Did the Media Care When Obama Fired General Mattis?

By Daniel John Sobieski https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/did_the_media_care_when_obama_fired_general_mattis.html
December 23, 2018

Defense secretaries come and go.  President Obama had four of them in eight years, who had some unkind things to say about his leadership or lack of it.  There was no talk of chaos or of the only adult in the room leaving.

Suddenly, the media are in a meltdown after "Mad Dog" Mattis announced his departure from the Cabinet after President Trump announced our departure from Syria:

Foreign Policy Pentagon reporter Lara Seligman wrote the press corp [sic] is contemplating suicide over Mattis' resignation, "I think I speak for all national security reporters tonight when I say I'm about ready to jump off a cliff. But at least I already wrote the "who will replace Mattis" story two months (only two months?????) ago[."]

Democrats who won't defend our southern border and who slept as Obama drew red lines with vanishing ink worry about an ISIS Obama created by a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq regaining strength and reforming in Syria and Iraq.  The general Obama fired is suddenly a man of principle whose leadership was indispensable:

House Speaker-designate Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she was "shaken and "concerned". "General Mattis was a comfort to many who were concerned about the path the Trump Admin would choose to take. His resignation letter is defined by statements of principle – principles that drove him to leave the Administration. All of us should be concerned at this time."

There was no such concern when Obama relieved Mattis as commander of CENTCOM without so much as a phone call, a factoid typical of Obama's disdain for the military, its missions, and its heroes.

[Thomas E.] Ricks says Mattis was fired because:

Pentagon insiders say that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way – not because he went all "mad dog," which is his public image, and the view at the White House, but rather because he pushed the civilians so hard on considering the second- and third-order consequences of military action against Iran.  Some of those questions apparently were uncomfortable.  Like, what do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe?  What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf?  He kept saying, "And then what?"

There is also a belief that Mattis and Obama differed on Iran.  "A particular point of disagreement was what to do about mischief Iran is exporting to other countries.  Mattis is indeed more hawkish on this than the White House was," writes Ricks in yet another post.

Mattis is probably more hawkish than Trump as well.  Mattis and Trump disagree on strategy.  Obama and Mattis disagreed on goals and consequences.  While a liberal uproar greeted the former, utter silence greeted the latter.

No doubt, our Syrian withdrawal was a factor in Mattis's decision.  I don't agree with it, but to compare it with Obama's withdrawal from Iraq when he snatched defeat from George W. Bush's victory, as many conservatives are doing, is a tad disingenuous.

President Trump destroyed the ISIS caliphate as originally constituted in Syria and Iraq.  Obama watched it grow and facilitated its growth through inaction and indifference.  ISIS is a cancer that has spread but is currently in remission. If it comes back in force, we can deal with it.  But it is not dangerous isolationism for Trump to consider Iran the main threat and to focus on it.

It is Iran that wants its nukes to be an existential threat to Israel, Europe, and the United States.  It is Iran that is trying to build a corridor of terror from Tehran through Syria and Iraq to its Hezb'allah puppets in Lebanon.

Iran is the head of the snake.  Syria and ISIS are the tail.  Strike at the head, and you kill the snake.  President Trump is doing that by nixing Obama's nuclear deal and reimposing sanctions, including prohibitions on Iranian oil exports.  That, arguably, is a better way to deal with a very real threat than chasing random jihadis through the Syrian desert.

Critics of our Syrian withdrawal forget that under President Trump, American-backed forces liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa.  They forget the hundreds of Russian mercenaries killed in clashes with U.S. forces.  They forget the cruise missile strikes against Syrian targets under the nose of Vladimir Putin.  Trump's moves in Syria were hardly under a white flag.

Obama, by contrast, didn't want to win anywhere and waged his own war against the U.S. military, purging it of generals, admirals, and commanders who dare to talk of victory.  President Obama began a military purge not dissimilar to those routinely conducted by third-world despots, with the goal of eliminating voices that might oppose his withdrawing from the world stage.  As Investor's Business Daily editorialized:

[W]hat has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture.  We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham.  He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi[.] …

From Breitbart.com's Facebook page comes a list of at least 197 officers that have been relieved of duty by President Obama for a laundry list of reasons and sometimes with no reason given.

Retired four-star general and Fox News analyst Jack Keane, architect of the Iraq surge that produced the victory Obama threw away, recently spoke on Kilmeade and Friends about Obama's ongoing purge of the military of officers who oppose his isolationist and defeatist policies.

It's also a fact that a number of our general officers, not all of them but a number of them, were asked to leave before what would normally be accepted as the routine tenure for that particular position, and General Mattis is a case in point who had very strong views on Iran.  Most of us agree with those views but I know the administration did not agree with them.  General Flynn, who you know very well and had on your show, was an outspoken proponent for understand[ing] radical Islam, how dangerous this particular threat was and was trying to communicate that, he was not able to serve out his full tenure.  So yes, that's another fact that we can substantiate, that there were generals who did leave earlier than what their tenure would be and the characteristic they all shared together is they did disagree with the administration on various points."

General Mattis is an old-school warrior known for his colorful rhetoric and his commitment both to his men and to his mission.  He, along with other generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, did have a problem with Obama's quest for a substitute for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the New York Post reported:

Officially, the administration offers a nothing-to-see-here explanation for Mattis' departure, noting that his tenure in the crucial job was about average for the post.  Maybe.  But politics is at play here as well.  The brusque Mattis apparently fell afoul of National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, an Obama apparatchik.  Why?  Because Mattis says things the Obama team doesn't want to hear, especially about what might well become the next theater of operations – Iran.

