Dancing On The Dead. Biden A Certified Liar. Dump On Trump. They Just Love Killing. Tar And Wokeness. Pompeo VP. IAF Attacks. Bolton.

“No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society.  If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed, and love of power.”

 

            --- Patrick Jake “P.J.” O'Rourke (1947-2022), American political satirist and journalist, born on this day, November 14^th, in Toledo, Ohio.  The quote is from his 1992 book, Give War A Chance: Eyewitness Accounts of Mankind’s Struggle Against Tyranny, Injustice, and Alcohol-Free Beer.

Hoover Daily:

Bipartisanship Is Dead. Except On China.

by Niall Ferguson via Bloomberg Framing immigration, energy policy and other issues as national security imperatives could break through Washington gridlock.

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BIDEN MIGHT NOT HAVE KNOWN WHAT COUNTRY HE WAS IN RECENTLY BUT HE WAS CLEVER AND GUILELESS ENOUGH TO KNOW HOW TO SCARE VOTERS BY TELLING THEM REPUBLICANS WERE GOING TO DESTROY THEIR DEMOCRACY.

AS RECENTLY NOTED, IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT DEMOCRATS ARE DOING JUST READ WHAT BIDEN IS SAYING ABOUT REPUBLICANS.  

I REMEMBER WHEN  TRUMP HATERS BLAMED TRUMP FOR LYING AND HE DID STRETCH THE TRUUTH BUT NOW YOU NEVER HEARABOUT THAT.  BIDEN IS A MASTER AT PURPOSEFUL LACK OF VERACITY.

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I was a classmate of Lauder and my second cousin, Sam Grundwerg, was his right hand man at The WJC, until Bibi appointed Sam the Consul General in Los Angeles. The Lauder family are solid and courageous.

Palestinians we have allowed to come to America have done nothing but create discord and stir up trouble. Jimmy Carter started the nonsense about Israel being apartheid.

These pitiful young people along with their their weak college administrators have proven to be tragic figures and done much to turn American College Campuses into places where vermin antisemites are allowed to parade.

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Republicans have perfected how to turn off potential voters. They need to tell voters what they believe in, how they will accomplish it and, you would think, that is a message even they can understand.
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The GOP’s Lost Independents 

The Editorial Board 

The GOP did well in getting out its voters. In the two main election surveys, more Republicans than Democrats turned out to vote: 36% to 33% in the national media exit poll, and 49% to 43% in the AP VoteCast. Republicans could get a majority share of the final House vote without getting a House majority. So much for the GOP’s supposed gerrymandering edge.

What cost the GOP is that it lost voters who identify as independents, who now make up a quarter to more than 40% of the electorate, depending on the state. According to Gallup, in October this year 33% of voters nationwide identified as Republicans, 29% as Democrats and 35% as independents. Forty-eight percent of the self-identified independents said they lean Republican while 42% lean Democrat.

In a typical midterm, those voters should be inclined to swing against the party in power, especially given inflation and President Biden’s low job approval. This year they didn’t. According to the national media exit poll, of the 31% of voters who identify as independent, 49% voted Democrat and 47% Republican. In the AP VoteCast survey, independents favored Democrats by four points. 

Those numbers are startling compared to the usual pattern for independents in midterms. According to CNN polling, in 2018 54% of independents voted Democrat and 42% voted Republican. (Democrats added 40 House seats.) In 2010, 56% of independents voted Republican and 37% voted Democrat for a Republican pickup of 63 House seats. In 2014, 54% voted Republican and 42% voted Democrat, adding an extra 13 Republican House seats.

The results are worse for Republicans in key races. In Arizona, 40% of voters in the Senate race identified as independent in an exit poll, and of those, 55% voted for Democrat Mark Kelly and 39% for Republican Blake Masters, who lost a winnable race.

In Pennsylvania, 24% of voters identified as independent and an amazing 58% of them voted for the left-wing Democrat John Fetterman compared to 38% for Mehmet Oz. Ditto in Georgia, where 24% of voters identified as independent and Democrat Raphael Warnock won 53% of them compared to 42% for Herschel Walker. In New Hampshire, 43% of voters call themselves independents and 54% of them voted for Democrat Maggie Hassan over Republican Donald Bolduc. 

The message couldn’t be clearer. Independent voters in swing states may be unhappy with the direction of the country, but they didn’t trust the GOP enough to give them power. Abortion seems to have been one factor that cut against the GOP this year, and the pro-life party will have to adjust its policy and message for 2024.

Mr. Trump’s hand-picked candidates who supported the stolen 2020 election line to win his endorsement also appear to have driven away swing voters. The excuse coming from the MAGA media and Blake Masters, who lost badly in Arizona, that Mitch McConnell didn’t spend enough money to save him doesn’t stand scrutiny. Mr. Masters raised too little money himself and got little help from Mr. Trump.

The counter example is Florida, where Republicans were able to create a separate governing identity from Mr. Trump. Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won 53% of independent voters to Democrat Charlie Crist’s 45%.

In today’s closely divided politics, some partisans think all you need to do is drive your own base supporters to the polls. That’s important but not sufficient. If Republicans want to keep losing elections, they’ll keep nominating candidates who turn off swing voters.

And:

Let’s Talk About Trump

By Kurt Schlichter

And Finally:

Tragically Trump

Victor Davis Hanson 

Will Trump rest on his considerable laurels and ride out gracefully to Mar-a-Lago? Or will he choose the

tragic hero path?

