How Bill Barr’s Silence Impacted the Outcome of an Election

 

On May 18, 2020, then-Attorney General Bill Barr made a statement to the media, declaring that special counsel John Durham’s investigation into the origins of the Russiagate hoax wasn’t focused on either former President Barack Obama or former Vice President Joe Biden, stating that “I don’t expect Mr. Durham’s work will lead to a criminal investigation of either man.”...

Barr’s May 18 claim is an often underappreciated statement, the fallout of which was felt throughout the 2020 presidential election. Although Barr now claims that he issued his statement from a position of fairness, what he actually did was insert himself and the Department of Justice (DOJ) into the presidential campaign, and in doing so, he set the stage for the media’s whitewashing of questions of corruption that swirled around Biden throughout the campaign...

More importantly, Barr’s May 18 statement stands in stark contrast to his decision to remain silent after the second presidential debate in October 2020, when Biden falsely blamed the story about his son Hunter’s laptop on a “Russian plot.”...

By first speaking out and then remaining silent, Barr very directly put his thumb on the scale, leading to material ramifications for our country—including the geopolitical landscape we now face.

Question: is Bill Barr the most wily Deep State political operative who helped defeat Trump in the 2020 election?  Many Trump supporters like Barr.  I wonder if they are just as gullible as the Conservatives who are gulled into voting for Republicans like Mitt Romney who said all the right things but who wore Conservatism like a skin suit over the Uniparty carcass.

Just a reminder: you can't be paranoid enough.

Read the whole thing.

Trump Is Necessary to Restore Two-Party Rule

 The enablers of the Never-Trump conspiracy-like George Will and Peggy Noonan get called out by Conrad Black.  "Complacent mediocracies" are good beginnings.  Pusillanimous Fools is a better description.  

The only justice in this is that the American elites, in gaudily demonstrating their complacency, mediocrity, and institutional dishonesty on a monstrous scale, have punished themselves before the entire world; unfortunately the whole nation shares in the collateral damage of this exposé of gigantic failure and usurpation. No further puppetization of Joe Biden, as George Will proposes, will achieve anything. 

Before this international nightmare of incompetence is over, George Will and Peggy Noonan and the other conservatives who should have known better will be well launched in their foreseeable effort to justify allowing snobbery, which was comprehensible up to a point, to override their political judgment. As Adam Smith said, “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” and America will survive. Confession is good for the soul and the Will-Noonan axis could benefit from a bit of that, too. 

The country will not mourn their passing.

Going, Going. Gone

The credibility of the mainstream press establishment is shimmering into nothingness, like the last bit of winter snow after a week of warm spring days; just as our respect and trust for such federal bureaucracies and establishments like the FBI are similarly evaporating. While acknowledging and accepting that such establishments are operated by mere mortals, with all the weaknesses and moral failings that ordinary human beings are heir to, and grudgingly accepting the understanding that the establishment news media trends strongly to the left in political sympathies … look, we can accept all that and a certain degree of human bias, but what’s getting hard to swallow of late is the sheer, mind-numbing, flaming incompetence of them all. Which might be a blessing, for terrifying competence on the part of our current Ruling Class and their minions would make protesting or opposing them that much more difficult. Instead, as Kirk so memorably put it last week,

“What we have is, instead, an aristocracy of dunces, men and women who tell the rest of us how smart they are, and then screw up the entirety of civilization based on fantasies they’ve come up with. The rest of us need to start recognizing that the emperor not only isn’t wearing any clothes, he’s drunk off his ass and waving his wing-wang in our faces. The people who’ve flim-flammed their way into power are all dangerously inept and terminally deluded. If you doubt me, open your eyes and look around yourself: Is there anything, anything at all that these soi-disant “elites” have gotten right in the last century? Anything at all?”

I have to admit that I supported the Republican part of this "establishment" in part because the Democrats were undoubtedly worse.  In part I allowed myself to be deluded (McCain, Romney). But the Never-Trump part of the Right has self-identified as deranged poltroons.  The curtain has been ripped in two and the fakery, the genuine incompetence and venality has been exposed.   And it was due to one man who the establishment could not destroy or dominate.  God really does work in mysterious ways with imperfect tools.  Thanks be to God.

