Compare: Conservative rationalism v. Progressive emotionalism

MAY 24, 2017 BY BOOKWORM 4 COMMENTS

A Victor Davis Hanson article and a Progressives’ fact-free attack text perfectly offset Conservative rationalism against Progressive emotionalism.

The Progressive argument

This blog’s motto is “conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.” One of these days, I’ll get around to changing the word “liberals” to the word “Progressives,” so that my motto is completely accurate. Otherwise, I think it’s correct in all respects.

Certainly Trump’s election has highlighted the vast difference between Right and Left, with the former hewing to what I call Conservative rationalism and the latter giving themselves over completely to Progressive Emotionalism. Two things that I saw yesterday are exemplify these differences.

The first thing that I saw yesterday was Victor Davis Hanson’s really extraordinary article entitled “Regime Change By Any Other Name?” Hanson offers five different, but interrelated, views of America’s political scene since 2008. He opens by identifying all of the horrible, and provably fake, accusations leveled against Trump. Here are just a few of the many falsehoods he calls out:

Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election.

There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton.

Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers.

Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration.

Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as incapable of properly vetting travelers to the U.S.

The first lady did not work for an elite escort or prostitute service. She never said that she and young Barron Trump would not be moving to the White House. Barron does not have autism.

The multitude of fake news stories Hanson identifies make a compelling, logical case that Trump is on the receiving end of an exceptionally vicious smear campaign. Having established this fact, Hanson moves to the second part of his essay, in which he offers one jam-packed paragraph identifying everything the media has ignored in its rush to lead with a false Trump narrative:

Fake news crowds out real news. Here is what we do not read much about: North Korea, long appeased, could well send missiles against our allies, perhaps even with nuclear payloads. Afghanistan is at a crux and will either implode or need more American troops. China’s role is in the balance, and it may or may not help defang North Korea. The greatest tax- and health-reform packages in years are now in the hands of Congress. Executive orders have revolutionized the domestic energy industry and achieved a stunning and historic reduction in illegal immigration. The stock market is soaring, employment is up, and confidence in the economy has returned. Wall Street seems to dip only on talk of impeaching Donald Trump.

Hanson had written the article before the Muslim terrorist attack in Manchester. Had the attack come earlier, he could have added to the list the media’s disinterest in yet another Muslim terrorist attack. All that the talking heads wanted to talk about was Trump.

Watching and reading today’s news, it’s impossible to deny that the media has abandoned its old-fashioned, self-identified task of providing “all the news that’s fit to print” — unless, of course, today’s media has determined that the only things newsworthy are lies about the President of the United States.

The media hasn’t limited itself to ignoring or downplaying non-Trump stories. After valiantly shoving aside any negative stories that occurred during Obama’s presidency, many of which had their roots in his subordinates’ misbehavior, the media during his post-presidential years is convincing itself (and anyone who will listen) that none of those bad things ever happened on his watch. What bad things? These bad things:

And here is what no longer troubles us at all. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama used back channels to communicate flexibility to the Iranians (as in the later assurance he gave, on a hot mic, to the Russians), which may have helped undermine the ongoing Bush-administration negotiations with Iran.

Hillary Clinton set up an illegal server, distributed classified information in an illegal and unsecured fashion, lied about it, and destroyed thousands of e-mails central to an investigation — and got off without an indictment.

In the 2016 election, the head of the DNC conspired to massage the debates and help swing the nomination to the Clinton campaign.

The prior attorney general of the United State met with the spouse of a presidential candidate under investigation, in a stealthy conversation on an airport tarmac, did not inform officials of that meeting until the get-together was discovered by a reporter, semi-recused herself under pressure only to turn over her prosecutorial discretion to the head of the FBI, in a fashion that was both improper and perhaps unconstitutional.

We do not hear how exactly Russian interests at Uranium One obtained market control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium holdings, or the connections between Uranium One and their prior multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, or that the Podesta Group had numerous financial dealings with Russian interests, or that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 from Russian oligarchic interests while his wife was secretary of state — ten times more than what Michael Flynn was alleged to have received.

And that’s only half of Hanson’s indictment against the Obama administration. Only someone blindly determined to see no evil when it comes to Obama can ignore undisputed facts showing that there was a vast amount of truly illegal, as well as morally reprehensible, activity during his presidency.

Hanson’s an honest broker, so he acknowledges that Trump does not always help his own cause. Being honest, though, almost means admitting that, while Trump make lack finesse, he has not done anything worse than past presidents have done, nor has any evidence emerged showing him engaged in or suborning illegal acts. As often as not, Trump’s done a great deal less in the way of damage and dishonesty than Obama did:

Of course, a media-targeted Donald Trump is weaponizing his enemies by his characteristic blunderbuss approach in interviews. Of course, in anger and without political experience, he tweets too much and says things better left unsaid. Of course, at 70, he has an in-your-face character that is unlike any other president’s and also unlikely to change. He mixes freely truth, rumor, and innuendo.

And of course his superb appointments and Reaganesque approach to foreign affairs, energy production, tax reform, and deregulation are all threatened by his own team’s inability to deal with a dishonest and largely corrupt Washington and New York media.

So Trump boasted and talked trash with the Russians? Terrible and stupid, no doubt. Worse than what Franklin Roosevelt communicated to Winston Churchill about the mass-murdering Stalin? (“I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks, he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”) Was Trump more Machiavellian than was Obama, with his “it’s important for him to give me space” requests to Vladimir Putin when he met President Medvedev before the 2012 election and apparently banked his reset policy on his ability to get away with misinforming the public?

It’s against this purely factual background — a vulgar, explosive president who has done nothing wrong; who’s been the target of an unprecedented media smear campaign; and who follows on the heels of a president who flouted the law at all turns, secure in the knowledge that the media would protect him — that Hanson begins his indictment of the larger “resistance,” the one that extends beyond the media to the political class and the ordinary Progressive citizen:

The “Resistance” peddled the yarn that the election tabulations were electronically rigged; then it was an appeal to electors not to do their constitutional duties; then it was reduced to street theater and demonstrations; then it turned to desperate deep-state leaks and media blitzes; now it’s mere hysteria.

