognizing the action as the daily spasm of narcissistic gratification and episodic vanity that it truly is.

See how it goes? Something like it would be reasonable to be reasonable about Trump if we didn’t know that we shouldn’t be reasonable because everything Trump does has evil motivation even if it looks like it might not. Talk about circular reasoning!

Gopnik goes on to describe various actions by Trump that might be considered to have benign motives but which he rejects out of hand. What’s more, he warns his readers that it is dangerous to think otherwise—in other words, that any defection from Trump Derangement System is the beginning of a slide down the slippery slope of compromise with evil:

Doubtless there will soon be revisionist trends in the assessment of Trump, with journalists insisting that beneath the flailing and lying there is something resembling a plan””that one can connect the dot, and see a real picture. Don’t buy it.

Don’t open your mind and even consider the alternative to Trump-as-evil. If this sounds a mite familiar, it should. Not only is it a variant of the same thing I wrote about earlier today regarding the reception of Bret Stephens’ NY Times column on AGW, but it’s the same thing I’ve written about for over a decade: the left’s closed minds and intolerance of any thought that challenges its belief system and agenda.

Thinking for oneself and opening up one’s mind—who knows to where it might lead? After all, someone like me who happened upon certain alternate (conservative) views that made more sense to me than the liberal/left ones I’d always known, and who changed her political affiliation as a result—someone like that is dangerous to the solidarity of the left.

When I was a liberal Democrat (I was never on the left, although “liberal Democrat” and “leftist” have become more synonymous these days than they were when I was young), I actually believed that “liberal” meant “open-minded and willing to listen to the opinions of others.” Therefore it was one of the shocks of my life to be the recipient of so much rage when I tried to discuss my differing and changing views with people I knew. Some were okay with it, by the way. But many were not, and I could not have predicted in advance who those people were going to be.

But I don’t think that even in my liberal Democrat days I would have nodded along with what Gopnik is writing in his column. But there are an awful lot of people who will.

AGW: when a scientific theory becomes a religion…

The New Neo Posted on by

…then those with an opposing view become apostates.

That’s especially true if the topic is one with very high stakes, such as AGW (anthropogenic global warming). Think about it this way: if a person is—(a) convinced that AGW has been proven beyond any doubt (b) threatens life as we know it all over the globe; and (c) can be halted and/or decreased by measures we understand and can control if only we had the will to implement them—then if follow that anyone who disagrees is a person who is endangering life on earth.

Science, of course, is not a religion, and the history of science is littered with theories that have been considered proven and then are disproven. So scientists must remain skeptical and open to any evidence that would challenge their theories and their findings. That’s difficult enough to do when the topic is an abstract one with few practical applications. But when a topic is highly highly politicized (as with AGW), the difficulty increases exponentially and the public also becomes very much involved.

Which brings us to an article Bret Stephens wrote in his new venue, the NY Times. It was really a rather modest suggestion that people listen to both sides of the issue—not so much on AGW (which he himself seems to believe is true) as on whether we know enough to accurately predict the future of AGW and/or to fix the problems it may cause.

The Twitter storm this caused has been virulent. But if AGW (and intervention to halt or slow its effects) is your religion, then someone like Stephens becomes the AGW devil. Then this sort of response seems perfectly reasonable (if crass):

“You’re a s”“thead. a crybaby lil f”“kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.

“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.

“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.

Not only has Stephens been excoriated, but that last sentiment—that he shouldn’t be at the Times—has drawn enough support to be expressed in a petition, that now has about 27,000 supporters, asking that he be fired. It’s especially ironic, not only because Stephens just arrived there but also because the main thrust of his column was to ask people to listen to opposing voices. And although Stephens is voicing only the mildest of opposition to current AGW thought, his voice is intolerable to many people who like their echo chambers particularly echo-y:

“Censoriously asserting one’s moral superiority and treating skeptics as imbeciles and deplorables wins few converts,” [Stephens wrote]. “None of this is to deny climate change or the possible severity of its consequences. But ordinary citizens also have a right to be skeptical of an overweening scientism. They know ”” as all environmentalists should ”” that history is littered with the human wreckage of scientific errors married to political power.”

