Random Thoughts

We’ve just had a weird election where the rules changed in the middle of the extended campaign creating an appearance of partisan fraud, and the President is on social media making his case (rather poorly in my opinion).  Ultimately, the courts will at some point probably side with the various states that the certification of results is a state issue and that is all that counts.  Will this undermine the next President’s administration?  In the wise words of Bugs Bunny, “hmmm, could be.”  But with an adoring press and social media probably not.

This got me to thinking about the road we’ve traveled to this point.  Elections have always been a contentious thing with good and bad winners, or good and bad losers.  I don’t think John Adams was particularly enamored with his job after coming in second to George Washington, and not too long after that the election of the Vice President became linked to the election of the President.

In the early, to mid-nineteenth century the South would routinely threaten to leave the union unless their favored Democrat (or Democrat-Republican) was elected.  With the election of Abraham Lincoln, they made good on their threat. I guess this would be the ultimate example of “delegitimizing” a Presidency.  After the war, the winners got the spoils and there was a period where only Republicans were elected followed by a relatively even period of swapping where both parties traded power back and forth.  At least until Franklin Roosevelt felt it was his destiny to save the nation and held onto the office for four terms (he died in office or it might have been five terms). 

After the latest of the World Wars (2^nd for those keeping track), both parties were made up of liberals, moderates, and conservative, but with the advent of President Johnson’s “Great Society,” and the recognition of the overt racism still plaguing America that began to shift as the parties seemed to abandon an inclusive approach to appeal to specific population segments.  I often wonder if the creation of the Presidential primary system did this?  For me, it is kind of a chicken and egg question.  Did the primaries create the power of political activists or did the activists lead to the creation of the primaries?

What I’ve seen in my lifetime, the role of the President has gone from an astute politician/administrator, seeking to protect the country from its outside enemies, while working towards what he viewed as best for the nation (meaning he would work with the opposition when he could convince enough members of the other side it was in both parties interest) to the point where we are at today where each party believes only they have the nation's interest at heart and they need to control the entire government so they don’t have to work with those “other guys,” or if they don’t have the entire government they have enough to stop “those other guys” from doing all sorts of bad things.

We as a society, thanks to the internet and social media, have pushed that relationship with mass movements to legitimize or delegitimize both parties and their candidates.  For brevity let's only go back to the very end of the last century where the Florida election held up the concession of Al Gore until the Supreme Court ruled in GW’s (Bush the younger) favor. I think he would have remained a challenged President by the losers if 9/11 hadn’t united the nation at least for the next several years.

In 2009 when Barrack Obama was sworn in – those who didn’t like him spent years on the conspiracy trail claiming he wasn’t really a natural-born citizen and in so doing sowed the seeds of dissent.  The fact he came out of almost nowhere to win the Democratic Party’s nomination and all his records were sealed only added fuel to the conspiracy fire.  For the eight years of his Presidency, the press seemed to find a lot of things to investigate, but those questions weren’t high on their list of things to wonder about.

Then we come to 2016.  A year when both the major parties find as their “best choice” candidates, people who carried as much excess baggage as Jacob Marley[1].  When the anointed Democratic woman lost, the left went wild.  We had women marching where the women wore “pussy hats” to demonstrate their mature response to the loss.  We had street riots where stores were vandalized to demonstrate the principled response to what was clearly a stolen election.  Then there were the never-ending investigations of the Trump campaign and principles associated with the campaign.  The evidence now strongly suggests many of these activities were begun by the previous administration which had, in its words, “a scandal-free administration.”

I’m just guessing here but I assume two things.  First, President Trump will be unsuccessful in his appeals since the Federal Courts are hesitant to step into something that is really a state issue.  (The Dominion Servers issue might be a federal issue which the court could address under the Commerce clause but that seems unlikely to me.)  The second is the media will return to its preferred role of quiet partnership with the DNC where its sole role is to protect the Democratic incumbent whoever he or she might be.

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[1] Charles Dickens “A Christmas Carol”

Where There's a Will

What do you do if you have a problem that is too big to tackle the conventional way?  Why you get creative and find solutions you can implement, even if it means breaking a few eggs.

That appears to be the case with the Democrats right now.  Rather than admit they lost the last election because of a flawed candidate and an equally flawed campaign strategy they have chosen to focus on the issue of our electoral college versus the massing of democratic voters in big cities in the east and west.  The mantra from the DNC after President Trump’s upset victory has been “But we won the popular vote!  It just isn’t fair!”

Now we have states with Democratic Governors and State Houses beginning to move to invalidate the will of their own voters and cast their lot with those of NYC, LA, Seattle, Boston, Atlanta, and the other major metropolitan areas.  How are they doing this you ask?  Easy, they write legislation that will commit their electoral votes to whoever wins the popular vote.  The assumption being no Republican can ever win over the majority of voters so they will most certainly go to support the Democratic candidate. 