The effort to remove the president is conducted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the wire services, and the major networks. And we have seen nothing like it in our time. In the last six months, Americans have been told quite falsely so many untruths about the Trump administration by their news agencies that for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a media as we once knew it.

Journalists are not shy about their prejudices. In some cases — James Rutenberg, Jorge Ramos, and Christiane Amanpour — they have admitted their view that the duty of the new media in the era of Trump is not to stay disinterested, but to become political opponents. Some have been exposed as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to prevent Trump’s election victory; they tried to keep those efforts secret because they knew what they were doing was unethical and self-interested.

A second effort to achieve a Trump removal is conducted by pop-culture celebrities — who make the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush furor of 2003 now look mild. This opposition is waged in a way that would have ruined careers if directed at Barack Obama.

Madonna dreams on Inauguration Day of blowing up the White House. Don Cheadle wanted Trump to die in grease fire. Snoop Dogg videotapes his mock execution of a Trump lookalike. Martha Stewart poses flipping the finger to a picture of Trump while flashing the Victory sign to a photo of the felon and former pimp Snoop Dogg. Icon Robert De Niro said eloquently of Trump: “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullsh** artist.”

The efforts to demonize and thus delegitimize and so emasculate Trump have reached sick new heights.

As before, that’s just a half of the list of undisputed facts Hanson offers regarding a resistance that is, for the most part, substantively meaningless, but that has a single-minded, deadly intent to destroy a duly elected president. No wonder Trump said, in all honesty, that no president (certainly no modern president, including Reagan or Bush) has been the subject of such unrelenting attacks from his political opposition.

And then there’s Obama himself. Early in his article (see above), Hanson identified malicious, illegal acts committed by those under Obama’s command and control. That’s not all that happened in the last eight years, though. Obama himself was guilty of myriad actions that were dishonest, ineffective, vicious, and otherwise deserving of public and media scorn — but the media and a lock-step Democrat party always protected him:

I thought — and so wrote — that Barack Obama subverted the Constitution when he refused to enforce federal laws concerning the ACA mandate, illegal immigration, and contractual provisions of the Chrysler bankruptcy.

I felt Obama, as a candidate and a president-elect, was unethically signaling both the Russians and the Iranians through back channels that he would soon be flexible, even as George Bush was conducting foreign policy as our president.

I thought President Obama had no constitutional right to strong-arm Boeing, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the small Gibson Guitar company. His administration flat-out lied about the Benghazi catastrophe, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the Iran Deal, and the chemical-weapons depots of Bashar al-Assad.

The Obama administration endangered U.S. security by yanking peacekeepers out of Iraq for a cheap campaign talking point, by destroying Libya without a follow-up plan, by setting faux red lines and deadlines, by allowing China to create an artificial island base to adjudicate trans-Pacific sea traffic, by appeasing and resetting relations with Vladimir Putin, and by turning a blind eye to North Korean stepped-up aggression. When the president of the United States promises the Russians that he will be more flexible after an election, the message is that he soon plans to do things that, if known, would likely cost him a victory with the American voters.

I’ve recited the structure Hanson used for his article and included select quotations. However, you really must read the entire thing to understand how a classically-trained logician with complete mastery over relevant facts, defends an imperfect, but wrongly beleaguered political iconoclast, and politely, but savagely indicts an entire Leftist political class that has rotted over the last eight years from the top down. Fact, logic, conclusions. . . . It’s all there.

And then. . . .  And then there’s the incoherent rage attack visited upon a conservative friend of mine via a series of text messages from one of the parents in his children’s community. On the emotional, navel-gazing scale, it’s got it all: rage, sarcasm, vituperation, ad hominem attacks, hysteria, and maudlin paranoia. And on the fact and logic scale, it’s got . . . nothing. Absolutely nothing. This is pure Progressive emotionalism on open display. (I’ve deleted all personal identifying information, but otherwise, this is the text exchange as it played out in real time.):

There’s your resistance, which is really nothing more than one long, drawn-out primal scream. It’s hard to find a better example of the Progressive emotionalism that drives so much of our politics today.

We ignore this primal, angry Progressive emotionalism at our peril, though. The logical person behaves logically and, usually, non-violently, as well as legally. The angry hysteric, responding solely to his limbic system, is terribly dangerous. He is willing to tear down the house to kill a fly.

Photo credit: Scream, by Crosa. Creative Commons license; some rights reserved.

An Optimistic U.S. Foreign Policy - VDH

An Optimistic U.S. Foreign Policy

by Victor Davis Hanson

Thursday, May 18, 2017

Image credit: 

Barbara Kelley

History teaches us that during war and international crises, just when things were looking most grim, they were oftentimes already getting better.

Consider the dark days of World War II. Seventy-five years ago, 1942 started out as an awful year. The United States and the British were still reeling from the December 1941 Japanese surprise attacks on Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, and Malaysia. Singapore would fall in February 1942 in an ignominious defeat; and the American bastion at Corregidor surrendered in May.

For the first four months of the war, Japan had run wild. Or as two Japanese analysts, Masatake Okuymiya and Jiro Horikoshi, put it: “Japan took more territory over a greater area than any country in history and did not lose a single ship.” By June, the Japanese Empire stretched from the Aleutian Islands to the Indian Ocean, and from Wake Island to the Russian-Manchurian border—the most expansive Asian Empire in world history.

Things were no better for the Allies in the European theater. In August 1942, German soldiers climbed Mt. Elbrus, the highest mountain in the Caucasus, as the German army neared the shores of the Caspian Sea, and one of the richest oil fields in the world. The vast Third Reich stretched from the English Channel to the Volga River and from the Arctic Circle southward to the Sahara by the summer of 1942.

The British base at Tobruk, in Libya, fell on June 20, 1942. Field Marshall Erwin Rommel gained a wealth of British supplies, crossed the Egyptian border, and headed eastward to Alexandria and the Suez Canal. German U-boat commanders called the initial months of 1942 the “Second Happy Time” as they sank over 600 Allied ships—the first Happy Time occurring in 1940. Many American freighters were torpedoed just miles off the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Miami. Allied bombers, especially the Americans, were increasingly stymied over Germany—and, by late 1942, they were suffering unsustainable losses without inflicting significant damage on German industry.

