And so it goes. Proof of my previous memo's assertion the revolution is in gear.(See 1 below.)
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And
Wonder how many kids died from drug overdosing and illegal guns as a result of this plan which weaponized the Treasury and Justice Departments? The Iran Deal was bad enough, but now we learn it was only the tip of the iceberg! (See 1a below.)
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Meanwhile, Trump is dealing in a realistic manner with security and cyber challenges from our adversaries and is also trying to reshape America through his judicial appointments. Can the latter become an offset to what progressives and liberals have done through faculty appointments?
It will be interesting to see whether judicial rulings can neutralize the radical impact of liberal's subversion of campus educational diversity, student freedoms and political destruction of our nation and economic system
Stay tuned because it will either end/reverse the cultural and political revolution in America, slow it down or fail. If the latter, America will become another Europe and us codgers who live to see it (I hope I am gone)will become imprisoned relics of the past and too old to kneel when the national anthem is played. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Whither go Franken? (See 3 below.)
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Another take on what conservatism means and in today's political environment. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)
Did you happen to see where a BU professor named Kyna Hamill got her 15 minutes of fame by informing us that “Jingle Bells,” one of the jolliest songs of the Christmas season, was inspired by northern racism?
Its intent, Hamill maintains, was to mock the black community’s enjoyment of winter, poking fun at the notion of laughing and singing while dashing across snow-covered fields aboard an open sleigh.
Actually, that sounds uproariously enjoyable, suggesting a word of thanks from all of us might be in order to whoever came up with the idea.
Bigotry? Racism? Please. You have to look pretty hard at “Jingle Bells” to find any of that in its jolly content. Truth be told, the professor brings to mind those stodgy old Puritans of whom it was said their only joy in life was condemning other people’s joy in life.
But to give Hamill her due, it’s commonly understood that if we thumb through the pages of history long enough we’ll find plenty of reasons to be offended. That’s no bulletin.
For starters, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both owned slaves. What should we do about that in 2017?
Perhaps we should acknowledge that times change, and people do, too.
But if Hamill’s determined to add a sour note to the music of Christmas, here’s something she might ponder: Suppose it hadn’t been foggy the night Santa recruited Rudolph “with your nose so bright” to “guide my sleigh tonight?”
Think about it, especially with today’s great focus on kids who are bullied and isolated.
Rudolph was just like them.
The next time you hear children singing about him, listen a little closer:
“All of the other reindeer used to laugh and call him names;
“They wouldn’t let poor Rudolph join in any reindeer games.”
It’s hard to believe Prancer, Comet and Blitzen could have been so cruel. Dasher, Donner, Vixen? Were they that rotten? Was Cupid a brat? Was Dancer just plain mean?
We read about kids just like them all the time.
Thank goodness visibility was terrible that night. If the weather had been better, Rudolph’s torment would have continued.
By the time the song ends, “all the reindeer loved him as they shouted out with glee, ‘Rudolph, the red-nosed reindeer, you’ll go down in history!’ ”
Well, that’s wonderful. But suppose it had been a clear, moonlit night? What would that Christmas have been like for poor Rudolph then? He’d have probably ended up in therapy.
C’mon, Professor Hamill, lighten up!
No offense, but here’s wishing you a Merry Christmas.
1a) To Clinch Nuke Deal, Obama Said To Have Derailed Campaign Against Hezbollah
By Eric Cortellessa
1a) To Clinch Nuke Deal, Obama Said To Have Derailed Campaign Against Hezbollah
By Eric Cortellessa
WASHINGTON — In order to help solidify the 2015 Iran nuclear accord, the Obama administration covertly derailed a campaign by the US Drug Enforcement Administration that targeted the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorist group, according to an investigative report by Politico.
The specific campaign, called Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 to monitor Hezbollah’s weapons and drug trafficking practices, which included funneling cocaine into the United States.
Along with drug-trafficking, the Lebanon-based terrorist group was also engaging in money laundering and other criminal activities — from which it made some $1 billion annually.
When investigators — after amassing substantial evidence — sought approval for prosecution from the US Department of Justice and US Department of Treasury, those two agencies were unresponsive, the Politico report said.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, an analyst for the US Department of Defense specializing in illicit finance who helped set up and run Project Cassandra. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
Asher added that Obama officials obstructed efforts to apprehend top Hezbollah operatives, including one of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s foremost weapons suppliers.
Ex-Obama officials, for their part, said they sought to improve relations with Iran as part of a broad strategy to prevent Tehran from acquiring a nuclear arsenal, but did not try to derail Project Cassandra because of any political motive.