Okay, maybe Mattis was saying things Trump didn't want to hear about tactics and strategies, but we have only one commander-in-chief at a time, and the one we have now is trying to rebuild the military, so we can win wars, not letting the military atrophy while generals who want to win are purged.

We have not only ISIS jihadis to worry about.  We have the Iranian nuclear threat, an expansionist China with sub-launched nuclear missiles capable of hitting U.S. cities, and a belligerent Russia developing hypersonic missiles we might not be able to stop as it negotiates with a crumbling Venezuela to base its nuclear-capable bombers on an island not far from Caracas.

So chill out, Chicken Littles of the left and right.  There is an adult in the room.  His name is Donald J. Trump.

Mueller’s Collusion Hoax Collapses

By Conrad Black|
https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/muellers-collusion-hoax-collapses/
December 11th, 2018|

The sudden death of the unutterable nonsense of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, announced as it was in the hand-off to the Southern New York U.S. Attorney of the shabby fruit of Michael Cohen’s plea bargaining, has divided onlookers into three communities of opinion.

The true believers in the collusion canard are left slack-jawed, like the international Left after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: an immense fervor of faith is instantly destroyed; it is the stillness of a sudden and immense evaporation.

The professional Trump-haters, the Democratic Party assassination squads in the Congress and media, like disciplined soldiers, have swiveled with parade ground precision and resumed firing after a mere second to reload, at the equally fatuous nonsense about illegal campaign contributions. Disreputable, contemptible myth-makers and smear-jobbers though they are, they deserve credit for fanaticism, improvisation, and managing in unison to sound half plausible in the face of the crushing defeat they have suffered and the piffle and pottage they are left to moralize about.

Third, and slowest to respond, so sudden has been the change of the whole Trump-hate narrative, are those who never wavered from the requirement of real evidence of something before they would endorse the drastic act of impeaching and removing the nation’s leader. Some feel betrayed and some vindicated, but sensing no need for instant response, unlike the Trump-haters who are scrambling to try to cooper up some credibility for continuing their assault on the president, the third group is preparing with only deliberate speed to counter-attack the assassins-by-impeachment with their full and now overpowering armament of facts and law.

The Trump-haters can make a strong case that the president is an obnoxious public personality—that he is boastful, exaggerates constantly, sends out silly tweets with grade two typographical errors in them and gets into ill-tempered slanging matches with half the people with whom he comes into contact. To a great many, he is just refreshingly puncturing official self-importance.

But whatever anyone thinks of Trump, there are two points his enemies will have to face: he won the 2016 election and that can only be undone by the 2020 election, and high office-holders can only be impeached and removed from office by high crimes and misdemeanors as prescribed by the Constitution.

We may assume that the tactical battlefield commanders of the impeachment squad are now Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairmen of the judiciary and intelligence committees. As of now, they are merely alleging criminal offenses that may not secure removal from office by the Republican Senate, but could lead to the conviction and imprisonment of the president after he has finished his term, in two or six years.

To appreciate the absurdity of this, remember that the impeachable and indictable offense the Democrats have in mind is that Michael Cohen, a lawyer in the midst of the inherently corrupt plea bargain catechism classes, trading extorted and false evidence against the president with a guarantee of immunity from perjury charges, for a lighter sentence, asserts that Trump ordered him to pay off women who claimed to have had sexual relations with him over 10 years ago for their silence, to enhance his chances of election.

To evaluate the probative quality of this evidence and the gravity of such charges, we must remember that Cohen has been charged with lying to Congress, has pleaded guilty to various acts of fraud, that the women were trying to blackmail then-candidate Trump and were breaching non-disclosure agreements, that Trump paid Cohen’s legal bills, that a person can contribute to his own campaign, and that the jurisprudence is that such payment are not campaign expenses anyway. That was the finding in the John Edwards case, where there was a child out of wedlock. Here, the facts of what actually happened between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal are disputed, and the wording of the relevant statute could just as well be interpreted as meaning that a candidate who buys mouthwash or gets a haircut or a new suit, is equally trying to enhance his likelihood of election.

Up to a point, Nadler and Schiff, egregious, obsessive Trump-haters and mud-slingers as they are, can only be accused of doing their jobs, or at least carrying out their self-assigned mission to bring down the president. Their accomplices in this foredoomed mission to self-immolation do not have the excuse of carrying out their misconceived duty. All the televised useless idiots with talking heads seem not to realize that they are now giving voice to ideas and outcomes that are so impossible and nonsensical, they are insane.

While Mueller could be represented to the malicious and the credulous as possibly having or being in the process of obtaining real evidence of cooperation by the Trump campaign with the Russian government to affect and falsify the results of the U.S. presidential election, at least the offense being alleged and which they sought to prove, would be, if it had happened, a very serious matter that would have justified the removal of the president. This was what Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and all its immense army of media jabbering puppets claimed. It was obvious at every stage to any serious person that this was extremely unlikely, but if it had actually happened, the alarms and accusations would have been justified and vindicated, and skeptics like me would have had to recant.

When that phantasmagorically impossible mission failed, without missing a newscast the president’s enemies opened fire with the new theory. This is that a confessed criminal and accused liar could prove that the president committed crimes when he paid his legal bills, including, with or without his specific knowledge, inducements to two women not to violate agreements to keep private their own contested recollections of innocuous sexual encounters with the president ten years before the election.