But social media users didn’t care, with some ”” including several scientists ”” going so far as to order a subscription boycott of the Times on Friday.

“Each and every one of us should fully boycott the NY Times ”” don’t link to them, don’t click on their links. Their actions are inexcusable,” wrote one Twitter user. “You cannot be an ostensible paper-of-record and allow a science denier to spread propaganda.”

Adriana Heguy, a genomics scientist and professor of pathology at NYU, urged her colleagues to scrap their subscriptions, as well.

“Composing my letter to the editor today and canceling @nytimes,” she tweeted. “”˜Balance’ means a VALID alternative opinion, not pseudoscience. I’m so sad.”

There’s room for plenty of sadness to go around. I certainly feel it, although I’m used to it, and I’m used to the sentiments expressed there.

The left has always had aspects of a religion, although many on the left don’t believe in religion. Or maybe because they don’t. Human beings apparently have a need to believe, whether they believe it or not.

Safety vs. speech at Cornell

The New Neo Posted on by

Professor William Jacobson teaches law at Cornell, and also runs the blog Legal Insurrection for which I sometimes write. Anyone who is a conservative on campus these days needs to be a profile in courage, and Professor Jacobson most definitely is. Recently he championed and defended another professor at Cornell who was under attack from graduate students in an incident Professor Jacobson described yesterday at length in this post at LI.

It’s complex, but here’s a summary version:

For the past year or so there has been a divisive and ugly unionization drive by some graduate students, backed by the political power of the American Federation of Teachers and New York State United Teachers. Democratic politicians in the state came out in support of grad student unionization…

For his efforts [against grad student unionization at Cornell, chemistry professor David B. Collum] became the focus of union ire, singled out by the national union and pro-union students… in a horrendous hit piece in the form of a letter to the editor of the Cornell Sun written by seven grad students, at least several of whom were involved in the union organizing…

It’s Alinsky Rules in action, freeze and isolate the target and cut him off from support. And the way you do that on the modern campus is to accuse someone of one of the “isms” or “phobias.” And worst, to claim the person is a rape apologist or misogynist.

All of those charges were lodged against Dave in the Sun based mostly on selected tweets he had made and it just hung out there from the Thursday April 20 publication through the weekend.

Jacobson suspected that Collum’s words had been twisted and/or taken out of their proper context, and he set about to show just how that happened in a letter he wrote to the editors of the same university paper:

In publishing that letter, The Sun gave a platform to a smear campaign against Prof. Collum in a manner that did not allow Prof. Collum to respond or provide for a verification of the context of the supposed evidence. I have researched several of the key tweets and quotes attributed to Prof. Collum in the letter, and it is clear that the way in which they are presented in the letter is misleading at best, and, in some cases, presents a false portrayal.

Read the whole thing in full to understand the details; it’s well worth reading. Job well done, Professor Jacobson.

This is another example of what university life has become—a witch hunt for the shrinking number of those who oppose the left, and a no-holds-barred campaign to destroy them, all in the name of self-righteous groupthink.

In addition, I became curious about the original letter to the editor from the seven graduate students. What were the charges, and what did the students want to have happen? Here’s an excerpt from their letter entitled “On a professor’s misconduct”:

Professors who supervise grads have unparalleled influence over their future careers, which can create an environment in which grads feel they do not dare to lodge complaints.

As a graduate student at Cornell, I am extremely troubled ”” in fact, disgusted ”” by the conduct of Professor of Chemistry and Chair of the Chemistry Department David Collum. For years, Collum has publicly shared extremely sexist, bigoted and misogynistic statements.

Note that all the accusations involve speech, “mere speech.” There’s not even an allegation of an act (sexist, bigoted, misogynist, or otherwise) having been committed. Of course, we’ve learned from Professor Jacobson’s letter that even Collum’s speech was not as the grad students had indicated. But let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Professor Collum had written every single thing these students alleged, and had written it in exactly the way and manner they alleged as well.