“Yet for a variety of reasons, both personal and civic, their characters not only should not be altered, but could not be, even if the tragic hero wished to change, given his megalomania and absolutist views of the human experience. In the classical tragic sense, Trump likely will end in one of two fashions, both not particularly good: either spectacular but unacknowledged accomplishments followed by ostracism when he is out of office and no longer useful, or, less likely, a single term due to the eventual embarrassment of his beneficiaries, as if his utility is no longer worth the wages of his perceived crudity.”   —The Case for Trump (2019)

After the midterms, the Republican Party and half of the conservative movement are now furious with Donald Trump. Their writs are many—even though the party establishment shares much of the blame. More importantly still, American elections have radically shifted to mail-in/early/absentee voting rendering Election Day a minor event. The predictable result is that any close race undecided on Election Day in subsequent days usually is won by the Democrats. 

On the eve of the midterm, Trump gratuitously attacked Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was up for reelection, while all but announcing he would run for president. 

That preview could have waited until the elections had passed. The pizzazz may have galvanized some Trump-haters to go to the polls. It might even have alienated perhaps a few thousand DeSantis Republicans who were not thus inclined to vote for Trump-stamped candidates. 

Trump’s frantic fundraising efforts had amassed a huge sum in his PAC, geared to his future primary fights. But many felt he was far too parsimonious in spreading his largess to his own cash-strapped and outspent MAGA candidates. That stinginess might have helped contribute to their defeats in close House and Senate elections. 

Those earlier rumblings were only amplified after the unexpectedly anemic Republican midterm performance. Trump sent out a disjointed, almost unhinged letter damning DeSantis as disloyal, without gratitude (to Trump), mediocre, and overrated. 

The indictment was ill-timed to DeSantis’ landslide victory over Charlie Crist. DeSantis’ long Florida coattails fueled the only red tsunami of the entire evening. If Trump thought he would employ the battering-ram tactics of his first presidential debate of 2020, then he should remember they failed (in contrast to his effective second debate against Biden). And in reaction, DeSantis’ rope-a-dope silence is effectively designed to let Trump punch his way out and down to the low 30s in approval.

Trump further blamed some of the losses of his endorsed candidates on either their own shortcomings and lack of loyalty, or the bad advice from those who had persuaded him to back losers. New Hampshire U.S. Senate candidate Don Bolduc was deemed insufficiently denialist and so, according to Trump, was crushed in the New Hampshire race. 

Former First Lady Melania Trump, of all people, was reportedly to blame for convincing the ex-president to back Mehmet Oz in the Pennsylvania U.S. Senate race. 

Yet Oz turned out to be a tireless worker and a rookie but solid candidate. Still, he was easily outspent—and was fatally injured by the balloting blowback against the mediocre Trump-supported gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano. The latter’s wipeout injured Oz and Republican congressional candidates once thought likely to win. 

Worse still, Trump highlighted his self-obsession over party concerns by weirdly celebrating the loss of fellow Republican senatorial candidate Joe O’Dea of Colorado. His RINO crime was spurning Trump’s support. Stranger still, Trump attacked popular Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin for supposedly having a “Chinese”-sounding name.

But these were sins of commission. There were also those of omission. Trump had not issued an ecumenical call to head to Georgia, to forget intramural squabbles, and to rally money and time on behalf of Herschel Walker—Trump’s own endorsed candidate. 

Even if the Senate is now lost, Trump should issue such a call—if keeping his person clear of the Georgia mess. In 2021 his loud whines to supporters that Georgia’s voting was rigged kept his base home, while offending swing independents. 

That one-two punch ensured the surreal victories of two neo-socialist Democratic senators, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff. The duo ensured Democratic control of the entire Congress, guaranteeing the disastrous first two years of the Biden Administration. It takes effort to ensure that Georgia now hosts the two most radically left-wing senators in the entire Senate.

Even before the midterms, there was a latent feeling among half of Republicans that Trump, given his age, and the animus he incurs among the rich Left and touchy independents, might retire to the role of kingmaker, rather than try a third presidential election. Trump’s eruptions, coupled with DeSantis’ stunning and singular midterm success, ensured that such prior latent conservative unease is now overt. 

Indeed, in near hysterical fashion, Trump became stigmatized and scapegoated as the culprit for nearly every Republican race lost. Yet many of his endorsed candidates won. And some who lost did so quite independently of anything Trump said or did. Tiffany Smiley, Tudor Dixon and Lee Zeldin were good candidates and their opponents feeble. But not even Abraham Lincoln could have gotten them elected in bright blue Washington, Michigan, and New York. 

On the other hand, there were also lots of RNC-approved candidates who likewise lost narrow races. And Senator Mitch McConnell sent millions of dollars to RINO Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) to defeat fellow Republican and genuine conservative Kelly Tshibaka, more to protect McConnell’s own leadership role than to ensure a more reliable Republican vote in the Senate.

As the disappointment over a red ripple began to subside, many found some long-term good: the winner Ron DeSantis was empowered. The now cocky but still demented Joe Biden is delusional, convinced he could be a winner in 2024, And Donald Trump now must either settle down or settle up. 

An unspoken paradox arose among many that Trump’s vital MAGA agenda might be better continued and advanced by those others than its creator—even as Trump insisted that there can no more be a MAGA party without him than there could be sunshine without the sun. 

Trump Considered

One explanation of the Trump dilemma is that like all classical tragic heroes and western gunslingers, Trump solved problems through means unpalatable to those in need of solutions beyond their own refinement. It is the lot of such tragic figures to grate and wear out their welcome with their beneficiaries—but only after their service is increasingly deemed no longer needed.

In this moment of wishing the wounded Shane would ride off into the Tetons and leave the more civilized alone, we should remember Trump’s four historical accomplishments that will only grow in light of Biden’s subsequent disastrous four years. 

One is partisan. Trump utterly destroyed the 30-year Clinton grifting and quid pro quo machine in general, and Hillary Clinton’s endless and often toxic political career in particular. It was characterized by the despicable Uranium One sale, the foreign shake-down contributions to the Clinton Foundation, her destruction of subpoenaed emails and devices, and her blatant violation of State Department rules of personal communications. 

Clinton’s failing campaign and eventual collapse in 2016 was so shocking that it all but crushed her very psyche—to the point that she had funded a foreign ex-spy to systematically and illegally destroy her political opponent. She ended up denying the very legitimacy of the election she lost. Then she topped that off by urging Joe Biden not to accept the 2020 verdict should he lose the popular vote. 

Hillary Clinton is physically, psychologically, and spiritually spent—and never recovered from her ill-fated collisions with Donald Trump.

Two, Donald Trump recalibrated the Republican Party to become more populist and nationalist. Previously it was shrinking and offered the Left an easy stereotype of a small club of aristocratic white corporate elites. 

Yet Trumpism did not renounce prior Republicanism, at least not entirely. Rather, Trump sought to save it by recalibrating the party. He demanded toughness with China, attacked illegal immigration, addressed the crisis of the deindustrialized American interior, and adopted a Jacksonian foreign policy. That was all in addition to embracing Republican policies of low-taxes, small-government, deregulation, traditional values, and originalist justices.

Three, Trump’s actual four years of governance were characterized, before the advent of the pandemic, by robust growth, low inflation, energy independence, low unemployment, a rebuilding of the U.S. military, eventual curbing of illegal immigration, the Abraham Accords, and forcing NATO to spend far more on defense. Trump saved the Supreme Court and lower federal courts for a generation.

Four, in his furious counterassault against a vicious administrative state, bankrupt media, and crazed elite bicoastal class, Trump survived and ended up exposing and discrediting them all. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, which monitors media coverage, found that after just a few months in office, Trump was the subject of the most biased coverage in modern presidential history. 

While the media both thrived on him and yet sought to ruin their greatest source of income, it committed suicide through its hysteria and fixations. Trump’s “fake news” attacks were crude. But they resonated precisely because he was correct that the media had become utterly corrupt and a mere extension of the progressive project. 

Trump in his current state is an object of derision. But that he is still standing is a miracle in itself, given the abuse he endured that was predicated on lies, myths, and venom. In the first year of his presidency, partisan House members filed articles of impeachment. Foreign Policy printed an essay 11 days after his inauguration calling for his removal through either impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or a military coup.

It became a progressive parlor game to publicly dream of his assassination by explosion, decapitation, stabbing, incineration, hanging, or shooting. Joe Biden on three occasions bragged of his desire to physically beat him up.

That fisticuffs trope was amplified by everyone from Cory Booker to Robert De Niro. His National Security designate, General Michael Flynn, was framed by the efforts of the FBI and remnants of the Obama Justice Department through an ambush interrogation aimed at reviving the ossified Logan Act. 

For nearly three years he was smeared and slurred as a Russian collaborator. That was a false charge and it devoured 22 months of his presidency, until the Mueller investigation imploded. Frenzied leftist hysterics followed this implosion. His first impeachment remains a stain on democracy. 

Trump, remember, did not cancel aid to Ukraine. He was prescient in warning about the serial corruption of Hunter Biden and his father’s family syndicate. He was far tougher on Vladimir Putin (greater sanctions, flooding the world with cheap oil, leaving a flawed missile treaty, hammering Russian mercenaries in Syria, sending offensive weapons to Ukraine that Obama-Biden had forbidden, beefing up military spending, etc.) than his predecessor. Putin did not invade other countries under Trump’s tenure, unlike during prior and subsequent administrations.

In its politicized efforts to get Trump, the FBI blew up its reputation as a competent, professional, and disinterested investigatory bureau. A good argument can be made that three consecutive directors, Mueller, Comey, and McCabe, either under oath misled a House Intelligence Committee inquiry or simply flat-out lied. Retired four-star generals systematically violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice with impunity as they slandered their commander-in-chief variously as Nazi-like, a Mussolini, or analogous to the architects of Nazi death camps. 

Congressional representatives grew so desperate to end Trump’s presidency that they called in a hack Yale psychiatrist to declare him, quite unprofessionally and without an examination, non compos mentis and deserving of a forced removal from office. Do we remember “Anonymous” who bragged in the New York Times of a covert and concerted effort inside his administration to destroy it?

A common denominator with all his critics—Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Dr. Bandy X. Lee, the CNN cadre, Andrew McCabe, Robert De Niro, Adam Schiff, Howard Stern, Peter Strzok, and a host of others—was that their anti-Trump obsessions either diminished their careers or empowered Trump, or both.

In response to all this, and often in preemptive fashion, Trump became obsessed with the historic injustice of it all. He yelled to high heaven that the Russian collusion charge was an utter hoax. He hammered the message that the COVID pandemic never originated naturally in a wet market but was birthed in a Wuhan virology lab. He screamed that the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic and a window into the Biden family’s systemic and lucrative corruption. Trump was right on all these counts, but, like mythical Cassandra, the more he rattled off the truth, the less likely he was to be believed given the coarseness of his protestations. 

To push through his agenda, and to strike back at the Democratic-media fusion, Trump stooped to battle nonstop with minor and irrelevant enemies—and often his own allies. He wrongly encouraged January 6 demonstrations at the Capitol at a time of volatile passions—missing the story of the 2020 election that was lost far earlier in the spring through altered voting laws. 

We will never quite know why the media became obsessed with Trump to the point that it is now a mere caricature of its former self. Was it Trump’s supposed crudity, both physical and vocal, that so shocked their sensibilities, from his orange hue and combover flop to his Queens accent? Was it MAGA estrangement from both Republican and Democratic hierarchies? Was it his deplorable base that had earned an entire vocabulary of hatred from the Obama-Clinton-Biden nexus (clingers, deplorables, dregs, chumps)? Or was it Trump’s own Ethan Edwards-like 360-degree, 24/7 constant obsessive combativeness?

After all, it was not Trump but his enemies who weaponized the CIA, FBI, and Justice Department. Trump, unlike Obama, did not spy on journalists. And unlike Biden, he created no ministry of truth. His supporters did not call to junk the Electoral College, pack the court, destroy the filibuster, or opportunistically add two new states. They did not radically change the voting laws through means that undermined the authority of state legislatures to end Election Day as we had known it for over three centuries. They did not turn balloting into mostly a mail-in/early voting phenomena that saw the usual rejection rate of ballots plummet even as the number of non-Election Day ballots soared. 

So, Kingmaker, Scapegoat, or Outlaw?

A good argument of “ifs” concerning Trump and the recent Republican midterms can be made: if he had stayed out of picking candidates; if he had helped all Republican candidates including those who opposed him; if at his rallies he had advanced positive “Commitment to America” solutions rather than litanies of his own past hurts and grievances; and if he now pivoted and raised money for the conservative agenda rather than having trashed rivals who nonetheless have advanced his shared cause.

By 2022 even hard conservatives thought Trump was expendable, his liabilities growing larger than his assets, his future potential deemed less than his past achievements, his don’t tread-on-me pushbacks to the Left overshadowed by his cul-de-sac and gratuitous spats with irrelevancies, and his former remarkable perseverance in the face of historic and unjust attacks overshadowed by his current preemptive squabbles.

So, will Trump rest on his considerable laurels and ride out gracefully to Mar-a-Lago? And there, as a kingmaker/elder statesman, will he work to institutionalize his MAGA agendas while raising money for any presidential candidate who embraces it?

Or will a subdued candidate Trump now pivot, grow quieter, and let the people vote in the primaries to decide whether they want him anymore—and whether Ron DeSantis sinks as a 2016 Scott Walker on the national stage (a similarly talented and successful governor), or assumes the mythical status of Ronald Reagan? 

Or will an unapologetic Trump instead now escalate his slurs, bray at the moon, play out his current angry Ajax role to the bitter end, and thus himself end up a tragic hero—appreciated for past service but deemed too toxic for present company?

 More:

Don’t believe Trump — this midterm miss is all because of him

By Post Editorial Board

Donald TrumpFormer President Donald Trump only has himself to blame for the GOP's poor showing in the midterm Senate elections. TalkTV

In August, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told NBC News he was confident Republicans could take the House. As for the Senate . . . “Senate races are just different,” he said. “They’re statewide, candidate quality has a lot to do with the outcome.”

He was absolutely right, of course. Candidate quality gave Democrats control of the Senate again, and forced a runoff in Georgia.

In Arizona, for one, McConnell had wanted popular Gov. Doug Ducey to run. But ex-President Donald Trump had slandered Ducey, vowing to oppose him every step of the way because he had refused to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 election. So the GOP got Blake Masters, who just lost to Democrat Mark Kelly.

And Trump blames . . . Mitch McConnell.

“Spending money to defeat great Republican candidates instead of backing Blake Masters and others was a big mistake,” Trump “truthed.” “Giving 4 Trillion Dollars to the Radical Left for the Green New Deal, not Infrastructure, was an even bigger mistake. He blew the Midterms, and everyone despises him and his otherwise lovely wife, Coco Chow!”

Pretty much every word out of Trump’s mouth these days is a lie, but it’s worth unpacking this particular bag of bunkum. 

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Trump worked against each other for Republican candidates they believed were a better fit.

First, though the relationship between Masters and McConnell was indeed fraught, the Senate Leadership Fund spent $8 million in Arizona in October alone.

You know who didn’t spend a lot of money? Donald Trump. Sitting on a warchest of $92 million, he spent just 22% of it on the midterms nationwide.

Trump allowed Masters to send out a fundraising message to the former president’s donor list in late October. The split? For every dollar donated, 99 cents would go to Trump, 1 cent to Masters.

As for the spending bills, McConnell did help get an infrastructure bill passed, which was $1 trillion, not $4 trillion, and supported by a number of Republicans who are now touting projects in their home states. The other “Green New Deal” funding Trump alludes to? McConnell opposed it, but he was powerless to stop it. Why? Because Donald Trump sabotaged the Georgia runoff elections in early 2021 and Republicans lost control of the Senate. 

Then there’s a racist cherry on top, where Trump smears his former transportation secretary.

No, Don, it’s not Mitch who “blew the Midterms.” It’s you.

All but one of the “America First” slate of election deniers you endorsed lost. Your key hand-picked Senate candidates lost. Your obsessive fixation on trying to prove a lie — that the 2020 election was “stolen” — even hurt the GOP in statehouses, as  Democrats gained ground in Pennsylvania, Michigan and elsewhere.

All while the enormously unpopular, incompetent President Joe Biden sits in the White House. 

The election should have been about him. Instead, you made it about you. And since you made it all about you, you are the only one to blame.

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Toameh is a courageous journalist friend i met in Israel well over 10 years ago. Far too many Islamists are obsessed with killing.  if there is a god were they put on earth so we would have an example of how not to live and treat life? Bless their wretched Souls.

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The Jihad on Man's Best Friend

BY RAYMOND IBRAHIM 

   

On Nov. 4, 2022, Khaled Abu Toameh, an Israeli Arab journalist, tweeted: “The mayor of Hebron [a Palestinian city] offered 20 shekels to anyone who kills a dog in his city. Palestinians took to the streets, torturing and killing dozens of dogs.” The tweet was accompanied by a picture of what appeared to be Palestinians beating or striking to death a dog with sticks.