The theory further holds that these supposedly criminal violations of election financing laws could cause a two-thirds majority of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate to remove the president from office, or at the least, that a prosecutor who patiently waited until the president left office could then send him to prison for this conduct.

I was even astounded at the reaction of the Trump-haters who had been citing the Steele dossier as incontrovertible evidence of his “treason” (Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and many others), when they had to deal with the fact that it was a smear-job commissioned and paid for and shopped to the media by the Clinton campaign. Without breaking their strides, they called this inconvenient fact “a talking point” (Washington Post), and altered the dossier’s status to “campaign information,” (Hillary Clinton).

This latest display of sangfroid is even more remarkable and ethically disturbing. All of them knew that the Russian collusion claim was defamatory fiction, and no one with an IQ in double figures or higher could believe that the election finance crime theory generated by putting the screws to a low-life like Cohen could seriously inconvenience the president. The Democrats are now on suicide watch. It is not too late to recognize that however much they may hate Trump, and however objectionable he may be to some reasonable people, he is the president and only the voters or a medical catastrophe or the passage of his constitutional term will remove him. That is as it should be.

The country noticed that the same James Comey whose bias didn’t affect his judgment, didn’t remember 245 times in his testimony last week, and then told a New York audience of the absolute necessity of defeating Trump at the next election. If the Democrats use their new majority in the House to send this campaign-finance clunker for a Senate trial, as they shut down the existing investigations into the Justice department and Clinton campaign (which will be taken up by the Senate), they will destroy themselves. That, too, is as it should be.

The disappearance of most currently visible Democratic federal politicians and opinionated journalists would be a welcome national enema. But the self-destruction of a great political party would be a gruesome and destabilizing event. Somewhere in there must be some trace of the political DNA that from Alfred E. Smith to Hubert H. Humphrey, and intermittently since then, rendered magnificent and irreplaceable service to the nation and the world.

As Christmas approaches, the thoughts of Democrats should be of resurrecting themselves, not of crucifying an enemy so maddeningly invulnerable to their murderous rage.

Checking Robert Mueller

Kimberley A. Strassel
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2018/12/14/checking_robert_mueller_461241.html
December 13, 2018

Robert Mueller has operated for 19 months as a law unto himself, reminding us of the awesome and destructive powers of special counsels. About the only possible check on Mr. Mueller is a judge who is wise to the tricks of prosecutors and investigators. Good news: That’s what we got this week.

Former national security adviser Mike Flynn a year ago pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Flynn’s defense team this week filed a sentencing memo to Judge Emmet Sullivan that contained explosive new information about the Flynn-FBI meeting in January 2017.

It was arranged by then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who personally called Mr. Flynn on other business, then suggested he sit down with two agents to clear up the Russia question. Mr. McCabe urged Mr. Flynn to conduct the interview with no lawyer present—to make things easier.

The agents (including the infamous Peter Strzok) showed up within two hours. They had already decided not to inform Mr. Flynn that they had transcripts of his conversations or give him the standard warning against lying to the FBI. They wanted him “relaxed” and “unguarded.” Former Director James Comey this weekend bragged on MSNBC that he would never have “gotten away” with such a move in a more “organized” administration.
The whole thing stinks of entrapment, though the curious question was how the Flynn defense team got the details. The court filing refers to a McCabe memo written the day of the 2017 meeting, as well as an FBI summary—known as a 302—of the Flynn interview. These are among documents congressional Republicans have been fighting to obtain for more than a year, only to be stonewalled by the Justice Department. Now we know why the department didn’t want them public.

They have come to light thanks to a man who knows well how men like Messrs. Mueller and Comey operate: Judge Sullivan. He sits on the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, and as he wrote for the Journal last year, he got a “wake-up call” in 2008 while overseeing the trial of then-Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Judge Sullivan ultimately assigned a lawyer to investigate Justice Department misconduct.

The investigator’s report found prosecutors had engaged in deliberate and repeated ethical violations, withholding key evidence from the defense. It also excoriated the FBI for failing to write up 302s and for omitting key facts from those it did write. The head of the FBI was Mr. Mueller.

Judge Sullivan has since made it his practice to begin every case with a Brady order, which reminds prosecutors of their constitutional obligation to provide the defense with any exculpatory evidence. On Dec. 12, 2017, days after being assigned the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan issued such an order, instructing Mr. Mueller’s team to turn over “any evidence in its possession that is favorable to defendant and material either to defendant’s guilt or punishment.” Had any other judge drawn the case, we likely would never have seen these details of the FBI’s behavior.

It’s clear that something has concerned the judge—who likely sees obvious parallels to the Stevens case. The media was predicting a quick ruling in the Flynn case. Instead, Judge Sullivan issued new orders Wednesday, demanding to see for himself the McCabe memo and the Flynn 302. He also ordered the special counsel to hand over by Friday any other documents relevant to the Flynn-FBI meeting.

Given his history with the FBI, the judge may also have some questions about the curious date on the Flynn 302—Aug. 22, 2017, seven months after the interview. Texts from Mr. Strzok and testimony from Mr. Comey both suggest the 302 was written long before then. Was the 302 edited in the interim? If so, by whom, and at whose direction? FBI officials initially testified to Congress that the agents did not think Mr. Flynn had lied.

Judges have the ability to reject plea deals and require a prosecutor to make a case at trial. The criminal-justice system isn’t only about holding defendants accountable; trials also provide oversight of investigators and their tactics. And judges are not obliged to follow prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.

No one knows how Judge Sullivan will rule. His reputation is for being no-nonsense, a straight shooter, an advocate of government transparency. Whatever the outcome, he has done the nation a favor by using his Brady order to hold prosecutors to some account and allow the country a glimpse at how federal law enforcement operates. Which is the very least the country can expect.

History Gives George Bush His Due, by Peggy Noonan

As America’s mystique has faded, we’ve grown to miss the skill and steadiness we once took for granted.

I feel it needs to be said again: George Herbert Walker Bush should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an epic moment in modern world history, and a close-run thing. “One mishap and much could unravel,” former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, in his eulogy, of those days when the wall was falling, the Warsaw Pact countries rising and the Soviet Union trying to keep its footing as it came to terms with its inevitable end. Patience and shrewdness were needed from the leader of the West, a sensitive, knowing hand.

In “A World Transformed” (1998), Bush described his public approach as being marked by “gentle encouragement.” It caused him some trouble: “I had been under constant criticism for being too cautious, perhaps because I was subdued in my reaction to events. This was deliberate.” He didn’t want to embarrass or provoke. He reminded Mikhail Gorbachev, at the December 1989 Malta summit, that “I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.”
It was Bush’s gift to be sensitive even to Soviet generals who were seeing their world collapse around them. He knew a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—and this foe had a nuclear arsenal. He slowly, carefully helped ease Russia out of its old ways and structures, helped it stand as its ground firmed up, and helped divided Germany blend together peacefully, fruitfully.

You’d think the world would have been at his feet, and the prizes flying in from Oslo. It didn’t happen. Why

Here’s a theory: Bush’s achievement wasn’t seen for what it was, in part because America in those days was still going forward in the world with its old mystique. Its ultimate grace and constructiveness were a given. It had gallantly saved its friends in the First World War, and again in the Second; it had led the West’s resistance to communism. It was expected to do good.

Having won the war, of course it would win the peace. It seemed unremarkable that George Bush, and Brent Scowcroft, and a host of others did just that.
Bush was the last president to serve under—and add to—that American mystique. It has dissipated in the past few decades through pratfalls, errors and carelessness, with unwon wars and the economic crisis of 2008. The great foreign-affairs challenge now is to go forward in the world successfully while knowing the mystique has been lessened, and doing everything possible to win it back.

Bush came to be somewhat defensive about his reticence in those days. As a former aide I respected his caution, his sense that the wrong move could cause things to go dark at any moment. But I saw it differently: This was a crucial event in the history of the West, and its meaning needed stating by the American president. There was much to be lauded, from the hard-won unity of the West to Russia’s decision to move bravely toward new ways. Much could be said without triumphalism.

It is a delicate question, in statecraft as in life, when to speak and when not to. George Bush thought it was enough to do it, not say it, as the eulogists asserted. He trusted the people to infer his reasoning from his actions. (This was his approach on his tax increase, also.) But in the end, to me, leadership is persuasion and honest argument: This is my thinking. I ask you to see it my way.

Something deeply admirable, though: No modern president now considers silence to be an option, ever. It is moving to remember one who did, who trusted the people to perceive and understand his actions. Who respected them that much.

To the state funeral in the Washington Cathedral: Its pomp and ceremony served to connect Americans to our past and remind us of our dignity. In a way, it was a resummoning of our mystique. It was, for a moment, the tonic a divided nation needed.
There was majesty—the gleaming precision of the full-dress military, the flag-draped casket coming down the aisle, the bowed heads and hands on hearts, the bells tolling, the dignified solemnity.

For those of us in the pews there was none of the sadness and anguish that accompanies the leaving of a soul gone too soon, or tragically. This was a full life happily lived, and we were there to applaud, to see each other and say, “Remember that time?”

There was a sense of gratitude that the old man had, the past week, gotten his due. For decades the press and others had roughed him up—“wimp,” “lapdog.” His contributions had not been fully appreciated. Now they were. We were happy but not triumphalist.

We were reminded: History changes its mind. Nothing is set. A historical reputation can change, utterly. Sometimes history needs time and distance to see the landscape clearly.

And history is human. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the senior most world leader, was there. Back home her party was in the middle of a battle to choose her successor, and she couldn’t afford to be gone. But when she heard of Bush’s death she said she had to come to Washington. She told reporters that without Bush, she “would hardly be standing here.” She had grown up in East Germany.

There was something else. She had told Bob Kimmitt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, that Bush had treated her “like a somebody when I was not.” Meeting with the obscure junior minister in the Oval Office in 1991, the president treated the young woman with great personal and professional respect. And so there she was this week, because history is human and how you treat people matters.

Two other points about the funeral. Its unembarrassed religiosity and warmly asserted Christianity were beautiful, and refreshing. The burial rite was from the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, and it was a great and moving moment when the presiding bishop, Rev. Bruce Curry, met the flag-draped coffin at the Great West Doors and said: “With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body of our brother George for burial.” Such simple, humble, egalitarian words. “Our brother George.” The frozen chosen done themselves proud.

And there was a consistent message in the speeches. George Bush in his 94 years asked for and received everything—a big, loving family, wealth, position, power, admiration. But the lesson of that life was clear: He worked for it, he poured himself into it. He gave it everything he had. He made sacrifices to be who he was.

We gave a lot of attention to his life this week, in part because we want to remind ourselves that such fruitful lives are possible. We want to show the young among us what should be respected and emulated, and that public service can be a calling, and that calling brilliantly met.

This was a good man, a brave one who proved himself solid when major edifices of the world were melting away. He was kind and gentle.And he loved America.We were lucky to have him—the steady one, the sensitive one. The diplomat.


By Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal
December 6, 2018

The Progressive Synopticon

Victor Davis Hanson
Americangreatness.com
November 19, 2018

In the post-election aftermath, Republicans are wondering about how they can capture that missing 2-5 percent of the electorate that lost them the House of Representatives.
Could they pry away 40 percent of the institutionalized Democratic Latino vote on delivery of a full-employment economy of rising wages? Can they win over 20 percent of the African-American electorate on the basis of more jobs and less competition from illegal immigrants?

Can Trump tone down his ad hominem invective and tweeting to reassure an additional 10 percent of independent and middle-class suburban women that his national security agenda, free-market prosperity, traditionalism, law-and-order, and national sovereignty policies ensure greater tranquility, safety, and opportunity—even if they are not packaged in the manner of his more mellifluous and vacuous “presidential” predecessor?
No Escaping the Culture Wars

Republicans, in deer-in-the-headlights-style, appear shocked that they are increasingly prone to winning the vote on Election Day only to lose it in the ensuing weeks when absentee ballots and what-not filter in with astounding Democratic majorities. Someone is spending a lot of money to get the absentee voting ballot out, correctly marked, and returned. And whatever that “lot” is, it is killing Republican candidates

Yet there is a larger obstacle to achieving that long-term 51 percent Trump solution along with the shorter-term strategy of matching Democratic absentee ballots with Republican absentee ballots. Conservatives have lost entirely the culture and establishment wars. The result is that they are besieged by a circle of hostile progressive, but quite establishment institutions that are relentless.

Imagine the traditionalist as living in synopticon—a suspect that is the target of 24/7 viewing, indoctrination, and conditioning by progressive auditors. In other words, a 40-45 percent minority of Americans is relentlessly lectured, sermonized, demonized, and neutered by a 360- degree ring of prying institutional overseers.

There is no escape. There is no respite. There is no quarter given.

The media has become an extension of the progressive movement, partly because its farm teams are the universities and the upper-middle class suburban professional classes. Journalists, such as Jim Rutenberg and Christiane Amanpour, concede they can no longer stay neutral in the era of Trump—“neutral” in the sense that old partisans of a bygone age like Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather were careful to mask their progressivism on the air.

Not now. The major networks and public affiliates are proudly overt in their efforts to oppose conservative traditionalism often defined (for now) as the agenda of Donald Trump—in 93 percent negative coverage fashion, as is the case with MSNBC/NBC and CNN according to the liberal Shorenstein Center.

Conservatives believe Fox is a powerful counterweight. It may be, but it is one that is surrounded and overwhelmed by liberal networks and state media. After all, Fox is only one of about six corporate conglomerates that control almost 90 percent of televised and print news.

The masters of our social media and Internet universe are the most insidiously partisan. Open your laptop or power on your smartphone, and you meet their shadow personas nonstop. It is not just that the smug class of Menlo Park and Palo Alto censor and disallow posts, podcasts, and messaging along partisan lines, or that a search engine’s headers and footers are advertisements for a new progressive America. It is that social media has also been on the vanguard of redefining the Democratic Party, from Hubert Humphrey’s old workers party to a pyramid of the very wealthy overseeing a government-subsidized underclass.

Never has the country seen wealth on the magnitude of the fortunes of Jeff Bezos, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, or Mark Zuckerberg—and an array of high-tech, finance, and marketing grandees. Many can spend $50 million in an election and either never miss the gift, or at least make it up in a few weeks. Their apparent long-term aim seems to be to change the conditions of America to ensure that others, and newer versions of their earlier selves, would do worse than they have done. The earth can only afford to allow so many hilltop estates, private jets, fleets of cars, and lavish playthings to so few green, open-minded, activist, wise, and committed progressives, who need all these exemptions to save us.

Escape! No Escape!

Popular culture—from rap and pop music to corporate advertising—is progressive hip, a sort of non-ending assumption that the Life of Julia and Pajama Boy are the way of America. Pick up a comic book, download a tune, or watch Ellen on airport TV: the messaging is all the same—the old creaking brontosauruses are heading for the tar pits, and being replaced by far cooler, better, and smarter youthful raptors—even as the society grows ever more callous, indebted, factional, and dysfunctional, from the now normal tarmac nightmares to going into the DMV. It is hard to find a TV sitcom, a song, or a billboard that is not in your face about something.

Maybe one can turn then to sports either to find at least an escape from 360-degree progressive surveillance? No luck there. If an NBA figure were to speak out as conservatively as the vast majority of owners, players, and coaches do progressively, his career for all practical purposes would be over—and so none do—even if there are any who are not genuinely progressive. Ditto the “take the knee” NFL. From the National Anthem pregame observance to the Super Bowl halftime show, professional football is now mostly politicized entertainment. It is only apolitical in the sense that everyone is assumed to be on the same progressive team. ESPN analysts talk as if they are MSNBC and CNN news anchor leftovers.

There is no real need to reference Hollywood. Its movies remain as banal as they are partisan. We know the usual script: a good looking social justice warrior ferrets out a polluting corporation, a cancer-causing drug company, a CIA orchestrated massacre abroad, an internal right-wing FBI-led coup, and then allies with crusading journalists, courageous environmentalists, or undaunted social activists. Usually their suit-clad corporate villains employ as hit men and foot soldiers the usual white-male goons, authenticated with Russian, South African, or southern drawl accents, and various fascist tattoos, scars, and missing teeth.