For a brief moment in mid-1942, the Allies seemed likely to lose the war.

And then, abruptly the nightmare vanished.

Enormous industrial and armament production in Britain, the Soviet Union, and America kicked in and flooded the global fronts with planes, ships, tanks, and guns. Anglo-American lend-lease help came just in time to a reeling Soviet Union; everything from fur boots to locomotives were soon in abundance.

The American Navy fought the Japanese to a standstill at the Battle of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and crushed the Japanese carrier fleet a month later at the Battle of Midway (June 4-7). The huge German Sixth Army by late 1942 was stalled and then surrounded at Stalingrad. At the second Battle of El Alamein (October 23-November 11, 1942), British General Bernard Montgomery stopped the Afrika Korps and forced back Rommel’s tattered forces in what would become one of the largest German retreats in history.

By late 1942, intercepted German naval codes, improved British sonar, more Allied convoys, and better air and sea patrols would frustrate the U-boat effort for good and lead to unsustainable German submarine losses. And at the end of 1942, there was hope that huge influxes of new model Allied bombers, new fighter escorts, and improved tactics would revive strategic bombing over Germany.

In other words, 75 years ago, World War II abruptly changed momentum even as the Allies had seemed to be fated to lose.

Such abrupt and unanticipated changes are again common in wars—and in the fates of nations.

A century ago this year, World War I seemed lost for the Allied powers. After suffering crushing casualties at the Somme and Verdun the prior year, the British and French armies were about to crumble. In early 1917, America remained isolationist. By November, the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin took power in Russia, signed a humiliating armistice with Germany and its allies, and refocused on the Russian civil war. This, in theory, freed hundreds of thousands of German soldiers to head to the Western Front to finish off the battered French and British.

But by the end of the year, everything quite suddenly began to change—just as it had in 1942 during World War II. In April 1917, the U.S. declared war on Germany and its allies. By late 1917, over 100,000 U.S. doughboys had arrived to plug up holes in the reeling French and British line—the vanguard of some 2 million troops who would cumulatively land in France and Belgium by November 1918.

Inexplicably, Germany kept a million men in the east to guard its newly won spoils in a defeated Russia, at the very moment they were most needed on the Western Front. A new Allied command troika of British General Douglas Haig, French General Ferdinand Foch, and American General John Pershing learned from past blunders to forge new effective ground strategies. Vast allied industrial output of planes, newly invented tanks, and artillery began to dwarf German production. In short, just when German thought it had almost won the war in December 1917, events were already in play to ensure that it would lose it in less than a year.

Such hinges of fate are common. The arrival of General Matthew Ridgway in December 1950 to Korea saved what was generally acknowledged as a lost Korean War. David Petraeus’s surge of 2007-2008—initially written off as hopeless or counterproductive—broke the back of al Qaeda in Iraq within months and led to relative peacefulness, until the abrupt American withdrawal of 2011. By 1979, an ascendant Soviet Union—invading Afghanistan, threatening Western Europe, funding uprisings in Central America—seemed to have the edge in the Cold War. Yet by 1981, Ronald Reagan was already on his way to ensuring a Soviet implosion.

In sum, nothing is more unpredictable and volatile than war, international tensions, and foreign affairs. Often perceived wisdom, media consensus, and punditry are wrong or out of date, and miss ongoing insidious and subtle undercurrents of change that can abruptly turn the tide of events.

Something like that is now occurring on the world stage. During eight years of a lead-from-behind recessional, America created a number of dangerous vacuums that invited in foreign-power adventurism.

The Iran deal of 2015—as we are now learning from the leaked information—green-lighted the Iranian efforts to obtain not just nuclear weapons, but also sophisticated ballistic missiles and a veritable hegemony in the Persian Gulf. The Russia reset empowered Vladimir Putin to absorb some of Russia’s neighbors and to worm its way back into the Middle East. China was periodically encouraging an unhinged and nuclear North Korea to terrify its Western rivals, even as it built artificial island bases in the South China Sea to adjudicate one-quarter of the world’s shipping. The savage war of ISIS against Bashar Assad and his Iranian backers led to genocide in Syria.

In sum, U.S. defense cuts and a passive foreign policy emboldened American enemies and disheartened our allies to the point where wars broke out on several fronts. Yet America’s retreat was predicated on choices, not on fate. Indeed, America is now reasserting its past role as a dominant, deterring force on the international stage.

In just the last 100 days, the storm clouds have broken a bit. Tough talk with China on trade abuses may persuade Beijing that it would be wise to help the U.S. corral North Korea, while America assembles a well-armed alliance of Japan and South Korea to deter Pyongyang. The bombing of a few of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s air assets, with promises of possibly more action to come, could deter him from further nerve gas attacks. The dropping of a huge MOAB (Massive Ordnance Air Blast) bomb on an underground ISIS lair in Afghanistan has startled U.S. enemies who rely on such subterranean sanctuaries. To America’s enemies, the signal is clear: U.S. action is not necessarily predictable, measured, or proportionate.

Many of these developments reflect a sharp ideological upheaval in foreign policy leadership. The prior Obama national security team of Ash Carter, John Kerry, Susan Rice, and Ben Rhodes has been replaced by General H.R. McMaster (national security advisor), Rex Tillerton (ex-Exxon CEO and now Secretary of State), General James Mattis (Secretary of Defense), and General John Kelly (Homeland Security). None of these men is a professional diplomat or former politician. Instead, they come to office either from the military or private enterprise. None is overtly political; all are widely esteemed for succeeding in cutthroat military and commercial arenas.

The new national security team seems to believe in the value of soft power as did their predecessors—but with a fundamental difference: they know that diplomatic, political, and economic strategies are not effective without a credible threat of resorting to overwhelming military force. In this regard, Trump is slowly restoring the defense budget that Obama had slashed, while sounding unpredictable rather than compliant.