Such barbaric behavior for what is otherwise considered in the USA as “man’s best friend” is not uncommon in the Muslim world.

Thus, on July 26, 2022, another similar tweet appeared: “The savage rulers of the Islamic Republic of Iran decided to raid a dog shelter in the desert and kill all of the 300 dogs being taken care of by volunteers. Only a few dogs survived. The entire shelter turned into a bloodbath.”

According to another tweet that appeared one day later, the bloodbath was even worse: “The ruthless regime in Iran has raided a dog shelter and killed more than 1,700 stray dogs protected by volunteers. Very few dogs survived. This volunteer woman in tears holds a dead dog and says ‘This was the most vulnerable & obedient one.’”

And a few days before that, in Qatar, on July 10, 2022:

A group of armed men stormed a secure facility in Qatar used to feed and shelter stray dogs, killing 29 of them and injuring others over claims that one of them had bitten one of the men’s children.… [T]he unidentified gunmen threatened security guards with weapons before entering a secure factory area, where the stray dogs are looked by the community. The assailants are then thought to have shot 29 dogs, including puppies, leaving others badly injured….  [A] source described the incident as “horrific” with people running for cover as the group of men shot at the defenceless animals. The source added that after the shootings, a number of animals have still not been found, and locals fear they are hiding, possibly with terrible injuries….  [T]he animals posed no threat to anyone and were well looked after. One puppy is fighting to survive under a vet’s care.

One can go on and on with similar stories — in August 2021, the Taliban prevented the rescue of 173 dogs and cats, preferring to see them “bake to death in their travel crates” — but the point should be clear.

To be sure, not all Muslims are inhumane to dogs. The Animal and Environment Association in Bethlehem, for example, the only animal shelter in the West Bank, issued a statement condemning the mayor of Hebron’s recent “bloody campaign,” which “resulted in killing many dogs, [by] shooting, hanging, abusing, running over them by cars. What happened today is beyond humanity and ethics,” the association continued, before adding, “No religion would accept such barbaric actions toward innocent animals.”

Here we come to it: Is this true? Does no religion — including the one in question, Islam — “accept such barbaric actions toward innocent animals”? … Keep reading.

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When voting was a sane endeavor and you could trust the results:

https://townhall.com/columnists/allenwest/2022/11/14/when-voting-was-easy-n2615907

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Tar and "Wokeness," a new film which I have not seen:

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‘Tar’ Film Shows What Happens When Bad People Are Canceled For The Wrong Reasons

Cate Blanchett’s role in ‘Tar’ may be Oscar bait, but her character also prompts serious reflection on the nuances of cancel culture.

BY: JONATHAN S. TOBIN

Audiences that are tempted into the theater to see Todd Field’s new film “Tar” — which is widely perceived as Oscar bait — starring actress Cate Blanchett may know little or nothing about Gustav Mahler, J.S. Bach, or Glenn Gould.

In 21st-century America, classical music has become a niche interest with little crossover appeal. Generations raised in an era when schools have discarded the idea that educated people are supposed to know at least a smidgeon about high culture will draw a blank when an endless list of musical figures, institutions, and terms are name-checked in a movie that revels in the inside baseball world of classical orchestras and the imperious maestros that rule over them.

But even if all of that passes over their heads, they will understand immediately what’s at stake when Blanchett’s character Lydia Tar must decide how to handle woke ideology run amok. Nor will they be surprised when that confrontation eventually produces incalculable consequences for the film’s protagonist.

In a key scene in the movie, Tar, someone that we are introduced to as a classical music superstar at the peak of fame and important enough to be the subject of a fawning on-stage interview by The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik (who plays himself), is teaching a conducting master class at the Juilliard School. There she faces the challenge of how to reach a student who describes himself as a “BIPOC pangender person” who believes the music of Bach deserves to be rejected because that 17th-century genius is a dead white male who is the product of a racist system and is also suspect because he fathered 20 children.

Tar is supposed to be savvy enough to have navigated her way through the art world to the point where she has gone from a working-class home on Staten Island to being the principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, a post that places her at the pinnacle of her profession.

As such, she ought to understand that calling out the arrogance and ignorance of such an impudent twit at a place like Julliard is a no-win proposition. Ours is, after all, a time when virtually every leading institution of the music world has been forced to bend the knee to identity politics by appointing cultural commissars who supervise personnel and programming decisions according to the woke catechism of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

But Blanchett’s creation is sufficiently full of herself because of her stature as an artist that she thinks the rules of this leftist orthodoxy don’t apply to her.

What follows is a brilliant takedown by Tar of the presumptions of wokeness. It ought to be required viewing for anyone who presumes to opine about the need to reject the classics in favor of the generally awful modernist compositions produced by members of favored minority groups that are nowadays routinely crammed down the ears of audiences who attend concerts by major American orchestras.

Tar’s oration beautifully captures the joy and the love of music that was at the core of Leonard Bernstein’s influential televised “Young People’s Concerts” broadcast in the 1950s and ’60s that helped inspire both the fictional Tar and a generation of young American musicians then and in subsequent decades.

That her words will be taken out of context and twisted to make her appear to be a racist later on as part of a frighteningly effective effort to cancel Tar is unsurprising. But what makes this movie especially interesting is that she is not an innocent victim. She is, instead, arguably guilty of other offenses that are worthy of cancellation. 

