Hypocrisy Rules Supreme

You can't argue for universality of human rights and dignity, bash Islamists for promoting child marriages, and for basically treating women like property (except when they are needed for propaganda), and then go and claim that 40 years ago Alabama culture permitted much older men to molest teenage girls (despite the laws to the contrary) and that it's perfectly ok and not at all creepy. If it's creepy when your political opponent does it, it's creepy when your guy does it as well. Just sayin'.

One of the issues that really bothers me about this whole thing with Moore is how easily the public has created double standards. The same religious Christians who are all up an arms for the horrific Islamist cultures that have no regard for women or for individual rights are completely nonchalant about allegations concerning Moore so long as they can score a political victory. Well, if in your cost-benefit analysis, a 2-year Senate seat outweighs any moral considerations, that's certainly up to you, but you will have lost any right to sit in moral judgment of other people and the nasty or blatantly illegal things that they do. And expect me to question the defenders of Moore every time they express outrage about Hollywood pervs who are accused of doing similar things, which are likewise from long ago and at this point, unprovable. No, I don't expect politicians to be saints. I do expect their supporters to have enough intellectual honesty to hold themselves to the same standards they expect of their opposition.

How to Preempt Republican Primary Challengers in 2020

Prediction: Every time Sheldon Adelson shows displeasure with Steve Bannon, or someone linked to Trump, or Republicans, Mike Pence, or someone from the administration will renew the promise of moving the Embassy to Jerusalem. The words "actively considering" without any specific date will reappear at some appropriate event. Meanwhile, we'll be no closer to any action than at the beginning of the presidency. Works every time. Like clockwork.

What Does the Left Get Out of the Roy Moore Fiasco?

Ladies and gents, I bring to you the very obvious outcome of the left's efforts in handing the Ray Moore story.

The issue for the left is not whether Moore is guilty or innocent.

Not whether they will win or lose that one seat (that's not under anyone's direct control).

Not whether, he'll keep on fighting or leave the race. All those are factors, not central issues.

The central issue here is dividing and ridiculing the Republican party, having Republicans go at one and other, and discrediting themselves in a wide variety of ways.

So far, the plan is succeeding.

When You Think You Are Strong, When In Fact, You're Just SHort-Sighted

Democrats are ALWAYS trying to do hit jobs. That's called opposition research. Sometimes it bears out and sometimes it's pure fabrication. That's nasty, but it's politics so there is no excuse not to be prepared and not do your own job in looking at where your candidate might get hit.

And do all of you honestly believe that the Republicans woudn't do oppo research on a candidate and try to bring it up at a convenient time if they could? The better question is why are they so terrible at doing that. Is it laziness? Weakness? Corruption? Lack of access to quality operatives? I don't know. What I do firmly believe that all the people who are more than willing to overlook whatever Roy Moore did just because the Democrats brought it out of the closet at the last minute would do the same thing to the other side in the heartbeat, if only they could. But they can't, so they are doing their party a disservice twice: first, by talking the talk without walking the walk, and second, by failing to distance themselves from known liabilities and therefore opening themselves up to further attacks of the same kind.

I won't be surprised if more of this doesn't come out in a week or two, only much worse and with some awful evidence that will be hard to dispute.

Let's face it, 40 years ago, people did not keep good records. They weren't in the habit of instagramming their every move. There was no Instagram. 20 years from now? The young candidates running in local elections will be inundated with blackmail and revelations. And if we are still stuck in the mindset from 40 years ago 20 years from now, there won't be any elections worth winning left.

Roy Moore's Defense Starts With Roy Moore

1. Roy Moore failed to publicly and unequivocally deny all allegations, including but not limited to accusations of attempted sexual assault, being banned from the mall for being too creepy even for that time and place, and the yearbook.

2. If in doubt, see one. I see no reason to defend someone who refuses to defend himself. Why are you killing yourselves and making yourselves look ridiculous over someone who refuses to simply state "There is not one word of truth in any of this"?