Both low-brow and high-brow children’s animation and cartoons are so frequently about a once smiley old tree choking on corporate-fed stinky air, a fishy swimming for his life in a climate-changed boiling sea, or some sort of beetle, mouse, or bunny trying to get home to protected green spaces or federal wetlands, as it dodges greedy clear-cutting ax-men, chain-sawers, psycho NRA hunters with assault weapons, or soulless huge corporate agriculture combines.

Parents have few options to the progressive university octopus. The campus’s explicit message is that hyphenated “studies” courses must correct the incorrect thinking that students bring with them, brainwashed as they are by their parents, families, churches, and communities.

If students learn nothing about the old dead white men of the Iliad, Latin, Descartes, the Renaissance, Beethoven, or Melville, apparently all the better, given that ignorance spawns arrogance. And arrogance is necessary to push one’s partisan ignorance on others.
The real tragedy is not that today’s professor is biased, but that he is incompetent (ranting is no substitute for learning, even as gender or ethnic studies are not real scholarly subjects). The English professor so often now does not know much Shakespeare, the classics professor does not always read Thucydides in Greek, and the art historian can have little idea what the Hudson River School is.

Indebted Futures

The university accepts that its huge administrative superstructure, swelled by “diversity” and “inclusion” six-figure fixers, ensures that federally subsidized tuition goes up higher than the rate of inflation, and that students leave (not always with diplomas) with massive debt. Their degrees cannot guarantee that encumbered students can even pay the interest on their educational debts.

No wonder that a generation will have to postpone marriage, put off child-rearing, and live as perpetual adolescents, and urban apartment-renters. Their bitterness over poverty, and their angst at being uncompensated for supposedly brilliant college degrees often translate into progressive solidarity.

Foundations—such as those established by the Fords, Guggenheims, Mellons, and Rockefellers—fund liberal groups and research almost exclusively. The subtext seems to be that the billions piled up in tax-free foundations should be used to ensure that no one else can make a million. A man worth a billion is deemed a valuable progressive, one worth a mere million more often a counter-revolutionary danger.

There are few reticent “wise men” left, senior veterans of politics and government who in their later years pop up to give the country non-partisan but sober advice on war and peace, economic pitfalls, or geostrategic warnings. So many seek legacies as progressives, given that creeping progressivism ensures a final PBS, NPR, or New York Times encomium.
Past presidents and first ladies? They no longer stay out politics, resting at the “ranch.” The getting-rich Obamas follow the Clinton model and are everywhere—he on the stump blasting Trump as a liar and taking credit for economic growth that he never achieved; she reminding the country of its culpability for Trump with the usual whining that even her global fame and multi-millions are somehow not compensation enough for what she suffered for all of us.

When you get up in the morning until you go to bed at night, you are on stage, and a progressive synopticon is everywhere around you.

Socialism: The Opiate of the Corrupt and Ignorant

Charles W. Calomiris
https://economics21.org/socialism-opiate-corrupt-and-ignorant-calomiris
November 14, 2018

The overarching message of “The Opportunity Cost of Socialism”—a study recently released by the President’s Council of Economic Advisers (CEA)—is that the advocacy of socialism cannot reasonably be based on policy preferences; its attraction has always been grounded in a combination of wishful thinking and ignorance. For example, the new CEA study shows that the socialist approach to “single payer” health care advocated by many on the left would cost much more and deliver much less, resulting in the significant worsening of mortality and morbidity, not just higher taxes and reduced economic growth.

One prominent opinion page editor described the CEA study’s conclusions to me as too obvious to warrant mention. That reaction reflects the problem the study seeks to remedy. Obvious facts about socialism are not discussed enough. Few people are willing to read 50-page studies like the CEA’s, and there has been very little media coverage of it—journalists or politicians who could summarize the CEA findings haven’t seen sufficient reason to do so (or may themselves be among the uninformed advocates of socialism). That is too bad because the ignorant advocacy of socialism is currently a significant threat to our democracy.

Socialism has existed in many forms which lie on a continuum, from the central planning nightmare of the USSR, to the Scandinavian democratic experiments of several decades ago. The idea that unites the various embodiments of socialism along that continuum is that economic freedom is counterproductive to the aspirations of humanity. It would be far better and fairer, socialists argue, for the state to distribute scarce resources rather than letting the market allocate goods and services by itself. Socialism seeks control of economic decisions, either through central planning or through expropriative taxation and regulation, in the interest of the common man.

Socialism’s appeal has always been its false promise to create wealth better than capitalism can.

The difference between market-based and socialist economies is not the presence of redistributive policies per se. For over a century, around the world, market-based economies have taxed and redistributed wealth, and provided a host of services such as public education and care for the poor, sick, and elderly. The difference is that in market-based systems taxation is regarded as an unfortunate burden, which is employed out of necessity to ensure that other priorities are achieved. In contrast, in socialist regimes, taxation is not regarded as an undesirable consequence, but as a means to prevent individuals from counterproductively controlling their collective economic destiny.

Socialism’s appeal has always been its false promise to create wealth better than capitalism can. Advocates of socialism promise great economic achievements, which they argue are worth the price of reduced individual economic liberty. It is worth remembering that Karl Marx regarded socialism as an economic necessity that would emerge out of the ashes of capitalism precisely because capitalism would fail to sustain wealth creation. Marx made many specific, and erroneous, predictions about capitalism, including its declining profitability and rising unemployment. His analysis did not consider permanent economic growth in a capitalist system to be a possibility. And his “historical materialist” view of political choice claimed the rich and powerful would never share power voluntarily with their economic lessers, or create social safety nets. Writing in the mid-19th century, Marx fundamentally failed to understand the huge changes in technology, political suffrage, or social safety net policies that were occurring around him.