Blanchett’s character describes herself at one point as a “U-Haul lesbian.” When not flying around the globe on private jets to be feted as a musician, author, and cultural guru, she is in a seemingly stable and loving relationship with her orchestra’s first violinist and concertmaster (played by German actress Nina Hoss) and the adoptive parent of a young girl. But she is also a serial sexual predator who uses a fellowship program for aspiring young female conductors to groom women who idolize her for sexual dalliances only then to discard them. 

Blanchett’s performance unravels the complexity of a character who is a fiercely protective parent (in perhaps the film’s most chilling scene, she threatens a child who bullies her daughter at school in a way that seems to have been taken straight out of one of the Grimm brothers’ darkest fairy tales) and kind to an elderly and neglected retired colleague. But she is also utterly ruthless and callously insensitive to faithful subordinates and willing to use her position to advance the career of a young Russian female cellist (played by a real-life aspiring musician Sophie Knauer) whom she has marked as her next conquest.

Still, memories of a young woman that she may have abused and whose career she ruined, who then committed suicide, haunt her. Inevitably, her indiscretions and crimes begin to close in on her leading to a denouement that is no less tragic for being a fitting punishment to someone who has behaved as she has done.

Yet what makes “Tar” such an important film and one that is particularly emblematic of the culture wars of the 2020s is that it is not just a compelling story with a riveting, incandescent performance by the sublime Blanchett or even that it has outraged leftists who identify with the absurd position taken by that Juilliard student.

It also leaves audiences pondering whether the world would really be better off without getting to hear the interpretations of great music that someone like Tar could produce — the film takes place as she prepares to record a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony — even though we also don’t want to give her a pass for bad behavior.

That “Tar” was going to be viciously criticized for championing, in the words of one piece in The New Yorker, “regressive ideas” and “regressive aesthetics” that the woke despise was always a given. Cancel culture exists and thrives because ideological zealots have assumed positions of power in various sectors of society and use them to enforce fealty by means of fear and intimidation.

The fact that some of the same voices have criticized the film for the sin of putting forward the transgressive notion that powerful women/non-heterosexuals can act just as abusively as white males should also have been expected.

If Lydia Tar is doomed to be taken down by a social media campaign and lawsuits and subjected to a humiliating comeuppance as much because of her admirable loyalty to art as her actual crimes, that is an irony that the filmmaker relishes. A society that enables sexual predators is one that has lost its moral compass. But it’s also possible to assert that a society that has no room for flawed people who are able to channel that flair for spreading the beauty of great music in the manner that Bernstein embodied is poorer for their loss.

Like some famous conductors, such as James Levine and Charles Dutoit, whose careers were brought to an end by the #MeToo movement, Bernstein, who is frequently referenced in the film and then seen in videos of his concerts for children, had a problematic personal life and controversial stands (a party he hosted for the Black Panthers inspired Tom Wolfe’s famous “radical chic” essay) of his own. But he lived and died in an era when being a star brought with it indulgences that we no longer grant artists.

There should be zero tolerance for the kind of bad conduct in which Lydia Tar engages. But the means and the motives for punishing people like her are now tangled up with issues that go further than violating sexual harassment rules.

“Tar” gives us no definitive answer about how to judge the value of flawed people’s work. But that it is willing to ask such questions and challenge conventional wisdom about the intersection of ethics, politics, and aesthetics marks it as a uniquely morally serious work of art worthy of a broader audience than the ones who attend classical concerts.

Jonathan S. Tobin is a senior contributor to The Federalist, editor in chief of JNS.org, and a columnist for Newsweek. Follow him on Twitter at @jonathans_tobin.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor in chief of JNS.org, a senior contributor for The Federalist and a columnist for the New York Post and  Newsweek. He is also the host of the Top Story podcast that can be viewed on YouTube and listened to on Spotify and other platforms. He can be reached via e-mail at: jtobin@jns.org. Follow him on Twitter at @jona

thanks_tobin and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/JonathanSTobincolumnist/

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DeSantis and Pompeo would be my ticket.

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I learned a lot inside my M1 tank. 

By Mike Pompeo

As a young tanker in Germany during the Cold War, I learned to see that the only color that mattered was green.

And, above all, the only thing that mattered was if a soldier could do their job under the greatest of pressures in defending their country. 

These life lessons and self-evident truths are rejected by the Democratic Party. They see EVERYTHING through the lenses of race and gender. Their goal is to divide the American people every chance they can get.

This is wrong, regressive, and downright un-American.

 

MAKE AMERICA PATRIOTIC AGAIN

Right now, the Democrats are turning our country into a socialist nightmare. 

I don’t want to see the America I fought for and love vanish, so I’m doing everything in my power to restore patriotism to America.

 

MAKE AMERICA PATRIOTIC AGAIN

If you feel like I do and want to see the patriotic America I grew up in restored, please consider making a donation today.

We are all Americans, created equal in the eyes of God, endowed with unalienable rights guaranteed to us by our creator. Let’s make sure these principles remain in place.

Never Give An Inch,

 

Mike Pompeo

On another note:

Russia and Iran are Heading for Defeat in Ukraine

By Ben Cohen

Former President George W. Bush with the late Israeli PM Ariel Sharon at the White House. Photo: White House

JNS.org – Those who are nostalgic for the heyday of neoconservatism might want to know that on Wednesday, former US President George W. Bush will host a video discussion with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Bush—whose famous 2002 “Axis of Evil” State of the Union address listed Russia’s loyal ally Iran alongside North Korea and Iraq—has said that he regards Zelensky as a Winston Churchill for our time, while a statement from the George W. Bush Institute announcing the event urges the US to “provide the assistance, military and otherwise, to help Ukraine defend itself.”