“The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking,” one former Obama-era national security official said. “You’re not going to let CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does, Treasury does, DOD does.”
Politico said in its report that sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed the allegations made by its team members.
It cited a Treasury official in the Obama administration, Katherine Bauer, who submitted written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs acknowledging that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
After the nuclear deal was officially implemented in January 2016, Project Cassandra officials, such as John Kelly, a veteran DEA supervisory agent, said they were transferred to other assignments.
As a consequence, the report said that the US government “lost insight” not only into Hezbollah’s drug trafficking operation, but also other aspects of its vast criminal operations worldwide.
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2)Trump Plans Shift to U.S. Security Strategy
New approach, which ties economy, trade more closely to strength, stresses confronting unfair practices and puts China, Russia in focus
WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump will put his domestic economic and trade policies at the heart of a new national-security strategy that depicts the world as one of heightened rivalries and potentially dangerous competition.
The new strategy, with an emphasis on confronting unfair trade practices and precluding rivals from stealing American technology, holds potentially far-reaching implications for relations with China, which is described as a “revisionist power” that is seeking to undermine U.S. security and prosperity.
Russia is portrayed as a dangerous rival that is trying to restore its status as a great power and establish spheres of influence by dividing the U.S. from its allies and is using state-funded media and cyber elements to undermine Western democracies.
“China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests,” states the 67-page strategy, which Mr. Trump plans to formally unveil in a speech in Washington Monday afternoon. “They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
The drafting of the national-security strategy is mandated by Congress, and some past strategies have been derided as heavy on platitudes and short on policy prescriptions.
Mr. Trump’s strategy has attracted particular interest because it comes early in the administration and presents an opportunity for the White House to systematically outline views that have often been espoused in Twitter messages and sometimes have appeared contradictory.
“The act of writing it is useful because it forces the administration to confront contradictions that arise when you just deal with problems as they come up,” said Peter Feaver, a Duke University professor who served on the National Security Council under former President George W. Bush. “This is especially important when you have a president like this one who did very little set-piece messaging on his worldview during the campaign and only a handful of big speeches since then.”
Much of the emphasis in the document is on economics, including domestic policy. The strategy casts the tax-overhaul plan and reductions in regulations as essential steps to strengthen the U.S. as an economic and military power.
It defines homeland security expansively, to include the protection of intellectual-property rights, which it suggests can be defended by tightening procedures for granting visas to suspected intelligence agents, including foreign students. The document broadens the notion of safeguarding the defense industrial base to protecting American advantages in research and technology—what it calls the national-security innovation base.
It also urges a series of measures to help the U.S. achieve “energy dominance,” including easing regulations on energy production and resisting climate-change policies that are considered detrimental to economic growth.
“Rebuilding economic strength at home and preserving a fair and reciprocal international economic system will enhance our security,” the strategy says.
The heavy emphasis on economics reflects Mr. Trump’s campaign promise to put American first and his aides’ insistence that the U.S. has entered an era in which geopolitical rivalries have intensified and great power collaborations are at an end.
Philip Zelikow, a professor at the University of Virginia who served as the State Department counselor during the George W. Bush administration, said there was risk in trying to wrap much of the Trump administration’s domestic agenda in the mantle of national security.
“When the term ‘national security’ came into common usage in America in the 1940s, it was used specifically to include economic strength and resource mobilization in addition to national defense,” he said. “But if you attach the claim of national security to many of your domestic policy preferences, you will debase the coinage.”
The preparation of the strategy document, which was circulated widely throughout the government, was overseen by Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, Mr. Trump’s national-security adviser, and one of Gen. McMaster’s key deputies, Nadia Schadlow.
Much of the document covers the more typical array of national-security dangers, such coping with what it calls jihadist terrorist threats and the threat of weapons of mass destruction.
The strategy stresses that the size of the armed forces needs to be increased and rejects the notion that improvements in military technology can offset reductions in military-force structure. It calls for strengthening missile defense and fielding more-modern nuclear weapons.
In contrast to the national-security strategy promulgated by former President Barack Obama, climate change isn’t presented as a national-security danger and there is no talk of seeking a world without nuclear weapons.
It isn’t clear how the Trump administration will meet some of its goals. The strategy describes the expanding national debt as a serious threat to the U.S.’s long-term economic security and underscores the need for the federal and state governments to work with private industry to update the nation’s infrastructure.
Despite planned cuts of more than 30% to the State Department budget, it calls for upgrading U.S. diplomatic capabilities to foster more “competitive diplomacy.”
The White House released excerpts from the text of the new strategy, and other aspects of the document were described by officials who have reviewed the plan.