Allies and enemies have made the necessary adjustments as the United States becomes—to paraphrase the dictum of the Roman Republican general Lucius Cornelius Sulla during the wars of the Republic—no better friend and no worse enemy. If this new deterrent foreign policy is coupled with changes in U.S. regulatory and tax policies and expanded energy production—and if these measures help America achieve a three percent growth rate in annual GDP—then all sorts of supposedly intractable dilemmas and tensions may find resolution.

In the past, it was not necessarily in China’s perceived interest to help an economically stagnant, strategically predictable, and politically diffident United States to deal with North Korea—nor Russia’s to help convince Iran and Syria to follow international norms. But it may now prove both wise and useful for China and Russia to cooperate—if America is economically robust, appears somewhat dangerous, is unapologetic about its past and future, and does not loudly lecture its rivals about their supposed moral failings while losing their respect.

In that case, the storm clouds abroad will clear as abruptly as they have so often in the past during the world’s darkest moments

San Francisco's Higher Minimum Wage Costing Hundreds of Jobs

San Francisco's Higher Minimum Wage Costing Hundreds of Jobs

 

BY RICK MORAN MAY 22, 2017

CHAT 199 COMMENTS

  

Here's one from our "Least Surprising News of the Day" file. San Francisco raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour by July 1, 2018. After immediately going up to $13 an hour when the ordinance was passed in 2016, the wage is set to rise to $14 an hour July 1, 2017, before settling on the $15 an hour target next year.

The result? Well, you can guess the result.

The Daily Wire:

In the winter of 2016-17, 64 restaurants around the Bay Area have closed. And these weren’t your garden-variety restaurants that were parts of national chains; they closed all over the area, from Berkeley to Hayes Valley to Oakland to the Embarcadero to Inner Richmond to the Marina to the financial district.

But that possibility didn’t matter to the groups fighting for a wage hike, including “Fight for 15,” which stated, “We’re robbed on the job by our employers looking to cut corners. And it’s not like our employers are struggling — these are multi-billion dollar corporations.”

In April, the Harvard Business School, released a study that examined restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area between 2008 and 2016 titled, “Survival of the Fittest: The Impact of the Minimum Wage on Firm Exit.”  The study posited that a $1 increase in the minimum wage led to a roughly 14% increase in the likelihood of a median 3.5 star restaurant closing. The study concluded that over the next two years, San Francisco’s restaurant industry would shrink, meaning the workers would lose jobs.

Shhh. Don’t tell that to the restaurant workers. Let them find out for themselves.

There is no doubt that driving the minimum wage up to $15 an hour will cause thousands of restaurants to close. But the problem with blaming the rising wage on the 64 restaurants that closed is that it's impossible to tell how many would have closed regardless of what the minimum wage was.

Up to 90% of all restaurants opening this year will fail within three years. That's the economics of the business and a minimum wage won't change that. Of course, a $15 minimum wage makes it harder to succeed, but as in all things, if you build a better mousetrap, you're more than likely to end up a winner.

SPONSORED

The high minimum wage affects restaurants on the margin -- those already losing money or barely squeaking by. How many of those would eventually have succeeded without the wage hike, with success being measured by the ability of the business to stay open for five years or more?  Impossible to say.

That Harvard study appears to take the factors above into consideration, so at least nine of those 64 restaurants were forced to close because of the higher wage. But no study can predict how many restaurants won't even open because of the high minimum wage. An established business can get away with raising prices to a certain extent as well as cutting staff. But how many potential restaurant owners are looking at the numbers and changing their minds? Again, we'll never know.

Unions have been pushing the "15 or Fight" movement because the higher minimum wage means higher wages for their members in the trades and elsewhere. Few restaurant workers are unionized, so unions don't care if those workers lose their jobs.

Have the fast food workers and others been misled? They are hardly innocent. You can bet they are well aware that many jobs are going to be lost but figure it won't happen to them.

They are hoping that by feeding the crocodile, it will eat them last.

Regime Change by Any Other Name? - VDH

 Regime Change by Any Other Name?  

