Leftism Is Like the Cult of Cthulhu

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/13/leftism-is-like-the-cult-of-cthulhu/

February 13, 2019

Cthulhu

The most merciful thing in the world, I think,” wrote the American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in the opening to The Call of Cthulhu, “is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” In the Lovecraftian mythos, this refers to the occult world of the Great Old Ones, eldritch gods from outer space, as old as time itself who lie beyond our ken, dead but still dreaming. If we could only grasp their existence and see how fragile our imaginary world really is, we would go mad. Thus, we go on believing in an illusion and subconsciously hope Cthulhu and Azathoth never show us their true faces.

The secret to being a successful leftist is very similar. Like Lovecraft’s narrator, they are unable—certainly unwilling—to correlate the contents of the minds; thus, they are able to hold two or more antithetical bits of information in their minds and discount or ignore any bit of evidence that does not conform to their theoretical worldview. In Through the Looking-Glass, the White Queen tells Alice that she can believe as many as six impossible things before breakfast. Leftists have her beat many times over.

A prime example came this past week, when the Democrats, who now appear to be the personal party of a small child from the Bronx named after a city in Egypt, rolled out their “Green New Deal”—which implicitly called for, among other inanities, high-speed trains to Europe and the reconstruction of every building in America—at the same time that the newly installed governor of California, Gavin Newsom, was aborting his predecessor Jerry Brown’s high-speed train to nowhere, a $77-billion exercise in fruitlessness that marks, to date at least, the high-water mark of liberalism’s inability to correlate any of the contents of its largely empty heads.

Anyone, including this semi-native Californian, could see there was no market for a bullet train from Bakersfield to Fresno to Merced to Erewhon, especially one that had already busted its budget many times over—a great gobbling maw worthy of Cthulhu himself that, in true pagan god fashion, would and could never be satisfied no matter what or whom was sacrificed to it. But liberal gods are insatiable; too much is never enough for them. And so “progressives” keep on feeding the beast, in the belief that it will eat them last.

In the meantime, they feel free to indulge their wildest fantasies and darkest desires. Infanticide—one of the surest signs of a pagan culture—came out of the closet in New York (where it is now the law of the former Empire State) and in Virginia, where it was turned back legislatively but no doubt will return with its governor’s blessing, if he lasts that long. The fact that Cardinal Timothy Dolan has not summarily excommunicated the notional Catholic, Governor Andrew Cuomo, speaks volumes about the impotence of the modern Catholic Church.

In the Senate, the Spartacan walk-on also known as Cory Booker—whose veganism is possibly a contributing factor to his lack of mental acuity—bravely launched an attack on meat and cheese, neither of which he eats. As is typical of proto-fascists everywhere, Booker has personalized his dietary preferences and then universalized them on a crusade to—you guessed it—save the planet by punishing the rest of us.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) said the planet “can’t sustain” people eating meat, as the 2020 hopeful aims to become the first vegan president. Booker told the vegan magazine VegNews  earlier this month that he became vegan after coming to the realization that eating eggs “didn’t align with my spirit.”

While claiming he does not want to lecture Americans on their diets, Booker says Americans need to be nudged into fake cheese because the planet cannot sustain the “environmental impact” of the food industry. “You see the planet earth moving towards what is the Standard American Diet,” Booker said. “The tragic reality is this planet simply can’t sustain billions of people consuming industrially produced animal agriculture because of environmental impact,” he said. “It’s just not possible.”

Easy for Booker and his imaginary friend T-Bone to say. (Is T-Bone a vegan, too?) But the leap from munching on arugula to the mass extinction of cows in the name of cutting down on methane is a brain fart too far for sane people.

Still, the ease with which such preposterous notions are not only proposed but taken seriously by a national media whose own utter lack of sophistication, knowledgeability, wit, and cultural savvy is on display daily. The earnest dullards of the media have their own Great Old Ones to propitiate; in order stave off having to correlate the contents of their minds, they awaken every morning with absolutely nothing to do except to flog every transgressive, fantastical notion regarding sex, diet, the environment, celebrating each and any deviation from traditional norms as “historic,” when in fact it is generally accidental, when not actually inimical. Who would have thought that a boy declaring himself to be a girl and then winning wrestling, powerlifting, and sprinting events would be cheered as a “first,” although I suppose in a way it is. But not in a good way.

