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http://www.iamawake.co/the-eu-
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More Mattis commentary. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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Trump is setting his own house on fire and his tussle with Fed Chairman Powell, goes beyond common sense. By allowing us to know his every thought, Trump is simply giving more ammunition to the Trump haters and is reinforcing the views of those who believe he is deranged.
He is welcome to blow off steam but he should not give us a front row seat every time he wishes to do so. In fact, Trump spouts off/Tweets all the time but seldom follows through.
His volcanic personality is winning him few friends and undoing much of the good he has accomplished.
My advice would be to "Cool It Donald."
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Are the accusers more guilty than their accused? (See 2 below.)
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Anschutz was within his rights financially and morally to quit bankrolling when he chose to do so.
Even a wealthy man does not have to bleed to death.(See 3 below.)
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Did Mnuchin pick up the wrong bucket to calm the market's boiling waters? (See 4 below.)
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Some wars are phony. (See 5 below.)
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Perhaps we need to use more A I to run our government:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse
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What type president after Trump? (See 6 below.)
Frankly, I would love to see Trump put Haley on the ticket for 2020.
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Dick
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1)The ‘adults’ in the Trump administration are surprisingly childish
Mattis’s petulant resignation fits a pattern
What Malcolm said of the Thane of Cawdor — ‘nothing in his life/ Became him like the leaving it’ — cannot be said of General James Mattis’s leavetaking his position as Secretary of Defense.
Let me first say that General Mattis has long served his country with distinction, betraying immense care for the Marines and soldiers under his command as well as condign fierceness towards the enemies of civilization. As Secretary of Defense, he obliterated ISIS as a fighting force and has overseen the beginnings of a critical upgrade of America’s military infrastructure, which had been allowed to atrophy under the lead-from-behind posturing of Barack Obama.
Like President Trump, I liked the fact that Mattis’s nickname was ‘Mad Dog,’ though I understand he dislikes the soubriquet. After the America-last, apologize-first foreign policy of Obama, it was nice to have a Secretary of Defense with sufficient backbone to compliment the steeliness of a robust Commender-in-Chief such as Donald Trump.
At the same time, I remember several conservative friends expressing reservations about Mattis when his nomination for the post of SecDef was announced. He was, it was widely rumored, a Hillary supporter and, what’s more, his view of foreign policy was much more in line with the Bush-Obama species of moralism than Trump’s ‘we’ll-do-what’s-in-our-national-interest’ pragmatism.
So it was hardly surprising that rumors of Mattis’s imminent departure have circulated at least since last summer. As the Trump administration matured and the President’s policy of ‘America First’ (which does not, as POTUS perhaps neglects to point out frequently enough, mean ‘America Alone’) came increasingly on line in his foreign policy, it was inevitable that fissures between Mattis and Trump would open up.
Predictably, the neo-con fraternity has its collective knickers in a twist over Mattis’s announced departure. Max Boot, who is always good for a laugh these days, epitomized the angst in some recent tweets. ‘Jim Mattis is gone,’ he said in one. ‘God help America. And the world.’ But then it has been obvious for some time that for Max the criterion of a good decision is that it was not taken by Donald Trump.
It should also be said that that even if the President and his Secretary of Defense were in perfect accord about things, it is hardly surprising that a Secretary of Defense should leave after two years. Indeed, by the time he departs, at the end of February, Jim Mattis will have served longer than the last three Secretaries of Defense: Leon Panetta, Chuck Hagel, and Ash Carter.
The sad thing about Jim Mattis’s exit is his grandstanding, not to say petulant and immature, mode of departure. The letter announcing his resignation, circulated yesterday, is half bureaucratic boilerplate (‘I have been privileged to serve,’ ‘proud of the progress,’ etc., etc.).
But those nuggets are set in a jelly of snarky recrimination about how he, Jim Mattis, has always believed that our strength as a nation is ‘inextricably linked’ to our system of ‘alliance and partnerships.’ Further, he says we must treat our allies ‘with respect’ while remaining ‘resolute and unambiguous’ about ‘those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours,’ e.g., Russia and China.
You do not need an advance degree in hermeneutics to unpack the implications of such statements. ‘I, Jim Mattis, am the adult in the room. I want to foster our partnerships with our allies — unlike some people — and I want to be tough with respect to opponents like Russia and China’ — again, not stated but clearly implied, unlike some.