But what if a Republican were to campaign and win in the cities, but not the flyover states?  While not an obvious scenario, it is possible.  What if a Republican were to win the popular vote and not the electoral vote, would these same Democrats rejoice in their decision?   For example, suppose there was a fissure in the DNC and one of the losing primary candidates decided she should run as an independent, as happened in the 1960 election.  In that election, Nixon lost to Kennedy by less than 115,000 votes (a result that would be immediately challenged in recount) but lost in the electoral college by 84 votes.  What if the contest had ended in a tie in the popular vote with the independent candidate drawing off just enough of the democratic vote?

So far, Colorado has taken the lead, but Delaware and perhaps other states will follow.  The funny thing is politicians never seem to learn from past experiences, and this appears to be another example.  Remember when the Democratic Senate cast aside the tradition of requiring 60 votes to confirm a judge and now find themselves on the losing side of simple majority votes?  Today, thanks to their shortsightedness, all they can do is attempt to destroy the person in the hopes they will withdraw or be withdrawn by the President.

Not being a Constitutional scholar, I wonder how the choice to align electors with the popular vote, rather than the votes cast within the state will play out as these laws are challenged in the courts?  And they most certainly will be challenged for on their face they potentially disenfranchise the choice of over 50% of the state’s voters.

What I do know is these types of moves can and will be cast as responding to the will of the people, but in reality, they are nothing more than political power grabs that remove any illusion that politicians believe the people they were elected to serve should have a voice in the governments they run.

Governing in the Age of Outrage

This week’s outrage seems to focus on two freshman Representatives in the House.  Individuals who’ve made it quite clear they believe their faith is superior to all others and another faith is to be vilified and eliminated, if possible, from our political system as a good first step to its total elimination from the world.  They are supported by a third media savvy Representative and backed in a kind of “kid gloves” approach by their party leaders who choose to condemn anti-tolerance, but not really THEIR anti-tolerance.

Of course, those who recognize the hate speech as hate speech are all over this, many going so far as to question why we are even allowing “their religion” and “their views” to be a part of “our government.”

I guess the real question is how far will identify politics go, or how long will it take before we achieve the ultimate end of a representative government able to work for a common good, rather than vilification of all the various groups who are a foundation of what was once a homogeneous nation?

I use the term "homogeneous" for that is what I was taught as a boy.  “E Pluribus Unum” is found on our coinage, and it was put there intentionally to remind us that we are “Out of many, one.”

It should be obvious to anyone who cares to actually look at the issue of identity politics – it is all about the gaining of power and position in society.  There is no real secondary reason.  It is justified by saying we need to seek all the social buzz words like “tolerance,” “equality,” or “justice” but at the end of the day the groups who make these claims have shown no real evidence they want to stop at recognition or equality, they all want to dominate and destroy their opponents, just as the tycoons of the industrial age sought to dominate and destroy their rivals.  I think I can safely conclude this is a human standard, which would carry back to almost all human societies throughout written history.

As we embrace the new standards of identity politics and its major components of victimhood and intolerance it seems inevitable the two major parties, who’ve more or less guided this nation since the mid-1800s, will fracture and divide and perhaps become a multitude of parties with a need for coalition building – as is common in most parliamentary governments.  Unfortunately, most coalition building requires acceptance of mutual common ground, and in the age of Twitter^© common respect and acceptance seems increasingly unlikely in the public forums.

Just my two cents.

It's the Truth

“I want the truth!”  “The Truth?  You can’t handle the truth!”  An exchange between LTJG Daniel Kaffee (USN) and Col Nathan Jessup (USMC) in the movie A Few Good Men.

As I’ve grown older the world has changed from “black and white” to “Living Color” to “50 Shades of Gray.”  It is a place where everyone once knew what was “right and wrong” is now “you have your truth and I have mine.”  I find it interesting in today’s world there are still people who believe they are standing on the moral high ground as they condemn their opposition as (insert your preferred demeaning adjectives here).

As I’ve noted in previous postings, we (the adults) of this American society have shifted from a heated but generally respectful debate of issues (social, economic, or otherwise) to simple personal attacks on those with opposing ideas.  We live in a world where most people now communicate across the social media by finding a glossy picture that praises or vilifies an idea they find attractive or outrageous, but when challenged they can’t really waste their time explaining why they feel as they do, they just do (or worse someone they like said they should).  It’s their truth and they are sticking to it.

As I write about the issues I find relevant – I find people of my generation generally understand the context of my statements and will either agree or ignore without comment.  (I sometimes regret the fact people who may disagree are unwilling to stand up and question me in public, but that is not something I control.)

Then there are those who focus on a single statement and seem to ignore the broader context.  Perhaps, it is my poor writing and an inability to articulate and define the central theme, or maybe it is easier for some to focus on a single tree when looking at a forest.  But, I ramble on.

