Meanwhile…the courts begin the shift to the right

The New Neo Posted on by

This Bloomberg article isn’t happy about it, but its headline gets the phenomenon correct: “One of the Biggest Reasons Republicans Stick by Trump.”

Indeed, this is why:

Although he’s been thwarted so far on his legislative agenda before Congress, most notably on health care, President Donald Trump has a big opportunity to reshape another branch of government outside his control: the federal judiciary. He has already moved swiftly to fill an unusual, inherited vacancy on the Supreme Court, and now his aides are working their way through a large number of openings on the lower federal courts. Some of his first picks are up for a Senate committee vote this month.

The article contains a handy chart that illustrates the situation facing Trump, as well as the opportunities. Here it is:

This is indeed one of the reasons a lot of people held their noses and voted for Trump. But there was also significant doubt about whether his lack of conservative bona fides would mean that as president he wouldn’t follow through on his promises to make judicial appointments that were reliably conservative. Of course, there’s no predicting how a justice or a judge will change over time (we’ve seen plenty of that sort of thing, mainly right to left). But so far, in terms of judicial appointments, Trump is exceeding the expectations of most conservatives who felt they had reason to doubt him (I was one of those people).

It’s hard to overestimate the importance of this. It will affect the legal system far into the future.

The NY Times claims it made an “honest mistake” about Palin

The New Neo Posted on by

Sarah Palin has sued the NY Times for defamation based on an editorial in the paper shortly after the Scalise shooting. In it, the Times had made this false claim:

In 2011, when Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl, the link to political incitement was clear. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map of targeted electoral districts that put Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs.

It was false in two ways. The first was that, in the Giffords shooting, there actually was no link to political incitement at all. This has been known for many years, and anyone familiar with the story ought to have been well aware of it.

The second is that Palin’s PAC had not published a map that fit that description; the cross-hairs were on the districts, not the people (the actual map can be found here).

The Times’ later “correction” of the story—published after a large public hue and cry had ensued—corrected the second fact but not the first, which was no longer stated so overtly but was nevertheless still implied as a possibility. Here is the correction:

Was this attack [the Scalise shooting] evidence of how vicious American politics has become? Probably. In 2011, Jared Lee Loughner opened fire in a supermarket parking lot, grievously wounding Representative Gabby Giffords and killing six people, including a 9-year-old girl. At the time, we and others were sharply critical of the heated political rhetoric on the right. Before the shooting, Sarah Palin’s political action committee circulated a map that showed the targeted electoral districts of Ms. Giffords and 19 other Democrats under stylized cross hairs. But in that case no connection to the shooting was ever established.

The standard of proof for defamation in a lawsuit against a newspaper, [clarification/correction added: or against anyone else, in a suit brought by a public figure, is higher than if it were brought by a citizen]. It is necessary to prove “actual malice,” but that doesn’t mean what people often think it means. It’s not required that one have a recording of the Times editors saying that they hate Palin’s guts. A showing that they published their editorial with “reckless disregard” for its truth or falsehood would suffice.

Now it is being reported in the NY Post that the Times’ lawyer has made the following claim in the newspaper’s defense:

“There was an honest mistake in posting the editorial,” lawyer David Schultz told Manhattan federal Judge Jed Rakoff…

On Friday, Palin’s lawyers argued that the Times knew the story was false.

“It was literally acknowledged the same day in another story in their paper,” said Kenneth Turkel.

Which brings us to my question: if the Times (or any other newspaper) claims it made an “honest mistake” in a story, shouldn’t its mistake be based on—you know—-something? Or can it be an honest mistake to just make s*** up?

If I had made the same statement about Palin the day after that Times editorial, and she had sued me for defamation, I might cite the Times as the authority on which I mistakenly had made my claim. But what authority can the Times cite? Its own editorial, in circular fashion?

Or perhaps Kathy Griffin, who tweeted in January of 2011, shortly after the Giffords shooting: “Watching the news? Congresswoman in AZ,who is ON Sarah Palin’s crosshairs map was SHOT in the head 2day. Happy now Sarah?”

I doubt that’s the authority on which the Times wishes to rely at this point. But beggars can’t always be choosers.

The sort of connection cited by Griffin was corrected time and again over the years in MSM stories across the land, including those in the Times itself. Even the Times’ fellow the WaPo pointed out the following, in a recent article about the Times editorial:

[Loughner’s] focus on Giffords began as early as 2007, long before the map was published. He became fixated on her since he met her at a constituent event in 2007, and decided he was unsatisfied by her answer to his question: “If words could not be understood, then what does government mean?”

Three days after the shooting, authorities filed criminal charges against Loughner after finding items in his home that showed he had plotted her assassination. They found in his safe a 2007 letter from Giffords thanking him for attending the constituent event, and an envelope stating “I planned ahead,” and the words “assassination” and “Giffords,” along with his signature.

Loughner had no clear political views. Instead, he was a troubled man who abused alcohol and drugs, and whose mental illness was apparent to his classmates and family even before he was diagnosed as schizophrenic during his court trial.

The Times wants the protection from constant defamation suits that is afforded by current law, based on the landmark 1964 case New York Times Co. v Sullivan that established the high standard of proof necessary to win such a suit [clarification/correction added: by a public figure]] against a newspaper. But aren’t newspapers supposed to meet some minimal standards of due diligence before publishing something? How low can that standard go?

In other words, for a mistake by a newspaper to be “honest,” must the paper not make some small effort to ascertain the truth? Is it not assumed to know the basic facts of something that’s been in the news for many years? And recall, this wasn’t an error by some cub reporter, it was by the full editorial board of the Times. And even after it published its correction—with all the benefits of hindsight and much published criticism in other media—it wasn’t all that much of a correction.

The Times’ motto has long been “All the news that’s fit to print.” This was neither news, nor fit to print. But after all, the Times never said “Only the news that’s fit to print.”

Free-climbing El Capitan

The New Neo Posted on by

Yes, you read that right: someone climbed the monolith El Capitan in Yosemite without ropes, in what’s called a “free solo” ascent. That means crawling up the vertical rock face with only your hands, feet, muscles, and steely (some would say demented) nerves to help you along.

The man’s name is Alex Honnold, and you can read about his exploits in this NY Times article:

Alex Honnold woke up in his Dodge van last Saturday morning, drove into Yosemite Valley ahead of the soul-destroying traffic and walked up to the sheer, smooth and stupendously massive 3,000-foot golden escarpment known as El Capitan, the most important cliff on earth for rock climbers. Honnold then laced up his climbing shoes, dusted his meaty fingers with chalk and, over the next four hours, did something nobody had ever done. He climbed El Capitan without ropes, alone.

The world’s finest climbers have long mused about the possibility of a ropeless “free solo” ascent of El Capitan in much the same spirit that science fiction buffs muse about faster-than-light-speed travel – as a daydream safely beyond human possibility. Tommy Caldwell, arguably the greatest all-around rock climber alive, told me that the conversation only drifted into half-seriousness once Honnold came along, and that Honnold’s successful climb was easily the most significant event in the sport in all of Caldwell’s 38 years. I believe that it should also be celebrated as one of the great athletic feats of any kind, ever.

Also one of the great mental feats of any kind, ever:

Fear of falling is about as primal a fear as we humans have, and that fear is present to some degree whether you are 10 feet off the ground or 3,000. In this sense, Honnold’s specialty – free-soloing – is a distillation of the entire climbing world’s collective fantasy life. Vanishingly few elite climbers make careers out of free-soloing, and plenty call it irresponsible and deplorable, but in their heart of hearts they all recognize it as the final word in bad-assery…

El Capitan does have vertical fractures that allow expert climbers to insert their hands and feet and sometimes entire legs and arms and then twist and flex those body parts in highly technical and painfully exhausting ways that do create a temporary grip over the abyss. Still, so much of that cliff is devoid of anything that normal human beings would recognize as handholds or footholds that the overwhelming majority of El Capitan climbers resort as I did to artificial aid. We insert hardware into cracks, clip nylon stirrups to that hardware and stand in the stirrups. Even then, we struggle to stay calm in an environment that feels like a mile-wide plain of smooth stone that we happened to be lying upon when it flipped to vertical and swung us higher into the sky than any of the world’s tallest skyscrapers yet reach…

…[T]he nature of the rock is such that no amount of finger strength can make it feel entirely secure. Much of the terrain is so smooth that it can be ascended only by identifying half-imaginary indentations, pressing shoe rubber against those indentations – smearing, as the technique is known – and then hoping that the rubber sticks while you ease upward.

Oooooo, sounds like fun, doesn’t it? NOT. But to climbers, and particularly to free-climbers such as Honnold, it’s a challenge they want to meet, and are confident they can and will meet.

I will pause now for a moment to post some photos I found here. This is only a small sample of what you can find if you click on that link, which I urge you to do. You won’t believe your eyes:

In case you hadn’t already figured it out, Honnold is different from you and me. I hate heights, so he’s particularly different from me:

Honnold’s sang froid on big cliffs is also so peculiar that even the world-class climbers who consider him a dear friend struggle to believe that it really is just sang froid and confidence, and not borderline-suicidal recklessness or at least a missing screw…[F]riends of Honnold’s joke that when Alex was a baby his mother must have stepped on his amygdala – the brain region that controls fear. Last year, fMRI testing at the Medical University of South Carolina tilted the scales toward precisely that explanation – an underactive amygdala, not a negligent mother – by confirming that Honnold’s fear circuitry really does fire with less vigor than most.

Sort of like those people who don’t feel pain, Honnold really doesn’t seem to feel much fear. But he feels enough of something akin to fear (or maybe it’s just the desire to live) that he’s very, very careful, practicing over and over with safety ropes until he knows the course cold and hasn’t fallen on any ascent for a long, long time.

My reaction to all of that is that of course Honnold’s brain is wired differently, as is true of most people who do extreme sports (although there’s a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” cause/effect question there). Honnold is one of the more extreme of the extremists. Ice water must run in his veins.

He is also—obviously—rather obsessive compulsive, as one must be to do that sort of thing successfully. Human beings can accomplish amazing feats if they have just the right combination of characteristics and all the stars are in alignment. He makes me think of wire-walker Kurt Wallenda, who said, “Life is on the wire, the rest is just waiting.”

However, Wallenda died in a fall from the wire after a lifetime of performing, and years after several members of his family were killed and some injured in a fall during the act in Detroit in 1962 (a roommate of mine had been present the night of the Detroit fall, and she told me about it and how frightening it was to be in the audience). Perhaps Wallenda just failed to retire at the right time, or maybe he assumed the risk and preferred to keep going.

But back to the Times article about Honnold:

Allow your mind to relax into the possibility that Honnold’s climb was not reckless at all – that he really was born with unique neural architecture and physical gifts, and that his years of dedication really did develop those gifts to the point that he could not only make every move on El Capitan without rest, he could do so with a tolerably minuscule chance of falling.

I agree with everything there until that last part—that Honnold’s chance of falling was “tolerably minuscule.” Obviously it was tolerably minuscule to Honnold; it depends on one’s tolerance. He’s the one who made the decision and assumed the risk, and he must have felt exceedingly confident. But that doesn’t mean his chance of falling was actually minuscule. I think it was certainly less than 50%, so that he was more likely than not to succeed. And of course we know that he did succeed.

This time. But I think that if, like the Wallendas, he repeated it often enough over time, he would probably die that way.

I wish him well. And maybe he’ll never do this again, having done it once (for his poor dear mother’s sake, I hope once is enough!).

Praising Western Civilization

The New Neo Posted on by

You wouldn’t think it would be controversial to praise Western Civilization. Even among liberals.