Roy Moore is Not The Hill Worth Dying On

Let me put it this way, whatever you think of cultural norms in Alabama 40 years ago, the bulk of the evidence, Moore's guilt or innocences, who is behind the current revelations, and whether or not it's appropriate to run such candidates, one thing is clear to me:

Moore is not entitled to support of anyone except the people who voted for him. No politician from another jurisdiction "has" to continue supporting somebody with a cloud of attempted sexual assault allegations hanging over his head. And not one conservative must act against his conscience and show support to somebody from another state just to virtue signal their opposition to dirty trickery by the Democrats. And if the v oters in Alabama decide that this guy deserves to be in the Senate, so be it. But he is not entitled to a single colleague's support there if they in good conscience believe that he is a liar and a pervert.

And if he continues tarnishing the brand of the Republican Party, the people who are vigorously supporting him now will have that to content with. If the Party continues to fail to recruit new people because GOP becomes associated with hypocrisy, complete lack of accountability, and lack of good judgment, Republicans will have only themselves to blame. There are many battles to fight against the left. Some Republicans were willing to hang themselves on the hill that was Michael Flynn. We all know how that turned out. Sometimes it's just not worth it, morally or practically. I am not willing to tie my personal reputation to Roy MOore, whom I didn't actually support to begin with, except in a very technical sense as the voters' choice for the general election in Alabama. And the PR winner in this battle is going to be the left anyway. By all means, expose dirty trickery wherever you see it - but only after making sure that you yourself are not going down with the people you are exposing.

Why You Don't Have To Support Moore to Be a Real Conservative

It's astounding to see the very same people (literally) who expressed horror at Donald Trump's character last year, and were distressed that the Republicans chose him as their nominee in the primaries, and were shocked that the Evangelicals and other religious groups would endorse someone like that, the same people who refused to give him full-hearted support even after the nomination... suddenly defend Roy Moore with their dying breath AS IF THERE IS NO CAUSE FOR CONCERN whatsoever.

Now, don't get me wrong. I've been struggling with this issue myself since the story broke out. Unlike many of Moore's supporters, I never liked the man to begin with, but since this is the candidate Alabama voters have chosen, I was hoping, and could certainly understand, that Moore's conservative colleagues in the Senate would try to make the best of the situation, buddy up with him, and get him to vote for the right things and avoid saying and doing harmful things as much as possible. I would not be happy that he was there at all, but I could live with that outcome. I cannot live with a liar, who makes fools of his own constituents, and who appears to be completely non-chalant about the seriousness of the accusations by his detractors. I will be significantly less diplomatic about it than some people I very much respect were and say as following: sure, the timing MAY very well be entirely political and disruptive. But that does not justify Moore's crimes, if he is guilty of them, and it's certainly does not justify the lying.

And it absolutely does not justify those "conservatives" who are willing to put aside all moral judgment and support Moore EVEN if it turns out that all claims are true and he is indeed a pedophile and a liar. To say that I'm disappointed, not so much in the original Trump supporters, but in the people who did consider character an important issue to selecting a candidate and who now completely destroyed their credibility by trying to find excuses for the inexcusable, is not to say anything. I've already seen a fair number sliding down that slippery slope into blatantly favoring evil, not even the lesser evil, just evil, so long as it's "their" kind of evil, and this further degradation just adds an additional layer of disgust on top of it all. Now, I get if people are genuinely struggling with this issue. I myself expressed grave concerns about the high likelihood of defamation of character, conveniently launched by political operatives and picked up by those who simply dislike Moore.

For that reason, I have a great deal of respect for Steve Deace, who, in a very earnest statement, explained why he himself is struggling with this issue. I myself was not willing to "buy into" (as I was accused of doing) the political machinery behind the latest election-time shenanigans. I wanted to see what would happen next. I was sorely disappointed by Roy Moore's own actions, his loss of credibility on Hannity, and by the bandwagon of apologists, who do not care about truth, righteousness, or even legality of his actions, so long as he "wins" and they get to score points against the left. Once again, my advice to the conservatives: the road to hell is paved with good intentions. You might want to reconsider your own choices that keep leading you towards increasingly more impeachable candidates. There is no shortage of staunch conservatives without this kind of baggage. How about, instead of falling for the most shrill, grandiose megalomaniacs that you can find, supporting people with no dark secrets of the sexual crime variety, who will do their job earnestly, and who will not blatantly lie to you about the most basic facts of the situation?

I am further disgusted by the accusations of bad faith and being a tool of the left that are being launched at me now that after a time of carefully monitoring the situation and struggling with various angles of it, i have come to a personal choice that Moore is more likely guilty than not, and that he is almost certainly lying about at least some aspects of this situation. I took heat from the left when I cautioned against jumping at easy political bait and at the gravity of undermining someone's reputation. I am equally willing to take the heat now, because truth to me, matters a lot more than opinions of people on the Internet. I am not willing to make compromises with my own conscience and to support someone who engages in this level of deceit and is either covering up a crime, or is so narcissistic, that even for the sake of clearing his name and helping his party dig itself out of the moral morass, will continue covering up, lying, and equivocating.

I pray and wholeheartedly hope that Moore turns out to be entirely innocent of the heinous accusations against him. However, he disgraced himself on Hannity, and he disgraced himself further by refusing to clear his name and by not calling out to his supporters and cautioning them against their willingness to support criminals. That would have been the right thing to do in this situation. Unlike the many "conservatives" I have encountered, I remain fully confident that the State of Alabama, has, in fact, a number of viable, conservative candidates, who are neither pedophiles nor liars or equivocators, and who would make fine candidates in the event Roy Moore wisely decides to spare us all additional embarrassment and to withdraw. He is now a complete liability to the party, and the best he can do is come clear, apologize, and take his leave. If he stays in the race, somehow manages to win the election (which I doubt), and takes the Senate seat, he will have not only disgraced that institution, but he will be a political loss for conservatives. His vote will be tainted, and he will end up as disservice to his own state.

Is Trump All That Different? Posted at TOI

http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/is-the-trump-administration-all-that-different/

Is The Trump Administration All That Different? NOVEMBER 9, 2017, 12:07 AM   

Many, on both the left and the right, critics and supporters, have asserted that the Trump administration is like no other in history of the United States, or for that matter, the Republican party. But is the Trump administration all that different?

Trump has been a politically polarizing politician, but policy-wise, his administration is not too different from George W. Bush’s in many respects. And on some things, he basically continued with Obama’s policies. The major difference between him and Obama are 1. conservative judges and 2. deregulation. However, many of these regulations only came into place under Obama, so there isn’t actually a striking difference between the way life was under Bush and what it’s like under Trump. So then, leaving aside, Trump’s personal qualities, why is the reaction to his administration so hysterical, when there isn’t actually all that much that has changed, much less negatively affected anyone in the US? (I have yet to see one person who lost medical coverage because of Trump). Three things:

1. The hysteria started under Bush with completely over the top reactions to Iraq war. Many of the people who expressed their differences over the war were so hateful in tone that I wonder to this day whether they knew who the real enemy was. The people who now fondly recall the Bush eras, tend to forget the utterly hateful rhetoric surrounding the war in Iraq and all the names Bush was called, and so forth. Bush himself was significantly more civil in tone. Trump supporters now call it weakness. I think there is a middle ground between allowing your adversaries to walk all over you and reacting impulsively to every single negative comment about you. Those who think that Trump comes out as strong and in control by lashing out are doing so because they are projecting their own wish to see someone respond to the annoying media and leftist loons. And gratifying as it may be emotionally, it does absolutely nothing for Trump’s image otherwise. No one except his most hardcore supporters actually believes he is a strong president due to that. That’s not to say that people won’t vote for him given no other Republican alternatives. Incumbents tend to win, and most people are doing ok for now, so there is no reason to believe that unless his policy ends up putting us on a crash course, history won’t follow the examples of previous presidents who got reelected despite not being particularly outstanding on any one thing. But let’s not kid ourselves about how Trump actually comes across. Or that someone less polarizing wouldn’t have gotten the same share of attacks. Same people who “wanted” Jeb or Rubio would have turned to calling them fascist Islamophobes the moment they took office and shown opposition to the Iran deal or cracked down on terrorists (and they would have done exactly that).

2. Media – for all the talks about the failing media, there are now many more media outlets than under Bush. These echo chambers started mushrooming under Obama as a reaction to each other. On the part of the left, it was a deliberate strategy of amplifying the message, on the part of the right it was a reaction to a perceived bias in the MSM, and MSM’s unwillingness to cover issues of concern to conservatives or give voice to conservative perspective. All of which is perfectly ok, of course, so long as people are still willing to examine the other side. But neither the journalists nor the readers were willing to do that, although there is a number of very fair minded conservative journalists who do excellent investigative work. But many of them are outright dismissed as political hacks by all of the left, regardless of what they say. Yes, there is bias and tunnel vision on both sides. But I would say that more conservatives are at least willing to hear what the other side says, if only to debunk it, than progressives who don’t even read what conservatives have to say.

3. The rise of activist movements – BLM, Occupy Wall Street, and BDS movements have all contributed to the radicalization of the discourse on the left. And they are not really comparable to Tea Party, which had very specific economic goals, and moreover organized around electing more conservative politicians, rather than just having actions for the sake of actions, or changing culture, or infiltrating the academe. To some extent, I think it’s the failing of the conservatives to utilize the Tea Party momentum to that end. But regardless of that, I think it’s clear that the rise of radical activists galvanized the left, though not necessarily towards any helpful ends such as getting elected. It definitely influenced rhetoric and perceptions, so that even very mainstream, old-school Democrats found themselves having to move to the left in order to keep up with the party messaging and not be left out in the cold. You might say that Trumpism did the the same for conservatives, but ideologically that’s not really the case, because Trumpism didn’t make anyone (not one peson) more “conservative” in any traditional understanding.

It shifted the focus of conversation to particular concerns popular with the conservatives in recent years, but whereas the conservative platform had a broad spectrum of issues and perspectives, Trumpism was a nativist/populist focus on a few very narrow issues to the exclusion of discussion and understanding of anything else. To some extent, it’s more a demagoguic exploitation of deeply personal fears and problems than any political movement that that affects the reasoning of the party about its platform. it’s not cohesive, it’s not based in any principles, it’s reactionary, and unfortunately, it plays on emotions and poor understanding of economics and foreign policy for overwhelming majority of people, instead of addressing their concerns in a thoughtful way (which is the failing of conservatives – and that’s how Trumpism took advantage of the vacuum). It’s not that conservatism holds no answers, it’s that a combination of corrupt or weak politicians, lack of access to broader discourse with the public, and failure to organize conservatives on a grassroots level made the public ripe for a quick takeover by loud over the top brash voices, which are perceived as strong, more confident, more decisive, and having solutions because they tell people what they want to hear.

No one really wants to discuss the downsides of these “solutions”. That’s old school. That failed. That’s out the door. So at the end of the day, left wing activist movements took the Democratic party through the triumph of cultural rhetoric and socialist economic appeal, while the right has been largely abducted by populist nativism, which actually has very little to do with “nationalism” as most people view it. It’s more like the combination of 1920s nativism/Know NOthing party and early post-revolutionary Soviet Union, with the focus on taking down the corrupt economic elites and installing the Peope who surely knew how to address their own needs. That was actually the underlying political premise of the first years of Bolshevism. Though Trumpism doesn’t embrace communism, it actually has a lot more of socialism in it than anyone would care to admit, and anyone who compares it to Italian fascism or German Nazism is sorely deluded. The underlying premise is actually very particular to early Soviet populism, minus the violence. That Trumpism and left wing cultural activism both rely on Alinsky tactics to carry out their agendas, makes them both more alike than they are different. That’s not to say that Trumpism is practically useless, and that someone who embraces it, cannot execute a policy successfully. But let’s see who’s actually executing some of the more successful Trump policies. Are they actual true believer populists? Or are they hardcore pragmatists, who’d be doing the same thing in any Republican administration? I actually think there are significantly fewer populists in the administration than people on either side of the aisle believe.

I think if Trump were to retire from politics, the movement will quick die down for lack of leadership, so long as more traditional conservatives get their act together and put forth a cohesive vision, which they had failed to do during the election. And I think, results will sooner or later speak for themselves. It may not happen today or tomorrow, but Trumpian isolationism is not consistent with the security demands of modern reality, nor with the economic demands of a colossal economy that we have in place today. All of that will fall by wayside, and Republicans will either feel betrayed once again, or others will emerge to take advantage of the things the administration did right and build on it in a more traditional and thought out manner. It remains to be seen what actually happens. But from the left, no matter who takes the mantle after Trump, expect nothing but more hatemongering, dismissal and Alinskyite tactics. To contrast with conservatism, they are forced to rely on the polar extreme, simply because of who their constituency is. I am not sure how the left can ever roll back the excesses of intersectionality given the generations of mindless drones it has produced. If they do try to do so, it may end badly.

Meanwhile, the GOP has some demons of its own to exorcise.

We no longer have the specter of Hillary haunting our upcoming electoral future. How are Republicans going to motivate the voters into turning out en masse to the Congressional elections next year when a) the momentum is with the Democrats, who are staunchly opposing Donald Trump (and any Republican initiative) b) Republicans are disunited and ready to eat each other alive c) many Republican Congressmen are retiring, so many of the spots will be up for grabs and d) Republicans have thus far failed spectacularly to deliver on their promises?

You cannot keep scaring people with imaginary boogeymen forever, and you cannot keep feeding them incoherent and half-baked promises that your own state’s constituents don’t actually want or you are not ready to full-heartedly sell to them and to fight for in Congress. You also cannot keep backing Obama-lite foreign policy that leaves us and our allies less secure and dominated by aggressive and tyrannical powers. At the rate we are going, we are facing a massive and well-deserved blowout… which will not teach anybody, anything as Republicans, after each loss, will continue to use DOnald Trump’s unpopularity or failure of any particular candidate to align with him, for this loss rather than engage in self-reflection on how party can do better.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you can bully people into supporting a particular candidate at the Convention. You cannot bully them or the entire country into sharing the spirit of the message that candidate brings. That just doesn’t work; GOP’s messaging continues to be behind the times and poorly delivered, and the same “old hands” from their positions of looking down, continue to believe that charging after your own and force feeding cheap propaganda somehow translates into unity building are completely delusional. I do not hope that the Republican politicians will take any lessons from last night’s electoral developments or the very obvious pattern easily observable on the ground, but I do hope that grassroots, sooner or later, and with however many election losses and intersectionality victories it requires, eventually figure it out.

Republicans Continue Tripping Over Their Own Feet

We no longer have the specter of Hillary haunting our upcoming electoral future. How are Republicans going to motivate the voters into turning out en masse to the Congressional elections next year when a) the momentum is with the Democrats, who are staunchly opposing Donald Trump (and any Republican initiative) b) Republicans are disunited and ready to eat each other alive c) many Republican Congressmen are retiring, so many of the spots will be up for grabs and d) Republicans have thus far failed spectacularly to deliver on their promises? You cannot keep scaring people with imaginary boogeymen forever, and you cannot keep feeding them incoherent and half-baked promises that your own state's constituents don't actually want or you are not ready to full-heartedly sell to them and to fight for in Congress. You also cannot keep backing Obama-lite foreign policy that leaves us and our allies less secure and dominated by aggressive and tyrannical powers. 

At the rate we are going, we are facing a massive and well-deserved blowout... which will not teach anybody, anything as Republicans, after each loss, will continue to use DOnald Trump's unpopularity or failure of any particular candidate to align with him, for this loss rather than engage in self-reflection on how party can do better. I've said it before and I'll say it again: you can bully people into supporting a particular candidate at the Convention. You cannot bully them or the entire country into sharing the spirit of the message that candidate brings. That just doesn't work; GOP's messaging continues to be behind the times and poorly delivered, and the same "old hands" from their positions of looking down, continue to believe that charging after your own and forcefeeding cheap propaganda somehow translates into unity building are completely delusional. I do not hope that the Republican politicians will take any lessons from last night's electoral developments or the very obvious pattern easily observable on the ground, but I do hope that grassroots, sooner or later, and with however many election losses and intersectionality victories it requires, eventually figure it out.

Beware of the Donors

You know who's really driving the GOP? It's not Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. It's the donors. They can't do anything about or to Trump, but they can do a great deal of damage to the House, Senate, and state candidates if they decide to. The issue is that not all of these billionaires are of alike mind about, well, anything, so it's hard to predict whether their money will actually do any good or will go down a black hole.

If they can get their act together and figure out which candidates they can all back in good conscience, we may see some changes = and perhaps a signal to the administration. How the billionaires and their influence lines up with what Trump's base actually wants is a different issue. There is definitely some interloping, but I think the donors will be more likely than the base to criticize Trump himself, as well as members of his administration. Whether Democrats and any future primary candidates will be smart enough to figure out where these difference lie and how to exploit them remains to be seen.

The Rise of Political Hackery on the Right

Where is the outrage of the Trump supporters over the disastrous position his administration took over the course of this week, and the inane statements by the State Department, that are no different in tone or in substance from what we would have gotten from (and did) from the Obama administration?

There has been nary a word from the usual suspects, who've dedicated their precious time not to pushing their movement's leader to do better, but to discuss three subject matters: Harvey Weinsteing, NFL nonsense, and bashing anyone who is not a Trump groupie. Yes, I'm using this word deliberately, because rational people, no matter how much they support whoever they support, have something of substance to contribute to the discussion other than bashing critics and dwelling on the failures of others. Instead, I see my entire feed deteriorate into schadenfreude about the leftists and hatred aimed at George W., Bill Krystol, and anyone who dares say a word against Bannon, Trump himself (of course), or any of the policies that are worth at least discussing.

Being a yes-man does not make you any more loyal to the country, t he party, or for that matter, the president, than someone who is genuinely trying to ways of improving things that need to be fixed. Notice that you won't find me complaining about the administration's regulatory policies, judiciary appointments, or anything that I think they get right. I give praise where it's due. Likewise, I have praised Democrats, in the admittedly rare instances where they demonstrated rational thinking, moral clarity, or for whatever reason said and did the right thing. ((Here's loooking at you, Sen. Blumenthal, Schumer, & Menendez & Joe Biden).

I find it disheartening and infuriating to see people I once respected even when I disagreed with their political choices turn into unpleasant, bitter, political hacks who take on the worst aspects of the very things they once hated without blinking an eye, without realizing how much damage they are doing to their own purported causes.

Unwarranted Hysteria Over George W. Bush's Speech

I hate to say it, but all the Trump apologists who were bashing George W. for allegedly attacking Trumpism have just taken a page out of the leftist playbook. Not in terms of being effective Alinskyites, but in terms of jumping the gun and embarrassing themselves and their leader. You know how insecure leftists get when you read some awful quote and it sounds like it could have been Obama and Hillary but it turns out to be someone else together? Or, you make a general statement condemning corruption or some such and they immediately jump in assuming that you are talking about O.?

And we all laugh and laugh and laugh because such assumptions are generally a sign of the guilty conscience? Well, in this instance, that's exactly what happened. The White House correctly issued a statement that no one there took Bush to be referring to Trump (and in fact, he spent a great deal of his speech bashing the left, and the racist intersectionalists)... but Trump's supporters immediately assumed it was about him.

Why exactly would anyone make comments that Bush was bashing Trump, when the context was clearly about the left unless deep inside you think that if he HAD meant Trump, he may have had a point>? Why are Trump's OWN die-hard supporters giving ammunition to the left? To be sure, Bush is no great example of conservatism. Neither is Trump himself. But what kills me is when allegedly super-conservative elements of the party begin to attack everyone around them as not conservative enough in an attempt to defend their party leader who is not conservative at all, and as a result, make themselves look foolish. Stop it already. You want party unity? Begin with yourself.