Today, the issue before us is really one of government control, or rather how much government is enough and how much is too much. 

The members of the new People’s Democratic National Committee have rolled out a vision for America in their plan for a “Green New Deal” where they propose a government-run universal health care, elimination of all vehicles that use carbon fuel propulsion systems, an entirely new mass transportation infrastructure, a universal base salary, and essentially government control of all aspects of our social and economic lives.

The flash debate between the left and right is whether or not some words in the published draft are actually in the current draft or whether or not they really mean what they said before people questioned them on some of the stupid stuff they included. 

Just so there is no mistake let me be clear in my view.  I don’t believe this Green New Deal is any better than the last Green Deal the DNC rolled out.  And at the sake of offending those of my home town, I am not sure if the President’s intent of original New Deal was to actually help America recover sooner from the depression or just increase his power as President?

At its core, the New Green Deal is about expanding government control over the decisions of the average citizen.  Those who support it will claim it’s about making lives better, protecting the environment and creating the brave new future the progressives always see “just around the corner.”  These would be the self-same progressives who saw a better world in eugenics, lobotomies, and the myriad of social welfare programs aimed at eliminating poverty, racism, addiction, and illiteracy, but until now have only achieved a greater individual dependency on the state, while fostering poverty, racism, drug addiction and increased illiteracy.

But, just like the progressive movement, conservatives who oppose this new plan come in a variety of flavors and the most extreme would advocate we move governmental decision making back to the private enterprise.  This would, of course, undo over a century of lessons where we’ve found good reasons for government regulation.  For example, should we put banking without regulation back in the hands of the banker?  I think anyone who would advocate for this simply does not understand the human dynamic of wealth accumulation, but then again, has banking regulation stopped the creation of mega-banks (banks too big to fail), or has it led to our government spending money to prop them up when they realize risks they had dismissed as unimportant?  As Elizabeth Warren has pointed out, the money interest in Wall Street and beyond have paid substantial sums to have the politicians vote their way.  Unfortunately, Liz seems to think only one party has taken those funds, while we can clearly see otherwise.

That last point is really my central concern with an ever-expanding government.  It is not the average citizen who runs for federal office.  It is not someone who will serve a couple of terms and then return to private life.  Rather, it is someone who craves the power that title confers.  Once in office they, more often than not, become holders for life, except in the case of the President where the Congress decided after FDR that a lifetime was too long.  They accumulate wealth through their ability to influence the laws and regulations that are written, or direct the tens-of-thousands of employees hired to enforce those laws and regulations.  For them, and their media surrogates it is all about dividing the population into fragmented groups to maintain their elite status.

I believe the Green New Deal would not only create greater government power, but its real objective is to make the politicians and their business supporters wealthier.  In the end, it will do little to actually save a world that is, if you believe the hype, eating itself alive.  In a world of 7.5 billion, a nation of 350 million is simply a part of the equation.  Perhaps a big part, but even then, not the biggest part.  I would ask those who feel different explain to me how unilaterally expanding our government into a socialist state will prove economically successful at making the lives of the individual (who is not a member of the state party) better?  Alternatively, you can lay out how your example of environmental socialism will save the world by changing the way everyone else treats it.

Oh yes, when giving comparisons of how well democratic socialism has worked please account for the scaling issues of small versus large countries, or use examples from countries of equivalent size to the U.S.

Until you can convince me otherwise, that is my truth, and I’m sticking to it.

It's About Karma and Stones

The theologies of the world’s religions try and teach us to be better humans, but more often than not they fail miserably because we can’t get past the fact we crave attention and power.  Let’s think about that for a bit, shall we?

The religions of India detail a cause and effect relationship with one’s actions.  Good acts in the current life will have a positive outcome in the next, while bad acts will likely have a negative impact.  One’s future, therefore, depends on acting in a positive and affirming nature but as we see in the world around us, despite all the cliché examples of good or bad Karma, we humans will act out of a need for short-term gain without consideration of the potential adverse outcomes our actions might generate.

In Christianity, we find the story of Jesus and the temple courts (John, Chapter 8, versus 1-8).  A woman stood accused of adultery - under Hebrew law her punishment was death by stoning.  The scribes and Pharisees, attempting to corner Jesus is some act of heresy, questioned him on what they should do to the woman, and asked him to approve of the stoning.  Jesus response silenced the elders when he directed that whoever was without sin should throw the first stone.  Everyone knew there was no one without sin, so they were at a stalemate.  He then questioned the woman and released her with the direction to “go and sin no more.”

These examples serve only to preface the hilarity of today’s political world, where people who have little or no real morality are empowered to tell the rest of the world how things must be.