Not only has socialist theory been wrong about the economic and political fruits of capitalism, it failed to see the problems that arise in socialist governments. Socialism’s record has been pain, not gain, especially for the poor. Socialism produced mass starvation in eastern Europe and China, as it undermined the ability of farmers to grow and market their crops. In less extreme incarnations, such as the UK in the decades after World War II and before Margaret Thatcher, it stunted growth. In most cases, socialism’s monopoly on economic control also fomented corruption by government officials, as was especially apparent in Latin American and African socialist regimes. The adverse economic consequences of socialism led the Scandinavian countries to dial back their versions of socialism in the past decades. If the United States had imitated Scandinavian-style socialism, the CEA study estimates that our GDP today would be 19% lower.

Socialism has been abandoned in virtually all of the developing world. Countries today do not seek to emulate the disasters of North Korea, Cuba, or Venezuela. They also avoid high taxation of the rich. That reflects the recognition that countries compete with each other for capital. Expropriating the rich tends to make them leave, and when they leave they take their wealth with them.

This philosophical shift in the developing world is a major change since the 1980s when socialism was still fashionable among some. The shift away from socialist thinking was grounded in the growing body of empirical evidence about the kinds of policies that produced growth and poverty alleviation—that is, policies that used markets as a lever of economic development. Now developing countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, India, China, South Africa, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia are known as “emerging economies,” a description that recognizes their need to emerge from state control of their economies through privatization, free trade, and the creation of viable private financial intermediaries to promote growth and poverty alleviation. All around the developing world, socialism is understood as a false promise, an ideological opium that repressive elites use to retain and expand power. Capitalism, in contrast, is seen as the force that has lifted over a billion people out of poverty worldwide since 1990.

Socialism has never conquered poverty. It has never competed with capitalism as a means of effectively allocating resources and promoting sustainable growth.

To historians, that was obvious long before the 1980s. Socialism has never conquered poverty. It has never competed with capitalism as a means of effectively allocating resources and promoting sustainable growth. Over the past half century, scores of economic historians have sought to explain the factors that produced the economic progress that Europe and some of its offshoots enjoyed in the 18th-20th centuries. This group of scholars, which includes Angus Maddison, Joel Mokyr, Eric Jones, David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey and Douglass North, tend to hold quite diverse political preferences, but they universally agree on the facts: Government policies that safeguard a combination of personal economic freedom, secure property rights, and the ability of individuals to gain personally by participating in markets have promoted the effort and innovation that conquered poverty and promoted growth through the ages.

The facts about socialism and capitalism may shock the young people of America, many of whom lionize Bernie Sanders, an unapologetic socialist who honeymooned in the USSR, as the new conscience of our nation—and many of whom, 51% according to Gallup, now have a positive view of socialism. Only 45% have a positive view of capitalism. That represents a 12-point decline in young adults’ positive views about capitalism in just the past two years.  Many of these young people are thoughtful and intelligent—but they are also ignorant about the history and economics of the systems they favor or condemn. This is the main reason why they must read this important CEA study.

Charles W. Calomiris is Henry Kaufman Professor of Financial Institutions at Columbia University and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. ​

Why Trump Is Owed Thanks On Climate Pact

Conrad Black
New York Sun
November 14, 2018

President Trump has not received adequately grateful recognition for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and effectively scuttling the Clean Power Plan. These measures, which reinforced each other and were an outright assault on American capitalism and economic growth, were, with the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) and the nuclear giveaway to Iran, the core of Barack Obama’s effort to be a transformative president.

The whole basis of the Clean Power Plan and the Paris climate accord was false from the beginning, yet the premise on which they were based attained a tremendous level of momentum and effectively bulldozed opposition throughout the Western world and enjoyed an overwhelming preeminence in academic, journalistic, and public opinion.

Everyone is in favor of improved quality of air and water, but out of environmental and conservationist enthusiasm and even zeal, there abruptly arose the movement to reduce carbon use because of the miraculously conjured and promoted but unsubstantiated theory that the world was quickly warming and that carbon use was the reason. Failure to change radically how we lived and how our economies in the West functioned would lead to a catastrophe of rising water levels and skyrocketing temperatures.

An Old Testament fate was just around the corner. Historians of the future will wonder how our civilization could have been so thoroughly gulled that it began to undertake a profound economic self-dismemberment, and harried and ridiculed doubters as “climate deniers” as if they believed in a flat earth where stones fell upwards.

The warming argument has been nibbled at and not borne out by much evidence, and so has awkwardly largely given way to climate change — which is only a step from weather change, hardly a novel phenomenon — but which is now solemnly invoked by Bernie Sanders to explain Caribbean hurricanes (though they are not new and have not been unprecedentedly damaging or more frequent).

Governor Jerry Brown blames California forest fires on climate change, though there is no identifiable connection, much less anything linking any of these phenomena to human behavior. The human-generated global-warming theory was formally launched by the Willach (Austria) Conference of 1985, bringing together the leading figures of the United Nations Environment Project (an outgrowth of the Stockholm Conference of 1972, which was itself a product of the political machinations of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme) and the World Meteorological Organization.

