++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Newt Gingrich sees clearly and, in my opinion, is most eloquent when describing what it means to be an American. (See 1 below.)
Meanwhile:
One of the downsides is Trump can snatch victory from the jaws of defeat by gloating and failing to understand he needs centrists.
Pelosi smeared Trump this morning and cleverly responded in a subtle manner which was full of rebuttal lies and distortions. I wish I was an interviewing reporter because I would have ticked off challenges rather than, do as most reporters do, just allow these politicians to get away with verbal murder.
She basically burned any bridges for a relationship and displayed, again, her antipathy. Even her efforts at being amicable were sprinkled with poison.
Democrats would be wise to replace her if they truly wanted to make progress and do something right for America. Then the election can replace Trump if they can muster the votes. Miss Petulance chose the wrong path, buckled and paid homage to the radicals and Professor Turley is correct when he calls for her resignation.
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2020/02/06/democrats-panic-after-iowa-james-carville-says-hes-scared-to-death-
that-dems-have-gone-too-far-left-thomas-gallatin/ De
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Two worthy op eds by Victor Davis Hanson. (See 2 and 2a below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A few more personal comments re SOTU. (See 3 and 3a below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1) Pelosi’s Petty Nastiness and the Fall of the Democratic Party
by Newt Gingrich
When the Democrats collapse in a sweep this fall, a significant part of their failure will be traced to their pettiness and nastiness.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s behavior at the State of the Union was only the most recent example of someone who is out-of-control and simply doesn’t understand what the larger country is seeing.
Of course, the night before, the Democrats’ dance of self-destruction in Iowa had reminded people they have become the party of incompetence. (Their inability to count something as simple as a caucus was a vivid reminder that Democrats could not possibly run a national health care system.)
On Tuesday, Pelosi reminded everyone that Democrats are the party of viciousness.
We all watched Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Pelosi endure standing next to each other – with virtually no conversation – for 20 minutes as the various groups came into the House chamber. It was clear this State of the Union was going to be a little tense.
President Trump was well received when he entered the Chamber. Democrats as well as Republicans shook his hand and chatted happily with him as he came down the aisle.
When Speaker Pelosi offered her hand and President Trump ignored it, the burden of civility seemed to be on the President.
However, Pelosi ensured that would not last. Her introduction of simply, “the President of the United States” was jarring to anyone who knew that the traditional introduction (which I had used for President Bill Clinton four times). Traditionally, the Speaker says to members of Congress: “I have the high privilege and distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.” Speaker Pelosi’s omission of the honorific was a deliberate and planned insult to President Trump.
Plainly, Pelosi was saying President Trump did not deserve high honor, and introducing him did not constitute a privilege. When I saw it on TV, I was furious. (I was in Seoul South Korea watching, while and Callista was in the Chamber – she had a better deal.) Pelosi was displaying a mean, nasty streak worthy of seventh grade bullies in the school cafeteria.
This opening insult was doubly stupid. For people who knew the tradition, it made her look petty. For the average person, it was smothered by the wave of the standing applause the President immediately received. The vast majority of the House (including a number of Democrats who were standing and applauding) did think it was an honor and a privilege to be with the President at this historic speech.
After a strong speech, with many applause moments, the President was cheerfully leaving with a great success accomplished. He had a powerful speech, and he delivered it powerfully.
At this high point in the evening, Pelosi went overboard to prove she was maniacally opposed to working with President Trump under any circumstances. She tore the speech up while standing at the podium!
This was the behavior of a beaten, failed Speaker, who was desperately seeking approval from her left-wing fanatics. For most of the country, it was simply shocking and alienating.
The Speaker of the House is the third in line to be president. It is the only legislative office mentioned in the Constitution. It is institutionally the protector of the House’s prerogatives. The office has enormous power, responsibility, and prestige.
Pelosi took all those historic advantages and threw them away in an evening of pettiness and nastiness. By her actions, she created a much stronger “replace Pelosi” movement. She also created a good case for the House to censure her for actions, which diminished and embarrassed the House of Representatives. It will be an interesting test of her marginal members if they will go home and defend her nastiness and pettiness.
Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy has just moved a significant step closer to being Speaker in 2021.
Speaker Pelosi proved Tuesday night that after failing with the Russian collusion attack – and being on the verge of failing the phony impeachment – the bitterness was getting deeper, and the chances for cooperation on behalf of the country were being shredded. She made it clear she has no interest in working with the President of the United States. This position weakens the Democrats, because Americans are tired of the bickering and gridlock.
On a historic note: President George Washington came to the Congress to deliver a State of the Union and disliked his treatment by the members so much that all future State of the Union addresses were submitted in writing and read by the Clerk of the House.
Not until Woodrow Wilson in 1913 – over century later – was a State of the Union delivered in person by the President. It’s a good thing Washington and Wilson never met Pelosi.