In other words, let’s discuss a hypothetical in which the graduate students’ charges are actually true about some member of the Cornell faculty. If that were the case, what would the charges be, and what would the remedies be? Their letter continues:

These statements make me wonder how he can supervise female and/or LGBTQ students without creating what the law and Cornell’s policy call a “hostile work environment.”

So the letter goes from alleging offensive speech on Twitter to an assumption of the person creating a hostile work environment, even though the allegations appear to have zero to do with that person’s actual treatment of anyone or that person’s actual behavior (or even that person’s speech) at work. These students don’t seem to require offending acts, or even offending speech at work, to be offended and frightened by that person’s presence and interactions. It’s enough for them to know (or to believe) that a person they are interacting with might harbor a non-PC thought, such as the following:

[Collum] has made posts indicating that he sees allowing young people to identify as their preferred gender as child abuse. He then supported that claim by referencing the American College of Pediatrics (a fringe group founded to push anti-LGBTQ beliefs).

But that’s a matter of real, bona fide disagreement, and although a non-leftist position it’s fairly mainstream. And yet these seven are terribly outraged/frightened that a professor might hold that opinion, and they believe such an opinion would disqualify that professor from being allowed to advise students or to chair a department (those are the remedies they are seeking in this instance).

The following quote from their letter is the heart of the matter:

Cornell advertises itself as a “caring” institution, where grad students are supposed to feel ”” and be! ”” safe.

That’s the most extraordinary statement of all. That’s what’s it’s come down to these days: many students at Cornell and elsewhere (even ones old enough to be graduate students) believe that students and graduate students are supposed to feel safe there—not just safe from crimes like assault or robbery, but safe from exposure to people with ideas that might disagree with theirs, ideas that they feel are bigoted. These students actually have come to think that this intellectual and emotional safety is the function of a college; their statement to that effect seems to be sincere and non-ironic. .

The seven graduate students’ goal, expressed in the last sentence of their letter, is that a professor who has issued words such as the ones they cited should not be advising students nor be a department chairman. And yet the alleged crimes are pure thoughtcrime.

To take the thought experiment a step further: in the brave new world world these seven students envision, I wonder what they think should happen to people they label bigots (that is, people who think making a gender re-assignment to children is a form of child abuse). Should bigots be allowed to have jobs at all? Or, like lepers in ancient times, should they walk around with bells around their necks to warn others of their sickly and dangerous approach? Should they be kept in the equivalent of leper colonies? Or maybe work camps? How about re-education camps?

Then we’d all feel safe.

What’s wrong with the polls on Trump

The New Neo Posted on by

Most of the time I don’t credit the idea that polls are so very far from the truth, because they’ve often predicted results quite well. But in the last couple of years, polls in the West have certainly have been wrong in more than a few key races, including of course our very own 2016 presidential battle.

So at this point I’m inclined to agree with this article by pollster Mark Penn suggesting that the current polls on Trump are underestimating his approval, and to also agree with his suggestions as to why:

The major network polls all now report “U.S adults” as the sampling frame, not people who voted in the last election or expect to vote in the next one. The non-voters include 11 million undocumented aliens and a lot of folks who liked neither candidate and stayed home, as well as younger people who have lower rates of participation. These polls should not be confused with the views of the American electorate.

Penn adds that all indications are that Trump is holding his base. I agree. What’s more:

…[T]he media echo chamber has, I think, made it more difficult for people to express their political views, especially to live interviewers. With the growing gender gap, I’m not sure most men are even telling their spouses or partners what their real views are on the president. In a recent Harvard Harris poll we did, only about 60 percent in the country now feel free enough to express their views to friends and family.

That’s a very sad finding, but it’s one I sense is correct. My own experience reflects it. I’ve been expressing my own views on politics to friends and family for a long time, but not only have I gotten a certain amount of flak for those views, but sometimes among groups of friends people have come up to me privately and said they agree with me but don’t want to voice those views in front of the others.