The implication is made all-but-explicit in the next paragraph which begins ‘Because you have the right to have a Secretary of Defense whose views are better aligned with yours on these and other subjects…’ Well, because of all this, I quit. In other words, I am the good guy who wants to reward our friends and stand up to our enemies, whereas you, Donald Trump, do not.
I think there is plenty of room for disagreement and shades of opinion about how the United States ought to conduct its foreign policy. I can understand how Donald Trump’s heterodox behavior and rhetoric raises eyebrows among establishment diplomats. The President speaks a novel language most of us are unused to hearing among politicians. I believe that thus far the he has been admirably resolute in his dealings with Russia and China while at the same time regularly reminding us that ‘it would be a good thing, not a bad thing’ to have good relations with both countries. I think that is true, notwithstanding the thuggishness of Putin and the neo-Maoist ambitions of Xi.
In any event, the larger point here is that Secretary Mattis’s letter of resignation exhibits a petulance and smallness unbecoming a man of his distinction, accomplishments, and position. I was sorry to see it. Curiously, however, it was of a piece with the behavior of other former high-ranking officials in the Trump administration. The most conspicuous is Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first Secretary of State, whose chief qualification for the job seems to have been that he looked the part. Since being abruptly fired, he has taken to sniping at the President publicly, an unbecoming and counterproductive habit. The takeaway, alas, is that many of the figures who were hailed as the adults in the Trump administration have turned out to be grandstanding partisans. In the aftermath of Mattis’s resignation, the spigots of fake news are gleefully disgorging dire predictions of ‘global chaos’ and ‘international shock waves.’ The whole spectacle is childish and distasteful, and it reminds us that it is not always as easy to tell who are the real adults in the room as we might think.
An earlier version of this piece contained a reference to a screenshot of a column with a doctored headline that deliberately distorted Max Boot’s position. The editors, alerted to the forgery, removed the reference. I apologize to Max for the error.
1a) Trump’s Populist Schism Over Syria
The most surprising thing about President Trump’s decision to overrule his top advisers and withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan isn’t that it was improvised and disruptive. Sudden shifts are part of Mr. Trump’s method, and disconcerting senior officials is one of his favorite management tools.
1a) Trump’s Populist Schism Over Syria
His troop-withdrawal plan is politically risky. The Republican base is more hawkish than isolationist.
The most surprising thing about President Trump’s decision to overrule his top advisers and withdraw U.S. forces from Syria and Afghanistan isn’t that it was improvised and disruptive. Sudden shifts are part of Mr. Trump’s method, and disconcerting senior officials is one of his favorite management tools.
The surprise is that for the first time, Mr. Trump made a foreign-policy decision that divides the coalition that brought him into the White House and risks his control of the GOP. Mr. Trump has frequently challenged and infuriated his political opponents, but his Syria decision risks alienating allies he can ill afford to lose.
Mr. Trump’s greatest political asset has been his feel for the priorities of his populist base. The importance of this skill is sometimes underrated, but his ability to unite and energize his voters gave him control of the Republican Party and the White House. If he loses his bond with the base, he will quickly find himself isolated in a Washington that loathes him.
Nowhere has Mr. Trump’s sense of populist America been more important than in foreign policy. As a candidate in 2015-16, he showed that he understood something his establishment rivals in both parties did not: that the post-Cold War consensus no longer commanded the American people’s support.
During the Cold War, a large majority of Americans united around the policies that built the international liberal order after World War II. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, a gap opened between those who saw an opportunity to expand America’s world-building activities and those who saw an opportunity for the U.S. to reduce its commitments overseas. The foreign-policy establishment across both parties supported an ambitious global agenda, but increasingly alienated populists preferred to pull back.
For a quarter-century after the Soviet Union collapsed, the establishment consensus for building up the global order dominated American foreign policy, and dissenting voices were shunted aside. By 2016, that was no longer possible. In the Republican Party, Trump’s antiestablishment message led him to victory; on the Democratic side, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign also benefited from opposition to establishment policies on security and trade.
The conservative opposition to conventional American foreign policy is anything but monolithic. One group of critics continues the Jeffersonian tradition of preserving American liberties at home by minimizing American involvement abroad. Figures like Sen. Rand Paul and his father, former Rep. Ron Paul, speak to this side of the populist coalition. Jeffersonians are skeptical of international institutions and alliances as well as American interventions to protect human rights abroad. They oppose big defense budgets and extensive military deployments and see no reason for an anti-Russia foreign policy. Many believe that Israel seeks to drag the U.S. into Middle East struggles that Washington would do better to avoid. Sen. Paul was quick to announce his support for President Trump’s Syria decision.