Coupling Pelosi’s behavior with the collapse of Biden on Monday – and Bloomberg looming on the horizon – it’s easy to see the Democratic Convention in Milwaukee in July is potentially going to be a divisive, bitter fight. You will see a desperate establishment fighting to keep power – and a separate, bigger fight between a billionaire and the anti-billionaires.
The fights over the platform and who gets to speak at the convention will make it a destructive two weeks for the Democrats as they further demonstrate their vitriol and incompetence.
Monday night in Iowa was bad enough, but Tuesday night was even worse for the Democrats.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2) When There Is No Normal By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King
History lesson: Radicals eventually will need the norms and safeguards they’ve gleefully destroyed.
O ne of the ancient and modern critiques of democracy is that radicals destroy norms for short-term political gain, norms that they themselves often later seek as refuge.
Schadenfreude, irony, paradox, and karma are various descriptions of what happens to revolutionaries, and unfortunately the innocent, who suffer their collateral damage when radicals of any stripe use any means necessary to achieve supposedly exalted ends.
Three of the most moving — and terrifying — passages in Greek literature involve such ironic payback. In the third book of Thucydides’ history, the historian relates a murderous civil war (stasis) between oligarchs and democrats on the island of Corcyra (modern Corfu). He laments how morals and laws are destroyed in a cycle of madness, all to achieve short-term gain while depriving both parties of sanctuary when the tide one day turns against them.
When extremism becomes normal, there is no prior normal. In his fifth book, Thucydides describes the destruction of the small island city-state of Melos, in a riveting dialogue between the Athenian invaders and the Melian defenders. After concluding his account with the Athenians’ destruction of Melos, Thucydides immediately, in books six and seven, describes the Athenian catastrophe on Sicily, in which the invading and soon-to-be-trapped Athenians play a similar role to that of the doomed Melians, and the victorious Sicilians are no more magnanimous to the defeated than were the once-victorious Athenians.
In the historian Xenophon’s second book, there is a frightening account of the destruction of the Athenian fleet at distant Aegospotami in Asia Minor. The final Athenian defeat of the Peloponnesian War robs the democracy of its last defense against an alliance of Spartans, Thebans, Persians, and Sicilians. As the terrible news arrives at the port of Piraeus, Athenians wail as they fear they are about to suffer the same atrocities at the hands of their victorious enemies that they so often inflicted on others.
Once the Jacobins took over the French Revolution and instituted the Reign of Terror, few of them seriously expected that they themselves would stand convicted in show-trial courts they had helped to establish; fewer imagined they would lose their heads on the same guillotine that they had so often used to execute others.
One of the most fascinating themes of Christopher Caldwell’s just-released The Age of Entitlement is the sad irony that 1960s federal government programs to end institutionalized racialism used the vast power of government to accentuate race and tribalism — and thereby helped ensure the current toxic obsessions of race so characteristic of woke identity politics and radical diversity movements.
The current white leading Democratic candidates should read Caldwell’s book to fathom how their own ideologies now boomerang. They might question why they — and not Cory Booker, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris, Deval Patrick, or Andrew Yang — are alone on the primary debate stage. Disparate impact and proportional representation were the federal government’s fillips to the civil-rights movement. They were embraced by the current white Democratic front-runners, without a clue that by the logic of their own ideological zealotry, about a third of them simply would have no right to be on stage and should sacrifice themselves on the altar of government-mandated diversity.
Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.), Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), and Gerry Nadler (D., Calif.) are currently furious that the Republican-controlled Senate adjudicates the rules of the trial of the impeached Donald Trump. But their appeals, whatever their merit or lack of same, fall increasingly on deaf ears. One reason is that the House impeachment proceedings started out in the House basement; they were marked by unethical collusion with the so-called whistleblower to jump-start the proceedings; they relied on selective leaks and were not symmetrical in the summoning of witnesses from both sides; and the proceedings were initially outsourced to Adam Schiff’s intelligence committee, by design, because of its greater power of secrecy, rather than the more appropriate House Judiciary Committee.
In essence, the House impeachers are now furious that the Republican Senate might prove as partisan in exonerating Trump as the House was in impeaching him.
For short-term gain, radical Democrats have now institutionalized the abnormal on the expectation that they themselves will never seek refuge in the customs and norms they have abolished. This is odd, given the lesson of the “nuclear option” on judges set in motion by former Senate majority leader Harry Reid: When in power, Reid destroyed the judicial filibuster, only to have this decision come back to haunt Democrats when they were in the minority and suddenly unable to stop majority-vote confirmations of a slew of conservative judges.
So far, the Democrats have redefined impeachment as a no-confidence partisan vote of the opposition upon gaining control of the House, used as an election-year force-multiplier to defeat a first-term president up for reelection — with no need for a special counsel’s findings, public support, bipartisan consensus, or specific crimes as outlined in the Constitution.
