Goldberg has crassly stolen the title of James Burnham’s great work… Goldberg’s random opinions represent the very pathology that Burnham railed against. Goldberg hates national identities (although he makes an exception for Israel), opponents of the Deep State, immigration patriots, and those who imagine that democracy has something to do with the popular will… Goldberg identifies “conservatism” with resisting Donald Trump.
But something about him changed after the 2016 election. He became obsessively, humorlessly anti-Trump… Adam always loved the idea of anarchy, of mixing things up, of overturning the old order… surely he could appreciate the absurdity, the surrealism, of the current situation. Surely he could embrace the chaos… It kills me that I’ll never have that conversation.
Crews has here misread both Nietzsche and Freud… Nietzsche did not say that Christianity was the revenge of the weak against the strong; he wrote (in 1887’s The Genealogy of Morals) that Christianity was Jewish revenge on the pagan world… Freud read Nietzsche more carefully than Crews… Freud’s argument that “hatred for Judaism is at bottom hatred for Christianity” in my view is on the mark.
The New York Times writes, “Crossfire Hurricane began exactly 100 days before the presidential election, but if agents were eager to investigate Mr. Trump’s campaign, as the president has suggested, the messages do not reveal it. ‘I cannot believe we are seriously looking at these allegations and the pervasive connections,’ Mr. Strzok wrote soon after returning from London.”
There are multiple problems with this claim. For one, Strzok wrote that text in all caps with obvious eagerness. As the Wall Street Journal noted months ago, “Mr. Strzok emphasized the seriousness with which he viewed the allegations in a message to Ms. Page on Aug. 11, just a few days before the ‘insurance’ text. ‘OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE WE ARE SERIOUSLY LOOKING AT THESE ALLEGATIONS AND THE PERVASIVE CONNECTIONS,’ he texted.”
I took part in an Intelligence Squared debate last night, speaking for the motion, “Give Trump a Chance.” My partner, Gayle Trotter, and I were soundly beaten by David Frum and Michael Waldman. Here’s the link: I think you’ll enjoy it.
Our side, I’m afraid, was a house divided against itself -- an enthusiastic Trump supporter and me, who agrees with Frum and Waldman that Trump was a terrible choice and is shaping up to be a terrible president.
History is not bending toward acceptance of big government, nor is it moving toward submersion of national identity into globalism. — Michael BaroneSounds nice.
Sure he can change Obama’s executive actions with a quick stroke of the pen. But rule changes require justification following a Reagan-era court case mandating that regulation changes aren’t done on a whim. — McClatchyWait, what?
Jonathan Chait’s ill-timed forthcoming book argues that “in the eyes of history, Barack Obama will be viewed as one of America’s best and most accomplished presidents.” CNN’s Fareed Zakaria recently offered a two-hour special concluding that America failed its president: “It remains unclear if the country was ready for Barack Obama’s vision.” — Jim GeraghtyThey can’t both be right. But, of course, they can. Because all the Democrats, or any pro-Statist party, needs to do is wait. Merely wait, and all they could desire will be handed to them by the Senate Forty-one, the Pentarchy of the Court, and the all-powerful Civil Service.
upended the two most stable democracies in the world“Stable” can mean “stagnant.”
a supremely talented demagogue who created an authoritarian cult with unapologetically neo-fascist rhetoric.It’s like Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln or FDR never happened.
This is now Trump’s America. He controls everything from here on forward.… and Obama?
He has won this campaign in such a decisive fashion that he owes no one anything.It was a close election, and he owes “we, the people.”
He will seek unforgiving revenge on those who dared to oppose him.… Did we elect Trump or Albert Anastasia?
he can pick a new Supreme Court justice who will make Antonin Scalia seem like a milquetoast.Shocking.
They will likely build a propaganda machine more powerful than Fox and Breitbart/facepalms
The only sliver of hope is that his promises cannot be kept.All of them can be kept. Tax rates are one part of America’s problem, another is the Federal Executive’s metastasizing, lawmaking bureaucracy. Social Security is a Ponzi scheme; Chile has a private retirement system that works quite well. We can create jobs.