The other, Jacksonian wing of conservative populism shares the Jeffersonian suspicion of multilateralism and humanitarian interventions, but is more supportive of the American military and of maintaining America’s reputation for standing by allies. Jacksonians are hawkish about China, Russia and Iran and favor a strong relationship with Israel. This tendency in American politics is represented by figures like Sen. Tom Cotton, a U.S. Army veteran who served in both Afghanistan and Iraq and has criticized Mr. Trump’s Syria decision.
Mr. Trump’s beleaguered presidency needs both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian support to survive, and until the Syria decision, he had managed the tension between the two currents pretty effectively. Both Jacksonians and Jeffersonians supported the withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, and both hailed the president’s skepticism about humanitarian intervention. Both sides enjoyed the discomfiture of the foreign-policy establishment when Mr. Trump challenged conventional wisdom, and both praised his willingness to pursue a more unilateral course in foreign affairs.
That harmony may soon sour. Mr. Trump’s decisions on Syria and Afghanistan risk a rift between the president and his Jacksonian supporters and provide a way for some in the GOP to break with the president without losing their own populist credentials. The betrayal of the Kurds, the benefits to Iran of American withdrawal, the tilt toward an Islamist and anti-Israel Turkey, and the purrs of satisfaction emanating from the Kremlin are all bitter pills for Jacksonians to swallow.
Of the two wings of the GOP populist movement, the Jacksonians are the stronger and, from a political standpoint, the more essential. The GOP base is more hawkish than isolationist, and from jihadist terrorism to Russian and Chinese revisionism, today’s world is full of threats that alarm Jacksonian populists and lead them to support a strong military and a forward-leaning foreign policy.
Neoconservatives tried and failed to rally GOP foreign-policy hawks against Donald Trump. Should Jacksonians turn against him, they are likely to pose a much more formidable threat.++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)The Neverending, Mysterious Saga of Michael Flynn
Certainly, no one should defend a top-ranking federal employee’s lying to federal investigators or to his superiors in the Trump Administration, if that is what former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn did, as evidenced by his own confession.
Note if Flynn lied to President Trump or Vice President Mike Pence about details of his private conversations, then that is unethical and understandably should be grounds for dismissal. The distinction, however, is whether Flynn deserved to be fired or to be in jail.
What put Flynn in legal jeopardy were the general’s statements to FBI investigators that purportedly were false, and allegedly given deliberately to mislead two federal investigators.
I express doubt here only because of media reports and leaks that Special Counsel Robert Mueller later either pressured Flynn for a confession, by strategies of financial exhaustion or leveraged him by threats to indict his son, or both.
Without that pressure, one wonders how Flynn might have explained his earlier alleged inconsistencies in recounting a private off the record conversation with a foreign diplomatic official to two FBI officials. That is, had he had adequate legal resources or not faced prosecutorial threats to indict his son, would he have later claimed that months earlier that he had been dishonest to Peter Strzok and his fellow FBI investigator?
Had Flynn at the time been apprised of why Andrew McCabe was sending his agents over to the White House, Flynn would have had choices, perhaps Lois Lerner-like to plead the Fifth, or in James Comey fashion he initially could have told chief interrogator Peter Strzok on 245 occasions that he did not know or did not remember, or he simply could have told investigators in James Clapper fashion that he was giving the least untruthful version of the story.
Moreover, a half-century’s worth of jurisprudence now has contextualized how evidence is obtained, and why it is often excluded in criminal cases to uphold larger principles of justice. We do not wish our prosecutors to become obsessive and vindictive in spending our time and treasure misleading citizens, without counsel, to say something that they might not otherwise have said had they not been targeted—all in order to jail them when our officials otherwise have found no other wrongdoing.
Even as importantly, issues of equality under the law certainly apply in the Flynn case.
James Comey has admitted he took advantage of the Trump Administration’s inexperience and no doubt assumed he could do so without repercussions due to Trump’s perceived unpopularity. In sending his FBI agents to Flynn under the cloak of friendly persuasion and having his deputy, Andrew McCabe, misleadingly ask Flynn that he talk freely about lots of things without legal counsel, Comey admits to having gotten away with something he could not have done with an administration more experienced in the ways of FBI investigators. Had the FBI hierarchy not misrepresented the purpose of their investigators, Flynn might either not have cooperated or have spoken in a manner not suitable to the FBI’s agenda.
