Politics

The Obama Presidency as the Pinnacle of Progressivism

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , , ,

Recently, I have been seeing a lot of libertarians tsk tsking  progressives for pinning their hopes on somebody like President Obama. For example, in a thread initiated by this article by Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic, an anonymous libertarian stated that Obama was “no progressive at all.”

Yet this is untrue. If anything, the Obama administration represents the pinnacle of Progressivism: “big” government taking care of the forgotten man in all aspects of his life. Self-styled progressives feigning disgust in the current administration’s dirty laundry need not do so. Either they implicitly endorse the authoritarianism of the Obama administration and pretend not to in polite company, or they don’t fully understand the moral and intellectual foundations of the ideology they purport to adhere to.

The Snowden Reset

muricaderp Law, Politics

Edward Snowden seems to have successfully hit official Washington’s Achilles’ Heel. The political and public responses to his disclosures are still in flux, so I’m hesitant to speak with any confidence as things currently stand, but the pushback against the surveillance state seems to be at or near critical mass.

Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA), one of the most prominent members of California’s Congressional delegation, has publicly said that Snowden committed crimes with his disclosures but should be pardoned because he is a whistleblower who exposed wholesale subversion of the Fourth Amendment and that he should be answering questions about the surveillance state at home, not abroad. McClintock seemed to imply that he would like Snowden to testify before Congress. As I alluded to, the response to this scandal is growing by the week, so Snowden is conceivably on the verge of simultaneously being under federal criminal indictment for leaking state secrets and under Congressional subpoena to testify about the same state secrets as a whistleblower, not a defendant. This could easily put the Department of Justice in effective, or even official, contempt of Congress for obstructing the sworn testimony of a subpoeanaed witness.

If more members of Congress join McClintock, Justin Amash, Ron Wyden and company in demanding answers, and if the answers that they demand include sworn testimony from Snowden, my guess is that Eric Holder will be a couple of wrong moves away from impeachment. Prior to Snowden’s indictment, much of the Republican Caucus was steaming mad at Holder over the “Fast and Furious” gun-running debacle, and a smaller (and certainly less organized and vocal) contingent of populists from both parties was disgusted with him for failing to prosecute bank executives for fraud in the subprime mortgage meltdown. If Holder continues to vindictively keep Snowden in exile (he almost certainly will) at a time when Congress has called Snowden to testify in person (by no means assured, but likely enough given the rapidly shifting Congressional response to the NSA scandal), the vendetta against Snowden could be Holder’s last major project as Attorney General and an ignominious capstone capstone to his legacy. I’d be highly surprised if Holder manages to talk his way out of that sticky wicket.

On a brief sidenote, I’d say that Tom McClintock is now bar none the strongest prospective challenger to either Barbara Boxer or Dianne Feinstein. California’s Republican primary voters have taken to nominating nobodies to challenge their state’s entrenched US Senators, and much of the state’s Republican establishment at all levels is buffoonish and bloodthirsty. Boxer and Feinstein (especially Feinstein) are authoritarian nightmares, but they have on their side inertia and a hapless opposition; McClintock is in a strong, and probably unique, position to singlehandedly destroy these advantages if he chooses to run for the US Senate.

Snowden’s supporters in Congress amount to a dissident faction trying to subvert the Politburo. The official response from the State Department, the Attorney General’s Office and the White House has been a clusterfuck. The sputtering rage at an exiled dissident has become so extreme and pervasive that the Washington press corps, normally prone to flatter the subjects of its coverage in exchange for access, is barely trying to spin the official response into anything rational. These high officials and spokespeople insulted, in succession, the sovereignty of Hong Kong (for allowing Snowden to lawfully enter and leave its territory in accordance with Chinese immigration law), China (mostly for unrelated geopolitical grievances that were irrelevant on account of Beijing’s delegation of political control in Hong Kong to the territory’s British-style parliamentary government), Ecuador (for offering Snowden asylum), Bolivia (again, for offering asylum, and additionally by grounding the country’s presidential plane to search for Snowden as President Evo Morales returned from official business in Moscow), several Western European countries (by intimidating them into closing their airspace to Snowden), and most recently Russia.