This past fall we saw the Democratic Senators, and their propaganda arm known as the mainstream media (i.e. ABCNNBCBS and MSNBC), attempt to destroy the reputation and approval of the administration’s nomination to the Supreme Court.  Every talking head, including the empty ones on “The View” and “Morning Joe,” set out to vilify the nominee based on unsupported accusations from his high school years.  At the end of the day “Spartacus Booker” Diane Feinstein, and “For the People, Harris” were unable to overcome the nomination, mostly because of the Karma that came from the decisions of the previous Congress where the Democratic party leadership chose to change the rules for what it took to block a nomination. 

Now we have the circus of the Virginia state government, which seems to be imploding after their less than courageous (I would suggest non-humanitarian) decision to support post-birth (okay really, really, late-term) abortion.  Remarkably, the Governor and Attorney General have been proven, by current DNC standards. to be racist while the Lieutenant Governor stands accused of being a sexual assaulter by another Ph.D.  In the past, the Democratic position was these sins must be accepted and the politicans stoned until they resign.

This presents an interesting dilemma for the party’s propaganda arm as they struggle to find the Republican who must really be the bad guy in this.  Fortunately, they’ve found a link to the next in line (State Senator Thomas K. Norment, Jr.) which can be used to suggest he too is a racist.  So, there may actually be no one who is not a racist or rapist in Virginia capable of running the state.  I can only imagine what the historically racist figures of the DNC would think of their party as it is embroiled in the social warfare the left has chosen as its battleground.

I also wonder if they will ever come to understand that attempting to destroy their opposition through ad hominin attack will most certainly come back to haunt them at some point.  As the bible said, “let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Or to put it in modern political terms.  “I’m rubber, you’re glue; whatever you say bounces off me and sticks on you!”

Walls - Good and Bad

Walls

We are in the midst of a great political debate over the issue of approved and unapproved immigration, and like most things in today’s world it comes down to something as innocuous as a physical barrier at our border.  Why is this?  My guess is a simple one, the propaganda machines can fit the argument for or against a wall into their 15-second sound bites.

We hear on the one side about the crisis in border security that would be solved by a wall, while the counter arguments span the gamut from “there is no crisis” to a claim the wall is “immoral.”  I would like to take a few minutes to review what walls are and can be, and perhaps remove the idea that they can be immoral, for morality is truly a human thing.  A wall has no humanity it is just a barrier serving a defined purpose.

Of course, walls can be used to define borders, this has been true since the beginnings of empire.  Take the Great Wall of China.  It remains today as a testament to the willingness of the Chinese Emperors to define and defend their lands.

Walls can also be expressions of man’s pettiness and incivility to their neighbors.

But walls are also reflections of so much more of the human condition.  They can serve to represent the faith of a people in their God,

Or separate some from society.

They can help a nation heal from a tragic war,

Or inspire a people to continue to fight for independence

They can keep a people enslaved by a government that sees them as the property of the state.

Or they can serve as a canvas for an artist's expressions of humanity.

Walls protect us from the noise of our inventions.

 Or define the boundaries of our games.

Walls can protect what we hold most important.

Or just keep our neighbors from bothering us.

So, we come down to the final question.  Should we have a border wall?  I am not sure how to break this to a lot of you, but we already do, the question is not should we have one, but how much of one should we have and maintain?

Today’s fight is just the latest in a test of wills between two parties who see little value in efficient government.  Rather, they seek to dominate the political arena to gain the wealth it offers
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Zealots

zealot (zĕlˈət) A person who is fanatical and uncompromising in pursuit of their religious, political, or other ideals.

The origin of the word comes from the Greek name of a Jewish sect that existed in the time of Jesus.  Their goal was to resist the Roman empire and create a world dominated by Jewish theology. Those zealots were surrounded first in Jerusalem and then Masada, and destroyed by the Romans in about 70 AD. [1]   We see a lot of zealots these days, but it seems most of them are engaged not by a deep understanding of the issue, but by the enthusiasm of youth and their educational indoctrination. 

Perhaps it is because we have so many social, economic, and environmental issues we can’t agree on that we create all these zealots who demand action but have little insight into the unexpected consequences of their solution sets and who take no responsibility when those consequences manifest themselves.  Or maybe, it is we have developed such a class of elites they believe world control is within reach and they’ve set the masses into conflict to further that goal?

What I find most interesting is we’ve reached a state of economic prosperity within our country where socially committed individuals have so much time and wealth they can devote themselves to what they believe to be these higher callings and not focus on the tasks essential for survival.  Along the way, their entitlements and views of self-importance are cast about as clubs while they abuse the legal and political systems.

Their issues and the positions seem often at odds as each group jockeys for dominance.  Take for example the recent massive fires in California.  The legislature and the Governor have written laws that prevent logging or other active forest management on much of the land under their control.  They’ve chosen instead to claim those lands must remain “natural.”  That would be a great idea if they were, in fact, wilderness areas, but they’ve also allowed development in those natural areas.  When wildfires break out and destroy homes, communities, and lives they are shocked.  Of course, it really isn’t a result of their direct political/economic self-interest, they can blame climate change -- because computer projections suggest a likelihood of stronger storms, longer droughts and a myriad of worsening environmental crisis, so it’s really the fault of those other guys, the climate change deniers.  Those who would question the accuracy of the computer projections and the group think (i.e. the science is settled) of those who are warning of imminent death and destruction if the US doesn’t take immediate action.  