Mr. Trump has maintained cordial relations with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping. That has prompted some observers to question whether the tough criticism of Russia and China in the strategy are more a reflection of the views of Mr. Trump’s national-security team than his own.
Senior officials insisted to reporters that China was seen as a strategic competitor, not an adversary, and that the White House was still seeking to cooperate with Beijing over North Korea and with Moscow on the Middle East.
The next few months will determine how well the Trump administration can maintain that balancing act. While the administration has so far taken little economic action against China, officials have over the past year laid the groundwork for measures that could be implemented fairly quickly in coming months.
The most prominent anti-China economic action under consideration by the Trump aides is an investigation, announced by the president in August, into widespread business complaints that China improperly pressures foreign companies to turn over valuable intellectual property as the price for entry into the world’s second-largest economy.
Trump aides also have been working closely with Congress to toughen four-decade-old rules that allow Washington to block foreign investments in the U.S. seen as harming American national security, an effort driven by allegations that Chinese government-backed investors have gamed the current system.
As for Russia’s ambitions, the strategy says the Kremlin is developing new military systems, cyber capabilities and subversive tactics, including the use of paid social-media actors, to interfere in the internal political affairs of other nations. American intelligence officials have concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Russia’s broader calculation is that it can engage in such activities without risk of a military confrontation. The Kremlin assumes that “the United States often views the world in binary terms, with states being either ‘at peace’ or ‘at war,’ when it is actually an arena of continuous competition.”
But Russia’s actions have led to an increased risk of a military conflict as a result of Russian miscalculation, according to the strategy.
—Jacob M. Schlesinger
and Chris Gordon
contributed to this article.
and Chris Gordon
contributed to this article.
2a) Another Escalation in the Judicial War
What will happen when a Senate majority votes in unison against every presidential nominee?
With last week’s confirmations of Don Willett and James Ho to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, President Trump set a record for most appellate judges confirmed in a president’s first year. Twelve judges have joined the federal circuit courts in 2017, beating by one the record previously held by Presidents Kennedy and Nixon. The quality of these new appointees is exceptional, with seven having clerked at the U.S. Supreme Court and six appearing on Mr. Trump’s impressive list of potential high-court candidates.
Add Justice Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation, and that’s quite a year. Even after Candidate Trump released his list of prospective justices, conservative legal elites were not at all confident that President Trump would—or would be able to—execute a concerted plan to put a stamp on the judicial branch. Credit goes to White House counsel Don McGahn, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley —and to the president, who deferred to their legal expertise and political strategy.
At the same time, with only six confirmed district-court judges, Mr. Trump’s total number of judicial appointments stands at 19, not even close to a record. While President Obama didn’t prioritize judges in his first term, George W. Bush filled 28 slots on the federal bench his rookie year and Bill Clinton 27 (plus Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ). Ronald Reagan had 40 lower-court judges confirmed his first year, along with Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
Many executive-branch positions remain vacant because Mr. Trump has not put forth nominees. Not so for judges. With 58 judicial nominations, Mr. Trump is second to George W. Bush at this point. Instead, the problem is that Senate Democrats have demanded “cloture” votes on all but one of the nominees. That is, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has forced votes on whether to proceed to a final vote, each of which eats up 30 hours of Senate floor time. That’s been the case even for district-court nominees, the closest of whose confirmation votes was 79-16 (the nays notably including potential 2020 presidential contenders Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren ).
Not surprisingly, the votes on most of the circuit judges were much closer. Ralph Erickson sailed through to the Eighth Circuit 95-1, with only Ms. Warren in the negative. Kevin Newsom of the 11th Circuit somehow drew 16 Democratic ayes, for a 66-31 tally. But the others have faced a blue wall. With the occasional exception of Democrats representing states Mr. Trump won overwhelmingly, the votes were essentially party-line. While the average Bush and Obama circuit nominee received about 90% of senators’ vote—many confirmed unanimously or by voice vote—Mr. Trump’s have averaged less than 60%, and have all been subjected to both cloture and roll-call votes.
A nominee with the support of fewer than three-fifths of senators can get confirmed today only because then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid did away with the filibuster for lower-court nominees in 2013. So Mr. Reid gets a share of credit for Mr. Trump’s success too.
This year Senate Republicans abolished the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, the culmination of a tit-for-tat escalation. The Democrats’ attempt to filibuster Justice Gorsuch was retaliation for the Republicans’ blockade of Judge Merrick Garland’s nomination in 2016, which in turn followed Mr. Reid’s nuclear option.