After all, liberalism itself, and the principles of liberty, protection of the underdog, celebration of diversity, the scientific method, and a host of other things that liberals profess to celebrate, are products of Western Civilization. But when President Trump spoke in glowing terms about Western Civilization and the need to defend and preserve it, he was roundly criticized by liberals and the left as having dog-whistled to the white supremacist fringe of what has come to be known as the alt-right.

Of course, if Trump said the sky was blue he would be criticized for that, too. But his speech was not only a good one, it contained talk about Western Civilization that not so very long ago would have been considered completely mainstream and non-controversial.

What happened in the interim? Well, one thing that happened was President Obama, who was famous for not defending Western Civilization but for seeing its faults (and there are certainly many). But what has really happened is two things that are related. One of the strengths of modern Western Civilization is its propensity for soul-searching and ability to find fault with itself. But that has been taken to an extreme by another product of Western Civilization, a political left that celebrates the third world and considers the West the root of all evil, and thinks that to speak of its achievements is to be a terrible racist.

The second thing is that those ideas have become the catechism taught on college campuses. And it’s been taught for quite some time. Although I don’t know the exact date that the practice began, it was in full flower by the 80s, when Allan Bloom was writing The Closing of the American Mind.

Here’s a summary of Bloom’s observations of the way American education had gone by the end of the 80s:

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It means students who graduate not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare””or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, etc. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction.

Academia has only gotten more so since then. What we see now are some of the fruits of that academic labor, resulting in an MSM that is almost wholly populated with people who believe just that, and a former president who also believed just that and was their champion. What a deep disappointment and outrage it must be for them to hear Trump say just the opposite.

The fact that the actual white supremacist wing of the alt-right have celebrated Trump’s Warsaw speech is also unsurprising. But it does not mean that Trump was speaking to them or is of them, although the left would have you believe that. People can celebrate a speech and see things in it that are not there, and they can also use that speech in ways it wasn’t intended.

“Western Civilization” used to be a required course for a liberal education. Around the time I went to school, the 60s (ah, the 60s), the situation was in transition. Western Civ (as it was not-so-affectionately called) had recently stopped being required in many colleges, and very few require it today, all these years later. It’s not just my imagination, either:

Survey courses in “Western Civilization,” once a common component of undergraduate curriculums, have almost disappeared as a requirement at many large private research universities and public flagships, according to a study released Wednesday [in May of 2011, but the link seems to be dead] by the National Association of Scholars.

The report finds that, since 1968, the number of the selected colleges that require Western Civilization courses as a component of general education curriculums and U.S. history as a component of history majors has dropped. This decrease has coincided with more focus on world history courses.

The association argues that Western Civilization courses are uniquely capable of introducing students to key themes of a liberal education. “In the absence of such an organizing principle the curriculum spins out into an all-things-to-all-people cornucopia of offerings, many of them exceptionally narrow in scope and many of them trivial in character,” the report states.

Historians and curriculum researchers attribute the de-emphasis on Western Civilization courses to significant changes in higher education curriculums, student diversity, university educational goals, and how history researchers study the world and receive training.

I remember my reaction in the 60s: joy. The reasons were many. As a typical teenaged student (although I was somewhat younger than average when I arrived at college) I resented required courses in general. But I had always disliked history courses in particular (go figure; I love history now) because I saw them as a dull recitation of irrelevant dates. That may have been a correct description of the history courses I had taken up to that point; I don’t know, because that part of my education is somewhat of a blur. I do know that somewhere along the line I had read a great many of the books that constitute the canon of Western Civilization, and liked them, but it was mostly in English classes that this had happened.

I think I was ignorant of what a “Western Civilization” course would have actually covered. It wouldn’t have been dates and battles; it would have been something like this, and I think I would have loved it:

Bloom regarded liberal education in its highest form as a conversation across the centuries that revolved around the perennially fresh question “What is the good life?” He championed what he called “the good old great books” because they are the prime repositories of thoughtful alternative answers to that question. A liberal arts education for Bloom centrally involved a meditation on those books and the “permanent questions” they posed in themselves and, above all, in relation to one another. As such a liberal arts education was “a resource against the ephemeral” and prophylactic against nihilism and spuriousness.