Animal rights is another area where with the best of intentions, uninformed individuals can band together to save the planet, or at least some of the planet as long as they are animals and not humans.  They can arrogantly dismiss the eons of humanity to now explain why tofu is preferred to the beef while lobbying for a ban on meat.  The simple question then becomes what to do with all the beef that is busy creating methane and contributing to global warming?  But that really isn’t their concern, there is obviously another group to handle that.

Last year we saw major protests over oil pipelines, where the native American tribes that would be affected by those pipelines were buoyed up environmental zealots from across the county, including a number of notable Hollywood personas.  In their zeal to stop the pipeline and reduce the flow of oil, they assembled in South Dakota to make their position known.  The funny thing about this environmental protest was the amount of human waste they left behind when they finally decided the weather was getting too cold to camp out and be visible to the press.  Of course, cleaning up after themselves as they fight to save the earth is really someone else’s job, isn’t it?

I could go on ad infinitum but in all cases, just as with the original zealots, their aim is to reshape the world into their vision of perfection, and if in the process they get to be richer or gain power through the manipulation of the masses, well that is just a wonderful side benefit.  Isn’t it?

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[1] https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/zealot

The Politics of Outrage.

To paraphrase a popular quote: Life is hard; It’s Even Harder When You’re Partisan. 

It seems this age we are in has made life almost unbearable for the partisan left and the partisan right.  There are so many things to be outraged about, yet our politicians find more value in feeding the outrage than they do in working towards viable solutions.  How does one cope on daily basis?

There is a line from the Cary Grant – Tony Curtis movie “Operation Petticoat” Tony Curtis, playing Lt. Holden, is put in charge of finding parts needed to fix the submarine commanded by Cary Grant, as Lt Cmdr Matt Sherman.  In one scene Lt. Holden leaves the sub while the navy base is under attack.  When he is asked where he is going he offers this memorable truth, “In confusion there is profit.”  That seems to be the strategy in play in today’s political division.

We have problems with immigration, who should come and how should they be qualified for entry?  Today, it is better to be outraged at the separation of children from adults at the border than it is to find a solution that prevents that from being a necessity.  This shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it clearly is.  During the eight years of the previous administration, we saw a hodge-podge of enforcement and non-enforcement of immigration laws.  The DOJ was accused of gun-running that resulted in at least one death of a border agent, some people were welcomed and others denied, and yet children and adults were still separated when detained and very little effort was made to ensure they were reunited after the mind-numbingly slow decision process.  The press and the partisan supporters of the DNC said little or nothing about the moral injustice.  Put a hated Republican in charge and all the sudden it is the end of the world, and people will die.

On the opposing side, there at least is not a rock-solid set of approved talking points as there is on the left. We have everything from President Trump’s promise of a wall to grants for limited immunity from deportation.  It would seem to anyone who considers this spectrum there is room to negotiate a new law, but when one side says there can only be one answer, that room quickly shrinks to the hardline rhetoric we have today.  We were supposed to have fixed this in the 1990s, under President Clinton when we granted immunity to millions with the intent we would have laws we could agree to. What has changed?  Who has altered the requirements for immigration?  Are we to be a nation that believes in the rule of law or not?  To me, that is the real question before us on immigration.  It appears one side says no.

Then we have the Russians and their impact on preventing the favored DNC candidate from achieving her rightful place in American history.  What makes matters so much worse is she lost to someone who the media and the party had vilified to such an extent that he was viewed as almost certainly someone who would be little more than a footnote in history, much like William Henry Harrison.  At the time of the election, the DNC had predicted the economy would never recover, the markets would crash, healthcare for the nation (especially women) would end and people would die.  On election night some small percentage of the 60 million or so voters who voted for HRC decided their outrage was just too great to contain.  They bought knit hats and took to the streets to show the world their disdain for the nation’s choice for the next president.  Calls for investigations on how this outrage could have occurred began immediately and here we are two years later still waiting for the Special Counsel to shed some light on how the Russians persuaded some 60 million voters to choose someone other than HRC. 

Of course, over the past couple of decades, we’ve developed an intolerance for ideas and thoughts that might invoke discomfort and force debate on an issue.  The definition of “hate speech,” although fluid, is now part of our language.  It sure appears the demands for politically correct speech is less about offending and more about controlling the debate.  When only one side gets to call the other racist it is no longer a debate, is it?  I give you, as an example HRC’s latest snappy comeback.  When an interviewer attributed a quote to Cory Booker, HRC corrected her and said that was actually from Eric Holder.  When the interviewer apologized Ms. Clinton forgave her saying “they all look alike.”  The audience laughed because after all this was Hillary Clinton and she’s a Democrat and by current definition can’t be racist.