Truth or consequences? Obama skated for far worse misdeeds. Election machines in three states were not hacked to give Donald Trump the election. There was never a serious post-election movement of electors to defy their constitutional duties and vote for Hillary Clinton. Nor, once Trump was elected, did transgendered people begin killing themselves in alarming numbers. Nor were there mass resignations at the State Department upon his inauguration. Nor did Donald Trump seek an order to “ban all Muslims” from entering the U.S. Instead, he temporarily sought a suspension in visas for everyone, regardless of religion, from seven Middle Eastern states that the Obama administration had earlier identified as incapable of properly vetting travelers to the U.S. The first lady did not work for an elite escort or prostitute service. She never said that she and young Barron Trump would not be moving to the White House. Barron does not have autism. Trump’s father never ran racist ads as a supposed candidate in a purported political campaign. Kellyanne Conway denies that in a private conversation between segments on MSNBC, she privately remarked to hosts that she had to take a shower after working for Trump. Donald Trump never suggested to the Mexican president that the U.S. was going to invade Mexico. Nor did Trump plan to mobilize the National Guard to send back illegal aliens. He did not remove a Martin Luther King bust from the White House. There was no evidence that he ever promised to ease Russian sanctions (much less that he promised the Russians he would be “flexible” after he was elected). He did not short the FBI of resources to conduct an investigation into supposed Russian collusion. He did not go to Moscow and watch prostitutes in his bed urinate where Barack Obama had previously slept. His deputy attorney general did not threaten to resign over the Comey firing. We have no idea whether Trump really gets two scoops of ice cream while limiting his guests to one. And we have no idea whether Trump really gets two scoops of ice cream while limiting his guests to one, or pads around in a bathrobe in the early evening, or cannot find the light switch in the White house. Yet all that is what daily we hear and read. Meanwhile . . .  Fake news crowds out real news. Here is what we do not read much about: North Korea, long appeased, could well send missiles against our allies, perhaps even with nuclear payloads. Afghanistan is at a crux and will either implode or need more American troops. China’s role is in the balance, and it may or may not help defang North Korea. The greatest tax- and health-reform packages in years are now in the hands of Congress. Executive orders have revolutionized the domestic energy industry and achieved a stunning and historic reduction in illegal immigration. The stock market is soaring, employment is up, and confidence in the economy has returned. Wall Street seems to dip only on talk of impeaching Donald Trump. Commensurate Worry? And here is what no longer troubles us at all. In 2008, candidate Barack Obama used back channels to communicate flexibility to the Iranians (as in the later assurance he gave, on a hot mic, to the Russians), which may have helped undermine the ongoing Bush-administration negotiations with Iran. Hillary Clinton set up an illegal server, distributed classified information in an illegal and unsecured fashion, lied about it, and destroyed thousands of e-mails central to an investigation — and got off without an indictment. In the 2016 election, the head of the DNC conspired to massage the debates and help swing the nomination to the Clinton campaign. The prior attorney general of the United State met with the spouse of a presidential candidate under investigation, in a stealthy conversation on an airport tarmac, did not inform officials of that meeting until the get-together was discovered by a reporter, semi-recused herself under pressure only to turn over her prosecutorial discretion to the head of the FBI, in a fashion that was both improper and perhaps unconstitutional. We do not hear how exactly Russian interests at Uranium One obtained market control over 20 percent of U.S. uranium holdings, or the connections between Uranium One and their prior multimillion-dollar donations to the Clinton Foundation, or that the Podesta Group had numerous financial dealings with Russian interests, or that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in 2010 from Russian oligarchic interests while his wife was secretary of state — ten times more than what Michael Flynn was alleged to have received. We know now that many of the elements of the Iran Deal, the most important foreign-policy decision in the last 20 years, were designed to circumvent Senate ratification and hinged on secret ancillary agreements. We know now that many of the elements of the Iran Deal, the most important foreign-policy decision in the last 20 years, were designed to circumvent Senate ratification and hinged on secret ancillary agreements. We know that unnamed intelligence officials during the Obama administration surveilled likely political opponents, unmasked their identities, leaked them to the press, either under the assumption that such skullduggery would not surface, or on the pretext that such monitoring was ordinary and involved national security. We know that Obama’s director of National Intelligence lied under oath to Congress without ramifications. We know that a high IRS official subverted her duties for political purposes in a manner intended to alter the 2012 campaign, took the Fifth Amendment, refuses to testify further before Congress, and faces no consequences other than a plush, taxpayer-funded retirement. Trump Agonistes Of course, a media-targeted Donald Trump is weaponizing his enemies by his characteristic blunderbuss approach in interviews. Of course, in anger and without political experience, he tweets too much and says things better left unsaid. Of course, at 70, he has an in-your-face character that is unlike any other president’s and also unlikely to change. He mixes freely truth, rumor, and innuendo.  And of course his superb appointments and Reaganesque approach to foreign affairs, energy production, tax reform, and deregulation are all threatened by his own team’s inability to deal with a dishonest and largely corrupt Washington and New York media. So Trump boasted and talked trash with the Russians? Terrible and stupid, no doubt. Worse than what Franklin Roosevelt communicated to Winston Churchill about the mass-murdering Stalin? (“I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He thinks, he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.”) Was Trump more Machiavellian than was Obama, with his “it’s important for him to give me space” requests to Vladimir Putin when he met President Medvedev before the 2012 election and apparently banked his reset policy on his ability to get away with misinforming the public? All that said, none of the above is a reason to impeach, or remove on medical grounds, an elected president, or to suggest that he resign less than four months into office. Yet we hear exactly that not only from the progressive, in-the-street Left, but from many of the Never Trump Right. In some sense, we are watching a sort of mass hysteria characteristic of pet-rock or hula-hoop democracy. (It reminds one not so much of the mob that went after Socrates –Trump is no Socrates — but of the mad fury of the French Revolution or the high-water point of the 1950s John Birch movement) The ‘Resistance’ The “Resistance” peddled the yarn that the election tabulations were electronically rigged; then it was an appeal to electors not to do their constitutional duties; then it was reduced to street theater and demonstrations; then it turned to desperate deep-state leaks and media blitzes; now it’s mere hysteria. The effort to remove the president is conducted by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the wire services, and the major networks. And we have seen nothing like it in our time. In the last six months, Americans have been told quite falsely so many untruths about the Trump administration by their news agencies that for all practical purposes, there is no such thing as a media as we once knew it. Journalists are not shy about their prejudices. In some cases — James Rutenberg, Jorge Ramos, and Christiane Amanpour — they have admitted their view that the duty of the new media in the era of Trump is not to stay disinterested, but to become political opponents. Some have been exposed as colluding with Hillary Clinton’s campaign in an effort to prevent Trump’s election victory; they tried to keep those efforts secret because they knew what they were doing was unethical and self-interested. A second effort to achieve a Trump removal is conducted by pop-culture celebrities — who make the Dixie Chicks’ anti-Bush furor of 2003 now look mild. This opposition is waged in a way that would have ruined careers if directed at Barack Obama. Madonna dreams on Inauguration Day of blowing up the White House. Don Cheadle wanted Trump to die in grease fire. Snoop Dogg videotapes his mock execution of a Trump lookalike. Martha Stewart poses flipping the finger to a picture of Trump while flashing the Victory sign to a photo of the felon and former pimp Snoop Dogg. Icon Robert De Niro said eloquently of Trump: “He’s a punk, he’s a dog, he’s a pig, he’s a con, he’s a bullsh** artist.” The efforts to demonize and thus delegitimize and so emasculate Trump have reached sick new heights. On cable television, Bill Maher jokes that Trump’s daughter fellates her father; on national television, Steven Colbert laughs that Trump fellates Vladimir Putin. Mutatis mutandis: Both would have been fired for suggesting the same about the Obama first family. Ad nauseam Trump is compared to Hitler by the likes of Ashley Judd and Chris Matthews. Hillary Clinton announces she is part of the “Resistance,” a reference supposedly to the French maquis who sought to ambush Vichy officials and SS patrols during the Nazi occupation of France. The Democratic party — now bereft of political control in most state legislatures and governorships, as well as in the Senate, the House, the presidency and the Supreme Court — has modeled its opposition on 1960s street theater. More than 60 congressional representatives refused to go to the Inauguration. Some call for Trump’s impeachment; others refuse to hold hearings, block nomination appointments, and demand special prosecutors. The California head of the party leads group chants of “F*** Trump” with extended middle fingers. The Never Trump right has gone from criticism to outright hysteria and is now calling for impeachment or removal on medical incapacity. The subtext of these latest demands is that a Mike Pence — a wonderful man who did not run for president and would never have been elected if he had run — might assume the presidency and return the Republican party to its former supposedly sober and judicious custodians who, after the proper catharsis, might resume their Washington–New York stewardship of the GOP. For these Trump critics, a defeat along the lines of 2008 and 2016 is far preferable to a 2016 victory. Being praised for being good losers is always preferable to being ostracized for being poor winners. The Obama Standard I thought — and so wrote — that Barack Obama subverted the Constitution when he refused to enforce federal laws concerning the ACA mandate, illegal immigration, and contractual provisions of the Chrysler bankruptcy. I felt Obama, as a candidate and a president-elect, was unethically signaling both the Russians and the Iranians through back channels that he would soon be flexible, even as George Bush was conducting foreign policy as our president. I thought President Obama had no constitutional right to strong-arm Boeing, the Little Sisters of the Poor, or the small Gibson Guitar company. His administration flat-out lied about the Benghazi catastrophe, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, the Iran Deal, and the chemical-weapons depots of Bashar al-Assad. The Obama administration endangered U.S. security by yanking peacekeepers out of Iraq for a cheap campaign talking point, by destroying Libya without a follow-up plan, by setting faux red lines and deadlines, by allowing China to create an artificial island base to adjudicate trans-Pacific sea traffic, by appeasing and resetting relations with Vladimir Putin, and by turning a blind eye to North Korean stepped-up aggression. When the president of the United States promises the Russians that he will be more flexible after an election, the message is that he soon plans to do things that, if known, would likely cost him a victory with the American voters. Obama high-fived the bin Laden raid to the extent of revealing classified protocols and turning over to pet reporters and Hollywood filmmakers some of the trove of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda communications. Obama high-fived the bin Laden raid to the extent of revealing classified protocols and turning over to pet reporters and Hollywood filmmakers some of the trove of bin Laden’s al-Qaeda communications, in hopes of advancing party-line narratives. His administration helped ruin the reputations of the IRS and the VA. His DOJ went after an obscure video maker and the journalist Dinesh D’Souza largely for reasons of political reprisal and deterrence. His team ordered illegal surveillance of AP reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen; it may well have surveilled and unmasked political opponents and leaked their names to the media. Obama invited a felon with a parole ankle bracelet into the White House and praised a visiting rapper whose latest album cover celebrated the murder of a white judge, whose corpse was being toasted over by rappers. Obama was degreed but not educated; he could not pronounce “corpsmen,” had no idea how many states there were in the Union, and thought Hawaii was in Asia and the Falklands Islands off the coast of India. The media demurred — based in some cases on the finery of Obama’s pants crease or his rhetorical ability to cause electrical sensations in one’s leg — and announced him a god, the smartest president ever to enter office. Obama himself in 2008 buffoonishly announced his power to lower global temperatures and the seas, and declared himself more adroit than all his own political handlers and aides in all of their respective jobs. Obama’s deputy national-security adviser admitted that the administration had misled the press on the Iran Deal by creating an artificial “echo chamber” among media naïfs. Obama’s comments about Trayvon Martin and the Skip Gates affair were incendiary and in line with his campaign smears about the clingers or his calls to supporters to take a gun to a knife fight and “get in their face.” And yet, for all that and more, Barack Obama certainly did not warrant articles of impeachment; he was not unhinged, nor did he offer any evidence of medical incapacity. He would not deserve to have his family smeared with jokes about incest or autism. Any Madonna-like talk of blowing him up in the White House would have been obscene, perhaps illegal, and probably grounds for prosecution. We are now watching insidious regime change, aimed at removing the president of the United States not because of what he has done so far, but because of his personality and what he might do to the Obama agenda — and because for a variety of cultural reasons, our elite simply despises his very being.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447864/trump-critics-left-right-want-him-removed