That sort of thing has been going on in my life ever since my political change (which would make it around 2003), and I don’t think it’s primarily “the media [MSM] echo chamber” that has caused it. The media echo chamber certainly reflects it, and also amplifies it. But the deeper cause is the social echo chamber—both online and in real life—and that echo chamber’s increasing demonization of the other side, which has also been greatly increased in the last few years through the force and power and amplification effect of social media.

Penn adds that pollsters don’t seem to be doing much polling on the issues that are Trump’s strength:

You will find plenty of polling on what a bad idea Americans think the wall is and on the “Muslim ban” (often without even mentioning security), but where is the polling on the rest of his themes and messages? On the power of “Buy American, Hire American”? On tax cuts to stimulate jobs?

More and more people have come to distrust polls and to find them meaningless at best and/or misleading (sometimes purposely misleading) at worst. More and more people refuse to respond to them, and that skews the results as well. As far as Trump’s support goes, I don’t think polls are much of a guide to the absolute numbers—which I doubt have changed much since the election—although polls might be accurately reflecting up-or-down trends.

And if the MSM doesn’t watch its step, its relentlessly negative coverage will increase Trump’s support, if only for the sympathy vote. After all, if the MSM is crediting its own polls, it might do well to note the results of this recent one that found the public more trusting of Trump than of the media covering him. Ouch.

Now that the glitch is gone…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I want to remind readers to go back and check out the posts of the last few days. You may have missed some of them, but I kept posting right along even though some of the posts weren’t displaying.

Boy, does it feel good to be able to post an article or a comment and have it show up immediately. Instant gratification.

City of Portland to “protestors”: we can’t or won’t keep our city safe

The New Neo Posted on by

I don’t see how this can possibly end well:

A threatening email has derailed one of the Portland Rose Festival’s signature events, and spurred new debate about the ongoing political protests in Portland.

Organizers of the 82nd Avenue of Roses Parade announced Tuesday that the event will be canceled, for fear that the east Portland parade could be disrupted by “the type of riots which happen in downtown Portland.”

Originally scheduled this Saturday, April 29, the parade is meant to highlight the local community and businesses along Southeast 82nd Avenue…

This year’s parade was once again set to feature the Multnomah County Republican Party as one of the many groups slated to march, but that inclusion drew ire from some of the city’s left-leaning protest groups.

At least two protests were planned for the day of the parade, one by Oregon Students Empowered and another by Direct Action Alliance. Both events were mentioned in an email sent to parade organizers on Saturday, threatening to shut down the event with hundreds of protesters in the street.

“You have seen how much power we have downtown and that the police cannot stop us from shutting down roads so please consider your decision wisely,” the anonymous email said, telling organizers they could cancel the Republican group’s registration or else face action from protesters. “This is non-negotiable.”

It’s not a good idea to cave to thugs, because it encourages more of the same. The article also says that “organizers pulled out after contacting Portland police…[who] said they couldn’t offer any additional security for the parade.”

I suppose the police were overwhelmed. Are they that shorthanded, that weak, that unable (or unwilling) to keep the peace? (In this they remind me of certain universities). It seems to me that giving the thugs what they wish is just asking for future trouble, and much more of it. I call them “thugs,” but what do they represent? This piece in the Atlantic features more of the text of the threatening email:

The email went on to speculate that right-wing extremists would march among the Republicans, and warned, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade into the middle and drag and push those people out as we will not give one inch to groups who espouse hatred toward lgbt, immigrants, people of color or others.”

A Facebook post from a different group than the one that sent the email said the following:

The fascists know that we’ll keep shutting their marches down, they are now planning to march within other parades to protect their message of hate and white supremacy – it WON’T work. Nazis will not march through Portland.

The group we’re disrupting is #67. It is registered to the Multnomah County Republicans, but these infiltrators are the same folks from Lake Oswego, Salem, Vancouver, and even Berkeley. These are the folks that attacked a woman at PDX, they harassed Latinx parishioners with slurs and threats at a local church, they spew hate, threaten and curse young women at women’s health clinics. They seek to intimidate and harass our Latinx, Muslim and LGBTQ+ neighbors and friends. Their Trump flags, their red MAGA hats and their hate group badges are all intended to normalize support for an orange man who bragged about sexually harassing women and who is waging a war of hate, racism and prejudice against our Muslim, Latinx, Black and Native neighbors.