We are bombarded by the idea that white racist organizations are going to undo all the civil rights minorities have fought so hard to gain and expand, yet how many white racists are really in power now that Robert Byrd (D-WV) is gone?   The Southern Poverty Law Center shows a marked decline in the number of groups since 2011 when estimates put the number of hardcore and sympathizers at about 300,000.  For the record that is .09% of the nation.  So, 1/10^th of one percent of the nation is classified as racist yet how many times have we heard someone who disagreed with the President called a racist?  Of course, with critical race theory that is the desired option, since only white people can be racist the best way to control the conversation is to shut it down.

Once again, the issue of putting on makeup has hit the news.  NBC has suspended and will quite possibly can Megyn Kelly for her comments about how as a child putting on “blackface” was okay and opining about why it isn’t today.  Having never had a desire to wear blackface, but watching the likes of Al Jolson play exaggerated characters in movies about the Minstrel shows I can certainly understand why many would find the idea of a whole bunch of white kids mocking their color as offensive, but the outrage that comes from these events today does not appear to be based on a compelling desire for cultural sensitivities nearly as much as it comes from a desire to control the conversation.  Just as in the #metoo movement there is evidence that when some liberal personalities chose to use blackface for the sake of their comedic benefit there was little mention of how offensive this was to black culture.

Finally, we have become a nation that selectively condones or condemns actual hate speech as represented by vile acts of terror against political or religious targets.  It sure seems the focus of these condemnations is more about affixing blame than actually ending any political speech that may incite the actual individuals involved.  One side lays the blame on President Trump, and of course, President Trump’s supporters have an equally large number of examples that will lay the blame on his opposition.  Is affixing blame for mean and ugly speech really ever going to solve a problem where individuals feel empowered to kill or attempt to kill others?  I doubt it.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what all this outrage is about?  The need to control the debate so your side wins?  The question we will see answered in the next week or so is can the idea of outrage be overplayed to the detriment of the victim party?  Will the voters reject the vilification of good people by the outraged left or will they reward them for their victim status?

Trump Loves Hate

Okay, now you’re just being silly.  As the Democratic extremists continue to argue against Kavanaugh, and suggest that if this or that was done it might change their position it has reached a point of absurdity.  On the bright side, it seems they and their tactics may just make this a mid-term to remember.  Six months ago, all the alleged experts were calling for a blue wave where incumbent Republicans would be tossed out and the Democrats would sweep into power to impeach and convict the President, thus removing him from office.  It appears that may not be as dramatic as the media would like it to be.  In fact, there may be a political red tide in lieu of a blue wave.

Diehards within the activist’s groups in the DNC don’t know how to quit, but the responses to their outrageous behavior are certainly getting easier for those who must confront them.

It seems daily their bad behavior is now displayed even on the most bias of social and public media.  It doesn’t matter if it is some guy with a roundhouse kick to knock out some poor pro-life girl with a camera, or the idiots who are yelling out the FBI investigation was incomplete.  For the average middle of the road voter, they are now getting a sense of how dangerous it would be to restore power to the extremists who’ve become the face of the Democratic party.

For those complaining the FBI didn’t interview Professor Blasey Ford or subject Judge Kavanaugh to a lie detector test, I offer two simple observations.

a. Professor Ford and her lawyers had over six months to come forward and didn’t.  She and her lawyers sought to control and limit her exposure to questioning by the Judiciary Committee where they had every opportunity to lay all their substantiation on the table.  They and the minority members chose not to -- believing uncorroborated claims would be enough.  Not one Democratic member chose to ask probing questions that would have perhaps filled in some of the corroborations.  They chose instead to praise and glorify her victim status since they had already made up their minds.  Because of the testimony, there was zero reason for the FBI to interview her, despite the claims by her lawyers she could offer corroborating evidence.  It seems interesting a recently retired law professor from UW Madison wrote on her blog today.  "There's so little honesty in law and politics. I sometimes feel like retreating from all of it and..."

b. The American Psychological Association^[1] says this about Polygraph (lie detector) tests. “Polygraph testing has generated considerable scientific and public controversy. Most psychologists and other scientists agree that there is little basis for the validity of polygraph tests. Courts, including the United States Supreme Court (cf. U.S. v. Scheffer, 1998 in which Dr.'s Saxe's research on polygraph fallibility was cited), have repeatedly rejected the use of polygraph evidence because of its inherent unreliability.”  So, any call for the Judge to take a polygraph test is either coming from a useful idiot or would be immediately questioned as bogus if he were exonerated.   This call is simply another red herring thrown up by those who don’t want President Trump to win.

I am surprised I haven’t heard how many people will die if he is appointed.  Oh wait, I have.  Never mind.