The Willach Conference produced the assertion that there would be a rise in global temperatures in the first half of the 21st century “greater than any in man’s history.” Though alarming, the conference report was numerically unspecific.

Using British Meteorological Office figures, global temperature appeared to rise more quickly in the last 15 years of the 20th century than the first 15 years of this century, although 2016 and 2017 were relatively warm years. Almost all tentative conclusions are within reasonable margins of error, and the mass of data is too ambiguous to support any of the more emphatic claims of factions in the climate debate.

The genesis of the agitation for restrictions of carbon use was in the Swedish movement to promote the use of nuclear power as the cleanest energy. Nuclear energy offended the pacifistic movement that was generally composed of fellow travelers of the environmental movement, and so they transferred their flag to renewable energy. This caught fire in impressionable, erratic, Western Germany, especially after reunification left it with the eco-disaster of East Germany to clean up.

This is not the place for an analysis of the political vagaries of Germany, whose contribution to world instability and war is notorious, and which reigns yet in the German consciousness, afflicted by cross-currents of acute guilt for the monstrous crimes of the Nazis and the un-humanitarian militarism of the Prussians, in a country where the Nietzschean nihilistic and Marxist strains of opinion were born and flourished and are visible and audible yet.

In this political hot house, the greatest leaders of the Federal Republic, Konrad Adenauer, Helmut Schmidt, Helmut Kohl, and Gerhard Schroeder knew that Germany was safest and most constructive in a cocoon of economic association and defensive military alliances with the Western Powers, especially the United States, Great Britain, and France, but including smaller and historically uneasy neighbors — the Dutch, Belgians, Austrians, Czechs, Scandinavians, and Poles.

Germany was susceptible to the appeal of an environmental and economic policy that was naturalistic, anti-materialist, and radically innocuous in international relationships. Angela Merkel, chancellor for 13 years, from East Germany, a chemist who studied in the Soviet Union but is the daughter of a Lutheran minister, the reconciler of all German contradictions, drastically cut back nuclear power, and drastically cut carbon emissions, but was caught red-handed promoting diesel automobile engines, which reduced carbon consumption but did savage violence to air quality, and is now walking that one back, blaming the automobile companies.

From Germany, the virus spread. Tony Blair, long-serving British prime minister, bought it entirely and became a passionate advocate of renewable energy. The old environmental organizations, the World Wildlife Federation, which opposed the killing of great beasts, and Greenpeace, which began in opposition to nuclear power and kept shifting focus with the times, moved to the banning of chlorine in drinking water. As this was one of the greatest steps forward in the history of public health, it didn’t work.

In 1989, Greenpeace, busy promoting a nuclear-free Europe, sold out altogether to the Kremlin, which deployed intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Eastern Europe. Greenpeace deserted the environmental groups in Eastern Europe, but the INF treaty and the collapse of the Soviet Union drove Greenpeace into the arms of the renewables advocates. Solar panels and windmills were now the salvation of opportunistic choice. The defeated international Left emerged from the rubble of Communism and crowded aboard the anti-capitalist anti-industrial bandwagon. The acid-rain myth was a dress rehearsal for the global-warming myth.

What was not so well known about renewables was that recourse to them does not dispense with traditional energy sources and does drastically increase electricity bills for all consumers. The whole initiative for renewable energy was shortly seen as a disaster: Electricity that can’t be stored must be used as generated, so renewables, which are dependent on wind and sunlight (and they kill stupefying numbers of birds in their glare and their blades), have always to be backed up by non-renewable energy.

There were many jurisdictions for which this provided a painful lesson, and Greenpeace, like the World Wildlife Federation, Sierra Club, and others which had begun bucolically and with memberships of lovable bird and butterfly watchers, metamorphosed into militants at the vanguard of environmental discontent. They succeeded, as one does with trendy left-wing causes, with the support of the great foundations (Rockefeller, Ford, Carnegie, Pew) and then co-opted the NGOs (Non-Government Organizations) and then suborned the great corporations themselves, always eager to scatter their benevolent crumbs to take a bow and get the anti-capitalist militants off their backs.

The evolution of the environmental movement from a crusade for more nuclear power in Sweden into this Frankenstein Monster of economic stultification in the name of a complete fiction of man-made global warming that threatened all of us was unutterable nonsense. But as an environmental replay of Orson Welles’s famous “War of the Worlds” that elevated the whole eco-lobby from obsequious grovelers for aid in maintaining wetlands for ducks and discouraging the killing of big game to the moral and economic arbiters of superficial America, it was brilliant.

To varying degrees a simple hostility to capitalism itself entered and captured the mind of the West. China and India, ground down by centuries of primitive subordinacy, looked on in disbelief as the cuckoo-bird in the Western mind became a gigantic pterodactyl assaulting Western civilization.

The pledge of the Obama administration at Paris to reduce American carbon use by 28%, backing its Clean Power Plan, was the supreme encapsulation of what British commentator Malcolm Muggeridge called “the great liberal death wish.” It was a secondary issue in the 2016 election. Mr. Trump called global warming a “hoax,” and so complete was the revulsion of the Left against him, this was barely mentioned.

When he renounced American participation in the Paris accord, there were unctuous noises from Europe and Canada and the American Left, but proclamations of imminent disaster were difficult to formulate credibly. It was suddenly a formerly unquestioned quest for an absurd objective that no one could now explain. It was scarcely mentioned in the 2018 campaign and is unlikely to become revealed conventional wisdom again soon. America and the world owe much to Donald Trump for this alone.