But these days my guess is that in many places (not all, of course) where Western Civilization is still taught it is presented as a toxic stain on humanity, a poisonous brew of intolerance and exploitation of suffering non-Western peoples, to be studied only to be condemned. That Trump doesn’t agree is one of his many crimes, according to the left.

I’m pretty sure that at this point the left doesn’t like Churchill, either. Or maybe he gets some sort of special pass, because he was fighting the Nazis?:

What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”

And not so very long ago it was possible to publish an article like this one in The New Republic:

Churchill’s worldview also cannot be easily categorized. It blended Victorianism and Edwardism, Liberalism and Conservatism. He saw the world in grand, often romantic, terms and himself in the tradition of great leaders like Napoleon, Castlereagh, Marlborough, Disraeli, and Gladstone. The ultimate issue for Churchill was the advance of “civilization,” by which he meant the British and Western way of life””its liberal values, laws, culture, industry, and science. He saw Britain and its empire as propagators of civilization, imbuing his nationalism and imperialism with a moral imperative. He came to see the United States, also, as a guarantor of civilization, and his support for Zionism was ultimately rooted in the belief that the Jews in Palestine/Israel were collaborators in this grand cause. Everyone, no matter his or her race””and Churchill conceived a hierarchy of races””had an obligation to contribute to the world’s progress. As he wrote in a 1908 travelogue about Africa, “No man has a right to be idle, whoever he be or wherever he lives. He is bound to go forward and take an honest share in the general work of the world.”…

Churchill considered Nazism vile and barbaric, a rejection of civilization in every way, despite his respect for the German race. He was particularly offended by its anti-Semitism, which made Nazism, in some ways, worse than communism…

Churchill was clearly the indispensable man of the moment in 1940, whom destiny summoned to change the course of history. His overwhelming love of country and civilization, grave sense of obligation to protect and improve on all the good the ages had produced, romantic view of the world, and keen understanding of how history had reached a vital point, made him realize why he and Britain had to battle relentlessly, regardless of the odds. His firm conviction that individuals can overcome great adversity, his belief that great leaders can redirect global forces, and his uplifting oratorical abilities, allowed Churchill to shape the thoughts and feelings of his countrymen and save his country and civilization.

Note that the author mentions Churchill’s racism (which was a symptom of his time; Churchill was born in 1874), but does not emphasize it or let it detract from his mammoth accomplishments. The word “civilization” is used without irony, too; it is considered a non-controversial fact that it was worth saving. And by “civilization” it’s clear that Churchill meant Western civilization. To repeat:

…“civilization,” by which [Churchill] meant the British and Western way of life””its liberal values, laws, culture, industry, and science. He saw Britain and its empire as propagators of civilization, imbuing his nationalism and imperialism with a moral imperative. He came to see the United States, also, as a guarantor of civilization, and his support for Zionism was ultimately rooted in the belief that the Jews in Palestine/Israel were collaborators in this grand cause.

Contemplate that, and then read or listen to Trump’s Warsaw speech again.

Trump and Putin meet

The New Neo Posted on by

Voluminous coverage on the meeting.

The handshake passes muster at Vox, while Twitter has a field day with the pressing of the flesh.

How about the actual content of the talks? Well, there’s this:

At first, media thought Trump would not bring up accusations that Russia interfered with our presidential election in 2016. But after the two hour meeting ended, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said that is the first topic Trump brought up…

To no one’s surprise, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov eagerly “told reporters that Trump had accepted Putin’s denial of tampering in the US election.

Tillerson also told reporters that Trump and Putin “reached an agreement on curbing violence in Syria.”

Europe and the US: Roger Simon asks…

The New Neo Posted on by

…whether “Europe—subsconsciouly—expects America to save it again?”