Ah, but as that legendary anti-Semite, Henry Ford, once remarked, “history is bunk.” The modern Left has no use for the past, except as a whipping boy, a scapegoat upon which can be laden all the sins of the Western world, and then sacrificed to appease their angry green gods.

But eventually even the Left runs out of victims, and so it must turn on itself. Suicide is the only act of contrition it can make that will satisfy Cthulhu’s bloodthirstiness. As I wrote in my book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, “Satan has no need for servants in Hell, as God does in Heaven; he is instead satisfied with corpses on earth.” Communism, the most perfect expression of what the satanic Left is all about, manufactured them on an industrial scale until it finally collapsed under the weight of, as Marx would say, its own international contradictions.

Because, in the end, even the craziest Leftist must, in his darkest moments, paradoxically have a moment of clarity, when all of the conflicting impossibilities inherent in his world view suddenly, briefly, become visible. And then Cthulhu and Dagon and Shub-Niggurath and Nyarlathotep appear, and the contents are finally correlated in a blaze of mad glory.

Let’s just hope they don’t take us with them when and wherever they go.

Too Fearful of Man to be Fearful of God

By Michael Walsh
https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/31/too-fearful-of-man-to-be-fearful-of-god/
January 31, 2019


Cardinal Timothy Dolan and Andrew Cuomo in 2016.

Of the many memorable scenes and sequences from the film, “Casablanca¸” one that stands out for both its subtlety and its continuing resonance comes when the Bulgarian Bride—her name is Annina Brandel in the script—sits down with Rick Blaine and asks for some very important advice. Let’s watch the scene first before discussing it:

The young woman, played by Joy Page, wants to know whether she can trust Captain Renault to deliver exit visas for her and her husband, Jan, if she sleeps with him. She poses her question to Rick as a hypothetical, but we know the central moral issue of her query cuts deep: it’s basically the same choice Rick’s lost love, Ilsa Lund, made when she left him standing the rain in Paris at the train station in order to rejoin her husband. She doesn’t know that, of course; when Rick abruptly excuses himself, she has no idea that he’s going to rig the roulette wheel in Jan’s favor in order for them to win enough money to afford the visas and then get the hell out of North Africa for America.

It’s a quandary to which we can all relate. One of her lines of dialogue, however, has an especially timely meaning: “The Devil has the people by the throat.” In the context of the film, the Devil is Hitler and the Nazis; the Brandels were lucky to escape with their lives. Today, the Devil is much closer to home. I’m speaking, of course, about the recent “Reproductive Health Act” passed by the New York State legislature and signed into law by a nominal Catholic governor, Andrew Cuomo. It is the greatest moral disgrace in American history and, if we don’t stop it, it’s just the beginning of what Ramesh Ponnuru has called, correctly, “the infanticide craze.”

In New York State, Governor Andrew Cuomo signed a law that makes abortion legal, even after the unborn child is viable, so long as the abortionist makes a “reasonable and good-faith judgment” that abortion will protect the pregnant woman’s health. In Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo has pledged to sign legislation that also makes abortion legal after viability to “preserve . . . health.” In Virginia, state legislator Kathy Tran has introduced legislation that would, she has explained, make abortion legal even at term and in the middle of birth. Governor Ralph Northam supports that legislation.

Does he ever: “When we talk about third-trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of obviously the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way,” Northam said on WTOP radio in Washington. “And it’s done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable. So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. So I think this was really blown out of proportion.”

Northam, of course, is a Democrat; a member of a criminal organization masquerading as the political party of slavery, segregation, secularism, socialism and sedition. If there is any meaningful distinction between his sentiments (for which he was roundly roasted by decent Americans) and those of any national-socialist murderer—other than perhaps his assurance that the victim would be “kept comfortable”—I would like to hear them.

Let’s be clear: the Empire State’s new law, and the one proposed but luckily so far tabled in Virginia, where it never got out of committee, has nothing to do either with reproduction or health. In fact, diabolically, it is the exact opposite. For it is meant to allow what amounts to infanticide right up to the moment of birth, thus preventing reproduction, and it has little or nothing to do with a woman’s “health”—unless you, like the Democrats, define pregnancy as a disease.

Shamefully, the New York legislature erupted in cheers when the bill passed, and the governor—his sainted father, Mario, was an unctuous phony, but Andrew is the real thuggish deal—said, “this is a victory for all New Yorkers” and ordered the Freedom Tower in lower Manhattan to glow pink in the celebration of homicidal “feminism’s” latest burnt offering to Baal and Moloch.

The Devil has the people by the throat, indeed. And a pussy hat on his horns.

Meanwhile, those who actually are in the business of devil-fighting, instead of devil-worshipping, are AWOL. That would be the Catholic Church (the rest of the Christian sects are too far gone to care, or care about), in the form of the Irishman, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York, and the Argentine-born Italian pope, Francis. If any single public figure has richly earned public excommunication from the Church, Andrew Cuomo is him. And yet, where are Francis and Cardinal Dolan?

It’s been a rough time for faithful Catholics recently in our state government’s frantic rush for “progressive” ideas.

I’m thinking first of the ghoulish radical abortion-expansion law, which allows for an abortion right up to the moment of birth; drops all charges against an abortionist who allows an aborted baby, who somehow survives the scissors, scalpel, saline and dismemberment, to die before his eyes; mandates that, to make an abortion more convenient and easy, a physician need not perform it; and might even be used to suppress the conscience rights of health care professionals not to assist in the grisly procedures. All this in a state that already had the most permissive abortion laws in the country.

Those who once told us that abortion had to remain safe, legal and rare now have made it dangerous, imposed and frequent.

So, what are you going to do about it, Your Eminence? Nothing: “Notable canon lawyers have said that, under canon law, excommunication is not an appropriate response to a politician who supports or votes for legislation advancing abortion,” he said in a statement.

This is not only wrong, it’s cowardly, which is what we’ve come to expect from the American bishops, who have been so busy trying to bury their gay clergy scandal without getting the hems of their skirts dirty that—since many of them have no skin in the game in more ways than one—they don’t have time for matters of faith and morals any more.

As I’ve often asked, what would Dagger John do?

In 1844, faced with a Nativist threat to burn down St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral (at Prince and Mott streets), John J. Hughes, the Irish-born bishop (and later first archbishop) of New York, gathered several thousand of his mostly Irish parishioners and deployed them around the church. Any attack on the cathedral, warned the man known as “Dagger John,” would be repulsed with force. The Nativists backed down.

During the Civil War, Hughes undertook a secret mission to Europe at the personal request of Abraham Lincoln, to rally support for the Union cause and keep Britain from entering the war on the side of the Confederacy. This he did in part by explaining the facts of life to the English: that they’d have no luck in raising troops in restive, famine-stricken Ireland to fight against America, and a great deal of trouble if they tried.

Those were the days of the two-fisted Irish clergy, who understood their dual American roles as both the spiritual leaders of their people and—when necessary—political figures as well. But those days are long gone (Cardinal O’Connor was the last of the line).

In other words, Archbishop Dolan and his confreres ought to ask themselves, What Would Dagger John Do? No need for mobs this time, just morals. But if they’re not going to vigorously defend their own faith, in a Church Militant sort of way, who will? 

I wrote that in 2012, when the public threat to private morals came from another notional Catholic, Kathleen Sebelius, implementing Obamacare’s mandatory birth-control coverage at government gunpoint. Over the next two years, I wrote three more articles in this series, concluding with this:

So I’ll tell you what Dagger John would do. (For more on Dagger John Hughes, please consult the first three articles in this series here, here, and here.) He would simply refuse to comply no matter how the courts rule, announce that no Catholic institution will either obey the mandate or pay the fines, stand on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and dare Eric Holder to arrest him in front of every TV camera in New York City.

With just a few changes of words, the same sentiment could and should be expressed today:

Michael Walsh@dkahanerules

Can you imagine what John Cardinal O'Connor would have said publicly to @NYGovCuomo? He would have berated and condemned him from the steps of St. Patrick's before every TV camera in New York City.

Scubalou@LoufromCT

1/6@CardinalDolan @davidwebbshow @KerryPicket @RAMansour @joelpollak @rmanning957 @mschlapp @mercedesschlapp @curmudgeonCT @clsadimas

ex·com·mu·ni·ca·tion
noun
the action of officially excluding someone from participation in the sacraments and services of the Christian Church.

Ah, but the Dagger Johns of the Church Militant are long gone, and in their place have come the mincing social-justice warriors in cassocks and mitres, too fearful of man to be fearful of God, false to their faith and false to their mission. Andrew Cuomo and his gloating, murderous, ilk are bad enough, but these whited sepulchers are even worse, because they know better and don’t care.

Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men’s bones, and of all uncleanness.

That’s Jesus talking, not me. The hell with them all.

Trump Is Lucky in His Choice of Enemies

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/23/trump-is-lucky-in-his-choice-of-enemies/

January 23, 2019

2018 State of the Union Address

No matter when or where Donald Trump finally delivers his State of the Union speech—late last night, he gave up on the notion of an alternative venue and tweeted that the speech will take place in the House according to “history, tradition, and importance of the House Chamber,” after the shutdown is over—one thing is certain the President is lucky in his choice of enemies.

The Left, of course, thinks it has him on the run: his popularity can’t crack 50 percent, a Vichycon Republican majority foot-dragging during Trump’s first two years resulted in a grand total of bupkis, policy-wise (thanks, Paul Ryan!), and the progressive media has turned every news story—from BuzzFeed’s catastrophic confabulation about the Trump Moscow project to the innocent high schoolers in MAGA hats targeted for a classic propaganda stunt that’s now backfired badly—into an instant referendum on Trump. And yet he’s still standing.

That’s because Trump, as combative a personality who’s ever occupied the White House, thrives on conflict. While Washington is often called Hollywood for ugly people, few of the dullards, clods, clowns, rapscallions, and mountebanks who occupy seats in the Congress or in the hierarchies of their respective branches of the Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party have his flair for drama or his tolerance for high-stakes risk. These two things infuriate the PBFP and its media claque, a.k.a. the Washington press corps. The very things they despise about him, including his insouciant, gleeful rudeness, are the things that bind him to his base and his base to him. As far as the base is concerned, the enemy of my enemies is my president.

“Enemy” is a word that has almost dropped from the American vocabulary, to our great loss. In the days when we could name our enemies—the French and Indians, the British, the Barbary pirates, the Germans, the Japanese, the Germans again, the Russians—we could muster the will, the firepower and the sheer joy of destroying them. Since the end of World War II, and with the notable exception of Reagan’s victory in the Cold War (over the obstructions of the Democrats, naturally), we’ve been leery of “demonizing” everyone from the North Koreans to the Iranians to the Arabs and the Afghans, and instead have tried the near-useless methods of negotiation and a “peace process” that only serves to prolong indecisive conflicts in order to give full employment to lawyers, bureaucrats, the State Department, and the Clinton Foundation.

Ah, but now once again decent Americans who believe in the country as founded—and not in the crackpot fascist world of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or their ilk—have enemies they can relish, as well as a champion who enjoys giving battle.

Domestically, foremost among them at the moment is Maerose Prizzi, princess of Baltimore, who learned her ethics and morality at the feet of her father, Tommy d’Alesandro, Jr., quaintly described as a “machine politician” in his obituaries. Pelosi’s battle with Trump erupted in full tit-for-tat glory this month when she disinvited him from giving the SOTU and then, when Trump said he was going ahead with it anyway, vowed not to let him on the floor of the House as long as the government continued in partial shutdown. Trump’s sudden and disappointing capitulation to the Speaker Wednesday night has temporarily ended the tussle, but the fact remains that whenever he gives the speech, Pelosi—sitting behind him, next to Vice President Pence—will still look petty and churlish, while Trump stands gloweringly in front of the Sour Patch Kids across the aisle, making them feel America’s pain for having put the country through this.

As for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), he manages to be both snarling and unctuous at the same time, a born villain who plays the part perfectly. Shorn of his mini-me protégé, Carlos Danger, Schumer has seemed far less cocky than in those glorious early days when the sky was the limit for Anthony Weiner, now just the punch line to an evening of dirty jokes having to do with his surname.

Meanwhile, in the socialist workers paradise to the south known as Venezuela, the administration has pulled the rug out from under “president” Nicolas Maduro and in the wake of an obviously fraudulent election, has recognized his opponent, Juan Guaidó, as the legitimate head of state. Caracas is burning and it’s only a matter of a very short time before Maduro meets the fate of other tinpots: as a refugee in some Third World hellhole or as a corpse, stood up against a wall and shot.

That this is all happening during the media-fueled ascendancy of the bird-brained Ocasio-Cortez is just one of those lucky accidents. Maduro and his late predecessor, Hugo Chavez, have done as thorough a demolition job on what was once Latin America’s most prosperous country, rich in oil and other natural resources, but unfortunately subject to the same toxic caudillo culture blended with the kind of half-baked Marxist theory that has rendered most every former Spanish colony in the Americas a kleptocratic basket case. When Maduro goes, Trump needs to make what happened to Venezuela an object lesson for all Americans, so that we never fall for the siren song of “never really been tried” and instead say, “been there, done that, got the t-shirt.”

In Europe, Trump has forced the western Europeans—led by who else but the Germans again—to harden their immigration-at-all-costs stance, thus handing the balance of patriotic power over to the Visegrad Group (Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia) and other small nations in the region desirous of maintaining their own cultural identities. Their grit and determination in the face of the usual taunts of “racism” have now inspired other countries, such as Italy, to rediscover the meaning of their pasts and kindled a determination to salvage their future in the face of a semi-unarmed invasion from the Middle East into the heart of historic Christendom.

In Asia, Trump has stood up to China’s expansionism, at least temporarily tamed its North Korean house pet, Li’l Kim, and reassured our principal ally, Japan, that we’re not about to abandon them to the Red Dragon. Trump’s tariff war with the Chinese (whose own economy is something of a Potemkin village) is paying dividends in their willingness to buy $1 trillion worth of American goods and reduce its trade surplus with the United States to zero by 2024—coincidentally, near the end of what will be Trump’s second term.

A showdown over the State of the Union? Possible military intervention in Caracas to protect American lives and property while a socialist dictator is deposed? By the time this is over, Democrats will be begging for the return of Vladimir Putin and the Russian collusion bear.

And don’t even get me started on Michael Cohen.

Take This SOTU and Shove It

By Michael Walsh
https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/16/take-this-sotu-and-shove-it/
January 16, 2019

In the annals of American political showboating, it’s tough to top the annual circus called the State of the Union message. Mandated by the Constitution—and at first delivered to Congress in written form—it has metastasized since the Wilson Administration into a full-blown political rally, celebrating not the party in power, but the president of the United States personally. Once a year, at the invitation of the Speaker of the House, he commands the attention not only of the Congress, but also members of the Supreme Court. It’s the nearest thing we have to a monarchical moment: all pomp and damn little circumstance, offering a president the chance to reel off, at stupefying length, a laundry list of policy prescriptions that have almost no chance ever of being realized. In short, the hot air that keeps the Capitol dome inflated doesn’t get much hotter than this.

This year, however, may be different. In their ongoing tug-of-war over the partial government shutdown, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has decided to stick her thumb in the eye of President Donald Trump and, citing security concerns, has asked him to delay his scheduled January 29 State of the Union address until the government re-opens or, alternatively, send it up the Hill in writing, as every president from George Washington to William Howard Taft did.

What a good idea.

The key to understanding what the SOTU was meant to address in the first place can be found in its Article II constitutional wording, which states that the president “shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” Accordingly, early presidents concentrated on the nuts-and-bolts of government, including budget requests, the general economy, and other mundane matters.

It wasn’t until Wilson, who prior to the election of Barack Obama was the most “progressively” radical president we’d ever had, that the annual message started morphing into the thing we know today—a full-throated advertisement for the president’s foreign and domestic policies, symbolizing the shift of power from the legislative branch to the executive.

Now, thanks to Pelosi, Trump has an opportunity to turn it into something else altogether: an actual report on the “State of the Union.” As Pelosi’s sidekick, U.S. Representative Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), cracked: “the state of the union is off.” Boy, is it ever.

As Pelosi suggested, Trump can easily send a written report to the Congress. He should do just that. Even better, he can then take his disinvitation and move the venue elsewhere. He could then deliver his speech from the Oval Office—although he just gave a short talk from behind the Resolute Desk. Or, he could take it to Trump Country, and find a 50,000-seat stadium somewhere in Indiana or Texas and rock the house; if the SOTU is little more than a campaign speech in disguise, might as well go whole hog.

Or, more audaciously, he could take it into the heart of Progville—San Francisco, say, or Chicago, or his hometown of New York City—and let his political opponents see just how many folks even in their own constituencies agree with him. As the victorious Roman consuls and commanders knew, there is much to be said for triumphalism, just as long as there is always the one slave, riding in the quadriga behind the victorious Caesar, holding the laurel wreath above his head while whispering in his ear: “Memento homo”—remember, you are only a man.