Yet sworn statements confirm that, at least initially, the investigators seemed to have found the uncounseled Flynn veracious. I say “seemed” because we do not know whether Strozk and his fellow investigator believed Flynn was truthful because of gut instinct or because of Flynn’s physical reactions, or because they had actual transcripts of Flynn’s surveilled conversations to collate with Flynn’s then allegedly accurate answers. If discrepancies had existed between transcripts and testimonies, perhaps they were they written off—given Flynn’s calm—as natural misremembering.
Again, this is all surmise because apparently Strozk neither taped his questioning of Flynn nor memorialized in great detail his favorable impressions shortly after his interrogatory—other than to note how relaxed and unguarded Flynn was, given his lack of counsel and the impression that he was among friends (e.g. “Flynn was so talkative, and had so much time for them, that Strzok wondered if the National Security adviser did not have more important things to do than have such a relaxed, non-pertinent discussion with them.”)
Note that Strzok’s own phone would later and mysteriously be scrubbed of a sizable trove of text messages between him and his paramour, Lisa Page, by the Mueller team, despite the stated intent of the Inspector General to examine the phone’s full contents. One wonders whether Strozk remarked about the Flynn interrogation in his daily texting to Page, given that the deletions may roughly match the time frame of the Flynn interview.
The Illegal Basis of the Interrogation and LeaksThe original justification for the FBI interviews of Flynn ostensibly was holdover Obama appointee Sally Yates’s laughable efforts to trap Flynn in a Logan Act violation, without which she apparently had no cause to investigate his transitional and quite legal conversations, secret transcripts of which already were apparently in her possession.
The Washington Post reported on the Flynn conversation with the Russian ambassador. How they knew of such conversations and perhaps the content of such private meetings might imply that someone had illegally leaked to the press classified surveillance information that circulated among government officials such as Comey and Yates. Mr. Mueller now has no interest in that real crime.
So how Flynn eventually was found guilty of lying was apparently accomplished much later by collating his testimonies (not under oath, or with counsel, but to federal investigators posing as friendly incidental visitors) with reverse-targeted transcripts—the prompt for which is still murky, but might be based on FISA warrants of dubious authenticity and rationale.
It is strange that federal judge Rudolph Contreras who initially presided over Flynn’s case and accepted his guilty plea, abruptly recused himself from the case. Contreras, remember, was one of the three D.C. federal FISA court justices who ultimately decided to issue warrants to monitor those considered suspect due to alleged Russian-Trump collusion.
Add up the circumstances and purpose of the FBI interviews, the strange government covert surveillance, the admission by the former FBI Director of the unusual latitude he took, the fact that interrogators likely knew the answers to Flynn’s questions from transcripts before they asked him questions, the various conflicts of interests and deceit of Andrew McCabe, the always suspect landscape surrounding invoking the calcified Logan Act, Flynn’s widely known unpopularity with the outgoing Obama administration justice and intelligence communities, the politics of Yates, McCabe, Comey, and Strzok—and one legitimately can conclude that the challenge was not rooting out serious crimes that unexpectedly had led to Michael Flynn.
Instead, the Justice Department and FBI were focusing first on Flynn and then searching for enough crimes to indict him, or more likely recalibrating Flynn’s DC swamp bombast, braggadocio, and transitional self-important blabber into criminal acts.
Equal Justice Under Law?We are often told that Robert Mueller was mandated to investigate all crimes that tangentially passed his way as he pursued his prime Russian collusion mandate. That is a fine and necessary agenda. But the reason that Mueller is losing credibility is not due to some right-wing conspiracy against him, but because of the public exasperation that the law concerning perjury and giving false testimony has not been equally applied.
We know that Comey’s and McCabe’s testimonies about leaks and the importance of the Steele dossier for FISA warrants cannot be reconciled. The inspector general seems to think McCabe is lying. Comey himself in still other areas involving sworn testimonies and leaking of government documents may face legal exposure. Most shockingly, Comey at least in his public and private sworn statements has mixed up his stories when he keeps denying that he once testified under oath to Congress that his agents initially found Flynn truthful. On 245 occasions in sworn congressional testimony, Comey claimed he did not remember or know the answer to questions answered. Had Flynn answered like that when not under oath to Peter Strzok would he have been indicted or exonerated?
Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely gave false testimonies about their knowledge of the private Clinton email server to at least one of the same agents who interviewed Michael Flynn. The nation’s two top intelligence officers, Brennan and Clapper, knowingly gave false testimony and have admitted to such, while under oath to Congress on matters of grave national importance, respectively concerning drone attacks abroad, surveillance of U.S. Senate staff computers, and NSA intercepts. So far none has been charged by any federal prosecutor.