Washington’s belligerence towards Moscow has been especially foolish. The State Department effectively made Snowden stateless by revoking his passport while he was holed up in the Sheremetyevo Airport international transit zone. Moviegoers may remember Tom Hanks in a similar predicament. State decided to reenact Airport, but in another country’s airport. Then various shrill officials took it upon themselves to publicly berate the Kremlin, one of Washington’s most celebrated adversaries, for not deporting a US citizen from a transit zone specificially set up for foreigners who did not intend to clear Russian immigration, for allowing that US citizen to hold a press conference in the transit zone and providing incidental logistical support to escort members of the press through passport control, for even thinking about granting this fugitive dissident asylum, and finally for granting him temporary asylum. Washington is now in the embarrassing position of having an American citizen and political fugitive freely and lawfully living in Russia without a valid US passport but with a valid Russian residency document under the odd name of “Snouden Edvard Dzhozef.” Washington could easily have avoided this embarrassment. It took a month of shrilly berating the very nationalistic government of a major military power, adversary, and oil and gas exporter to get Mother Russia to finally embrace the young man. One does not simply end up with Russian documents.

Notice, too, how calm Vladimir Putin has remained throughout the mess. Jay Carney yelling at a KGB Zen master was never auspicious, and indeed it has been fruitless. Putin was reticent in his public comments, initially calling Snowden a patriot, then describing the tar baby that the Snowden incident had become with a classic Putinism about shearing a pig (“a lot of squealing but little hair”), and keeping mum when, all but certainly on his explicit approval, Snowden was granted temporary asylum. Putin is continuing to let Washington officials do the talking about the White House’s cancellation of one-on-one talks that he was scheduled to have with Barack Obama next month, talks that have admittedly been canceled in part to punish Putin for granting Snowden asylum.

This is nuts. My country’s highest officials are acting like toddlers. For the last two months, they’ve been picking fights with any foreign government that dares cross them by showing or even considering showing mercy to a whistleblower whom they want to jail for exposing unconstitutional wholesale domestic spying. They’re cavalierly destroying goodwill with any country that thwarts their effort to persecute one of their own citizens for embarrassing them and trying to hold them accountable for secret subversion of the Constitution.

Comparisons to the Brezhnev-era USSR are appropriate. Snowden was a refusenik for a month, and the reason he is no longer one is that a moderately autocratic regime centered around a neotsarist personality cult gave him asylum at a time when he was stranded in one of its airports, forsaken by his own government.

We have a balance of powers again. This can’t be the “reset” of relations that Hillary Clinton and Sergei Lavrov sought. Russia is again welcoming American dissidents, much as the Soviet Union welcomed unemployed laborers and disaffected black activists in the 1930s. Angry US officials demand that Russia hand over a political fugitive, Russian officials calmly refuse, and the US officials build up an even stronger head of steam. We’re approaching the point at which Obama bangs a shoe on the podium while Putin quietly smirks and, if he says anything about the outburst, says something unimaginably crude and yet eloquent.

Ed Snowden isn’t exactly a loose cannon, either. Washington picked the most sympathetic whistleblower imaginable to target with its unprecedented campaign of smearing and intimidation. Snowden hasn’t been silenced like Bradley Manning, and he isn’t eccentric like Julian Assange. He’s as normal as they come, and the public knows it. The public also knows that his critics are overwhelmingly a bunch of amoral Beltway careerist freaks.

This huge mess may get resolved a lot more quickly and thoroughly than I had feared.

Words are Deeds for Young Americans

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , ,

I keep wondering why I don’t see or hear young people react to the burden newly imposed on them – and forever – by the implementation of Obamacare. It seems to me that, by and large, they don’t know about it. In addition, they tend to harbor an all-around cynicism of such completeness that they deliberately tune out anything negative as if it were completely expected. I except young Christians from this generalization.

To raise this question is to ask why president Obama continues at such a high level of popularity. (Although his ratings are sinking, they are till high by most standards.) The best answer I can give to this question is so simple, it took me an embarrassingly long time to grasp it. It is that the young, and many others who are not young, think that words are deeds.

Recently, I spent a little talk time with two young women I knew not to be on my side on much of anything. They told me that they supported Obama because he is “pro-women.” They assured me that he resisted the Republicans’ many attempts to abolish “contraception.” (NOT abortion.) They couldn’t name any successful Republican venture against contraception. I interpret this to mean that they may have heard of some speech by some extremist somewhere and considered it a done deed. Both were insensitive to my argument that if they mean by “pro-women,” defending contraception, most relevant decisions belonged to states and are therefore not within Mr Obama’s realm of decision-making.

I am not here dumping on the young and feeble. I was having a meal with these young women because one is a sometimes reading buddy of mine. (A “reading budding” is like a drinking buddy without the hangovers.) The other has a quick intelligence that is so obvious it invades the room she is in like a strong perfume. Neither is a dummy and I am always charmed by their company. But they are preoccupied by many other issues, more personal ones. They satisfy themselves that listening to words makes them politically conscious enough and good citizens, I suspect. And, of course, even in the absence of confirmation bias, they would hear ten of Mr Obama’s well-delivered speeches for one speech from any Republican at all. (“Confirmation bias” is the well-studied tendency to pay more attention to items of information that conform with one’s opinions than with those that diverge from it.)

So, when Mr Obama speaks of improving the economy (five years later and some), his young supporters consider it done. Difficulties finding jobs, or good jobs, stagnating wages, irresponsibly mounting college tuition, rising and absurd mountains of college debts, must come from somewhere else. The more frightening prospect is that the bad economy – started elsewhere but continued by the Obama administration – is becoming the normal state of things for young people who have little memory of happier times.

Here is a tangible example of the new normal. Some dispositions of Obamacare law 2,000 pages-plus drive companies to limit employment to thirty hours a week. Now, consider a reasonably well paid young worker taking home $13/hr. (Taking home). With the new limited work-week, this young worker has to manage to live on about $20,000/year. It can be done, easily in some rural areas , with difficulty in most American cities (except Detroit, of course). In my town of Santa Cruz, rent and utilities would easily eat half of this amount.
Of course, depending on where you live, with that kind of income, you might be eligible for food stamps.

I have seen something like this happen in France. We may have a French disease.

I try hard to think back and I suspect I did the same when I was young. I mean that I confused words with deeds. That plus a strong sense of justice may explain why I was a leftist. It took years and a really good education to get into the habit of looking at the facts behind and after the words. That new custom turned me into a conservative libertarian quickly.

This analysis is all bad news. I hope the young of today are smarter than I was, and quicker. They surely know more than I did; they are closer to the facts if they want to be. I hope I am wrong about mistaking words for facts. Please, tell me that I am.

Around the Web: The Failure of Detroit and the Demagogue of Vienna

Brandon Christensen Current Events, History, Links, Politics , , , , ,
  1. Ilya Somin argues that Detroit’s aggressive use of eminent domain needs to be incorporated into any discussion of Detroit’s failure (be sure to read through the ‘comments’ section, too).
  2. Richard Wolff blames “capitalism” for Detroit’s failure. No seriously.
  3. Historian Andrei Znamenski has a great piece in the Independent Review on the political life of Karl Lueger, a socialist who became mayor of Vienna in the late 19th century.

Ultimately, I think that Detroit’s failure can be chalked up to bad fiscal policy, cronyism (at the local, regional and federal levels) and freer trade (which lets me drive a high-quality Toyota rather than some clunker from Detroit).

Lueger was an advocate of social justice and consequently of national socialism. Znamenski found that he had a profound influence on the thinking of an impressionable young artist living in Vienna at the time.

My Latest Op-Ed: “…Libertarians Are Selfish and Stupid”

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , , , ,

It’s on foreign policy and the straw men libertarians routinely have to deal with. An excerpt:

If there is one thing that Leftists are known for, it is being rationally ignorant: the less you know about your opponent, the easier it is to dismiss him as a “right-wing nut job,” a “Korporate Klown,” or a “Teabagger.” The less you know about your opponent, the easier it becomes to swallow the fall of the Berlin Wall and the stagflation of the 1970s. The less you know about your opponent, the easier it is to forgive Barack Obama for his trespasses (see also this post by an economist, Bryan Caplan, on Leftist ignorance of conservative and libertarian arguments).

Conservatives are indeed more well-informed about Leftist programs and Leftist thought, but this is hardly something to be proud of. Being proud of such a fact is like Cuba being proud about the fact that it is not considered to be the worst violator of human rights in the world.

Read the rest. It’s on Dr Delacroix’s “other” blog. I’ve got a new one coming out either today or tomorrow, so be sure to check in more often and watch the fireworks.

Hopefully nobody is getting too tired of the NOL’s foreign policy focus lately…

Zimmerman, Martin and Racism in America: Who’s Really Promoting Prejudice?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Liberty, Politics , , , , ,

Campaigners chose to make Trayvon Martin the focus for a national discussion of race in America. But it was never going to lead to an enlightened and rational debate. In seeking to personalise the issue and create an emotional tie through Martin’s case, campaigners dodged the significant structural and institutional barriers that give rise to racial inequality. And by portraying racism as something that comes from deep within the hearts of white people (so deep that whites often don’t even realise they’re racist), today’s elitist ‘anti-racist’ outlook makes racial divisions appear hopelessly insurmountable.

This comes from Spiked, an online British publication (h/t Mark Brady). Read the whole thing.

I am a little disappointed in myself for not paying closer attention to this trial. Its importance for understanding American society has just become evident to me over the past few days. For what it’s worth, I think the US is still a deeply racist society. I think there are structural and institutional barriers in place today that prohibit most blacks from having the same support networks as other ethnic groups.

I think that the government is responsible for these structural and institutional imbalances, but also that black leaders are responsible for failing to consider (consider) anything other than statist solutions to the problems that afflict American society. I also think that religion is partly to blame. Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams may go to church on Sundays, but you’d never know it based solely on their arguments.

I’ve got a post on peace coming up shortly. Hopefully it’ll be much clearer than this.

Would A Libertarian Military Be More Lethal?

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Politics , ,

This is the question that military attorney David French asks and answers over at National Review:

I’m noticing military libertarianism increasing, not decreasing, among the more politically aware and engaged officers and enlisted […]

Frustration with bureaucracy and deep skepticism of nation-building and foreign entanglements should not be confused with weakness or wishful thinking […] Military libertarians tend to know how savage our enemy is. Moreover, they have no hesitancy to use overwhelming force in defense of the nation. After all, national defense is a core function of government even in a more libertarian state. In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, thoughtful military libertarians tend to advocate something we haven’t really tried in our more than decade-long fight against Islamic jihad — the relatively brief application of truly overwhelming destructive force against identified enemies.

That’s why I wonder if a libertarian military might be more lethal, even on smaller budgets. A trimmed-down bureaucracy, an increased emphasis on the destructive rather than nation-building capabilities of the force under arms, and doctrines designed to inflict maximum (non-nuclear) destruction on enemy forces rather than transforming and democratizing communities — all of this could add up to a more lethal (yet smaller) military.

Indeed. What do you think? I know I’ve made this argument plenty of times before, and it has basically been the standard minarchist line on foreign policy since the Enlightenment, yet somehow this seems to be a new concept for not only libertarians but others as well?

I don’t get it. How have we not been able to communicate this idea more effectively over the years?

I understand that rent seeking plays an important role in our failure, as does the fact that our arguments must compete with demagogues, but I don’t fully see why the libertarian foreign policy argument isn’t more understandable.

One thing that French forgets to mention is that the threat of facing an American military that no longer cares about winning the hearts and minds of its enemies will also contribute to a decline in wars. The inability to connect this implication – that of a more peaceful world – with a leaner, meaner American military force also baffles me.

Here is the relevant reddit thread on the link in question.

Update: Over the next month or so, I’m going to disaggregate a dialogue about foreign policy that I had with Dr Delacroix in 2011. It is different from the earlier dialogue on foreign policy that we held.

The Immigration “Reform” Bill: RINOs, Labor Unions and a Libertarian Alternative

Brandon Christensen Current Events, Links, Politics , , , , , , , ,

Nobody is happy with the current immigration reform package being shoved through Congress at the moment. I don’t know too much about the specifics of the bill, or even about immigration itself (except that immigrants make good drinking buddies), so I’ll just outsource some ideas and arguments I’ve read elsewhere. First up is our very own Jacques Delacroix, an immigrant from France, who writes:

The main objective of the bill is to install in this country an unbeatable Democratic majority for the foreseeable future. The intent is to turn this polity into a one-party system. Everyone assumes, of course, that the electoral benefits of the bill will redound to the Democratic Party. If you don’t believe it, conduct a simple mental experiment: Tell yourself under what circumstances the implementation of the present bill, or of one similar to it, would cause a net increase in the number of Republican voters?

At best, at the very best, the admission of ten million formerly illegal immigrants and of their dependents would have no effect on American electoral politics. There is no scenario whereas it would help the conservative cause.

New immigrants vote Democrat. Immigrants from societies with authoritarian traditions vote Left unless their societies have gone through violent purging convulsions such as happened in “communist” Eastern Europe in the nineties. The idea that the government should leave people alone is a sophisticated one. It does not grow naturally out of the experience of oppression.

Indeed. Is this analysis wrong? If so, feel free to elaborate why you think so in the ‘comments’ section. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. Angelo Codevilla, an immigrant from Italy (and one of Dr Delacroix’s fellow academics), also elaborates on the bill:

Beginning in the 1960s, increasingly dandified native youths shunned agricultural and service jobs. So did the new legal immigrants. This made room for a growing number of laborers from Mexico who came and went freely and seasonally across a basically un-patrolled 2000 mile border. These were not “immigrants,” but rather mostly young men who yearned to get back to their families. They did not come to stay, much less take part in American politics. America came to rely on them to the point that, were a magic wand to eliminate them, whole industries would stop, including California agriculture.

US labor unions however, supported by the Democratic Party, pressed the US government to restrict this illegal flow. While until the 1980s, the US-Mexican border was patrolled by fewer than 1000 agents – nearly all at a handful of crossing points – that number has grown to some 25,000 in our time. As the border began to tighten, making it impossible for the Mexicans to come and go, many brought their families and stayed put in the US between work seasons […]

The controversy over illegal immigration did not touch the core of the immigration problem, namely the Immigration Act of 1965 and our burgeoning welfare system. Nor did it deal with the fact that the illegal flow of Mexicans was really about labor, not immigration, because most Mexican “illegals” had not come with the intention of staying. A well-crafted guest-worker program would give most of them what they want most [emphasis mine – bc].

Hence the “illegal immigration problem” is an artifact of the US political system: The Democratic Party wants the Mexicans as voters, the labor unions want the Mexicans as members rather than as competitors, and the Chamber of Commerce wants them for as low a wage as it can enforce.

Codevilla has much, much more here. Codevilla attributes the US immigration system to the corporate state, but I am unsure if Dr Delacroix feels the same way.

Delacroix’s piece, like Codevilla’s, also brings attention to an alternative guest worker program. Delacroix, in an article for the Independent Review, points out that the guest worker program has worked extremely well in the pre-central bank European Union (I am unsure if this is still the case).

A guest worker program would eliminate the political implications associated with “illegal immigration reform” and, as a result, enhance the economic benefits of seasonal labor flows coming from Mexico. The Cato Institute has recently come out with a policy report detailing how a guest worker program might be implemented. As I’ve stated before, the Cato Institute is one of three think tanks I actually trust (the other two being Brookings and Hoover).

About the time I did grassroots campaigning for a high-end gigolo

muricaderp Politics, Religion

That’s an impertinent way to refer to the Secretary of State. I’d certainly be ashen with embarrassment upon writing such a thing if I were the kind of whinging supplicant who gives a damn about the etiquette of not holding the contemptible in open contempt. If I should be embarrassed by anything, it should be by the fact that a boorish, condescending, socially climbing arriviste with no discernible grasp on American culture beyond Route 128 is my country’s chief diplomat.

Now, is there anything wrong with being a gigolo? That’s a backhanded question to ask, but one that’s still worth asking. It isn’t wrong the way the guys I profiled last night are wrong, so I’ll let other people Godwinize this debate. (And they will. The concern trolls always do.) Getting head-up about some posh bugger having gotten that way by marrying a condiment heiress would normally be a true First World Problem, but John Kerry made his marriage the people’s business by inflicting himself on his nation, as New England’s posh inevitably do. That crowd gravitates to “public service” like flies to a cow pie. Would that they were merely indolent. My position is that the sugar lifestyle in any capacity (momma, daddy or baby) is awfully gauche and in no way admirable. I just feel a certain uneasiness with the idea of paying or being paid for such services in increments longer than a few hours. It comes a bit too close to indenture for my taste. As I see it, sugaring is something that should be done on a woodlot come spring, but needless to say, that takes a different kind of New Englander.

This is not a David Horowitz-style political conversion tale. Indeed, I campaigned for John Kerry’s 2004 presidential bid, and I did so in an inhospitable jurisdiction: Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, whose electorate was voting for Republicans two to one back then. To this day, I see no shame in that game.

There should be shame in it, but I beheld the man’s competition, and I blanched. A lukewarm Nantucket Catholic ketchup gigolo with a penchant for windsurfing and a schmucky trial lawyer with a powerful head of political hair made for an objectively awful slate, one that called into question the sanity of the party nominating them. It would have been brilliant to vote against that rotten duo, had their opponents not been a dry drunk hereditary boy king and his regent Dr. Strangelove.

In the latter case, we were dealing with a party that wasn’t just insane, but also depraved. The Democratic Party was being strangled by myopic, tone-deaf BoBo status whores, the same facepalmably witless cohort that has lately been smearing Edward Snowden for being a high school dropout. As pathetic as that was, the Republican Party was being strangled by a rogue’s gallery of dangerous authoritarians: theocrats, sex scolds, capital punishment fetishists, prison brutality fetishists, boot-in-the-ass jingoists, martial law enthusiasts, ad nauseam. Nor was there any need to be bashful about doing a mix-and-match at the crazy buffet: the more kinds of religious-nationalistic atavism, the better.

As choices of poison went, it was an easy one. This wasn’t so much a choice between the gas chamber and the electric chair as it was between either following the neighborhood serial murderer into his basement or spending the evening being high-hatted by the local gentry at an estate party. George W. Bush strikes me as someone who spent his childhood performing vivisections on cats. It’s a subjective gut feeling: nothing provable, and probably not the case, but I can’t shake it, either. Many Americans, especially ones who vote in the Republican primaries, looked at him and saw a pious Christian. What, you ask, was Jesus of Nazareth’s relationship to the death penalty? Never mind that. W is a Bible-believing man of God who doesn’t make fun of Christians for attending snake-handling churches.

Oh, you say he did make fun of pious Christians behind their backs? It can’t be. David Kuo must have been a red diaper baby liberal atheist to say such a thing.

What the Democrats have is a communication problem. As a rule, the electorate isn’t so much alienated by their policies as by their personas. The opposite is generally true of public attitudes towards the GOP. I suspect that if equally effective communicators from the Left and the Right squared off, the Right would get creamed.

Libertarians have a communication problem, too, albeit of a different sort, mostly of a tin foil hat variety. This is how Pennsylvania ended up with Ken Krawchuk burning a five dollar bill on stage to demonstrate the worthlessness of fiat money, Mike Fisher sanctimoniously accusing him of criminally defacing US currency, and Ed Rendell, a slimeball, as governor.

Again, though, the communication problems bedeviling Democrats go beyond rhetoric. They have style problems, too. As befits every posh New Englander, more than a few of them have problems involving watersports. Maybe the other kind of watersports, too, but definitely the kind openly practiced around Nantucket. Just the other day, John Kerry was caught out on his yacht while shit hit the fan in Egypt. A major but tenuous Arab constitutional republic was disintegrating, and that fool was out fooling around on a rich person’s boat. It must be that when you’re an international gigolo, it’s always time for a cool change.

Notice that Republicans don’t get caught pulling that kind of shit. George W. Bush clearing brush on his ranch is a trustfunder’s form of recreation, but at the most superficial level, the level that counts in American politics, it doesn’t look bad at all. It’s the kind of thing that any red-blooded American man might do, especially if he has a late-model pickup and eleventy thousand acres of personal backyard. Republicans know that this sort of thing really resonates with inattentive goobers, and they do it skillfully. Dick Cheney may shoot people in the face when he goes hunting, but he doesn’t look like a pandering doofus from the city the way John Kerry does in a hunting coat.

Verbally and visually, Republicans know how to stay on message. Authoritarians make great communicators.

Mealy-mouthed moral relativism won’t carry the day. I’m amazed that it even carried Pennsylvania in 2004. Left-liberal, conservative, or libertarian, regardless of the angle of attack, the only way to take on authoritarians is with some principles. There is evil in this world. It exists. Newsday may be too sheepish to print the pictures, but it’s true: SATIN LIVES.

Our closing hymns today, both written by the truest son of the Guyland, will be a celebration of how not to make a political disaster of one’s boating habit and a survey of the activities of the major American political parties. Go in peace, gigolos.

Around the Web: Rumpy Pumpy

muricaderp Liberty, Links, Politics

Just one link tonight, since I have to be onsite at a vineyard in less than five hours for work tomorrow.

Here it is, in all its sharp English glory. What does Mark Steyn find so compelling about an almost unheard-0f British politician named Nigel Farage? Here’s a taste:

The wobbly boozer turned out to be the steady hand at the tiller UKIP needed. He was elected (via proportional representation) to the European Parliament, which for the aspiring Brit politician is Siberia with an expense account. Then, in 2010, Farage became a global Internet sensation by raining on the EU’s most ridiculous parade — the inaugural appearance by the first supposed “President of Europe,” not a popularly elected or even parliamentarily accountable figure but just another backroom deal by the commissars of Eutopia. The new “President” was revealed to be, after the usual Franco-German stitch-up, a fellow from Belgium called Herman van Rompuy. “Who are you?” demanded Farage from his seat in the European Parliament during President van Rompuy’s address thereto. “No one in Europe has ever heard of you.” Which was quite true. One day, Mr. van Rompuy was an obscure Belgian, the next he was an obscure Belgian with a business card reading “President of Europe.” But, as is his wont, Nigel warmed to his theme and told President van Rompuy that he had “the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk.” A few days later, having conferred in their inner sanctum, the Eurocrats ordered Farage to make a public apology. So he did — to low-grade bank clerks for having been so ill-mannered as to compare them to President van Rompuy. He was then fined 2,980 euros (about $4,000) for his impertinence, since when he has referred to the European president as Rumpy-Pumpy, a British synonym for a bloody good shag.

I have to say, I like the guy. Nigel Farage is why we need Englishmen in Congress. But please no Belgians.

I’d round out this piece with some topical porn links or other suitable rudeness (autoerotic asphyxiation figures in Steyn’s piece), but I have  to be up before dawn. I’m the Help these days.

On the plus side of the ledger, the site where I’m working tomorrow is beautiful, and the grapes don’t talk back.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft on Zionism’s Colonial Roots

Brandon Christensen History, Politics , , , , , ,

Today, Benjamin Netanyahu is seen widely as a leader of the Right (although in comparison with Avigdor Lieberman and others who have held office in Israel lately, Netanyahu could look moderate), and Israeli politics have long been categorized in terms of Left and Right, with the Revisionists cast as right-wing no-goodniks. That was so from the 1930s: with the rise of fascism, it became quite common to characterize Jabotinsky as a fascist, a word widely used by his Zionist foes. Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent liberal Jewish American of his day, called Revisionism “a species of fascism,” while David Ben-Gurion—the leader of the Labor Zionists in the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement in British Palestine) and then a founding father and first prime minister of Israel—referred to his foe privately as “Vladimir Hitler,” which didn’t leave much to the imagination. And to be sure, while Jabo called himself a free-market liberal with anarchist leanings, the oratory of Revisionism—“in blood and fire will Judea rise again”—and the visual rhetoric—the Betarim in their brown shirts marching and saluting—had alarming contemporary resonances.

Read the rest, it’s very good throughout.

Internal Revenue Service Even Handed After All

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , , , , , ,

Liberal commentators in all media and even on this blog have been eager to announce that the IRS was an equal opportunity offender between Left and Conservative groups and that, therefore, there is not much of a (new) scandal attached to the IRS.

Peggy Noonan resets the clock in her column of Wall Street Journal of 6/29/13. (All boldings below come from me.)

According to a House Ways and Means Committee source , only seven (7) cases of the 298 cases flagged by the IRS for extra scrutiny appear to represent progressive causes. Not one of the seven was subjected to harassment and abuse. Of the seven, only two were sent follow-up questionnaires after their application for tax-exempt status was received […] And all seven saw their applications approved […]

The “source” was not identified by name. Want to bet it does not exist?

[…] Russel George, the Treasury Inspector General whose audit broke open the scandal answered Rep. Sander Levin’s charge that the audit had ignored the targeting of progressives (by the IRS, bolding and comment mine) […]

The evidence showed conservative groups were singled out by the IRS, not liberal groups. While some progressive groups may have ended up on a BOLO list, the IRS did not target them. We did not find evidence that the criteria you (Rep. Levin), labeled “Progressive” were used by the IRS to select potential political cases during the 2010 to 2013 time frame we audited. One hundred per cent of the groups with “Tea Party,” “Patriot,” or “9/12″ in their names were given extra scrutiny.

Soon, very soon, the Internal Revenue Service will withdraw its apology for misdeeds it gave about two weeks ago precisely for persecuting, treating unfairly conservative-sounding groups. Right?

I wish the liberal deniers on this matter were cunning and twisted rather than something else. It’s easier to deal with conscious dishonesty than with the alternative. Many 1932 Germans were also not twisted, not consciously dishonest; they just would not see the evidence of their eyes.

Snowden and Me

Jacques Delacroix Current Events, Politics , ,

Much unnecessary hoopla about Mr Snowden. Much conspiracy theorizing on conservative radio (but not on Rush Limbaugh).

I think things are pretty much the way they look. He has not worked for the Chinese or anyone. Not much that is very new has been revealed. The new things for some people on this blog is that Mr Obama is just as bad (OK, almost as bad ) as Mr Bush. N. S. !

Mr Snowden is almost certainly not guilty of spying: You have to spy for somebody or for something.