Nicely Orwellian. Call the opposition Fascists and then use Fascist methods to supposedly stop them.

Calling someone “Nazi” becomes a useful tool, and plenty of people buy into this. Leftist activists never rest, and right now they see their golden moment to radicalize others. I know plenty of people who wouldn’t issue such threats themselves, but who buy the argument that Trump and Republicans are Nazis at heart and must be opposed and “resisted.”

How wrong is Judge Orrick? Let Andrew McCarthy count the ways

The New Neo Posted on by

It seems to me that, with the recent spate of federal court decisions about immigration policy from liberal judges, the judiciary has seized the power to nullify any executive order they wish, quite arbitrarily. That effectively means that, unless an executive order finds favor with every single federal judge in the nation, a venue can be found where it can and will be stopped, no matter how carefully it is crafted.

And that stoppage is more likely to happen to orders issued by presidents on the right than presidents on the left. After all, liberal judges are more inclined to try to extend their own powers, because many believe the law is an elastic instrument that must evolve with the times, and that part of their duty is to advance the cause of social justice.

Andrew C. McCarthy is one of my favorite legal writers, perhaps my most favorite. In this National Review article he has taken up the subject of the latest ruling by a liberal judge to invalidate an EO of Trump concerning sanctuary cities, and it’s well worth reading the whole thing. Some excerpts:

A showboating federal judge in San Francisco has issued an injunction against President Trump’s executive order cutting off federal funds from so-called sanctuary cities. The ruling distorts the E.O. beyond recognition, accusing the president of usurping legislative authority despite the order’s express adherence to “existing law.” Moreover, undeterred by the inconvenience that the order has not been enforced, the activist court ”” better to say, the fantasist court ”” dreams up harms that might befall San Francisco and Santa Clara, the sanctuary jurisdictions behind the suit, if it were enforced. The court thus flouts the standing doctrine, which limits judicial authority to actual controversies involving concrete, non-speculative harms…

Again and again, Justice Department lawyers emphasized to the court that Trump’s order explicitly reaffirmed existing law. Orrick refused to listen because, well, what fun would that be? If the president is simply directing that the law be followed, there is no basis for a progressive judge to accuse him of violating the law. Were he to concede that, how would Orrick then win this month’s Social Justice Warrior in a Robe Award for Telling Donald Trump What For?

That’s a whole lotta overreaching. If you know much about law (and McCarthy most definitely does), it’s shocking.

McCarthy points out something else:

In any event, eight years of Obama’s phone and pen have made it easy to forget that the president is not supposed to make law, and thus that we should celebrate, not condemn, an E.O. that does not break new legal ground. Orrick, by contrast, proceeds from the flawed premise that if a president is issuing an E.O., it simply must be his purpose to usurp congressional authority. Then he censures Trump for a purported usurpation that is nothing more than a figment of his own very active imagination.

Obama set a precedent that a president—a Democratic president, anyway—is allowed to bypass the laws of Congress with executive orders. Trump is not allowed to issue an executive order that conforms to Congress’s laws, but hey, he’s a Republican.

That precedent of Obama’s is one of the many reasons I thought Obama’s presidency was disastrous. No wonder the Democrats are nervous, and their judges eager to clamp down on anything Trump does.

That’s the premise of this article by Victor Davis Hanson:

The Left is understandably apprehensive of Trump because Obama set the modern precedent that a contemporary president can do almost anything he pleases by executive orders (and in Nixonian fashion can weaponize federal agencies, from the NSA to the IRS, in order to monitor and hound political rivals and perceived enemies). Sen. Harry Reid’s near suicidal destruction of the Senate filibuster captured the unreality of the times, as if Obama progressivism most certainly would be America’s new orthodoxy for generations to come…

n sum, Trump is the beneficiary of a dysfunctional opposition whose reaction to the close loss of 2016 is reminiscent of the unhinged Democratic response to the narrow defeat of 1968, when it doubled-down, went harder left, gave up on middle-class concerns””and was demolished in 1972.