And what should he say? That the State of the Union is notgood, and is not emotionally strong. That after nearly 75 years of cultural-Marxist battering at the doors of all the major American institutions, half the country thinks its own nation is fundamentally illegitimate; that it was founded in venality and exploitative racism and sexism, for the purpose of establishing “white privilege” in North America—and no amount of evidence to the contrary will persuade them otherwise. That as faith has foundered, a new, secular religion has arisen, whose first burnt offerings were wafted aloft by the Wilson Administration, a government of experts celebrating a rule by the elites, a faith in which any gender could grow up to be president, as long as that gender went to Yale or Harvard.

More: that the other half of country has finally had its manners and its good will tested long enough; that it liked the way we used to be, and saw nothing either evil or exploitative about our country. That it resents the influx of Marxist professors—vipers, whom it welcomed as refugees—who via their sacred tenet of Critical Theory encouraged their naïve charges to pull down the pillars of American society. All the social troubles we have witnessed since, from the Weather Underground to the current racial and sexual unrest, derives from them. But wrapped in their false flag of “real patriotism,” they demand that the impossibly perfect always be the enemy of the good, and ascribe only villainy to their opponents.

He should say that the bloated federal bureaucracy is far too large and expensive, and that he will begin reductions in force as soon as practicable. He should say that trillion-dollar deficits—at a time of record tax revenues—prove not that taxes are too low but that government is too big, and that henceforth all extra-constitutional functions will be wound down, including the regulatory agencies created by Congress, until we at least reach some stasis point.

He should assert the equality of all three branches of government when it comes to interpreting and defending the Constitution, inform the lesser federal judges that they have no power over the executive acting either in his constitutional administrative capacity or as commander-in-chief, and tell them that henceforth he will ignore restraining orders and injunctions that are, in his opinion, unconstitutional, until such time as they are adjudicated by the Article III-established Supreme Court (the only federal court not established by Congress, as it happens).

Most important, he should say that the state of our union in a time of Cold Civil War is weak, but could once again be strong if we accept that we are all Americans, benefiting from the same system of government and living in the same blessed land, and that the sooner we remember that, the better. That we don’t have to be prisoners of imported central-European Marxism. That the genius of the American Founding was precisely that it was not ideological, systemic, academic, or programmatic, but based simply on the notion of individual freedom and Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”—a society built from the bottom up, not the top down.

In that way, the president can extend an olive branch to his enemies, “with malice toward none, with charity for all,” as Lincoln put it in his Second Inaugural, and try to turn the corner on the bitterness of the 2016 election. The Trump election signaled a desire for a sea-change and, now that things have come to this pass, it’s time to sink the showboat on the Potomac and move on.

What’s Good for General Bullmoose?

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/09/whats-good-for-general-bullmoose/

January 9, 2019

Tucker Carlson

The current split in the “conservative movement”—I use scare quotes because it is only in the minds of those who consider themselves spokesmen for the “conservative movement” that the movement actually seems to exist—has created a major political division on the Right between those who understand that Donald Trump is the only president we’ve got and those whose preenciples defy reality. But it has also laid bare some fundamental philosophical economic differences that, all of a sudden, have come front and center.

Principal among them is the notion of the unalloyed good of free-market capitalism, fidelity to which the “movement conservatives” often repeat with catechetical fervor as if the very repetition of it, like the Islamic shahada, demonstrates its talismanic validity. Indeed, there are whole think tanks devoted to the concept that “free trade” benefits America by allowing Americans (among other things) to buy the best goods at the cheapest possible price, thus elevating their standard of living and allowing them to spend the money that they’ve saved on something else. After all, what’s good for General Bullmoose is good for the USA—right?

Tucker Carlson’s instantly viral monologue from January 3, delivered on his Fox News show and widely reprinted online, exposed the fault line between the free-marketers and conservatives who think that the beggar-your-neighbor philosophy inherent in the practical application of “free-market” principles is, frankly, short-sighted, unpatriotic, and immoral.

Cue the buggy-whip argument, which I get whenever I dare to question whether the Amazon/Washington Post octopus ought to be free to gobble up the American retail industry unencumbered, or criticize Mitt Romney’s vulture capitalism, or suggest that “shareholder value” should not be the be-all and end-all of American domestic policy, or explain that Trump’s reliance on tariffs as an instrument of foreign policy is both historically valid and contemporaneously successful. That this jejune argument is often delivered by “conservatives” still sporting the intellectual equivalent of knee pants makes it all the more risible, since only those with almost no experience in the real world, writing from sinecures, could possibly believe it. And then they wonder why a naïf like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or a harridan like Kamala Harris is suddenly being taken seriously. As I like to say on Twitter, I never take political advice from small children, and neither should you.