That came a decade after Mr. Reid filibustered Bush nominees—using that tactic for the first time on a partisan basis—most notably Miguel Estrada, whom Democrats didn’t want to become the first Hispanic justice. Before that was the partisan fallout from Bush v. Gore, Justice Clarence Thomas’s “high-tech lynching,” and the smearing of Judge Robert Bork, led by Sen. Ted Kennedy. Attempts at obstruction and delay will continue, with pointless cloture votes and “blue slip” battles, as Mr. Grassley erodes home-state senators’ abilities to stall nominees.
The one escalation that has yet to occur is for a Senate majority to block a president’s nominees wholesale. One of the consequences of Doug Jones’s election in Alabama is that it becomes more likely that Justice Anthony Kennedy will retire in 2018—assuming he wants a Republican to appoint his successor, or doesn’t want to leave his seat vacant indefinitely.
It seems inevitable that Americans will follow the politicians’ lead and think of judges in increasingly partisan terms. That’s not healthy for an independent judiciary, but it’s to be expected given that we now have starkly contrasting methods of constitutional and statutory interpretation that largely track partisan polarization by ideology. Add the “resistance” to the Trump presidency—which regards as illegitimate everything the president does, including his appointment of Justice Gorsuch—and there’s no wonder judicial nominations are so fraught.
I see no way out other than the gradual unwinding of federal power or the establishment of a consensus around judicial methods that stick to the original public meaning of written legal texts. In other words, be prepared for the war over judges to continue.
Mr. Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute and editor in chief of the Cato Supreme Court Review.
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3)
Two weeks ago, when it appeared that Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore could cruise to victory despite credible allegations of molestation of a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl, Democrats went all-in on their #MeToo strategy: they decided to dump Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) on the side of the road to grab the moral high ground on sexual abuse. Franken reluctantly announced his resignation, all the while indignantly maintaining his innocence.
3)
SO MUCH FOR THE MORAL HIGH GROUND: Top Democrats Change Their Minds On Franken, Want Him Not To Resign
By Ben Shapiro
Two weeks ago, when it appeared that Alabama Senate Republican candidate Roy Moore could cruise to victory despite credible allegations of molestation of a 14-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl, Democrats went all-in on their #MeToo strategy: they decided to dump Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) on the side of the road to grab the moral high ground on sexual abuse. Franken reluctantly announced his resignation, all the while indignantly maintaining his innocence.
Then the voters of Alabama cast Moore out into the darkness. And the Democrats have no ability to claim the moral high ground — Moore isn’t around to use as a whipping post. Which means, of course, that top Democrats now want to walk back Franken’s resignation.
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) stated, “What they did to Al was atrocious, the Democrats.” He called Democratic attempts to oust Franken, “The most hypocritical thing I’ve ever seen done to a human being — and then have enough guts to sit on the floor, watch him give his speech and go over and hug him? That’s hypocrisy at the highest level I’ve ever seen in my life. Made me sick.”
Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT), who called for Franken’s ouster, has secretly told Franken he regrets doing so, according to Politico. Two other senators who sided against Franken apparently told Politico the same thing.
Why? Because Democrats aren’t interested in wiping out sexual abuse. They were interested in the political hay to be made by pretending to care about doing so. With Moore out, that possibility is minimized. Now, Democrats could attempt to target President Trump over allegations of sexual abuse, but that strategy has little credibility after Bill Clinton, and it has little capacity to motivate after Trump was elected despite the presence of sexual harassment and abuse allegations. Democrats know that’s going nowhere, so why bother using it as an attack line against Trump?
That’s particularly true given the fine line Democrats now have to walk between opposing Trump and appeasing their base with a counterproductive impeachment move against him. If Democrats continue with the line that alleged sexual abusers must go, they’ll be duty-bound to impeach him come 2018 if they take the House, and top Democrats know that such a strategy will backfire politically. So they’re preemptively walking back their call for sexual abusers and harassers to step down.
All of which proves that there was no moral high ground here, just political high ground. And now some top Democrats think that the political high ground lies again in ignoring moral concerns in favor of power.
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4) Review: From Barry to Donald
4) Review: From Barry to Donald
A close-up, firsthand view of conservatism, starting with the Goldwater campaign and ending at the current quarrelsome moment. W. James Antle III reviews ‘Just Right’ by Lee Edwards.
By W. James Antle III
What it means to be a conservative is a hotly debated question at the moment, with many self-described conservatives saying that they don’t feel at home in their political base, the Republican Party, or under the party’s titular leader, Donald Trump.
Should conservatives be welcoming of immigrants or should they try to conserve a cultural balance that mass immigration could disrupt? Is conservatism the ideology of American global leadership or a temperament that is skeptical of foreign entanglements? What to do when free markets produce outcomes that are corrosive of traditional values?