There is as yet no credible response to Trump and certainly no opposing coherent agenda. Instead, the “Resistance” is being waged by cherry-picking liberal federal judges in hopes of delaying and slowing down executive orders in the courts, along with states-rights nullifications, organized advertising boycotts of conservative media figures, media collusion, jamming town hall meetings of conservative representatives, campus antics, and waging war on social media.

I actually think the agenda of the left has been more effective than Hanson seems to think it’s been (the left has certainly been successful in destroying my respect for certain members of the federal judiciary). But I hope Hanson’s correct rather than me.

What’s that I like to say? We’ll see.

I’m pleased to announce that I think the recent technical problems on the blog have been fixed.

The New Neo Posted on by

Rejoice!

On the other hand, what a ride.

When this problem began three days ago, I immediately called my hosting company (Bluehost), which has 24-hour support. That’s one of the things I like about Bluehost; you can actually speak to a real live person 24-hours a day, 7 days a week, and the hold time is usually very short. So far so good.

I told them it was probably some sort of cache problem on their end, but they initially denied it and insisted it was a code problem on my end and that I needed to hire a web developer to fix it. A search revealed that there are quite a few companies that offer themselves as troubleshooters for problems with WordPress blogs, and they charge varying fees for the service. But I couldn’t get any of these companies to get back to me. With one, for example, I kept opening tickets with questions, but I never heard a word back.

Meanwhile, I kept doing my own research as well as phoning Bluehost. This took an enormous amount of time, as you can imagine. I called Bluehost about seven times altogether, and talked for at least a half hour each time. But for those first five or so times (and this included each support person going to multiple supervisors for guidance) they insisted it was a code problem on my end, whereas I insisted it was a caching problem on their end. A frustrating standoff.

Well, to make a very long story shorter, some friends and bloggers kept telling me that it indeed was a cache problem, and they gave me enough details that I was finally able to convince the folks at Bluehost that it was a cache problem and that it was on their end. But now Bluehost was insisting (late last night) that I needed to upgrade to hosting on the cloud.

This morning I called again. This time I got a gentleman who said “Oh, I’ll clear the cache on our server.” And voila, problem solved…at least for now.

So I didn’t have to spend extra money getting someone to delve into my code and fix it. I didn’t have to upgrade and give Bluehost more money. Had I gotten someone knowledgeable there on the phone in the first place, I wouldn’t have had to spend three days working on this, nor would you have had to have the frustration (and fun?) of posting under identities other than your own when autofill decided to become a trickster. All of this was apparently due to a caching problem at the server, causing the cached versions to keep displaying rather than updating.

What did I learn from all of this? I learned that people can pay scads of money—up to $20,000 per month (and no, that’s not a typo)—for a dedicated server, if their traffic is high enough. I’ve learned that support staff don’t always have a clue what they’re doing (although I suppose I already knew that). I learned that these days we often get the semblance of support and competence—fancy advertising on websites, “tichets” that you open that promise immediate response but that are messages in a bottle that never reach shore—without the substance.

But most of all, at this moment I’m grateful that the problem seems to have been solved. I give a heartfelt thanks to that guy at Bluehost who knew what he was doing. And I hope the whole thing doesn’t happen again—but if it does, I know what a good provisional diagnosis would be, and I took notes so I can remember.

By the way, if there ever is a problem of a similar sort (and I hope there never is), I recommend that you either hit the CTRL + F5 keys simultaneously to see the latest version of the blog, or if that doesn’t work, add “?no-cache=1” (minus the quotation marks) after my blog URL neoneocon.com. You might want to note that down, as well as the address of my old blog if all else fails: http://neo-neocon.blogspot.com .

Boy, I hope this post shows up in a timely fashion. If not, it’s back to the drawing board.