This is reason number 999,999 why John McCain lost

On Thursday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s Deadline, Steve Schmidt, John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign manager, said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) was “literally the only serious national leader the country has.”

Keep this slimeball in mind when you get a request for support by the losers in the Republican Party.

Steve Hayes - Insane Never Trumper

Today on the Brian Kilmeade show Steve Hayes came out for Trump’s impeachment. He actually defended the only indisputable quid pro quo in the entire Ukraine fiasco. Claiming that Joe Biden only demanded the immediate removal of the Ukrainian prosecutor who was investigating Burisma because the prosecutor was corrupt. 

Hayes is stupid enough to imagine that Joe Biden wanted the old, “corrupt” prosecutor to go so that a new “clean” prosecutor would do a better job of investigating corruption at Burisma – and determine why Hunter Biden was being paid over $80,000 per month for a no-show job knowing nothing about gas, Ukraine, or even speaking the language.  He wants us to know that Joe Biden was anxious to have his son's business dealings exposed.

That’s right, according to Steve Hayes, it was Joe Biden’s desire to have his son’s corrupt employer investigated. To do so he threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid unless the Ukrainians got a better prosecutor, the better to go after his corrupt son. Yes, it makes perfect sense: Joe Biden wanted a new, incorruptible prosecutor investigating Burisma so that the bribery of the Biden family can be exposed.

This makes you realize that either Steve Hayes has always been nuts, or that Donald Trump has driven him insane. And to think that at one time Hayes was considered a credible commentator on the Right.  

And that's why the Right, with spokesmen like Steve Hayes, was always losing. 

The obliviousness of Allahpundit

What’s fascinating is to see the reaction of the Never Trumpers.


A tweet by Never-Trumper Allahpundit asks why Trump continues to “flog” Biden. “It helps Democrats; Biden is already slipping in the polls and seems unlikely to win; even if Biden does win, Trump could revive this next year.”

And there you see the viewpoint of the Never-Trumpers. They view Biden’s corruption through a lens of politics. They agree with the Democrats and the rest of the media that Trump is doing this for purely political reasons. They never actually entertain the idea that Trump is really trying to expose high-level political corruption in DC; that he’s actually working to drain the swamp.

That’s because when you’re part of the swamp, political corruption is perfectly normal.  They're so much part of it that the only reason they can imagine for accusing someone of corruption is to gain a political advantage over a political foe.  To Allahpundit and the shrinking cadre of Never-Trumpers, it's inconceivable that anyone would actually want to expose corruption for the purpose of ridding the nation of corruption.  


 They think that political office naturally leads to great wealth ... like it does in Mexico, Cuba, Venezuela ... and the rest of the Third World.  It's a perk of office; a payoff for being an elected official who's base pay is modest by corporate standards.  

They see the evil and are perfectly fine with it.

Ahoy! David French Says Mueller's Testimony Proves.... Oh But I Won't Spoil the Guessing Game!

 Never Trumpers

If the mission is to blow up this guy’s credibility with any remaining nominally conservative audience he still has, it’s a smashing success. Please, MSNBC, take it all. pic.twitter.com/s1JET6Cb9u

— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) July 25, 2019

Was the goal of "True Conservatives" to trick the rubes and keep the money flowing?

"True Conservatives," you know who you are: Never Trump because you are as pure and innocent as the wind driven snow.

Your real job was to conspire with the Uniparty to fool the rubes, pretend you were going to actually do what you campaigned on but never actually did because ….

• You didn't have the House so we gave you the House, 
• then you wanted the Senate and we gave you the senate, 
• then you needed the Presidency and we gave that to you, 
• then you needed 60 votes in the Senate 
• but you always managed to elect enough Rhinos to keep that from happening
• because if that happened the scam would be exposed.
• So we voted for someone who would spit in your face and expose the lies.