But hope fades in turn when you realize how absolute and total his support clearly is./facepalms
And so there will have to be scapegoats — media institutions, the Fed, the “global conspiracy” of bankers and Davos muckety-mucksAll of whom will do better to cooperate with Trump than not.
his rankly anti-Semitic closing adHuh?
doubtless civilians who will be targeted by his ranks of followers/facepalms
And then there will be a terror attackQUELLE SURPRISE!!
there will be a clash between police and largely black protestors after another unarmed black man is shot.(Nostradamus, thou shouldst be living at this hour!) The Dallas police chief said it: “if you’re black, and you want black patrolmen, join us.”
Then he will reinstate Guantánamo and capture prisoners and torture them until the truth he wants is extracted.A hard line against Islamic jihadi terror is perhaps the best way to secure Muslims in America. Everyone else living here wants to feel secure.
the institutions he will have to destroy to achieve what he wants — an independent Department of JusticeBWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
our scientific institutions, and what’s left of free thought in our colleges and universities.Ah, yes, precious little of that Left. Pardon the pun. And what did Eisenhower say about “the scientific-technological elite”? We’re far down that road following Presidents Sullivan boot-licks.
We will need to march peacefully on the streets… nonviolent civil disobedience.BWAHAHAHAHA!! To do that, you’d really need to destroy the Left!
We must transcend racial and religious divisionWhatever you do, don’t call Obama.
we will have to resist partisanship.Resist partisanship, reverse gravity, push the toothpaste back in the tube. Whatever it takes!
In a country which just elected and re-elected a black president — whose grace feels now almost painful to recall/facepalms
Someone saw it coming a long time ago:George Washington did not want us to have political parties. He lived just before the age of a Loyal Opposition. Something the Democrats never quite mastered.
A country designed to resist tyranny has now embraced it.A country fed up with a worthless, even dangerous, political class has hired the strongest man available, a man with no military experience, whose power is one entirely of personality, to clean its public house. A man with riches, unimaginable in Washington’s day, to return to, who needs no more. Bless him, and all who follow him.
If corporate America pretty much has to make a profit by selling goods to Americans by Americans, this means that corporate America has an intrinsic interest in the productivity of Americans and in their ability to consume. Now, productivity plus consumption is prosperity, I mean, that’s pretty much all it is, so if you have an economy that’s set up that way then corporate America pretty much wants what the rest of us want, and for decades in this country, roughly from 1940 to 1975 there was an arrangement in this country where things were set up that way. It wasn’t perfect, but there was, broadly speaking, a structural alignment between what was in the interests of big corporations in this country and what was in the interest of the average American.No, I can’t sign on to this. No “New, New Deal.”
Shermer suggested to me that we try a scientific experiment, gassing dogs in the manner the Jews were supposedly gassed at Auschwitz, using the type of cyanide gas that was available in 1944.
“You want to gas dogs?” I exclaimed. “We’ll be running Bow-wowschwitz” … when I recounted the conversation to my girlfriend, she came up with an equally good one: “Barkin’ Belsen.” All the same, I nixed the dog-gassing idea. All I needed was to have the animal rights people on my ass.
Of course as soon as the Master Plan was adopted and funded, the California State Colleges began a political campaign to be turned into universities, with salaries comparable to the Universities, and graduate schools with research, and publish or perish, and all the rest of it; and instead of being teaching institutions they would become second rate copies of the Universities, with a faculty neglecting teaching in order to gather prestige in research and publication, or, perhaps, at least to look as if they were. In any event the California State Colleges became California State Universities, their commitment to actual undergraduate education was tempered to make room for the graduate schools, budgets were higher, costs were higher, and tuition, which had been designed to be very low, began to climb.
During a decade as head of global cancer research at Amgen, C. Glenn Begley identified 53 “landmark” publications -- papers in top journals, from reputable labs -- for his team to reproduce. Begley sought to double-check the findings before trying to build on them for drug development.
Result: 47 of the 53 could not be replicated.
Happy ever after in the market placeOr “Get Back”:
Molly lets the children lend a hand
Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face
And in the evening she's a singer with the band
Sweet Loretta Martin thought she was a womanThey keep explaining these as mistakes. Well, Mr McCartney sings this soi disant mistake over two lines; more than a mere substitution. Also note the matching of the pronoun: Desmond does his pretty face.
But she was another man.
All the girls around her say she's got it coming
But she gets it while she can.
As 1968 began to ebb into 1969, however, and as “anticlimax” began to become a real word in my lexicon, another term began to obtrude itself. People began to intone the words “The Personal Is Political.” At the instant I first heard this deadly expression, I knew as one does from the utterance of any sinister bullshit that it was—cliché is arguably forgivable here—very bad news. From now on, it would be enough to be a member of a sex or gender, or epidermal subdivision, or even erotic “preference,” to qualify as a revolutionary. In order to begin a speech or to ask a question from the floor, all that would be necessary by way of preface would be the words: “Speaking as a…” Then could follow any self-loving description. I will have to say this for the old “hard” Left: we earned our claim to speak and work. It would never have done for any of us to stand up and say that our sex or sexuality or pigmentation or disability were qualifications in themselves. There are many ways of dating the moment when the Left lost or—I would prefer to say—discarded its moral advantage, but this was the first time that I was to see the sellout conducted so cheaply.
And of course....
Actually, I am opposed to a balanced budget amendment. Simply, I call it a “tax-hike amendment;” better by far to pass a “flat tax amendment:” if the “proles” want a 50% tax rate on the rich (I do not think the U.S. has many proles, nor do I think they want a rate this high), let them pay it, too. Under this amendment, any deviation from the flat tax would last 2 years and require a 3/5 majority in Congress to pass.
TPM should be ashamed of itself passing along this embarrassing story and for the way it presented this material. In the middle of the piece, TPM informs us of Congressional ethics rules barring expensive gifts from lobbyists. I was thinking: Oh, maybe this is a serious problem. But if you keep reading, much further down, you see that Ryan paid for the meal with his own credit card, and TPM saw the receipt. Ridiculous! What hackery from the once-respectable Talking Points Memo!
Throwing The Gipper Under The Bus
It's impossible to overstate both the importance and impact that President Ronald Reagan had on the modern conservative movement. Actually, one could be forgiven for definitively stating that Reagan was the founder of the modern conservative movement. The problem with holding such an exalted position is that it's easy for people on both sides of a debate to co opt your legacy for their own purposes.
Reagan is rightfully exalted for being the godfather of supply side economic theory. He didn't develop it (Economist Arthur Laffer did), nor did he even modify it, but he was certainly his most enthusiastic supporter (with former congressman Jack Kemp coming in a close second) and the economic growth that his policies helped create were unprecedented in American history.
The problem with the Reagan presidency is separating fact from fiction, and nowhere is this problem more evident than in the current debate over extending the national debt ceiling. House republicans, led by John Boehner, Eric Cantor and Paul Ryan have insisted that no tax increases are up for discussion, with Speaker Boehner saying, "...tax increases are unacceptable and are a nonstarter"
Oddly enough, the record shows that supply side cheerleader Ronald Reagan himself incorporated tax increases into his economic recovery plans, most famously into 1982's Tax Equity and Fiscal Responsibility Act, though there were four more tax increases in the remaining six years of his presidency, with a total of $190 billion (in today's dollars) in revenue increases coming from those tax hikes. That's an amount significantly above what Vice President Biden is calling for during the recent deficit talks with GOP leaders.
In hindsight, one of Ronald Reagan's most enduring legacies was the economic recovery from the 1970's "malaise" and it's staggering, long-term positive impact on both our economy and our society as a whole. No one is doing Reagan's legacy any favors by misstating it's essential truths.