At a time when longtime political comrades are turning against each other—pro- Trump, anti-Trump, anti-anti-Trump—it is instructive to be reminded of an earlier epoch of conservatism, one that appears to be more cohesive than the one today but that endured its own fissures and internal debates.
Lee Edwards’s delightful memoir “Just Right: A Life in Pursuit of Liberty” offers just such a reminder—a perspective on our current moment that is informed by the past. A soft-spoken distinguished fellow in conservative thought at the Heritage Foundation and an adjunct professor at Catholic University, Mr. Edwards has not only chronicled the modern American conservative movement’s history. He has lived it.
“I was born under the sign of FDR, on December 1, 1932, on the South Side of Chicago,” Mr. Edwards begins. Of course, the handiwork of Franklin Roosevelt and his fellow liberals would guide Mr. Edwards’s life only by inspiring opposition. His father was the award-winning—and, Mr. Edwards is quick to add, “hard-drinking”—reporter Willard Ambrose Edwards. His mother once ran for the local school board and was savaged by an area political columnist as a “radical right” candidate married to a reporter for the “ultra-conservative” Chicago Tribune.
“Her bitter experience influenced my decision never to be a political candidate—my skin was not thick enough for electoral politics,” Mr. Edwards writes. Yet politics was in his blood, and he would advise and serve candidates over the years. Most notably, he was there from the start with Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign, a doomed effort that laid the groundwork for a conservative takeover of the heretofore milquetoast Republican Party. He notes that Goldwater was a reluctant candidate, personally friendly with the Democratic incumbent, John F. Kennedy, and fearful that he did not have a presidential-caliber intellect. Mr. Edwards chronicles the campaign’s highs and lows, not least the Democratic attacks on the GOP nominee as a mentally unstable man bent on nuclear war.
Mr. Edwards was with Ronald Reagan long before the White House years, when the erstwhile Hollywood actor considered his first run for governor of California. The Reagan of those years, Mr. Edwards shows, was a mix of the commanding personality that the country would come to know and a man with a quiet but deep interest in the writings of the conservative intellectuals who would gradually win him over from his youthful liberalism.
It was the “Red Menace” of the Soviet Union that first drew Mr. Edwards to serious conservatism. The “three pillars” of his political and cultural outlook, he says, were “my Catholicism, my anticommunism, and my individualism, but my anti-communism came first.” As for his sense of the broad direction of the conservative moment, he took his cues, he says, from M. Stanton Evans, the witty and genial editor of Human Events, the Washington-based publication for which Mr. Edwards still writes. But it was William F. Buckley who published his first article, in National Review, the flagship publication of the conservative movement.
What is especially remarkable is what a varied career Mr. Edwards has had within the movement: practical politics; journalism, including the editorship of Conservative Digest; a shelfful of books, including biographies of Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan; and an almost nonstop activism, including his work to memorialize the victims of communism after the Free World defeated the Soviets in the Cold War.
Beyond the autobiographical details, “Just Right” is a survey of the disparate elements that have made up the conservative movement and a reminder of how perilous conservatism’s future has often seemed. The conservative story is often told through the prism of Creation (Buckley founding National Review), Fall (Goldwater’s loss to Lyndon Johnson ) and Redemption (Reagan’s victories in 1980 and 1984). That standard account is retold here in detail, but there is a lot of intervening history.
If conservatism seems like an incoherent rabble in the age of Never Trump and Roy Moore, consider some of the important figures of its past. Robert Taft’s priorities were as different from Goldwater’s as Goldwater’s were from Reagan’s and Reagan’s from Jesse Helms’s , to say nothing of figures outside the political realm, ranging from Phyllis Schlafly to Milton Friedman. Taft was as skeptical of warfare as welfare, while Goldwater believed a robust military was essential to American leadership. Goldwater rejected the strong social conservatism that defined Helms’s politics. Schlafly’s anti-feminism resonated for many evangelicals but was seen as a liability by party stalwarts seeking to close the gender gap.
Mr. Edwards acknowledges the seeming lack of purpose that has at times gripped conservatism since its triumph over communism. Yet he traces commonalities between early conservatism and its later iterations, like the Contract With America and the Tea Party. He is not without insights on the current president. “Trump clearly spoke for the kinds of disaffected Americans who have long supplied a ready audience for conservative ideas and candidates,” he observes. “But he also pushed aside key tenets of the conservative approach to governing, including some that unify essentially all the various factions of the conservative movement.” Whoever can reconcile it all will write conservatism’s next chapter.
Mr. Antle is politics editor of the Washington Examiner and the author of “Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?”
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