The Left has recalibrated the FISA courts as political agencies that apparently will grant the FBI and DOJ whatever they wish — if they can, in unspoken fashion, agree on a common political threat of the sort that Donald Trump apparently represents.
There is little left to the idea of a disinterested whistleblower. From now on, they will be insider moles, leftovers from the prior administration who pop up to work with the congressional opposition, in leaking and misrepresenting administration communications to help impeach a president.
The Left has no awareness that under their new protocols, Barack Obama would have been more exposed to impeachment writs than Donald Trump is today, that the next administration mole as a whistleblower might seek to take out a Democratic president, and that politicized FISA courts might just as easily fast-track the surveilling of progressive campaign aides.
The ease with which Robert Mueller was speedily appointed, the hyper-partisanship (see the recent MSNBC hire of Mueller pick Andrew Weissmann) of his all-star, hunter-killer legal “dream team” (or so they were once heralded by a giddy Left), and the unlimited time and budget given Mueller — all will likely serve as a model when the next Democratic president does an Obama-like hot-mic quid pro quo, weaponizes the IRS, orchestrates an illegal prisoner swap, stonewalls Congress over a scandal such as Fast and Furious, or bypasses the treaty-ratification rights of the U.S. Senate.
Many of the current Democratic candidates have called for a court-packing scheme of increasing the Supreme Court to 15 justices in order to nullify the Trump appointees. Most also want to abolish the Electoral College. And leftist activists increasingly rail about the unfairness of the make-up of the Senate and the supposedly ossified idea that every state, however, small, has two senators.
Apparently, they believe that a Democrat will never lose the popular vote and win the Electoral College, and they don’t care that the solid-blue status of California, Illinois, and New York give any Democratic candidate an assured 84 electoral votes of the necessary 270 before a campaign even begins, and they forget that they once gained control of the U.S. Senate by flipping formerly small-population red states blue, such as New Mexico and Nevada.
We are now in a revolutionary cycle in which existing norms are considered obstacles to equality-of-result politics. The Left believes that they will never need the institutions that they are distorting, but they will soon be the first to rue their own folly.
NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author, most recently, of The Case for Trump. @vdhanson
2a) The Cult of Western Shaming By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted by Ruth King
An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.
Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.
My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon emissions.
Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbons will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.
In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.
Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the Euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.
By 2015, the EU was a mess, so China was preordained as the inevitable global superpower. American intellectuals pointed to its high-speed rail transportation, solar industries, and gleaming airports, in contrast to the hollowed-out and grubby American heartland.
Now the curtain has been pulled back on the interior rot of the Chinese Communist Party, its gulag-like re-education camps, its systematic mercantile cheating, its Orwellian surveillance apparatus, its serial public health crises, and its primitive hinterland infrastructure.
After the calcification of the Soviet Union, Japan Inc., the EU, and the Chinese superpower, no one quite knows which alternative will next supposedly bury America.
The U.S. and Europe are often quite critical of violence against women, minorities, and gays. The European Union, for example, has often singled out Israel for its supposed mistreatment of Palestinians on the West Bank.
Yet if the purpose of Western human rights activism is to curb global bias and hate, then it would be far more cost-effective to concentrate on the greatest offenders.
China is currently detaining about a million Muslim Uighurs in re-education camps. Yet activist groups aren’t calling for divestment, boycotts, and sanctions against Beijing in the same way they target Israel.
Homosexuality is a capital crime in Iran. Scores of Iranian gays reportedly have been incarcerated and thousands executed under theocratic law since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Yet rarely do Western activist groups call for global ostracism of Iran.
Don’t look to the United Nations Human Rights Council for any meaningful condemnation of worldwide prejudice and hatred, although it is a frequent critic of both the U.S. and Israel.
Many of the 47 member nations of the Human Rights Council are habitual violators of human rights. In 2017, nine member nations persecuted citizens who were actively working to implement U.N. standards of human rights.
There are many reasons for Westerners’ selective outrage and pessimism toward their own culture. Cowardice explains some of the asymmetry. Blasting tiny democratic Israel will not result in any retaliation. Taking on a powerful China or a murderous Iran could earn retribution.
Guilt also explains some of the selectivity. European nations are still blamed for 19th century colonialism and imperialism. They will always seek absolution, as the citizens of former colonial and Third World nations act like perpetual victims — even well into the postmodern 21st century.
Virtual-signaling is increasingly common. Western elites often harangue about misdemeanors when they cannot address felonies — a strange sort of psychological penance that excuses their impotence.
It is much easier for the city of Berkeley to ban clean-burning, U.S.-produced natural gas in newly constructed buildings than it is to outlaw far dirtier crude oil from Saudi Arabia. Currently, the sexist, homophobic, autocratic Saudis are the largest source of imported oil in California, sending the state some 100 million barrels per year, without which thousands of Berkeley motorists could not get to work. Apparently, outlawing clean, domestic natural gas allows one to justify importing unclean Saudi oil.