Personally, I think he is probably guilty of violating some contract or other that he signed. That’s worth a year in Club Fed with Bernie (what’s his name again?)

Personally, I did not like the blank surveillance cover and the data mining before. I still don’t. I don’t like big government and I don’t like big government doing big things. What’s so hard to understand?

There is one thing I learned again that  I already knew: College is overrated. Mr Snowden, the high-school dropout was earning $200,00 a year, in Hawaii. Of course, he was working for the Fed. Government.

Update: Booz -Allen says that no, he must be bragging, it was only $120,000. That’s before bonuses, of course.

Around the web: other civil libertarian perspectives on privacy

muricaderp Links, Politics , , , ,

1) Scroll back through Umair Haque’s Twitter feed to June 10 for a series of salty, pointed critiques of David Brooks’ recent hatchet job-cum-subsidiarity Jeremiad.

2) Three essays from Jacob Bacharach:

A) “Peeping Thomism,” an accidentally timely call for, among other things, hiring managers to grow up and cut out their censoriousness about stuff that their applicants post on social media: “But, says the Director of Human Resources and the Career Counselor, social media is public; you’re putting it out there. Yes, well, then I’m sure you won’t mind if I join you guys at happy hour with this flip-cam and a stenographer. Privacy isn’t the responsibility of individuals to squirrel away secrets; it’s the decency of individuals to leave other’s lives alone.”

B) A calm but firm call for his own demographic to stop falsely denigrating the less educated (Bacharach is a novelist by trade).

C) On David Brooks, his “conservatism,” and the amazing entitlement of certain posh people.

3) From Karen Garcia, a week-in-review summary of the PRISM bombshell. Garcia is a top-notch blogger whose archives I’ve been combing since discovering a link in one of her comments on Brooks’ “unmediated man” column. Other essays especially worth reading, on tangential but related topics, include her back story about Cornwall-on-Hudson homeboy David Petraeus and her evisceration of the covert classism of the Obamas’ 2012 Christmas message to the nation.

Impeach James Clapper

muricaderp Politics , , ,

It’s very simple. The Director of National Intelligence needs to go. He lied to Congress about the NSA’s totalitarian PRISM program. That’s as serious and subversive a lie as can be told to Congress about any topic. It’s exactly the kind of official misconduct that the impeachment process was established to check and punish.

I encourage those of you who agree that Clapper should be impeached to reblog what I’ve written, either verbatim or modified as you see fit. So far, there has been a strong and encouraging grassroots response to the White House petition to pardon Edward Snowden, a fair amount of it from latent civil libertarians who have been shocked into engagement by the egregiousness of what Snowden has exposed. A campaign to impeach Clapper, whom Snowden’s leaks have exposed as a liar, would dovetail perfectly with the one to pardon Snowden. Clapper has already provoked a number of members of Congress with his lie about PRISM, so timely pressure from constituents could be what it takes either to pressure him out of office or to get him formally removed.

A couple of side notes on the official reaction to PRISM (the metadata, if you will):

1) Rudy Giuliani offered a cretinously jingoistic defense of Clapper in an interview with Greta Van Susteren last night (6/11), premised largely on Clapper’s distinguished service as a military officer, the underlying ethics being that we dasn’t criticize the troops. It’s worth noting that by that standard Edward Snowden would also be shielded from all criticism, although perhaps less fully shielded since Clapper had the patriotism not to truncate his military career by breaking both legs in a special forces training accident. It goes without saying, but shouldn’t, that one doesn’t hear this sort of defense offered on Bradley Manning’s behalf, and not just because he’s a young grunt. Nor does one hear it made in defense of Robert Bales or Nidal Hasan, except perhaps by their defense attorneys, because it would sound absolutely absurd to say such a thing about someone under court-martial for mass murder. I submit that it’s no less absurd or evil when said about a spook who has been caught lying to Congress about a totalitarian eavesdropping program.

The interview got weirder than that. When Van Susteren confronted Giuliani with a chronology of Clapper’s evasions, Giuliani suddenly changed tack and accused Clapper of being a loose cannon for not having formulaically stated that he could not answer the question or offered to answer it in closed-door session. By mayoral fiat, an esteemed officer and gentleman was turned into a blithering fool who didn’t know when to keep his mouth shut. This makes the notion of Giuliani as some sort of mobster at least look plausible.

2) This vile mashup of pop psychology, pop sociology, generational smears, class snobbery, and milquetoast despotism is bad even by David Brooks’ usual standards.