In our Orwellian era, just as some hush monies are not campaign violations and others are, so too some lying to federal officials is classified as inadvertent misremembering and others as proof of felonious intent. In a Washington world, where Hillary Clinton can pay Christopher Steele with her campaign funds to find dirt on rival Donald Trump, and then list such secret payments as “legal expenses,” and be met not just with exoneration, but an absolute lack of interest in her skullduggery, the only guiding principle is that the nature of the crime matters not at all while the politics of the purported criminal is everything.
Mueller is not interested in whether hiding the spending of campaign money to find dirt on a rival through the intervention of British and Russian nationals is a campaign violation; instead, he is focused on whether using one’s own money to obtain silence from a past liaison violated campaign laws.
Lingering Questions and Manufactured GuiltSo we are left with a series of mysteries.
Was Flynn reverse targeted through a FISA warrant prompted by the hysterical climate prompted by the phony Steele dossier?
Did Sally Yates, the acting attorney general in January 2017, concoct the entire ambush on the dubious premises of the Logan Act?
Did Flynn for financial or family reasons in extremis lie to the Mueller team about earlier supposedly lying to the FBI?
Will anyone be prosecuted for illegally leaking the monitoring of Flynn to the Washington Post?
Did the FBI later recalibrate its initial assessments of the Flynn interview? Why would Strzok claim Flynn appeared veracious if he knew that his answers were at odds with transcripts of Flynn’s conversations in his possession?
Why did Comey and McCabe scheme to have Flynn believe that he would be interviewed under friendly circumstances without need of an attorney?
What exactly are the uniform DOJ and FBI standards relating to lying to federal officials and violating the Logan Act—and did they apply to Cheryl Mills, Huma Abedin, Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe—or John Kerry?
And has any federal judge, in the manner of Judge Emmet Sullivan, accused a defendant in his court of crimes that he had not confessed to and had not even been formally charged with—namely being a foreign agent operating in the White House, and engaged in treasonous acts, which were all demonstrably false assertions?
Michael Flynn is often cited as the Mueller’s investigation “big fish,” the sole high-ranking Trump Administration official so far to be indicted. He may well have been arrogant, and made money in the usual creepy Washington swampish way. But he certainly would not be facing criminal liability had the Justice Department and FBI not first targeted him as guilty of something, and then searched desperately to find or construct that something.
It turns out that those who sought to indict Michael Flynn are more likely to be guilty of unethical behavior than the target of their zeal.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com.
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3)In Defense of Philip Anschutz
The late William F. Buckley, Jr., published a book several decades ago titled Gratitude, in which, while making a case for mandatory community service, he argued that gratitude is one of the distinctively conservative virtues. Gratitude, he reasoned, nourishes continuity in society while its opposite—resentment—provokes discontent and disruption.
Buckley was hardly the first to say this. The great religions teach that a noble person is grateful for the favors he receives from others. Cicero, reflecting the view of Roman civilization, wrote that “Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”
These reflections are called forth partly by the Christmas season, also by some unfortunate responses to the news that The Weekly Standard has ceased publication. The decision by the owners will close the books on a spirited magazine that for the past 23 years served as a beacon for conservative thought and commentary. The Standard now joins a lengthy list of magazines that have failed over the decades because of the loss of readers or due to political fissures in society: The Literary Digest, The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, Look, Life, The Saturday Review, and Newsweek (to name a few). Others are certain to follow. Time magazine, for example, is unlikely to make it to its 100th anniversary in 2023.
William Kristol, along with several conservative colleagues, founded the magazine in 1995 in the wake of the 1994 “Gingrich election” and with a generous annual subsidy from Rupert Murdoch. It began as a neoconservative magazine, somewhat in opposition to the traditional conservatism articulated in National Review. While it covered domestic issues and reviewed current books, the magazine’s forte was always in the area of foreign policy where the editors promoted a robust role for the United States around the world.
In 2009, Philip Anschutz acquired ownership from Murdoch, and thereafter subsidized the magazine to the tune of $3 or $4 million per year, but without changing any editorial policies. It was ultimately Anschutz, in conjunction with Clarity Media Group, the corporation that managed The Weekly Standard and other publications, that ultimately decided to shutter the magazine.