Here’s one of Carlson’s salient points:

At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.

The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.

Amen. But that’s the path down which an unthinking reliance on secular sloganeering at the expense of our shared humanity gets you. The contempt these zealots have for the working class in flyover country rivals and even exceeds that of their counterparts on the Left.

Dogma works for religion—it is an essential part of it—but religion is a compact between God and man, whereas political philosophy is exclusively the province of man. Which is why the messianic fervor with which slogans on both the Left and the Right are mouthed is so pointless: God doesn’t care about how mankind organizes itself here on Earth, only that we try our best to get to Heaven, however those terms may be defined.

So let’s state things clearly. It may be economically advantageous for the individual to shop smart in the sweatshops of China, but it’s not necessarily advantageous for the nation. (Notice I did not say for the collective.) Is it really morally worth it to undercut your neighbor on price—for just a few cents—at the risk of exporting his or her jobs overseas? Was Walmart’s destruction of small-town Main Streets in the heartland really such a good thing? Is Amazon’s takeover to be cheered at the expense of retailers all over the country—the result of which is now having unintended consequences in local communities? According to the New York Times:

With astonishing range and rapidity, big-box retailers and corporate giants are using an aggressive legal tactic to shrink their property tax bills, a strategy that is costing local governments and school districts around the country hundreds of millions of dollars in lost revenue. These businesses—many of them brick-and-mortar stores like Walmart, Home Depot, Target, Kohl’s, Menards and Walgreens that have faced fierce online competition—maintain that no matter how valuable a thriving store is to its current owner, these warehouse-type structures are not worth much to anyone else.

So the best way to appraise their property, they contend in their tax appeals, is to look at the sale prices on the open market of vacant or formerly vacant shells in other places. As shuttered stores spread across the landscape, their argument has resonated. To municipalities, these appeals amount to a far-fetched tax dodge that allows corporations to wriggle out of paying their fair share. Either way, homeowners and small businesses will have to pay more or live with smaller budgets for police, schools, garbage pickup and road repair.

If the towns are losing property-tax revenue, perhaps they should petition Jeff Bezos, who has grown obscenely wealthy on the corpses not only of big-box and department stores, but on the bleached bones of the independent booksellers who were once the lifeblood of the publishing industry—although soon enough he may not be quite as rich as he used to be.

The fact is, pure “conservatism” as the “free marketeers” would like to see it practiced—it’s telling that the Venn Diagram of them and the #NeverTrumpumpkins would be very nearly identical—is neither a practical nor a moral form of capitalism. Happiness and the pursuit thereof are not merely economic; it’s also pride in accomplishment, in taking care of your family (even if you’re selling buggy whips), in doing good works. As Catholics understand, faith alone is not enough; there must be good works as well. Otherwise your faith is just a cult.

Firing your neighbor, putting him out of work by moving the factory to Mexico, eliminating his pension plan and then extolling the virtues of “creative destruction” is a moral obscenity. That it’s so blithely espoused by those for whom it has no practical or economic consequences is a national disgrace. But that it’s also a moral disgrace doesn’t seem to bother them one whit. They’d like the whole world, but, like the aptly named Richard Rich in Robert Bolt’s great play, A Man for All Seasons, they’ll settle for Wales.

Stuck in the Middle with Mitt

By Michael Walsh

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/03/stuck-in-the-middle-with-mitt/

January 3, 2019

If there’s one thing about Donald Trump all right-thinking folks can wholeheartedly celebrate, it’s the way he’s made the masks slip on so many alleged conservatives. First to go were the #NeverTrumpumpkins (no names, please!), as their magazines foundered and their reputations declined along with the quality of their shticks. Also out the door are many, if not most, of the “neocons” (Max Boot, Jennifer Rubin, et al.) who have abandoned their alliance of convenience with the post-9/11 War Department and have returned to their progressive roots.

Finally, there are the elder statesmen of the Republican Party, men much maligned by the Democrats during their active political careers—especially when running against Bill Clinton or Barack Obama for president—and then embraced as the very models of the kind of Republicans a leftist might think about voting for (sane, sober, judicious, dignified, honorable, and brimming with bipartisanship) if a leftist ever thought about voting for a Republican, which no one ever has.