Isolationists on the right and “anti-war” advocates on the left will doubtless sneer at this event as an exercise in the kind of warmongering we thought we’d left behind in Afghanistan and Iraq. But the concerns raised in those conflicts have little bearing on the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine. No-one is talking about deploying US or NATO troops on the ground in a combat situation, nor is there any discussion of an international administration to supervise the growing portion of Ukrainian territory that is being liberated from the Russian occupiers. The democratic government in Kyiv has asked for weapons, but it is Ukrainian fighters who will operate them and Ukrainian officials who will manage postwar reconstruction.

Moreover, the timing of the event with Bush and Zelensky is fortuitous. Last week, the Ukrainian armed forces achieved their most important breakthrough yet, as Russia was forced into a humiliating withdrawal from the southern city of Kherson it captured in the early days of the invasion. For months, Kherson was the locus of Russia’s reign of terror, with thousands of the city’s residents beaten, arrested and tortured for protesting the Russian incursion, the rape and abuse of women and girls as young as 12 and the abduction of nearly 2,000 Ukrainian children taken from their families and removed to Russia itself. Last Friday, Kherson’s battered citizens emerged onto the streets to the welcome sight of the Ukrainian national flag and patrols of Ukrainian, not Russian, troops.

The exhausted smiles in Kherson were matched by the nervous scowls of the Russian top brass as they tried to spin their defeat in Kherson into a mere “redeployment.” While it remains true that Kherson is a city fraught with danger, with boobytraps littering its streets and the remainder of Russian forces now gathered on the opposite bank of the River Dnipro, there should be no mistaking that Kherson also marks a decisive victory.

It’s important, therefore, that the international community assists the Ukrainians to build on this momentum. If victory is defined as the total expulsion of Russian forces from Ukraine, then the triumph in Kherson is the best evidence so far that such an outcome is possible. It is also eminently desirable; it is, of course, the Ukrainians who have suffered the most from Russia’s illegal aggression, but the rest of us, regardless of where we live, have been smarting from the war’s impact on food and energy prices at a time when our economic health is seriously deteriorating.

The current situation has additionally exposed the degree to which Russia’s leaders have alienated the international community. Indeed, there is only one state that is willing to concretely aid Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in his bid to eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation: Iran. Last week, the head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, flew to Tehran at the invitation of his Iranian counterpart, Adm. Ali Shamkhani. On arrival, Patrushev treated journalists to a rant about the nefarious western media’s supposed “disinformation” campaign regarding Ukraine before heading into discussions with Shamkhani and others that focused on how Iran can shore up the crumbling Russian war machine. Chiefly, that involves the supply of lethal weaponry; the Shahed-136 and Arash-2 drones that have already wrought devastation on Ukraine’s population centers and possbily Fateh-110 and Zolfighar missiles with ranges in the hundreds of miles. Such an equipment list is an indication of how Russia intends to fight this war going forward, by visiting destruction upon Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure in order to provoke the exodus of millions more refugees westward as the bitter cold of winter sets in.

In war, timing is everything. Ukraine’s armed forces have already proven the dictum that an army that believes in what it is fighting for is a superior force in the face of a larger, better-equipped enemy with low morale. The significance of this has been recognized in key international capitals, especially in Washington, DC, where the U.S. government last week supplied a further $400 million in defense assistance that included the HIMARS rockets deployed so effectively by the Ukrainians as well as Humvees, Stinger missiles and ammunition rounds.

Other countries debating similar moves should follow the U.S. example. That includes Israel, which—as I argued here last month—has been presented with a golden opportunity to underline its credentials as a leading member of the community of democratic nations. In addition, Israel also has an opportunity to inflict, through its involvement in Ukraine, a major defeat upon Iran and its aim of eliminating the Jewish state from the map in much the same way that Putin intends to do with Ukraine.

There will be those, as ever, who push caution with various arguments. Fear that poking Russia may cause it to destabilize other parts of the world, most obviously the Middle East, where it retains a notable if depleting military presence in Syria, is one. Observing that Russia is the world’s second-largest provider of natural gas and the third-largest supplier of petroleum, and that consequently we need to keep its leaders sweet, is another. Apocalyptic warnings that a desperate Putin will turn his nuclear arsenal on western cities is yet another. Ultimately, the goal of all these perspectives – which present questionable assumptions as undisputed facts—is to stave off total defeat upon the Russians, thereby allowing Putin’s regime to present its survival as a victory, just as Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship in Iraq did after the 1990 Gulf War.

Dithering at a time when we should be focused on further defeats for the Russians in the Ukrainian theater only helps Putin, who is manifestly not the pragmatic, benevolent autocrat which too many Western politicians inanely believed him to be for two decades. Let us seize the moment and deal the Russian-Iranian alliance the blow it deserves.

Ben Cohen is a New York City-based journalist and author who writes a weekly column on Jewish and international affairs for JNS.

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Israeli air force attacks Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria

Syrian state media and observer group claims Israeli military has carried out airstrikes on airbase used by Hezbollah and Iranian militia.

Syrian state-controlled media claimed Sunday evening that Israeli forces carried out an airstrike on targets on the outskirts of the city of Homs, in northwest Syria.

State television reported that the country’s air defense network was activated, and that a number of missiles were intercepted near the Al-Shoairat air base.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), an anti-regime monitor group based in London, confirmed the report, saying that Israeli warplanes fired four missiles at targets in the Al-Shoairat air base.

The report noted that the air base is used both by the Lebanon-based Hezbollah terrorist organization, as well as by Iranian-backed militias.

No casualties have yet been reported by either the SOHR or Syrian state media.

Sources cited by the SOHR report claimed that the Israeli airstrikes Sunday also hit targets near the Damascus International Airport.

Six missiles were launched towards targets in the vicinity of the Damascus airport, the report claimed.