As regular readers, we liked the Standard because it was informative, albeit idiosyncratic, and unpredictable, but never so on the large issues dealing with America’s role in the world and the preservation of her constitutional heritage. The writers were conservatives—mostly—but followed no party line. Many prominent journalists today got their start years ago at the Standard. Kristol, the magazine’s longtime editor, edited the magazine with a light touch, giving his writers great leeway in what they wanted to say. The editors came in for an avalanche of criticism for their support for the war in Iraq, but unlike others who initially supported it, they (to their credit) stayed the course to the end.
Several reasons have been cited for the demise of the magazine: the difficult landscape for print publications, the increasing expense of those enterprises, and the disappearance of younger readers accustomed to looking for news online or in bite-sized increments. But there can be little doubt that the magazine’s editorial stance—all anti-Trump, all the time—played a large role in the loss of subscribers and advertisers that eventually led to the owner’s decision to end his financial support.
It does not require a marketing degree to know there would never be a large audience for a conservative magazine with a single-minded mission to bring down a right-leaning president. That audience was more or less what the editors banked on when they embarked on their anti-Trump editorial position even before he took the oath of office.
As the editors soon discovered, the market for their re-tailored magazine was an exceedingly small one. As one wag commented, “why should conservatives pay good money for The Weekly Standard when CNN and the Washington Post will call us fascists for free.” That is harsh, but not all that wide of the mark. Conservatives did not subscribe to the Standard in order to read what their neighbors were hearing on CNN or reading in the New York Times.
Against this backdrop, it was surprising to see many friends of the magazine cast blame upon Anschutz for withdrawing his subsidy or for turning down offers to sell it, as if the magazine had not been drowning in a sea of troubles, some of them self-inflicted.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, wrote that Anschutz had “murdered” the magazine and that in closing it he had committed “a cultural and intellectual crime.” The annual subsidy for the magazine was (he wrote) no more than a rounding error on his vast fortune, suggesting thereby that Anschutz’s decision to close the enterprise was an act of personal pique or revenge.
Yuval Levin, editor of National Affairs magazine, endorsed this interpretation in a post on the website of National Review. David Brooks, who was present at the creation of the Standard, devoted a column in the New York Times to the closure of the magazine, repeating Podhoretz’s “murder” line and filling the piece with a host of snotty and gratuitous insults directed at Anschutz. In his view, the collapse of the Standard is a tale of corporate greed and ignorance.
“This is what happens,” Brooks wrote, “when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain a sense of intellectual standards.”
Brooks goes even further to attack Anschutz for closing the magazine at Christmas time, even though such decisions are often taken at Christmas time because the holiday coincides with the end of the calendar year. According to these critics, the editors bear no responsibility for the collapse of the magazine, and therefore the owner had a responsibility to continue his support regardless of financial losses or the hemorrhaging of subscribers and advertisers.
In fact, Anschutz deserves thanks and a measure of gratitude for subsidizing the magazine to the tune of $30 or $40 million of his own money over a period of nine years, during which his funds paid the salaries of the editors, the fees of countless writers, and the weekly costs of production. By all accounts, he never interfered with the judgments of the editors as to what should and should not appear in the magazine, even when those judgments proved controversial, as in the magazine’s endorsement of the war in Iraq. It appears that he was even tolerant to a fault of the magazine’s self-destructive editorial line against Donald Trump.
It is hard to see what Anschutz gained personally from his support for the magazine; he did it as an act of public service in the belief that the magazine expressed a point of view that deserved to be heard. While $3 million or $ 4 million per year may seem like a “rounding error” to some people, it is in fact real money that Anschutz could have deployed elsewhere. Many organizations around the country could have made good use of a $3 million annual subsidy. Yet he stayed with the enterprise for nine years, quietly paying its bills and keeping the operation going. No matter what some say, Philip Anschutz cannot be blamed for the magazine’s loss of subscribers and advertisers, and ultimately for the collapse of the enterprise.
Truth to tell, Anschutz is not all that different from the benefactors who subsidize Commentary, National Review, National Affairs, and other conservative opinion journals. Most are wealthy individuals who made fortunes in finance or in business and contribute substantial sums to keep these publications going. No one forces them to do it; they make these contributions of time and money as a way of investing in the moral capital of the system that made their fortunes possible in the first place.
Many of those benefactors make business decisions every day as to whether or not to sustain investments in their enterprises, or to pull out of them. Some have withdrawn support from newspapers and opinion magazines when they disagreed with their editorial positions or did not think they could sustain themselves. Does this mean that they are cruel and insensitive people? Many on the Left would say “yes” because to them all wealthy people are suspect. It is surprising to hear “conservatives” imply judgments along similar lines. If this is what these editors think of Anschutz, what must they think of the donors who sustain their own enterprises?