Western elites are perpetually aggrieved. But the next time they direct their lectures at a particular target, consider the source and motivation of their outrage.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author of “The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won,” from Basic Books. You can reach him by e-mailing authorvdh@gmail.com.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) Had Republicans sought to impeach Obama for a variety of questionable activities they would have been accused of being racially biased.
a) Lying about using the IRS to intimidate conservatives
b) Lying about Benghazi and failing to protect the life of n Ambassador - the equivalent of dereliction of duty
c) Shipping pallets of cash to Iran by calling the action a deal to deprive The Senate of their constitutional responsibility.
d) Interfering in the election of another ally
e) Illegally surveillance of a member of the press
Based on the behaviour of radical progressive Democrats over the last three years it is evident their contempt for Trump transcends their concern for the welfare of our nation. Their continued pursuit of identity politics has gone a long way towards dividing our nation to the degree that it effects the ability of Congress to function and has led to increased voter distrust of our government.
3a) James Madison 1, Nancy Pelosi 0
Impeachment achieved nothing but more bitter political division.
A sorry period in Congressional history ended Wednesday with the Senate acquittal of President Trump on two articles of impeachment passed by a partisan and reckless Democratic House. Chalk up one more victory for the Framers of the Constitution, who realized the dangers of political factions and created the Senate to check them.
A sign of our hyperpartisan times is that not a single Senate Democrat broke ranks on either article, not even the “obstruction of Congress” article that sought to eviscerate the separation of powers and two centuries of precedent on executive privilege. The vote was 53-47. Apparently the wrath of the anti-Trump resistance, and the risk of a possible primary challenge, was too fearsome to buck. Or perhaps it was a relatively easy vote since Mr. Trump was in no danger of being evicted from office.
Republican Mitt Romney broke GOP ranks to convict the President on the other article, “abuse of power,” making that vote to acquit 52-48. That’s still far from the two-thirds that James Madison and the Founders, in their wisdom, required for conviction.
Mr. Romney will now be derided as either a traitor or a hero, but we take his word that he voted his conscience. His explanation for his vote is another story.
The Utah Senator set up the straw man that the President’s lawyers said an impeachable act must also be a criminal offense. But Mr. Romney knows that isn’t the proper standard that other Senators used to judge impeachable conduct. He also claimed Mr. Trump “withheld vital military funds” from Ukraine, when the President merely delayed it and no investigation of the Bidens was ever undertaken.
“Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine,” Mr. Romney said on the Senate floor. But no election was corrupted, and no national security interests were jeopardized because other Senators and advisers persuaded Mr. Trump to release military aid.
Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse offered a far more thoughtful argument in the Omaha World Herald for his vote to acquit: “You don’t remove a president for initially listening to bad advisors but eventually taking counsel from better advisors—which is precisely what happened here.”
He also put impeachment in the context of today’s political furies. “Today’s debate comes at a time when our institutions of self-government are suffering a profound crisis of legitimacy, on both sides of the aisle,” Mr. Sasse said. “We need to shore up trust. A reckless removal would do the opposite, setting the nation on fire. Half of the citizenry—tens of millions who intended to elect a disruptive outsider—would conclude that D.C. insiders overruled their vote, overturned an election and struck their preferred candidate from the ballot.”
This is conscience tempered by judgment and political prudence, and similar cases were made by swing state Senators Susan Collins (Maine) and Cory Gardner (Colorado), as well as Tennessee’s Lamar Alexander as we wrote Monday. The shame is that Mr. Romney’s vote hands a political sword to the Democrats running this year against Ms. Collins, Mr. Gardner and Arizona’s Martha McSally.
Mr. Romney’s vote won’t matter to Mr. Trump, but Democrats and the impeachment press will now use Mr. Romney as an authority against his GOP Senate colleagues. At least Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has the compensation of knowing that Alabama Democrat Doug Jones has all but signed his eviction notice in 2020 by voting to convict on both articles.
In the bitter end, what has all of this accomplished? The House has defined impeachment down to a standard that will now make more impeachments likely. “Abuse of power” and “corrupt motives” are justifications that partisans in both parties can use.
Mr. Trump remains in office, but he will now claim vindication and use it as a rallying cry for re-election against what he will call an attempted insider coup. The partisan furies have intensified, and this election year will be even more bitterly fought. Mr. Trump’s political standing has even improved during the impeachment struggle, as voters concluded early on that his behavior was wrong and unwise but not impeachable.
We doubt this is what Nancy Pelosi hoped for, but it is what her partisan impeachment has wrought. She lost to a better statesman—James Madison. Now let the voters decide, as Madison and his mates intended.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment