War for Peace!

 

Trump Touts the Successes of His War for Peace

Roger Kimball, Spectator World

Roger Kimball polishes a turd

 ... Some say Trump exaggerates and overstates things. Perhaps, on occasion, he is given to mild hyperbole. But consider, sed contra, this masterpiece of understatement: “The United States of America has beaten and completely decimated Iran, both militarily, economically, and in every other way.” The Roman practice of decimation, rarely employed, was a brutal punishment for cowardice. The offending unit would be divided into groups of ten. One man from each would be selected by lot. The unlucky ticket holder would then be killed by his colleagues.

What the US and Israel have visited upon the Iranian regime is far more extensive than decimation. Most of its leadership has been erased. ...

More. 

If Daniel McCarthy were a conservative who understood history and human nature, he wouldn't issue embarrassing pronunciamentos like these

 Win or lose, Donald Trump has begun the last war the United States is ever likely to fight in the Middle East. ...

That's what we thought in 1991 about the victorious George H. W. Bush. And then somehow we lost our minds and elected blow-job Bill with his Sunday-go-to-meeting Bible under his arm, big enough to choke a mule. 

The state of mind – and the state of the world – that made possible the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003, has passed, never to return. ...

There wasn't a single state of mind from 1991 to 2003.

We didn't choose 9/11. It chose us and changed our minds. And the lunatics in Tehran are crazier and far more dangerous than Osama ever was.

Hell, we didn't even choose the Gulf War. Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, and set it on fire as it withdrew in January 1991.

We didn't choose this Iran War, either. Iran chose it for us when its proxies invaded our ally Israel in October 2023.

The state of mind and the state of the world . . . hasn't changed at all, except that Trump's a little slow on the uptake. 

The passions that involve us in foreign conflicts in the future will be those of a younger cohort. ...

Yes, it isn't just about a state of mind, is it? Things happen which we can't control. You can't predict "no more wars" anywhere, even though you can pretend for a long time, for example from the summer of 1939 to late 1941, and then something forces your hand.

... if the Iran war goes badly – as badly as the Iraq War did for Bush – Trump’s new style of interventionism will be repudiated by voters as thoroughly as Trump’s own election repudiated the neoconservatives. 

Bush 41 was popular because he won the Gulf War and suddenly wasn't because of the economy. And Bush 43 was re-elected convincingly in 2004, hello. If America didn't support his Iraq War, it had a funny way of showing it. There is no comparison with Trump.

Trump's economy already sucks and unsurprisingly right out of the box polling indicates Americans are against his attack on Iran. We're blowing up $1 billion a day over there and can't afford a lousy hamburger at home. We don't have to wait for Iran to go badly for the voters to repudiate Trump.

The only thing Dan is probably right about is this, unfortunately:

. . . what comes next will be an even more radical phase in domestic politics. ... 

Here.

They call themselves conservatives lol

 

Drug-Price EO Should've Happened Decades Ago

Scott McKay, The American Spectator

Elon Musk blocking The Spectator is Jack Dorsey blocking The New York Post

 

 The real Adrian Dittmann: An Elon Musk fan in Fiji tricks the world 

 Why Do So Many People Believe Adrian Dittmann Is Elon Musk? A reply guy with a voice eerily similar to the site's owner prompted claims of a double online identity — but the conspiracy theory has been debunked

 Did Elon Musk Use His Burner Account to Win MAGA Immigration Feud?

 Who Is Adrian Dittmann? Why Some X Users Are Convinced It's Elon Musk

 

 

 

JD Vance deletes things from his past, which is . . . troubling

For example, that he voted for Evan McMuffinhead in 2016, that he thought Trump was reprehensible, and now . . . pro-life sections of his Senate campaign website.

 

deleted sometime on July 15 or July 16, 2024

We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done

 Josh Hammer, here:

The imperative of this late hour of the American republic, in order to even attempt to rebalance our wildly off-balance pendulum, is to respond to the Left as it has acted toward us: by wielding political and prosecutorial power to reward friends and punish enemies -- to reward our side's forces of civilizational sanity and punish their side's forces of civilizational arson -- within the broad confines of the rule of law.

If we want to get back to "neutrality," at this perilous point, it's going to first take bloodying up some noses. That is unfortunate for those Americans who actually do value and cherish neutral enforcement of the rule of law. But yet again, here we are.

Above all, it is imperative that the Right not bat an eyelash. Do not be intimidated by this blatant show of crass thuggery masquerading as a legal proceeding. It's now full steam ahead through November. We must make these miscreants pay for what they have done.

Frankly, sympathetic as I am, I don't see how that will change anything. It will simply validate lawfare, the weaponizing of the legal system for political ends.

Democrats have crossed the Rubicon.

Escalation seems inevitable, but then there will be more escalation after that, and more after that.

That's what this means.

There has to be a better way.

 

Why I won't be patronizing Oppenheimer by seeing it: He was a Stalinist and a traitor

 Daniel J. Flynn, here:

As described in this column previously, Pavel Sudoplatov, so high-ranking that the Soviets placed him in charge of murdering Leon Trotsky, maintained in his autobiography that “Oppenheimer supplied … the Soviet Union with crucial information for it to successfully test its own atomic bomb in 1949.” He details Oppenheimer’s role, “which included allowing moles access to secret data to copy it, and describes him as ‘knowingly part of the scheme.’”

Material from the files of both Soviet and U.S. intelligence supports Sudoplatov’s claim: “An Oct. 2, 1944, memo from the Soviet archives, signed in receipt by chief of secret police Lavrentiy Beria, identifies Oppenheimer as a ‘member of the apparatus of Comrade [Earl] Browder’ who ‘provided cooperation in access to research for several of our tested sources including a relative of [the Communist Party USA leader].’”

Venona project decrypts refer to Oppenheimer under a codename, monikers in most but not all circumstances reserved for Soviet assets. A decoded March 1945 intercept “instructs Soviet agents to ‘re-establish contact with “Veskel” … as soon as possible.’ Veskel, the National Security Administration determined conclusively, referred to Oppenheimer.”

In The Venona Secrets, late authors Herb Romerstein and Eric Breindel wrote: “In May [of 1945] the Rezidentura sent Moscow another report from [Theodore] Hall on atom bomb research. It revealed the locations of work being done and the names of the heads of each research group. All of the names were clearly written out except one, that of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who was listed as ‘Veskel,’ the head of Los Alamos.”

Oppenheimer’s critics lacked this information in 1954, so one better understands their restrained classification of him as merely a security risk rather than charging that he lacked, in the words of President Dwight Eisenhower’s Executive Order 10450, a “complete and unswerving loyalty to the United States.” What’s the excuse of the NBC News Studios documentary airing on MSNBC for omitting so much information from credible sources in the U.S. and U.S.S.R. intelligence apparatus painting a grim picture of Oppenheimer’s trustworthiness? ...

Oppenheimer donated large sums to Communist causes, subscribed to Communist publications, and married a Communist. Other associates in the party included his brother, sister-in-law, landlady, the girlfriend who later became his mistress, and numerous students. He attended secret meetings of Communist professors while teaching at Berkeley.

 Most damning of all, Haakon Chevalier, a friend and professor at Berkeley, approached Oppenheimer with the idea of passing on Manhattan Project secrets to the Soviet Union. Oppenheimer did not report this event to his superiors for many months and, when he did, described the events dishonestly, i.e., by omitting both himself and Chevalier from the story. Rather than steer clear of someone petitioning him to commit espionage, Oppenheimer continued to see Chevalier socially for years.

Biden barely remembers major events in his political career and personal life, yet easily recalls things that never occurred

 

Biden has never been an honest man, but his inability to tell fact from fiction puts the nation at risk. 

 

Read it all here.

Last week's terrible Thursday was Joe Biden's, this week's belonged to Fani Willis

 

A Terrible Day in Court for Trump Prosecutor Fani Willis

Charles Lipson, Spectator :

 

As DA, Willis has full authority to hire outside attorneys and pay them generously. The problem arises only if she received personal (corrupt) benefits from her decision. That’s what makes Thursday’s testimony such a problem for Willis, regardless of when she began the affair. After Wade began work for her, the two went on expensive trips together and cannot prove they split the costs. The question whether Willis acted corruptly is underscored by her decision to hire an attorney who spent his career dealing with small cases.  

Most of the damaging information that came out Thursday stems from a nasty, ongoing divorce case between Nathan Wade and his wife of twenty-six years, Joycelyn. When Nathan began his romantic relationship with Fani Willis, he was separated but still married. That’s how Joycelyn managed to get hold of the credit card statements showing the expenses for Nathan and Fani’s jaunts together. Joycelyn has said she was nearly penniless while Nathan was spending lavishly and hiding their joint income.

LOL, guy named Purple says somehow we still ended up back together even after slavery drove us into a brutal civil war

 Back together at the point of a gun isn't back together, Matt.

Abraham Lincoln made America purple.

More.

What are public school students for, if not for political campaign work for incumbent Democrats?

 

On Thursday, news broke that the mayor’s campaign had sent an email attempting to recruit Chicago Public School students to “help” with the incumbent’s reelection effort. The students would earn class credit in exchange for their contributions.

More.

Trump failed to deliver in 2018 and 2020, now his party fails to deliver in 2022

Maybe America Hasn't Suffered Enough

 

Scott McKay, The American Spectator

This should have been a massive wave election. Given the low job approval ratings of the sitting president in his first midterm election, and given the favorable generic congressional ballot numbers, this should have been a plus-five wave in the Senate and a plus-30 wave, or bigger, in the House. It also should have resounded down to statehouses, and yet the GOP turns out, apparently, not to have been able to beat abysmal Democrat gubernatorial candidates like Katie Hobbs, Kathy Hochul, and Gretchen Whitmer. ... Trump didn’t play the net positive role he should have, and that might be the real takeaway. ... Objectively, it’s clear that DeSantis is the future of the GOP.

Once again, it was the idiot liberal Republican George H. W. Bush who advanced the anti-capitalist Democrat global warming agenda

 . . . the Inflation Reduction Act was signed by President Biden earlier this summer. It had been thirty years and sixty-five days since President George H.W. Bush signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro.

Here.

George also spawned the redundant hate crime legislation, huge increases to LEGAL immigration, wheel-chair access at every intersection's crosswalk among other expensive accommodations for the ambulatory handicapped, who in 2016 are fewer than 7% of the population, an unchastened Saddam Hussein, and READ MY LIPS . . . NEW TAXES.

Oh yeah. He also literally spawned the guy who didn't keep America safe on 911 and gave us the expensive nation-building wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the insidious Patriot Act, but don't get me started.

Everything BUSH has been terrible for America, which is saying a lot when everything Democrat always is anyway.  

Stephen L. Miller, aka redsteeze, prefers alternative C19 facts when it suits his rhetorical purposes against Anthony Fauci

OK Stephen.

He’s not referring to the science of, say, the human manipulation of viruses that can lead to a global pandemic, research Fauci once said he believed was worth the risk. Or to the science that has possibly led to eleven million deaths worldwide and altered the lives of every citizen of every industrialized nation on the planet. ... He’s not going to be prosecuted. He’s not going to prison, no matter how many Twitter users crow about it. He will, however, be judged by science, real science, when this is all over. And the real science shows that eleven million people and counting have died so far.

The guy is nothing if not weird. It's almost like he has 6 million on the brain or something. 6 million + 5 million = 11 million. I dunno.

 

LOL, Ben Stein, cheerleader for "corporations are people", has decided that America has only just now become a fascist state

Now, in the year 2021, the iron curtain has come down hard. With Big Internet Tech and the White House now admittedly colluding to identify and suppress dissidents, even completely nonviolent dissidents, we no longer have a Constitution.

There is just one big corporate–government–IngSoc superstate running everything. Goodbye, America. The GOP, with 50 senators, does nothing. The state legislatures, by far a majority GOP, and the spineless Supreme Court do nothing. And so goodbye to the greatest experiment in the history of the world.

More.

Gee, what's the problem, Ben?

“Liberals don’t understand that corporations are people,” columnist Ben Stein wrote back in 1974. “They are the people who work for the corporation, buy its products, and own its stock. There is no mechanical person who is benefited if corporations make a good profit. Real people benefit, just as real people lose when corporations lose money.” True enough. But it is also true that corporations have as much of a vested interest in the political system (if not more) . . ..

Here.

The corporation in America was the creation of the King of England. Virginia was but one example of thirteen. The damn things rebelled. Samuel Johnson tried to explain it to us, but it, shall we say, kinda went over our heads, and where it didn't was met with what they would come to call a generous demonstration of disapprobation.

And so, what goes around comes around. Or as Reverend Wright would put it, "America's chickens . . . have come home . . . to roost!"

Taxation No Tyranny

 

 

The dumbest political take of the week comes from Stephen L. Miller aka @redsteeze

DeSantis is the only name mentioned as a future replacement for Trump. He tacks close or higher than Trump in casual polling, his name is the first that comes up, even among the Trumpist base, as a preferred candidate. This is a burden no politician should be saddled with. The country and the GOP is one Ron DeSantis scandal away from returning to Trump’s awkward embrace in 2024.

More.

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine Ronald Reagan in 1975 reading this about himself as he's coming off the governorship of California and preparing to run for the Republican nomination against sitting President Gerald Ford.

"Oh my God. The burden! And I signed that damn abortion legislation in California and if anyone finds out, I'm toast! What oh what should I do?"

If Ronald Reagan were alive today he would laugh out loud at redsteeze. Like any skeleton lurking in DeSantis' closet could possibly hold a candle to the smoldering wreckage left in the wake of the SS Trumptanic. 

Ron DeSantis should definitely run against Trump, the biggest LOSER and biggest PHONY to ever make the big time.

Just win reelection in 2022 in Florida first, Ron. And then do run run.

Run for your lives: It's Charles Murray who is having the identity crisis, not America

Identity crisis: how the politics of race will wreck America:

The American experiment is fragile. It has always been fragile and always will be fragile because it is so extremely unnatural. ‘Unnatural’ in this context means in conflict with human nature. Jonah Goldberg has described the fragility of the American system by comparing it to a garden hacked out of a tropical jungle. A garden surrounded by jungle is unnatural. The gardeners must tend it with unremitting care lest the jungle return.

More. 

What's unnatural is Murray's perennial insistence that America was not a real nation where Englishmen revolted because they were denied their "chartered rights", who hoped to secure that nation "to ourselves and our posterity" as our Constitution says. Whether one believes their claim was legitimate or not is irrelevant to the history. An America populated as a nation by Englishmen who made that argument is a fact and shows they were a nation in their own minds, and nothing the left libertarians can say will ever change that, try as they may.

That opening sentence simply begs the question. You are asked to believe something else, that the first Americans didn't actually behave as a tribe whose members were loyal to each other and didn't already have a long history together before 1776. Which of course is ridiculous.

The violence done to this original American idea by libertarians, Lincoln and his worshippers, liberals, leftists, and other assorted lunatics is what is unnatural. It's they who have the identity crisis. They don't fit in here because our institutions survive from the founding and constantly remind them that they are misfits. They represent the foreign element, and usually are the main advocates for increasing the foreign element.

Instead give me millions upon millions of Italian Americans like Antonin Scalia who bowed to America as an Anglo Saxon nation, instead of this horde of harpies for every heresy.

Today's Tuesday conservatism over at Real Clear Politics is so ho-hum

In the line-up today at Real Clear Politics is one Buck Sexton, who tells us in "Following Rush Limbaugh" . . . not very much.

Is there any there there? is the question I have after reading this introduction to the man who is supposed to be the conservative in the duo taking over for Rush Limbaugh.

Since radio is a word business and this piece reads more like an apologia for his elevation to his new role than a taste of what to expect, it's not a good sign that this Buckaroo calls Rush's opening monologues "severely entertaining".

Is Buck Sexton a Mormon? I mean, this sounds like Mitt Romney, who trotted out his wife to assure Republicans that he was a conservative, and not long after addressed CPAC and called himself "a severely conservative Republican governor".

I know, I know. It's just a coincidence that this Jesuit-trained fellow sounds like the Mormon. But if you have to tell people you thought Rush was severely entertaining, maybe to you he really wasn't. At any rate, severe is not a word which ever came to mind when listening to Rush Limbaugh. 

Then there's Stephen L. Miller, whose Twitter feed is enormously entertaining @redsteeze , but whose prose offerings are, shall we say, stilted? The guy writes like he's got a brick up his ass.

Taking yet another much-deserved whack at CNN's Brian Stelter, Miller not entertainingly resorts to wooden stock phrases like "petty star-gazing", "it should raise eyebrows", "not becoming of anyone", "all fine and good", "all well and good", and "for anyone wondering . . . look no further". With all this lumber neatly stacked in a pile, the final paragraph ends with mistakes like "gleamed off" for "gleaned off" and "who claim to be just as a rigorous and dedicated journalist as Brian".

Yes, Stelter falls far short as a journalist. It's good that a mediocre writer points it out to all the people who obviously ignore Brian Stelter by the millions. It's an easy beat for Miller to cover, but maybe he should move on.

Miller claims to be good at hockey. I hear Clay Travis has left an opening somewhere.

Then there's a Democrat over at The Hill wondering "whatever happened to conservatism?"

When you get to paragraph seven you'll learn that Jan 6 was an "armed insurrection" and, if you're living in reality, you'll stop reading there.

But if you are a glutton for punishment and read to the end, you'll learn that the answer is The John Birch Society finally won the battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

I'm sure the five people still alive who ever knew an actual John Bircher will find that extremely amusing, if for no other reason than "that's what they WANT you to think".

Have a day.

Jack Cashill calls them the Pontius Pilate Republicans, which is kinda unfair to Pilate

Why Has the Right Let the Floyd Cops Fry?

Feeling they had to say something about the Derek Chauvin verdict, the Republicans in Congress seemed to take their cues from Pontius Pilate. “I think the jury did its job,” said Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst all too typically, “and I would – I did not follow, of course, all the parts of the trial, but I would say that given the information they received, they did their job, and I guess I’m in agreement.” The sound of hands being washed echoed throughout Capitol Hill.

I find in him no fault at all. -- John 18:38

Know that I find no fault in him. -- John 19:4

I find no fault in him. -- John 19:6

From thenceforth Pilate sought to release him. -- John 19:12