The editors of The Weekly Standard had every right, perhaps a duty, to follow their principles regardless of costs, but it is most ungracious of them and their friends to insist that Philip Anschutz was obliged to pick up their tab.
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4) Mnuchin speaks with big bank CEOs about market stability
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin on Sunday spoke with the CEOs of the six largest U.S. banks, who assured him that they have enough cash to lend money and continue all market operations, according to a readout from the department.
Treasury did not say what motivated the statement, though it comes in the midst of a partial government shutdown and after the Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst week since 2008.
Mnuchin in the past day has also sought to assure markets that President Donald Trump will not attempt to fire Fed Chairman Jerome Powell – a move that would ratchet up anxiety among already-skittish investors.
But if Treasury's statement was intended to calm the markets, it risked having the opposite effect. It was met with widespread bewilderment and nervousness, given the department's mention of a concern -- the liquidity of the banks -- that wasn’t even on the radar of many investors.
“Hoping the markets read this as strange instead of terrifying,” said Diane Swonk, the chief economist at Grant Thornton on Twitter. “I am completely baffled.”
In calls with Mnuchin, the CEOs of Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo “confirmed that they have ample liquidity available” and that “they have not experienced any clearance or margin issues and that the markets continue to function properly,” according to Treasury.
The banks did not independently confirm Treasury's characterization of the conversations.
Mnuchin will also have a call with the President’s Working Group on financial markets on Monday, which is Christmas Eve, to “discuss coordination efforts to assure normal market operations.” The working group includes the Federal Reserve, the SEC and CFTC.
“We continue to see strong economic growth in the U.S. economy with robust activity from consumers and business,” Mnuchin said in a statement. “With the government shutdown, Treasury will have critical employees to maintain its core operations at Fiscal Services, IRS, and other critical functions within the department.”
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5)
This is the tyranny of small differences, and neither choice will solve our national immigration dilemmas. A physical barrier has worked in some places like San Diego. But migrants then look for other illegal entry points. Building the wall across the entire 1,954-mile border would be expensive and it wouldn’t stop illegal immigration since most illegals arrive by overstaying their legal visas.
5)
The Phony Shutdown War
Trump and Democrats put political symbolism over policy substance.
The Editorial Board
This is the tyranny of small differences, and neither choice will solve our national immigration dilemmas. A physical barrier has worked in some places like San Diego. But migrants then look for other illegal entry points. Building the wall across the entire 1,954-mile border would be expensive and it wouldn’t stop illegal immigration since most illegals arrive by overstaying their legal visas.
The best solution, as ever, is to reduce the incentive for people to come illegally by creating more ways to work legally in America. Most migrants come to work, and at the current moment there are plenty of unfilled jobs for them. A guest-worker program would let migrants move back and forth legally, ebbing and flowing based on employer needs, while reducing the ability of gangs and smuggler “coyotes” to exploit vulnerable migrants.
If that’s too politically ambitious, then how about swapping money for border security or the wall—call it whatever you want—for legalizing the 700,000 or more Dreamer illegals who were brought to the U.S. as children? Both sides could take credit for addressing at least two immigration problems, and both could rightly claim a policy victory. But even that trade seems beyond the political imagination of Mr. Trump and Democratic leaders Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer.
So we are left with this phony shutdown war in which the extremes of both parties set the agenda to no good result. Democratic leaders want to show their base how tough they are for standing up to Mr. Trump, even if it means hanging the Dreamers out to dry. The left never wants any immigration compromise because it wants the election issue.
Mr. Trump can’t decide what he really wants and seems to have no political strategy for achieving whatever it is. First he surprised everyone by taking public ownership of a possible shutdown in a meeting in the Oval Office with Democratic leaders. Then he agreed to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s proposal to fund the government for two months to move the funding debate into the new year when Democrats run the House.
Then the House GOP Freedom Caucus and talk-radio hosts stomped their feet, and Mr. Trump flipped back to welcoming a shutdown and tweeting that “it could be a long stay.”
To what end? Mr. Trump’s shutdown tactic is to hold his breath until the other side gives in. This didn’t work for Newt Gingrich in 1995, though at least Newt was battling Bill Clinton over major reforms in the entitlement state. Mr. Trump is holding his breath over a mere $3.4 billion in spending for a piece of political symbolism.
The Freedom Caucus has long argued that Republicans can win a shutdown standoff if they hold their breath long enough. Perhaps Mr. Trump will try that, and at least we’d get a political market test of which party suffers most as the standoff continues. Yet if it ends with the two sides compromising on something like $3 billion in border funding, Americans can be forgiven for thinking the whole thing was a pointless political farce.
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6) What Should Come After Trump?
6) What Should Come After Trump?
There have been a spate of pieces lately about what comes after Trump -- as though President Trump were already half-way gone.
Really? You think the Mueller whisperers are going to get him after all?
But I would say that the question is: what kind of leader should we choose to lead us normals after the End of Trump?
First of all, we don't want someone kinder, gentler. Those nice, educated women who are offended by Trump's insults are forgetting one thing. Trump's playground insults are penny-ante compared to the totalitarian insults of the average Democratic politician or activist who routinely accuses ordinary Americans of the thought-crime of racism-sexism-homophobia, not to mention toxic masculinity or white supremacy.
Earth to liberals: the only supremacy problem around here is the cruel injustice of leftist supremacy.
No, the After-Trump president has to say: I can't believe that a person that has called people racists on no less than 231 occasions has any right to complain about insults.
Of course, this kind of remark should only be used when talking to an audience of women; it connects with the women's Culture of Complaint.
W
ith men the After-Trump should say: I've said it before, so I'll say it again. Nobody who has ever called another American a racist has any right to speak in the public square. Period. We cannot begin to solve our vital national problems until the Democratic Party's activists are prepared to recognize other people's right to hold a different opinion, and even express it on Twitter or in the sacred precincts of a university without fear of naming and shaming. Until then we should exile them to cultural Outer Slobbovia.
ith men the After-Trump should say: I've said it before, so I'll say it again. Nobody who has ever called another American a racist has any right to speak in the public square. Period. We cannot begin to solve our vital national problems until the Democratic Party's activists are prepared to recognize other people's right to hold a different opinion, and even express it on Twitter or in the sacred precincts of a university without fear of naming and shaming. Until then we should exile them to cultural Outer Slobbovia.
You can see that, when addressing men, the After-Trump can use a certain directness and manliness that is inappropriate for a female audience.
See what I am doing? I am getting the After-Trump to advance from Trump's tactical insults to insults with a strategic purpose. Because it is not enough to stop the advance of the liberal hordes. We need to defeat their cruel and unjust hegemony and then dispatch the cultural cavalry to rout them and disperse them.
The other thing I would like is for a president to be a cultural leader and lead the people to believe in the Promised Land of the market economy culture. For 150 years the educated elite has been teaching us all to hate the market economy -- while the market economy increased real per capita income by 3,000 percent. At some point it needs to admit it was wrong, dead wrong, more wrong than any ruling class has ever been wrong about anything in history. Trump has danced on the edge of this by talking tough nationalism while actually encouraging the market with tax rate cuts and deregulation straight out of the conservative think tanks. But at some point a president has to lead the priests of the ruling class out of a reactionary culture that believes in the saving grace of political power -- for people like them, of course, not for you and me -- and teach it to preach the new culture that believes in performing a service before demanding to be paid, and to accept that the world cannot guarantee anyone lifetime security, except by forcing other people to pay up using government force.
Of course, I realize that this is all pie in the sky. It is not the job of a president to change the culture, because politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from religion.
Yes -- it is the religion of the educated ruling class that oppresses us, with its transcendental faith in the idea of politics and activism as a sacred calling -- for the educated elite and its approved little darlings -- and with us normals as the Evil Ones to be vanquished in a progressive jihad of activism. But obviously we normals cannot ban other people's religion, nor should we want to.
Of course, we can rebel against the ruling-class injustice that issues from its ruling-class religion, and we should, and we will. And we can rally behind a president who will fight for us against the vile ruling class, and we will.
But we still need a new religion to inspire a new generation to create a new culture to develop a new politics to rule an America where normal people can wive and thrive in peace and prosperity rather than live in increasing subjection to progressive totalitarians. And that is the one thing that the After-Trump cannot deliver, not on his own.
What should come after Trump is a new religious movement revolted by the hypocrites and pretenders that rule us, and determined to find a new meaning of life, the universe, and everything that goes much lighter on politics and government power.
Come on, you young'uns. Stop sucking up to the poisonous teachers, administrators, and mostly peaceful protesters that exploit and oppress you!
Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.
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