My short answer: Yes, indeed. And not just subconsciously. I think they consciously expect it and believe it is their due.

But I also don’t think Europe—and we’re talking about Western Europe here, to be clear—believes it will require saving. It believes its current path is the right one, both in the moral and the practical sense.

Not all Western Europeans believe this, of course, not by a longshot. That’s why various nationalist, anti-immigrant, anti-EU parties have gained a lot of traction in recent years. An interesting question is whether that movement will gain support or lose it over time.

National security leakers upset at being monitored for leaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Or something like that.

The premise of this Politico article initially seems so bizarre it’s hard to fathom. The title, “Trump’s leaks crackdown sends chills through national security world,” had me scratching my head and asking, “Isn’t that what’s it’s supposed to do?”

Here are some excerpts:

National security officials across the federal government say they are seeing new restrictions on who can access sensitive information, fueling fears in the intelligence and security community that the Trump administration has stepped up a stealthy operation to smoke out leakers.

Officials at various national security agencies also say they are becoming more concerned that the administration is carefully tracking what they’re doing and who they’re talking to ”” then plotting to use them as a scapegoat or accuse them of leaks.

One U.S. official voiced concern over even talking to their superiors about a benign call from a reporter. The agency this official works for had started limiting staff’s access to information, they said, and it would make it far easier to figure out who was talking to people in the media.

There was suspicion, the official said, that the agency was even tracking what they printed, to keep tabs on what information they were accessing.

For quite some time there have been an unconscionable number of leaks of national security information from those working in the field. This is not only potentially damaging, it’s often a criminal act. If a person is hired to work in national security, that’s one of many things that person learns at the outset and is expected to respect.

And yet the leaks keep coming, and they are aimed at damaging the Trump administration. Is Trump just supposed to shrug and say “Oh well, all in a day’s work for someone in national security?”

It’s too bad it’s come to this. But what else is the administration to do? The article continues:

In some cases, the official added, information has been so “choked down” that if something comes out in the press, “it’s either a bogus leak” or, the official said, the relevant agency will know exactly where it came from…

But as anxiety grows ”” and as the fog surrounding the Trump-Russia question gets thicker ”” there is a tangible fear of the unknown. No one knows how far Trump and his affiliates would go to silence their critics, or the reporters they talk to.

Rumors have ricocheted among national security officials and journalists in recent weeks that Trump- or GOP-related operatives have hired private eyes to try and intimidate reporters, or run rogue operations to find their sources. Some U.S. officials voiced concern to POLITICO that the White House could be seeking out amenable employees in different agencies to do its bidding, effectively sanctioning its own, parallel ”” and informal ”” intimidation measures.

The Obama administration was known to be hostile towards reporters’ sources, prosecuting more leak investigations than any of the previous administrations combined. But there was a standard ”” though still worthy of criticism ”” that leak prosecutions involved clear and present threats to national security.

Excuse me, but why would it be “worthy of criticism”? Even when Obama the Great did it? My guess is that the press believes it has a right to all information, classified or not, and that leakers are heroes who facilitate their glorious work, and therefore should be allowed free rein.

[NOTE: Boy, I’m sick of writing about the press. But these days, so much seems to come back to issues involving the press.]

An Ivanka fashion interlude

The New Neo Posted on by

Today I came across this Daily Caller article entitled “Ivanka Turns Heads In This Striking Red Outfit Getting Off Air Force One In Poland.” It went like this:

Ivanka Trump was hard to miss Wednesday night as she was captured getting off Air Force One in Warsaw, Poland in a striking red outfit…

The first daughter has consistently shown off her incredible sense of fashion since Trump was sworn in as president. Here’s a look at some of the most striking examples.

That was followed by tons of photos of Ivanka in various outfits. I looked at them all, including the “striking” red one (go to the link and look at them too). Although attractive enough, there was nothing particularly striking or unusual or “incredible” about them except that they enclosed the figure of Ivanka Trump. In fact, they were rather ordinary, and believe me, if I’d been wearing them, they wouldn’t draw many glances.