Not coincidentally, these judgments generally are delivered after the demise of the Republican in question (John McCain, George H.W. Bush); in life, of course, they were vilified as sadistic plutocrats who happily caused the deaths of millions of women, children, minorities, and other living things, while marveling in privileged wonder at checkout scanners and having putative affairs with lobbyists not their wives.  

Failing death, the next best path to rehabilitation and redemption is to take a shot at the man who accomplished what you failed to do twice—win the White House. And that is the path that the ineffable, “severely conservative” Willard Mitt Romney has chosen as he takes his Senate seat from Michigan MassachusettsNew Hampshire California Utah this week.

You remember Mitt: the man who a) courageously decided not to run for re-election as governor of Massachusetts because he knew he would lose, b) lost the GOP nomination in 2008 to the left-for-dead candidate John McCain, and c) lost the 2012 election to Obama after winning the first debate and refusing to challenge the obvious electoral hinkiness in Ohio that still has Karl Rove scratching his head.

In an op-ed in the Washington Post, the recrudescent Romney blasted the man he once begged to nominate him for secretary of state as he publicly announced his candidacy for the office of the Media’s Shadow President. That unpleasantness about the dog on the roof, or bullying the gay kid in prep school? All forgotten now!

It is well known that Donald Trump was not my choice for the Republican presidential nomination. After he became the nominee, I hoped his campaign would refrain from resentment and name-calling. It did not. When he won the election, I hoped he would rise to the occasion. His early appointments of Rex Tillerson, Jeff Sessions, Nikki Haley, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster, Kelly and Mattis were encouraging. But, on balance, his conduct over the past two years, particularly his actions last month, is evidence that the president has not risen to the mantle of the office. 

That’s Mitt front and center, holding the mantle of his office. And this from the guy who wanted Trump to give him a job in order to (as Bill Clinton famously said) “maintain [his] political viability within the system.” Mitt’s willingness to cozy up to Trump even had some completely disinterested reporters fretting: “The statesmanlike version of Mitt Romney has left the building, and the self-proclaimed ‘severely conservative’ one has returned,” wrote Karen Tumulty in the Washington Post last March after Mitt took a “harsh” line on illegal immigration.

But once rebuffed, Mitt pivoted, ran for the U.S. Senate, won, and now stands ready to inherit the mantle of Bob Corker and Jeff Flake as the only living Republicans the media will quote with approval. That both of their political careers ended thanks to their opposition to Trump doesn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Romney peppers his piece with his own policy positions (as if they mattered), offering us a window into how he sees the world. Unsurprisingly, it’s a place of comity and stability, ruled over simultaneously by the spirits of the gracious Bush I and the bellicose McCain: an interventionist fist in a velvet glove. He cites Lincoln’s appeal to the better angels of our nature, offers a high-minded interpretation of foreign policy that would have appealed equally to Jimmy Carter and Bush II, but says we must evidence “leadership” by confronting Russia and China lest we suffer “less prosperity, less freedom, less peace.” And to that end, says Romney, leadership begins at home:

To reassume our leadership in world politics, we must repair failings in our politics at home. That project begins, of course, with the highest office once again acting to inspire and unite us. It includes political parties promoting policies that strengthen us rather than promote tribalism by exploiting fear and resentment. Our leaders must defend our vital institutions despite their inevitable failings: a free press, the rule of law, strong churches, and responsible corporations and unions.

The bien-pensant boilerplate is strong in this one, as is the hypocrisy of a guy whose vulture capitalist firm strip-mined corporations, sold them off for parts, fired their workers, and told us it was for the good of the shareholders while Romney and his colleagues grew rich.

But now that Mitt’s mask has slipped, the good news is, it’s gone for good. No doubt he harbors thoughts of challenging Trump for the nomination in 2020—although he denies it—and God knows, there are exiled GOP political consultants and “strategists” across the country more than willing to encourage him for the price of their media buys. But if Mitt runs, he’ll run as a 1990s Democrat—nationalized health care and all—not only in opposition to the ogre Trump but against the Bernie Sanders/Ocasio-Cortez Democrats as well. And what a campaign that will be. I can hear the campaign song now:

Clowns to the left of us, jokers to the right, here we are, stuck in the middle with Mitt.

Perhaps “Won’t Get Fooled Again” might be an even better choice. But then, fooling people has always been what Willard’s about, and he’s got the masks to prove it.