MEMORIAL DAY MEALS

A Top Chef’s Secret to Cooking the Perfect Steak

Acclaimed chef and author John Tesar shares his tips and tricks for cooking steak.

NOAH ROTHBAUM

05.24.17 1:00 AM ET

For many Americans, Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of backyard grilling season. But before you pull out your grill and get it ready for your first big cookout, chef John Tesar has some advice that may make you rethink everything you thought you knew about cooking a steak.

Tesar’s techniques, which he developed by running acclaimed Dallas restaurant Knife, are so interesting and unorthodox that with the help of James Beard Award-winning writer Jordan Mackay, he recently wrote them down to share with professional and amateur chefs alike. The resulting book, Knife: Texas Steakhouse Meals at Home, was just released a few weeks ago and has the potential of giving pit masters across the country bad dreams until Labor Day.

For one, steady yourself: He says forget using your grill, no matter if it’s a gas or a charcoal model. He only uses direct fire for cooking large cuts of meat, but for a steak he prefers a much simpler method: a cast iron or a carbon steel pan. 

“The pan works for everything,” he swears. “It works for hamburgers. It works for filet mignon. It works for every cut of meat.”

And no matter what cut you choose, “the pan automatically sears the piece of meat immediately,” he says, which makes it extra juicy. On the other hand, “if you [use] anything else, you’re basically just putting burn marks on it and all of the juice is going into the fire.”

He does suggest buying a so-called portable gas cassette burner that allows you to cook outside. “The average person who cooks a steak in a pan will smoke out their house,” he says. “That’s why you don’t have a barbecue grill in your house.”

Tesar suggest you start by dry aging your meat yourself. It sounds complicated, but it just means keeping the meat unwrapped, lying on a bed of paper towels on a plate in your fridge for three or four days. Keep replacing the towels as they get wet and pouring off any liquids. Once you’re ready to cook, pat the steak dry and allow it warm up. “You can’t put a wet steak in a pan because then you have water in the pan and it wreaks havoc,” he cautions.