Look, let’s face it: Ivanka Trump would look striking and incredible—in a good way, that is—if she was wearing the proverbial gunny sack. I mean that. The woman is gorgeous, she has a knockout figure despite three children, and she’s nearly six feet tall without heels—and she wears stilettos a lot, which must make her about six foot four.

Can you imagine that person walking into a room? You can bet all eyes would turn, and it wouldn’t be because of the outfits.

In summary

The New Neo Posted on by

I found this in a comment from a reluctant Trump-defender at an Atlantic article in which Peter Beinart had been dissing Trump’s Warsaw speech:

Trump is not an intellectual, he is not the great diplomat like Regan [sic], he is crude, arrogant and someone should cut off his tweeting fingers but by far his most annoying quality is how often he is right.

Touché!

It is driving the MSM and the left crazy—although they wouldn’t define it as being “right.” They would define it as being lucky, or as Trump provoking something rather than predicting or evaluating it properly.

For example, the MSM is acting every bit as badly as he’s been saying they do. IMHO that’s because they’ve been doing this for ages, and he has described what’s already been happening (although yes, he does seem to motivate them to display greater depths of it). But the MSM seems to think that it’s all a reaction to the horror of Trump, and an understandable and justifiable and noble one at that.

The press imagines…

The New Neo Posted on by

…that Poland’s First Lady was reluctant to shake Trump’s hand.

That’s a common imaginary meme on the left—people not wanting to shake Trump’s hand. Melania not wanting to hold Trump’s hand.

They’re like little kids saying “He’s got cooties!”

But part of the reason they do this is that they feel that way about him themselves. The other reason they do it is that they think they can get away with it.

There’s real tyranny going on in Venezuela

The New Neo Posted on by

Not fake tyranny.

This:

A mob stormed Venezuela’s opposition-dominated National Assembly on Wednesday with the apparent acquiescence of government troops and carried out a startling attack on lawmakers and journalists.

Bloodied lawmakers were treated for broken ribs and head injuries, and journalists said the attackers had stolen their equipment. The episode in Caracas, which coincided with Venezuela’s Independence Day, was a sharp escalation of lawlessness in a country roiled by a failing economy and daily street demonstrations.

“We’re here to defend Venezuela; that’s what we were elected to do,” Armando Armas, an opposition lawmaker wearing a bloodied white shirt, said in a video as two people cleaned what appeared to be head wounds. “Even if it costs us our lives.”…

While National Assembly lawmakers have been assaulted before, the attack on Wednesday was remarkable because the throng of assailants appeared to face no resistance from National Guard forces charged with securing the compound.

Another chapter in the sad sad recent history of Venezuela, a country that used to be relatively prosperous and relatively well-functioning—that is, until the socialists in the name of Hugo Chavez took charge. It’s been downhill ever since. Chavez is dead, but his successor Maduro lives on.

And this is especially ominous:

The assault came amid an intensifying political fight over Mr. Maduro’s effort to convene a constituent assembly that could render the elected National Assembly powerless…

In recent days, a rift has widened between Mr. Maduro and his attorney general, Luisa Ortega, who sharpened her criticism of the president’s plan to let a constituent assembly of handpicked loyalists write a new Constitution. The effort is widely seen as a ploy by a deeply unpopular leader to consolidate power by disbanding the National Assembly, which is controlled by his opponents. Ms. Ortega has denounced the plan as an affront to the country’s democratic principles.

The Supreme Court, which is loyal to the president, held a hearing on Tuesday that was expected to lead to Ms. Ortega’s removal; she refused to attend.

Enabling Act, anyone?

I would wager that Maduro is well aware of the history, and is determined to repeat it. Will the people of Venezuela be condemned to experience that repeat?

Another in the almost-numberless anti-Trump salvos from the press

The New Neo Posted on by

I think I’m getting jaded, because articles like this one have come to amuse me.