Maybe someday, perhaps not in my lifetime but someday, the DNC will actually have good ideas to make America Great and not just resort to ad hominin attacks on those who would like to live in a great country.

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[1] https://www.apa.org/research/action/polygraph.aspx

My 2-cents

I am already seeing the post-mortem editorial/opinion pieces on how the Senate should change the rules for its “advise and consent” requirement on Judicial and Executive Branch appointments.  So, it seems a good time to offer my two cents as well.

Some are advocating we take the public hearings out of the equation, thus eliminating the theater that has become standard in the current process.  I disagree with that approach.  Our government is opaque enough already.  Laws are written in such a manner as to be almost incomprehensible, even to their authors.  As Nancy Pelosi famously said once, “We have to pass this bill so we find out what’s in it.”  Do we really want to move yet another process behind closed doors so everyone can deny involvement?  Corruption thrives in the darkness, and for most citizens, the belief their government is corrupt is one of the primary reasons our current President is Donald Trump.

So here are the rule changes I suggest.

a.  Any Senator who states a public position before the formal questioning is complete is eliminated from the panels who will question the nominees.  They’ve chosen to make their position public and there is no need to provide them with an additional stage to advocate for or against the candidate just to increase their personal profile.

b.  Any Senator who refuses to meet privately with the nominee prior to public hearings is limited in their questioning time to ½ of what the committee sets as the standard.  This is an arbitrary choice, and it could just as easily be reduced to ¼ or even zero and I would be good with that.  Again, my reasoning is they have established a position based on personality, perceived constituent appeal, or something other than providing fully informed advise and consent to the President.  Why allow them the same privileges as those other Senators who are fulfilling all their responsibilities in the matter?

c.  Any Senator, as Senator Feinstein did, who withholds discriminatory evidence from the discussion until the 11^th hour should have their vote recorded as an abstain and there should be an automatic censure vote on their behavior.  They have chosen theater over what is best for the country.  There should be a personal cost for that.  The reason we are where we are today is the politicians pay very little in terms of Senatorial privilege for their actions, the political theater of today is an obvious result of politicians playing up to their base in anticipation of future campaigns for higher office.

Well, those are my suggestions, for what they are worth.

It is Done.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen lend me your ears.  I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.  The evil that men do lives on after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so let it be with Caesar.”  (Marc Anthony’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, Act III, Scene II).

What little attention I paid to the news this week showed their need to make the late John McCain’s funeral a stage for the ongoing political drama that is our politics these days.  This was undoubtedly fueled by the desires of the McCain family who seem to be seeking to inherit his seat in the Senate, as well as the insider political opposition to the President. This is not a new phenomenon, it can probably trace its roots back to the Pharaohs of Egypt but certainly was used as a dramatic device by Shakespeare.

A few thoughts on this whole affair.

First, there ought to be a law that prevents a governor from appointing the spouse of a politician as the replacement.  There won’t be, and it is really a matter for each state to decide.  But, all it does is further the separation between the politicians who believe there is a divine right for them to be in charge and the subjects who have little say in the true decisions.

I wonder what kind of funeral attendance Senator McCain would have had if the affair had been a private one, closed to the television media?

Bill and Hillary had a busy weekend as they shuttled between ceremonies in Detroit and Washington.  There will undoubtedly be a bunch of memes that come from either his dozing or rapt attention, depending on who was speaking/singing.

The average age of the political luminaries of both parties seems to be getting on up there, yet there seems to be little chance of dramatic change in the near future.

Finally, it seems pretty hysterical that the Democrats are pushing to rename the Senate office building (the Sam Rayburn building) and the Republicans are saying not so fast.

“O judgement thou art fled to brutish beasts, and men have lost their reason.  Bear with me; my heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, and I must pause till it come back to me.”

Senatorial Grandstanding vs. Intelligence (i.e. The morality of relative morality)

We are a nation of laws, hopefully based on a shared sense of what is right and just.  Laws come from politicians, elected to represent us, not from the bureaucrats hired to run the government or enforce the laws they are given.  More and more frequently we see a loss of that shared sense of what is right and just as our morality is changed by those forces active within society who rebel against the status quo.  As our morality changes so do the choices we make with regard to the law.

I’ve never been a prisoner of war, nor have I had to attempt to gain intelligence from those who have been captured as a part of a military or intelligence operation, but I have been through military survival school, and its resistance training.  I am fully aware of what the North Vietnamese did to US prisoners in the Vietnam war, as well as what the Japanese did to their prisoners in the Second World War.  During this long war I’ve had a number of conversations on the subject of “enhanced interrogation techniques” with my colleagues, what follows summarizes my thoughts, as well as an opinion of Senator Kamala Harris during her question period of Gina Haspel.