The cooking process is also fairly simple. Heat up the pan until it’s “ripping hot,” he says, and then add some canola or grapeseed oil as well as salt and pepper. Tesar doesn’t like using olive oil or even a pat of butter but prefers a neutral oil. A steak “has enough protein and enough fat and you don’t need butter. I want to taste beef,” he says. “I don’t want to taste butter.”

Right after the steak has been added to the pan, Tesar quickly lifts it up to allow the oil and rendered fat to coat the bottom of the meat. He then flips the steak just once or twice and lets it cook the same amount of time on both sides, which “ensures evenness of cooking.” (Don’t keep moving it around the pan or flipping it over and over again.) After you get a nice crust, turn the “flame down to a medium to a medium high. You don’t want to char it,” he warns. “You really want to crust it. Brown is the color, not black.”

Once the steak is done, pull it out of the pan and generally let it rest as long as you’ve cooked it.

Do people ever miss the grill marks? Tesar claims that nobody at his successful Dallas restaurant sends their steak back because it’s been cooked in a pan. If anything, they want to know why it tastes so delicious.  

The Nightmares and the Realities of Never Trump

34.201.232.221/2017/05/17/nightmares-realities-never-trump/

5/17/2017

Rarely in the last half-century have so many elite conservatives and intellectuals been so estranged both from a Republican administration and from those who voted for it—neither have they become so animated in their antipathy and disgust for a sitting president.

During the 2016 election, and the current Trump presidency, there have appeared four implicit tenets to the conservative “Never Trump” position that, we are supposed to understand, justified not voting for him, actively opposing him, or voting for Hillary Clinton:

1) The character flaws of the inexperienced and uncouth Trump would eventually nullify any positive agenda that he might enact; not opposing such a boorish character undermines one’s reputation as an empirical and fair-minded conservative;

2) Trump is a liberal wolf in conservative sheep’s clothing; at any given moment he will break his campaign promises and revert to his 1980s New York Democratic self. Or, Trump has no ideology and is an empty vessel willing to embrace almost any ideology he finds efficacious to his ambitions of the moment. Either way, he will do the conservative cause real damage;

3) Trump’s base supporters, while not irredeemables and deplorables, are prone to nationalist extremism and embrace certain prejudices that are antithetical to conservative values;

4) Clinton’s progressive agendas would not do as much damage to the nation as would Trump’s uncouth character. Thus the defeat of the Republicans in 2016, or the failure of an ensuing Trump presidency, would be cathartic. Only a Trump implosion would teach Republicans never again to allow such an untried and dangerous populist nationalist without political experience to highjack their party, while cleansing the movement of some odious figures and unpalatable ideas that have no business in it—or both.
How true have these nightmares so far played out?

#1 Character is Armageddon?

Trump, the president, certainly has continued his erratic and mercurial behavior in the manner of Trump, the candidate. His tweets are often incoherent (and yet also prescient in odd ways) and pursue the trivial. His habits—largely living alone in the White House, short on sleep, tweeting in the early hours—add to his irascibility. The White House operations reflect Trump’s own impulsiveness.

But all that said, Trump’s character defects have not so far derailed his conservative agenda, in some part because many of those who hate him—the media, academics, and the progressives—have acted so unhinged that they themselves have lost all credibility and now seem to belong in the pages of the National Enquirer.

Never Trump cadres rightfully object to the invocation of the classical logical fallacy of tu quoque. While liberal hypocrisy does not excuse evaluating Trump on his merits, in a world of flawed politicians, the media and critics nonetheless focus rarely on Trump’s accomplishments and almost always on Trump’s sins. And they do so in such an unbalanced manner that similar treatment of Obama (daily focusing on Rev. Wright, Tony
Rezko, and Bill Ayers; late night comedy about presidential ignorance that the Maldives were in the South Atlantic, or that corpsmen was pronounced with a hard p; daily emphases on serial untruth from the Benghazi disaster to the ACA to the Iran Deal, while mired in scandals that tarnished the VA, IRS, NSA, and Justice Department) would have caused hysteria.

While liberal hypocrisy does not excuse evaluating Trump on his merits, in a world of flawed politicians, the media and critics nonetheless focus rarely on Trump’s accomplishments and almost always on Trump’s sins.

Trump, it is rightly said, is his own worst enemy. The Never Trump mantra that “character is destiny,” and thus Trump in Nixonian style is doomed, may one day prove true. But for now the media is reduced to obsessions with Trump’s daily portions of ice cream (two scoops instead of one?) or peddles fake news that his wife was once an escort or that Trump frolicked in sick sexual antics in Moscow, and on and on. In the grand scheme of things these obsessions are far less important than the resumption of the Keystone and Dakota pipelines, a 70 percent drop in illegal immigration, and the appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

In the case of Never Trump, a week of relative Trump quiet and good economic or foreign affairs news earns either a minute of quiet, or a begrudging nod, while a media frenzy over another Trump crudity brings out the inevitable “I was right all along.” More glee arises from an unsourced Washington Post rumor than news of new energy development or ongoing restoration of deterrence abroad. All this begs the question of whether the Never Trump group ever remembered why and how such a polarizing figure won the election and the presidency instead of another sober John McCain or judicious Mitt Romney, or what would be the consequences of a failed agenda for the country at large?

Introspection is not advice to withhold criticism when Trump exhibits his character flaws, but a call to at least appreciate the tragic situation that half the country finds itself in: a flawed character has a better chance of enacting key conservative correctives than did his occasionally moral superiors—a paradox to be explored by reasoned conservative audit rather than through hysteria or self-referential snark.

#2 Backsliding Conservative?

Assumption #2 is mostly already refuted.

True, Trump is a volatile figure and without a long conservative pedigree, but so far he has kept to his word in nominating conservative and highly competent judges to the federal courts. His executive orders on deregulation, energy production, and illegal immigration are likely more conservative than those of any Republican president since Ronald Reagan.
The ongoing effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and scheduled tax reform are antithetical to the entire Obama-Clinton agenda. Trump has assembled the most impressive and capable national security team (James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, etc.) since the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. Other appointments like Tom Price, Scott Pruitt, Jeff Sessions, and Ryan Zinke are the sorts whom Republican presidents of the past might nevertheless have passed on as unnecessarily polarizing in their true-blue conservatism.