And look what happened:

Trump's Title X Rule Change Could Effectively Defund Planned Parenthood

—Ace of Spades

The "True Conservatives" ran on this issue and did nothing about it, because they're liars who only care about doing favors for their actual constituents, large corporate interests with deep-pocketed donors.

Trump, the former Democrat with liberal instincts, is actually doing something about it, probably because he is too unschooled in Conservatism, Inc. politics to know that his job is to Trick the Rubes, not attempt to accomplish their political agenda.

Karen Pence, Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, Part of a Christian Ministry?

David French is a Never Trumper and writes for National Review which became the 24/7 organ of Never Trumpers.

He's now trying to ride to the rescue of Karen Pence who's under assualt for practicing her Christian faith by teaching in a Christian school.

Immanuel is a church ministry applying the church’s theology. No one is forced to attend the church. No one is forced to attend the school. It’s a voluntary association that is protected by the First Amendment and rooted in the faith that guides the lives of tens of millions of Americans....

Not only is this not scandalous, but it’s also the exercise of a fundamental First Amendment right. If Lois Romano or Kate Bennett or any other Karen Pence critic wants to argue against Christian theology, then have at it. Most Christians I know welcome the dialogue. But if they want to condemn a woman for the free exercise of her Christian faith? If they want to argue that there’s something inherently wrong with orthodox Christians’ associating, worshipping together, and teaching their children? Well, then they’re exhibiting a deep intolerance that’s at odds with pluralism itself.

This is a great example of why French, National Review and the Never Trumpers lost the culture war. He's whining to be left alone to people who hate Christians. He's accusing Liberals of hypocrisy when that has never, ever, ever been shown to be effective. The Left revels in its hypocrisy because - thanks to people like French, they own the media. They ARE the media. The media creates the worldview that we live in. The only people that French is writing for are people who already agree with him; he's preaching to the choir. And he's in full-time hate mode against the only president in my lifetime who's actually pushing back against the anti-Christan animus of the Left.

Here's his gratuitous swipe at Trump:

How is a statement of faith rooted in ancient religious orthodoxy at all relevant to Trump? If the school followed Trump’s beliefs, it would reject Christian sexual morality and embrace adultery.

Yet Trump is the President who supports the right of organizations that have moral objections to abortion to exclude those procedures from their medical coverage.  He's never called Christians "bitter clingers" or referred to normal people as "deplorables."  Trump has allied himself with Christian faith leaders and actually rescinded regulations that inhibited the public expression of Christian faith.

French is that kind of public intellectual who would rather go to hell if going to heaven meant being led there by a sinner.

King David vs. Jonah Goldberg

It’s an interesting question.

 Should we judge a man on the totality of his works, or focus on his flaws?

 It’s worth looking at the historical King David, a person most Jews and Christians hold in high regard.

 There was much more to him than the juicy details we all know so well. He was a Peeping Tom with several wives and concubines, not uncommon for his time. What was not common was that he seduced a married woman.

He had the husband killed in a battle along with other Israelites as a cover-up for his crime of seduction.

 He raised an incredibly dysfunctional family. One son raped his half-sister. Another son murders his half-brother.

 Family troubles result in civil war during which the son rapes David’s concubines to motives his followers.

 He was politically divisive, creating friction between Judah and the other tribes of Israel which led to another rebellion in which one of David’s enforcers murders another one of David’s followers when didn’t follow orders quickly enough.

This is the guy that Jews hold in high regard?

 From a moral perspective, David was a monster making Trump angelic in comparison.

 A “Real Jew” with high moral standards would have opposed him and used every opportunity to denigrate him. He would have called on God to smite him, and given serious though to allying with Israel’s enemies to bring him down so that Israel could be reborn pure as the sands of the desert.

Despite his personal failures, we honor David because of what he accomplished. They are not an excuse for sin, but an explanation of why God can work through a very flawed individual to bring blessings to the people.

OTOH, Adolph Hitler was a vegetarian and led an exemplary personal life.

Ace of Spades: "Politico: Why the Smart Move for NeverTrumpers Is to Become Democrats"

There's a new debate inside the #NeverTrump movement about how to respond to a president they loathe and the Republican Party that loves him.

And a party they loathe, let's admit. They're not hiding that anymore. They've always loathed Republican voters, but saw them as useful idiots, easy dupes for advancing themselves.

But now the Revolting are revolting, and suddenly, the NeverTrump rump doesn't seem to like Republican Deplorables as much as they used to barely pretend to.

...

The Courageous Ones were and are cowards, and merely hinted the living shit out of their endorsement of Hillary.

Not quite courageous enough to tell their audience the truth about their positions.

But super-courageous otherwise -- believe them.

This commentary on Jonah Goldberg applies to all the NeverTrumpers on the Right

I just don't get it. You're right dude, why don't you act like it?

The Atlantic Fires Kevin Williamson

Ace of Spades:

Social Justice Warriors have been trying to get Kevin Williamson fired from his just-started job at the meaningless dribble publication The Atlantic -- a magazine much admired by the cucks -- because he has previously tweeted that women who get abortions should maybe be hanged.

The Atlantic just fired him. They said they'd found a podcast appearance where Williamson repeated that tweet, and that they now believed this wasn't just a provocative joke but his "carefully considered" opinion.

It seems it was just yesterday that The Weekly Standard, which you should totally obey because they're smart guys who really "get" the current political environment, were blowing air-kisses to the liberal print media and claiming charges that it was without integrity were "deeply unserious."...

What will they say now? If they now denounce the leftist print media as totalitarian, that would establish two things:

1, They're wrong about everything all the time.

Which we already knew. Worse, it would establish:

2, They don't care about the left's totalitarian attacks on speech and belief until it gets someone in their own class.

I despise these cucks for this reason: Many of these people scoff at the notion that the leftwing is out for scalps. They are out to get people fired. They are out to ruin lives. They stand for the proposition that You shall repeat our cult dogmas or we will work as hard as possible to deny you the ability to even earn a living plying your trade in Current Year America.

Yet these cucks continue to engage in apologism for the left, claiming that only "paranoids" believe this about their Very Good Leftist Cocktail Party Friends.

They themselves are immune from the Recite Our Dogmas or Lose Your Job threat, because they are actually paid to write (nominally) conservative twaddle by (nominally) conservative magazines funded by (nominally) conservative billionaires.

Read the whole thing.

Ignoring Democrats’ Farrakhan Ties Is The Epitome Of Media Bias

A congressman reaffirmed his ties to an avowed anti-Semite this week, but you wouldn’t know about it if you get your news from the establishment media.

The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Peter Hasson broke the story of Democratic Rep. Danny Davis doubling down on claiming Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan is an “outstanding human being.”...

In January, a photo emerged of then-Senator Barack Obama shaking hands with Farrakhan at a Congressional Black Caucus meeting in 2005. Little attention was paid to the photograph outside of conservative media.

In February, Hasson broke the news that Democratic National Committee deputy chairman Keith Ellison had met with Farrakhan multiple times since he supposedly disavowed the NOI leader in 2006. Ellison has faced very little scrutiny for these continuing ties to a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group.

When 21 members of the Congressional Black Caucus were asked by Hasson to disavow Farrakhan, all declined. But that shouldn’t be too surprising when Ellison himself says his fellow Democrats aren’t bothered by his Farrakhan connection. 

Multiple leaders of Women’s March — one of the biggest left-wing organizations at the moment — have strong ties to Farrakhan and aren’t ashamed about it. “Thank God this man is still alive and doing well. He is definitely the GOAT [Greatest Of All Time],” Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory once said of Farrakhan. She has refused to disavow the NOI leader and praised the group’s work as recently as Wednesday. (It would seem like all of these prominent Democrats and progressives having ties to a hate figure would be a huge news story. But the only establishment media figure to cover it is CNN’s Jake Tapper, who devoted a brief segment of his show to the story on Monday.

MSNBC Host Joy-Ann Reid Was Apparently Russian Trolls’ Favorite Pundit

No better way of fomenting hate than drawing attention to Joy-Ann Reid.

In fact, Joy-Ann Reid has made somewhat of a sport out of criticizing Sanders’ over the Russian issue in particular. Last year, she criticized Sanders and his supporters for repeating claims of Democratic National Committee fraud as little more than a Russian plot.

All in all, Reid was elevated by Russian trolls above Sanders by a ratio of roughly five-to-one.

The Russians didn’t do anything to us that we weren’t already doing to ourselves

What do you mean "We" Mr. Never Trumper?  Lowery has a point but misses the mark.

If only Joe McCarthy had lived to see this moment, when it’s suddenly in vogue to attribute large-scale events in American politics to the hand of Russia and to inveigh against domestic subversion.

Robert Mueller released an indictment of 13 Russians for crimes related to their social-media campaign to meddle in our internal affairs in the run-up to and aftermath of the 2016 election.

Mueller obviously isn’t a McCarthyite, and can’t be held responsible for the hysteria — and hopeful expectations of an impeachment-level event — that has built up around his work. His indictment is, as far as anyone can tell, rigorously factual.

That’s probably the point of it — to create a record of an episode that we should want to know as much about as possible and prevent from ever happening again.

[No.  The point of the indictment is to be to generate publicity for the Anti-trumpists, because none of those indicted will voluntarily come to the US to face trial.]

 But the scale of the operation shouldn’t be exaggerated. In the context of a hugely expensive, obsessively covered, impossibly dramatic presidential election, the Russian contribution on social media was piddling and often laughable.

The Russians wanted to boost Trump [No, the Russians wanted to dirty up the candidate who everyone assumed - including the Russians - would win the election.  The Rusians also supported Sanders ans Jill Stein.] but as a Facebook executive noted, most of their spending on Facebook ads came after the election.  The larger goal was to sow discord, yet we had already primed ourselves for plenty of that.

...

If you read the Mueller indictment, you might think the Russians were everywhere, not only advertising on Facebook (“Trump is our only hope for a better future”; “Ohio Wants Hillary 4 Prison”), but organizing rallies around the country.

But it’s not clear these rallies even came off.

The New York Post couldn’t find any evidence of planned pro-Trump and anti-Hillary rallies in New York — not exactly a swing state — in June and July of 2016. Pictures and videos that appear to be from Russian-initiated pro-Trump “flash mobs” in Florida show a handful of people in various cities. This at a time when Trump was routinely holding rallies with thousands of people that garnered lavish media coverage.

The biggest Russian rally success appears to have been an anti-Trump event in New York after the election drawing 10,000 people.  [And heavily covered by CNN/MSNBC and by attended by Michael Moore]

I'm also old enough to remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism

Via Ace of Spades:

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who is reportedly assisting special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election, boasted of his successful resistance to the Trump administration in a Tuesday Medium post.

Schneiderman, who could play an essential role in the disposition of Mueller’s investigation, has effectively branded as a public anti-Trump litigator during the president's first year, in keeping with the history of hostility between the two men.

Tuesday's Medium post accompanied a profile of Schneiderman in The New York Times, which noted that the AG lodged 100 legal or administrative challenges to administration policies during Trump's first year in office. Such challenges include lawsuits contesting the travel ban and rescission of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, an Obama-era amnesty policy that grants temporary status to illegal immigrants who entered the country as children.

"We try and protect New Yorkers from those who would do them harm," Schneiderman told TheNYT. "The biggest threat to New Yorkers right now is the federal government, so we’re responding to it."

And

Why, I'm old enough to remember when claiming the federal government was the "biggest threat" was considered Taliban terrorism!

I'm also old enough to remember when dissent was the highest form of patriotism, and then when dissent became the basest form of treason, before polymorphing once again to the highest form of patriotism.

I wonder what accounts for these whipsaw changes?!

DID THE FBI CONSPIRE TO STOP TRUMP? Pat Buchanan: 'One need not be a conspiracy nut to conclude the fix was in.

The original question the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign was to answer was a simple one: Did he do it?

Did Trump, or officials with his knowledge, collude with Vladimir Putin’s Russia to hack the emails of John Podesta and the DNC, and leak the contents to damage Hillary Clinton and elect Donald Trump?

A year-and-a-half into the investigation, and, still, no “collusion” has been found. Yet the investigation goes on, at the demand of the never-Trump media and Beltway establishment.

Hence, and understandably, suspicions have arisen.

Are the investigators after the truth, or are they after Trump?

Set aside the Trump-Putin conspiracy theory momentarily, and consider a rival explanation for what is going down here:

That, from the outset, Director James Comey and an FBI camarilla were determined to stop Trump and elect Hillary Clinton. Having failed, they conspired to break Trump’s presidency, overturn his mandate and bring him down.

Essential to any such project was first to block any indictment of Hillary for transmitting national security secrets over her private email server. That first objective was achieved 18 months ago.

On July 5, 2016, Comey stepped before a stunned press corps to declare that, given the evidence gathered by the FBI, “no reasonable prosecutor” would indict Clinton. Therefore, that was the course he, Comey, was recommending.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, compromised by her infamous 35-minute tarmac meeting with Bill Clinton – to discuss golf and grandkids – seconded Comey’s decision.

And so Hillary walked. Why is this suspicious?

What do YOU think? Did the FBI conspire to stop Trump? Sound off in today’s WND poll!

First, whether or not to indict was a decision that belonged to the Department of Justice, not Jim Comey or the FBI. His preemption of Justice Department authority was astonishing.

Second, while Comey said in his statement that Hillary had been “extremely careless” with security secrets, in his first draft, Clinton was declared guilty of “gross negligence” – the precise language in the statute to justify indictment.

Who talked Comey into softening the language to look less than criminal? One man was FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, whose wife, Jill, a Virginia state senate candidate, received a munificent PAC contribution of $474,000 from Clinton family friend and big bundler Terry McAuliffe.

Also urging Comey to soften the fatal phrase “gross negligence” was key FBI agent Peter Strzok. In text messages to his FBI lover Lisa Page, Strzok repeatedly vented his detestation of the “idiot” Trump.

After one meeting with “Andy” (McCabe), Strzok told Page an “insurance policy” was needed to keep Trump out of the White House.

Also, it appears Comey began drafting his exoneration statement of Hillary before the FBI had even interviewed her. And when the FBI did, Hillary was permitted to have her lawyers present.

One need not be a conspiracy nut to conclude the fix was in, and a pass for Hillary wired from the get-go. Comey, McCabe, Strzok were not going to recommend an indictment that would blow Hillary out of the water and let the Trump Tower crowd waltz into the White House.

Yet, if Special Counsel Robert Mueller cannot find any Trump collusion with the Kremlin to tilt the outcome of the 2016 election, his investigators might have another look at the Clinton campaign.

For there a Russian connection has been established.

Thank President Trump for all his accomplishments during his first year in office. Send him a FREE card of your choice. Go to ThankTrump.us

Kremlin agents fabricated, faked, forged or found the dirt on Trump that was passed to ex-British MI6 spy Christopher Steele, and wound up in his “dirty dossier” that was distributed to the mainstream media and the FBI to torpedo Trump.

And who hired Steele to tie Trump to Russia?

Fusion GPS, the oppo research outfit into which the DNC and Clinton campaign pumped millions through law firm Perkins Coie.

Let’s review the bidding.

The “dirty dossier,” a mixture of fabrications, falsehoods and half-truths, created to destroy Trump and make Hillary president, was the product of a British spy’s collusion with Kremlin agents.

In the Dec. 26 issue of the Washington Times, Rowan Scarborough writes that the FBI relied on this Kremlin-Steele dossier of allegations and lies to base their decision “to open a counterintelligence investigation (of Trump).” And press reports “cite the document’s disinformation in requests for court-approved wiretaps.”

If this is true, a critical questions arises:

Has the Mueller probe been so contaminated by anti-Trump bias and reliance on Kremlin fabrications that any indictment it brings will be suspect in the eyes of the American people?

Director Comey has been fired. FBI No. 2 McCabe is now being retired under a cloud. Mueller’s top FBI investigator, Peter Strzok, and lover Lisa, have been discharged. And Mueller is left to rely upon a passel of prosecutors whose common denominator appears to be that they loathe Trump and made contributions to Hillary.

Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had his “Get Hoffa Squad” to take down Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. J. Edgar Hoover had his vendetta against Dr. Martin Luther King.

Is history repeating itself – with the designated target of an elite FBI cabal being the president of the United States?

Jonah Goldberg's Above It All

National Review has been one of the leaders of the #NeverTrump movement and Jonah Goldberg is a senior editor.  That is a perfect place from which to position himself above the fray.  Goldberg and NR hate the Trumpian populism with a burning hatred that far exceeds their dislike of the Left. 

During the 2016 election they preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump.  Their hate of Trump and what he represents transfers to anyone who is on the same side of the cultural spectrum as Trump.

 

Which bring us to Roy Moore, Republican candidate for Senate from Alabama.

In this article he casts big stones at Judge Roy Moore who has been hit with a flurry of just-before-the-election sexual accusations.    

Right-wingers tell me that Al Franken must resign for behavior far less offensive than what Roy Moore has been accused of.

See what he did there?  Equating an unproven accusation with a fact that has been memorialized with pictures.  

Where there's an opportunity to stop another Trumpian figure an accusation =  a fact.  

In this respect, Goldberg is vying for a SJW award; since SJWs tell us to always believe the women, unless the accusation is against a Democrat. 

Goldberg deplores hypocrisy, and in an ideal world hypocrisy is to not a virtue, although I am reminded  of the old saying that “hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue.”   Hypocrisy is a human failing.  What I find even worse is that in so much of modern society virtue is no longer honored and vice is no longer condemned.   Where vice is normal, hypocrisy can't exist.

The problem with Jonah’s argument is not that it’s not abstractly worthwhile but it’s vacuous.   In years past, when NR was Bill Buckley’s magazine, Jonah wrote for the Conservative Republican audience.  Now that he’s a full fledged member of the #NeverTrumpers his writing is meant for a very small coterie and, except for some ankle-biting of Trump and his supporters, his writing has absolutely no effect on the culture.

It’s a form of onanism.  He’s writing for a fringe of a fringe.  That doesn’t make him a public intellectual; it makes him a jerk.  Someone who pretends to be something he’s not.  He’s not on the field where the game is being played; instead he’s wandering the sidelines jumping up and down hoping for attention.

Jonah's an entertaining writer, but opinion writers should be held to different standards than novelists.  The novelist only needs to entertain to be successful.  Opinion writers should have somewhat loftier goals.  Advancing their ideas, for one. 

Let’s check the scoreboard.

Didn’t National review call for the end of the Clinton Presidency during Whitewater and the Lewinski affair?  Yes.  And what happened?  Bill Clinton won two terms.  "We’ll just have to win" said perjurer/rapist/sleazebag Clinton.  And he did. 

Did National Review inveigh against the Obama presidency?  It most definitely did, and what happened?  He won two terms.  And, I might add, changed America … as he promised; not for the better but for the worse.  Not in the direction of National Review or the conservative direction, but in the direction of The Nation.  The country became the country of "Hands up don't shoot" and Black Lives Matter.  It honored Harvey Weinstein.   It became the country of Big Lies like the UVA Non-Rape and the Duke Lacrosse non-Rape Case.

But, but, but ....That’s not fair, cries NR and the #NeverTrumpers.  You can’t expect an opinion magazine and a few articles in the Wall Street Journal to effect an election.  It’s the rest of the press and the Democrats who are to blame. 

Can we be honest?  The people who were the intellectual Generals of the Right were as effective as the Washington Generals, the patsies for the Harlem Globetrotters.  The Washington Generals lost to the Harlem Globetrotters over 16,000 times.  They were there to make the Globetrotters look good.  And that's the role that Goldberg, and the others leaders of the "Respectable Right" were assigned.  And they played their role to perfection.

So here we are.  But in the meantime a strange, totally unexpected, intruder has entered Washington.  Despite unified opposition from Democrats, the Press (but I repeat myself) and the Establishment Right, we have a Republican President and he has a nominally Republican Congress.

And at this juncture, when the economy is picking up, the stock market is reaching all-time highs,  regulations are being repealed, energy production is booming, unemployment is at record lows, Jonah Goldberg calls us to commit political suicide.  To repeat the totally ineffective, ineffectual plays that were called before.  As the Democrats are circling the wagons around Al “Fish Lips” Franken, Goldberg demands that Republicans lose the Senate seat in Alabama.  Bill Buckley once said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact, but Jonah Goldberg doesn't believe it.  It’s said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. 

Jonah Goldberg's not insane.  He's comfortable.  The old Conservative objectives of limited government and rescuing America from decline is not his objective.  His eyes are closer to home.

He’s doing fine.  He’s got a job at NR, a syndicated column; he’s on Fox News from time to time as one of the designated “conservatives.”  He writes books, he’s happy, particularly content with the audience he’s got and the paycheck he receives.  Jonah Goldberg is a business, a persona, an actor  playing a role, just like many of the people who are doing well in the Swamp.  In reality he’s a guy with a pretty good career and he isn’t about to blow it.   That’s what pays the groceries and keeps a roof over his head.  He's not that much different from the sales rep who’s meeting his quota.  And he has just as much influence on the culture and the direction of American politics.

Which is interesting.  Because the current President – Donald Trump – is a gifted amateur.  And he’s doing a great job changing the culture, changing Washington, making America Great Again despite having to fight this particular fight virtually alone.  That’s why it’s time to roll right over the professionals – the Generals who have lost the last wars; every damn one of them.  It's time to go with a new team – and go with amateurs who will, at the least, fight.  Because the fight means something to someone who still cares. 

"if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us"

Richard Fernandez has an amazing essay PRIMAL SCREAM on the witch hunt now seizing parts of the country. I'm Christian and Calvinist enough to understand that all men are sinners. That none of us would want some other things we have done revealed. Yet, somehow it came to be accepted that purity is the basic requirement for government service.

"Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help" was the usual warning. But somewhere along the line conventional wisdom discarded this injunction and media began to create the myth that there were special people to rule over us. Celebrities. A cultural elite. Role models. The only adults in the room. The smartest woman in the world. As social media exposes celebrity after celebrity as flawed we are relearning just how fragile that foundation is.

Thus we have the NeverTrumpers at National Review:

... call for Roy Moore to drop out of the Alabama race because "there is no such thing as a statute of limitations on standards"

So what is that standard?

... an uncomfortable statistical fact, once widely accepted and prosaically expressed as 'all men are sinners'. Moore may or may not be guilty of sexual indiscretion, but the possibility is not excluded in principle. An earlier generation could probably quote 1 John 1:8 "if we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us" to remind themselves of this. Alternatively they might cite James Madison.

what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

Where does a lot of this come from? In part from a post-Christian culture and Marxism that seeks to create the Perfect Man.

Things are completely different when a political movement bases virtue on a particular class of human beings. The danger is particularly acute in Marxism which boldly declares in the Manifesto that "Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis". There being no God only institutions raises the stakes for institutions. If the Party, the Vanguard of humanity and the source of virtue is found to have a sinner, or worse yet found to be chock full of sinners, guilt is not merely individual but collective. The whole basis collapses. Unlike God who remains unsullied "out there", the practical effect of vice is to undermine the Party's actual legitimacy.

So this is a new day:

The scandals rocking Hollywood, the political elite and the media are qualitatively different from any scandal that could embroil a conservative because latter was always just a man while the former were special men who stood as judges of all mankind able to nudge or signal virtue as the arc of history bade them do.

Now, so the joke goes, they are all being spliced out of movies by the octogenarian Christopher Plummer because it turns out they are no better than anyone else. Being 'like everybody else' is the ultimate downer for any aspiring ruler. A ruler may be anything except ordinary and it's just the trouble when they aren't.