Multiple weapons depots and the headquarters of a pro-Iranian militia located near the airport were hit, SOHR reported.

Sunday’s airstrikes are the 29th attack ascribed to Israel against targets in Syria in 2022.

Syrian airbase hit by alleged Israeli airstrike used by Russian military

The runway and underground facilities at the Shayrat airbase have undergone a major expansion by the Russian military in the last three years.

Two Syrian soldiers were killed and three others were injured in alleged Israeli airstrikes that hit the Shayrat airbase southeast of Homs on Sunday evening, according to Syrian state media SANA.

The airstrikes were conducted from over Lebanese airspace in northern Lebanon, according to SANA. Syrian journalist Nour Abo Hasan reported that the airstrikes targeted a shipment of weapons intended for Hezbollah which was on its way to Lebanon near the airport.

The last Israeli airstrikes to target Syria were reported on October 27, when alleged Israeli airstrikes targeted sites in the Damascus area. Two additional waves of airstrikes targeted the Damascus area in the days preceding those strikes.

The runway and underground facilities at Shayrat, including aircraft shelters, have undergone a major expansion by the Russia military in the last three years, the military source said. Russia, which maintains a major military presence in Syria, has forces stationed near to Shayrat air base and uses the base, security sources say.

Last airstrike to target Shayrat was almost exactly a year ago

The last Israeli airstrike to target the Shayrat airbase was reported in November of last year, when two Syrian soldiers were injured in strikes targeting sites near Homs and Tartus. The airport has been used by Russian forces in the country as well.

Shortly before that airstrike, the ALMA Research and Education Center reported that Iranian UAVs were being transferred to the Shayrat Airbase.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Missile Defense Is More Urgent Than Ever 

By John Bolton

It is a small step for Russia from violating these international taboos to offering military assistance to rogue-state allies. Given China’s historical support for nuclear and missile proliferation and its enormous demand for oil and gas, you can imagine Beijing’s doing the same. And, unfortunately, it’s true that current U.S. missile defenses would be woefully inadequate to defend against significant ballistic missile strikes. but Washington must make enhancing our missile defenses a priority.

Even President Biden seems to understand what a vital task this is. As a senator, he stridently opposed George W. Bush’s decision in 2001 to scrap the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and build out missile defenses. The Bush administration’s plans were, in Mr. Biden’s view, equivalent to “raising the starting gun that will begin a new arms race in the world.” But times change. The Biden administration’s Missile Defense Review, released late last month, attests to the “expanding and accelerating risk” missile technologies pose to the U.S., its forces abroad and our allies, as well as the heightened need for missile defense.

Mr. Biden’s mind has been changed by more than Iran, which accompanied its claims of missile advancements with a threat that those who meddle in the state will “pay the price.” As experts speculate that North Korea is readying a seventh nuclear test (its first since 2017), the administration worries that Pyongyang might graduate from testing nuclear weapons to using one against an adversary. A sign of this fear: Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin recently threatened that such a strike would mean “the end of the Kim Jong Un regime.

North Korea’s missile-delivery systems, which like Iran’s are based originally on Russian SCUD missile technology, are improving rapidly as well. Tehran’s recent claims of advanced missile capabilities and its nuclear program in general have benefited from Pyongyang’s technical assistance. Iran is simply following North Korea’s lead. Pyongyang has been testing at a steeply accelerated pace, including a record-breaking 23 launches on Nov. 2, one of which landed near South Korean territorial waters. Subsequent North Korean tests included an intercontinental ballistic missile, which caused Japanese authorities to order civil-defense measures, although that launch was ultimately determined to have failed.

China and Russia pose a growing nuclear danger too. Both have made increasingly belligerent references to nuclear arms and offensive war. Yet the limited defenses America has built up have been consistently inadequate and are now simply not fit to meet that threat.

Washington has no excuse for how sparse its national missile defenses remain, two decades after freeing itself from the ABM Treaty. As our enemies pursued hypersonics and other threatening new technologies, America’s operational capacities for deterrence—and its will to retaliate with military force as deterrence requires—have declined. North Korea’s recent testing has led some pearl-clutchers to argue that we should acknowledge the dictatorship as a nuclear-weapons state. Yet it doesn’t take a hawkish attitude to see the immense value in improving our missile defenses. They are designed and deployed for defensive purposes and to protect the lives of innocent civilians. No president would hesitate to employ missile defenses in the event of an attack, especially a nuclear one, even if he feared retaliating against our adversary—contrary to our national security interests and deterrence policy.

We don’t need perfect systems to influence enemy risk calculations about taking offensive action against the U.S. Nonetheless, there is a significantly higher risk of missile strikes on the American homeland today than two decades ago, and our capabilities haven’t improved correspondingly. The U.S. needs greater accuracy in antimissile systems, and far more of them. Our defenses need to be deployed to deal with rogue-state threats, as well as China and Russia, and against all phases of hostile launches: boost, midcourse and terminal.

Such efforts will need to be far more ambitious than previous attempts. When Mr. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty 20 years ago, he created a missile-defense program to defend against “handfuls” of incoming missiles from rogue states and accidental launches from Russia and China, as was entirely appropriate for the threats at the time. Today, rogue state capabilities are more sophisticated, Russian rhetoric is becoming more belligerent, and China’s nuclear arsenal is growing rapidly. In response we must urgently increase our homeland missile defenses across the board, which will also have the collateral benefit of aiding our allies. The technology we develop to protect ourselves can be deployed to defend them too.

Today’s threat environment leaves no room for further delay and failure. Homeland missile defense should command top priority in our national security strategy.

Mr. Bolton is author of “The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir.” He served as the president’s national security adviser, 2018-19, and ambassador to the United Nations, 2005-06.

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