With the horrific attack on America by Islamic terrorists on 9/11/2001 this nation’s politicians reacted with the outrage we would expect of a group who found out we were not as immune to the terror as we had been led to believe we were during the 1990s, when the attacks on the US were all against interests outside the homeland or were from isolated domestic terrorists.

They reacted with the only tools they had.  They passed legislation allowing us to attack the country that harbored the terrorists, approved and funded the ability of the government to use its technology to monitor the activities of its own citizens and authorized the use of all means and methods necessary to find and bring Osama bin Laden to justice.  Some of this was done by the Congress in the form of legislation, and some of it by Executive Order.  There were few dissenting voices during those early days, just as there were few dissenting voices when the government approved the detention and relocation of Japanese-Americans at the start of the Second World War. 

The CIA, of course, was central to the process.  It failed to stop the attack and, I assume, was under a lot of pressure from the President, his Vice President, and a whole bunch of concerned Congressional members to fix the problem of finding Waldo, err Osama.  Everyone who had oversight and control pulled out all the stops to get them the tools and funding they wanted.  Among those efforts were the establishment of a number of undisclosed detention and interrogation centers, imprisonment in foreign countries where CIA accountability was masked, almost unlimited cash for “rewards,” development of a new generation of UAV and technology to track and target individuals, and of course the “enhanced” interrogation techniques like waterboarding.  Tracing the CIA back to its earliest days in the cold war there is a long history of it exploring ways to extract information from those it captured, just as other countries have.  It seems to be a foundational quality that if a little fear is good, a lot is better.  Wasn’t it the CIA who developed LSD as a tool to enhance the interrogation and quality of information a subject may provide, only to discard it when it was proven ineffective?

From the beginnings of this long war, I’ve found the use of these “enhanced” techniques unappealing and inappropriate for a society and a government that made such vocal condemnations of the brutality of others against our combatants in various conflicts.  For those who know me, I find the hypocrisy of saying one thing and then doing another a most unforgivable shortcoming.  That being said, I often found myself a distinct minority in the discussions.  Most of my peers, both younger and older felt that any tool available should be used if it meant we would gain a tactical advantage in the global war on terror.  My concern focused simply on the quid pro quo potential of our hypocrisy, but my friends pointed out the other side wasn’t playing by the rules so why should we?  For me, that argument was always the crux of a moral choice, going all the way back to that earliest childhood admonishment from your mother.  “If your friends jumped off the bridge, would you?”  Just because someone else does something does that mean it is moral?  It seems in these days where the morality of all sorts of things are called into question we have opened the door to the individual making his or her own choice.

Let’s take a moment to talk about these interrogation techniques and decide if they are torture or not.  Are these enhanced techniques torture?  Good question.  What is torture anyway?  The Oxford Dictionary (online) defines it as “The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.”  The beauty of that definition is you can choose to limit or expand your definition by qualifying the words like severe pain and then debating whether or not it deals with just physical or does it mean mental as well? Is the use of phenobarbital against a subject’s will torture?  You can certainly make the case it is since it will cause mental anguish.  Does waterboarding cause severe physical pain, or is the fear of death from drowning a cause for severe mental trauma?  At the end of the day it really boils down to an individual choice, doesn’t it?  From a technical standpoint, the real question is “is it effective and does it fit within the legal parameters of international law?”  The documentation I see is that “torture” is viewed as an absolute ban in international law, yet it is rarely enforced or condemned by the international tribunals for what I assume is a variety of political reasons.  So, the bottom line on waterboarding is it could be torture if you want to call it that, but it might not be if you think you can get away with it and it meets your immediate need.

There is an interesting dynamic in the post-Reagan society where the condemnation of the past takes on a smug moral superiority and those who participate in this reflection of hindsight feel empowered to condemn the decisions of the past as if they were all morally reprehensible and the people who made the decisions, or executed those policies were and are evil.  We see that approach pretty routinely in today’s social discourse.  I believe it is simply a strategy to gain a superior position and shut down legitimate debate, especially when it would call into question the broader moral questions of one’s own positions.

Other than what I’ve seen in the news, I know very little of Gina Haspel.  Apparently, she is a career CIA analyst/operative who has risen through the bureaucracy to become Deputy Director and is now nominated as its Director.  Since she is a Trump nomination, her qualifications are pretty much irrelevant as she becomes just another political football.  She is either the greatest thing since sliced bread, or she is evil incarnate based solely on your political point of view.

 What I did see in the questioning by Senator Kamala Harris was an adult, being questioned by a snobbish, uninformed, and self-serving child who asked a complex moral question dealing with past events, and then demanded a yes or no answer.  Her position on the appointment was decided the instant the nomination was made, and there was nothing in any of the answers of Ms. Haspel that would ever remotely persuade her to change her mind.  Her 5-minutes before the camera was there to showcase her opposition and set the stage for what she undoubtedly believes will be a run at a higher national office.  Unfortunately, she failed to show any qualities that commend her to a broader electorate than she already has.