They’re so transparent, and so seemingly unaware of how absurd they sound. I know they don’t sound the least bit absurd to the left, however, and I realize I’m not their intended audience. But I’m a person on the right who was never a Trump fan, and they’re putting me in the position of being a Trump defender.

My own previous anti-Trump bona fides are in order. I was never a Never-Trumper, but I wanted almost anyone else from the GOP to be the nominee instead of Trump. I won’t go into the whole history; readers of this blog are well aware of my point of view. And I still feel very free to criticize him, and there’s much to criticize. But there’s been much to praise, too—considerably more than I expected, and I’m happy to be saying that, rather than sad.

Of course, I didn’t exactly “expect” much of anything, because I didn’t expect Trump to win the presidency in the first place. But win he did, and here we are, and I find myself in the peculiar position of defending him more often than not.

But articles like the one I just linked don’t help their own cause, because they are examples of a press gone off the rails—so swollen with its own sanctimonious self-importance that it can’t see its feet of clay down below. The author is Kyle Pope, and he’s the head of the Columbia Journalism Review. So he’s a journalist addressing fellow-journalists, and here’s his message:

We need to stop.

Stop reporting on every tweet with the volume of a declaration of war; stop letting the president and his staff frame every misstep and scandal as a media story; stop treating Trump’s war with the press as if it’s the most important thing happening in this country. It’s not.

Good start, right? But you know what’s coming next—a litany of the terrible, terrible, terrible things Trump is doing. That’s followed by this:

…[Trump] doesn’t respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech. The media’s impulse, which is understandable, is to keep the focus on his threats to the press, and not to let them become normalized. But we have reached the point at which the media response has become counterproductive and even beneficial to the president and his lackeys in the White House, who have turned the West Wing into a megaphone for Trump’s faux media war and reporters in the White House briefing room into photo-op foils.

I missed the part where Trump issued orders to stop the press from speaking or writing. I missed the part where he jailed reporters. I missed the part where he doesn’t respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech—unless Pope thinks that criticizing the press is muzzling it, and that a president has no right of his own to free speech, only the press.

And Pope’s entire article is “a media war” by the press itself, and there’s nothing “faux” about it, or about Trump fighting back. I especially love the text of this open letter that Pope proudly quotes himself as having issued to Trump on the eve of Trump’s inauguration [emphasis mine]:

What we’re missing”“as I pointed out in an open letter to Trump on the eve of his inauguration”“is that we aren’t obligated to cede the media agenda to this or any other administration. We control the airtime, we decide who gets quoted and how, we set the rules of engagement.

Oh, so it’s just a faux war, eh? That Trump instigated? Note again, that letter was issued before Trump even took office.

Here’s what Pope thinks the media should be doing instead of focusing on the Trump tweets:

Pulling back from our own self-reflection and focusing all of that attention where it properly belongs”“on our childlike, possibly unstable national leader and the wrenching national policy changes he is stumbling to put into place”“could, ironically, also be the thing that convinces the rest of the country to pay attention to the dangers inherent in Trump’s attacks on the media and the First Amendment.

Now, there’s an objective journalist for you, one who’s not looking for a war with Trump. It’s obviously Trump who is the belligerant here, right? And oh, I see the light about the dangers of Trump’s attacks on you, you poor poor powerless media guy, you.

Towards the end, Pope writes:

Every time Trump fires a shot in his war against the media, there’s an opportunity for a more serious, nuanced argument about why everyone benefits from a free and vigorous press: Airing a president and his policies to open discussion and scrutiny results in better government.

That would be true—and I would applaud it—if the press showed the slightest indication it was capable of such a thing and interested in actually performing that service.

The ironic thing—the funny thing, although it’s really far more sad than funny—is that Pope’s article contradicts his own message, with his overwhelming bile and partisanship. Does he even see it anymore? Can he even see it anymore? Does a fish know it swims in water?