The pre-presidential fears about a populist nationalist rather than conservative Trump (e.g., that he would erect punitive tariffs, dry up global trade, start an unnecessary war, or crash the economy) have not materialized. Very preliminary statistics concerning economic growth, labor participation, energy production, the stock market, and business and consumer confidence are all positive. In just three months, Wall Street has concluded that Trump is most interested in growing GDP and with it good-paying jobs.

Illegal immigration is reportedly down some 70 percent while executives in the steel, coal, and manufacturing industries report a new confidence not seen in years. While it is possible that in the future a volatile and unpredictable Trump will become frustrated with an ossified Republican congress and turn to Democrats, as yet there is simply no evidence that Trump is not following a conservative agenda.

The pre-presidential fears about a populist nationalist rather than conservative Trump (e.g., that he would erect punitive tariffs, dry up global trade, start an unnecessary war, or crash the economy) have not materialized. Very preliminary statistics concerning economic growth, labor participation, energy production, the stock market, and business and consumer confidence are all positive.

There may well be widening fissures ahead in the conservative/Trump divide, as establishment Republicans find no need for a wall on the southern border. They may worry about Trump’s jawboning of private companies that have a right to outsource/offshore as they please. Trump’s tax cuts and refusal to address entitlement spending will acerbate already swollen deficits and debt. Yet, these are still not existential differences—at least not yet. So far Trump’s first 100 days are more conservative than the policies that both John McCain and Mitt Romney ran on.

#3 Nuts, Bigots, and Assorted Unhinged Populists?

The third worry of Never Trumpers about the dark strains and elements within the Trump movement has also proved so far groundless. The smears against the Make America Great Again crowd were more media-generated narratives that spun and exaggerated Trump’s campaign rhetoric.

So far Trump’s working class, populist supporters have been behaved and focused on the Trump energy and jobs agenda, as well as his refreshing lack of political correctness. Trump has made no racist or anti-Semitic appeal to gin up enthusiasm, but rather has gone out of his way to try to win over minorities and women with promises of economic growth.

So far all the political violence associated with the election of Trump, from Inauguration to the latest campus rioting, has been on the Left. No pro-Trump crowds don masks, break windows or shut down traffic. The crudity in contemporary politics—from the constant sick jokes referring to First Family incest, smears against the First Lady, low attacks on the Trump children, boycotts of the Inauguration, talk and dreams of killing the president—is on the liberal/progressive side.

Even Trump’s poorly prepared first immigration order did not target Muslims per se, but instead echoed Obama’s earlier apprehensions about unvetted refugees from seven volatile Middle Eastern nations (a small fraction of the world’s Muslims). Its subsequent and improved version (that did not target green-card holders, for example) will eventually pass Supreme Court muster.

So far all the political violence associated with the election of Trump, from Inauguration to the latest campus rioting, has been on the Left. No pro-Trump crowds don masks, break windows or shut down traffic. The crudity in contemporary politics—from the constant sick jokes referring to First Family incest, smears against the First Lady, low attacks on the Trump children, boycotts of the Inauguration, talk and dreams of killing the president—is on the liberal/progressive side. The entertainment industry’s obscenity and coarseness have been picked up by mainstream Democratic officials, who now routinely resort to profanities like s–t and f–k to attack the president. Almost every ethical code—television journalists do not report on air private conservations with their guests during breaks, opposition congressional representatives do attend the Inauguration, Senators do not use obscenities—have been abandoned in efforts to delegitimize Trump.

When Hillary Clinton assumed the mantle of the “Resistance,” she was deliberately using a metaphor to convey the idea that she is analogous to a French patriot under occupation and Trump is a veritable foreign Nazi belligerent.

#4 A Preferable Clinton Agenda?

From the opposition to Trump’s first 100 days, we can sense where the Clinton agenda was headed: a Supreme Court pick further to the left than Merrick Garland; expanded race/class/gender themes across cabinet offices; a likely single-payer health system; higher taxes and more regulations, a radical climate change menu, and increased identity politics.
Any presidential election is a zero-sum game; a Republican staying home was a vote for Clinton in the fashion of a Sanders supporter sitting out 2016 was a vote for Trump. Far from a Clinton victory being a catharsis, it would have green lighted more illegal immigration, expanded the themes of the Eric Holder/Loretta Lynch Justice Department, and lost the Supreme Court for 20 years.

As far as a catharsis, it has already occurred though perhaps in ways not anticipated. A reported 92 percent of Republicans voted for Donald Trump, even if in some cases on the low-bar assumption that 51 percent of something was better than the alternative.

Like it or not, a Rubio or Cruz nominee likely would have not won these swing voters and thus likely would have lost the election, and with it ensured at least 12 and likely 16 years of a hard progressive government.

A Never Trump movement, I think it is fair to say, had absolutely no influence on the 2016 election. In theory, elites may have convinced a few key Republican voters in swing states to stay home or to vote for Hillary Clinton; but in reality they were far outnumbered by huge numbers of new Republican voters who saw in Trump hope that they did not in far more experienced and sober men of character.

Like it or not, a Rubio or Cruz nominee likely would have not won these swing voters and thus likely would have lost the election, and with it ensured at least 12 and likely 16 years of a hard progressive government.

Finally, there was something deeply wrong in the Republican Party that at some point required a Trump to excise it. The Republican Party and conservative movement had created a hierarchy that mirror-imaged its liberal antithesis, and suggested to middle class voters between the coasts that the commonalities in income, professional trajectories, and cultural values of elites trumped their own political differences. How a billionaire real estate developer appeared, saw that paradox, and became more empathetic to the plight of middle-class Americans than the array of Republican political pundits is one of the most alarming stories of our age.

Trump was not so much a reflection of red-state Americans’ political ignorance, as their weariness with those of both parties who ridicule, ignore, or patronize them—and now seek to overturn the verdict of the election.