Saturday, June 10, 2017
Britain’s Election Disaster
Theresa May’s political incompetence carries a high price.
June 9, 2017
Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn ahead of the general election in June 2017
Theresa May has proved an apt pupil of the David Cameron school of political incompetence. Lacking principle, she is not even good at being unprincipled: a Machiavellian, it turns out, minus the cunning.
It did not help that she had the charisma of a carrot and the sparkle of a spade. As she presented herself to the public, no one would have wanted her as a dinner guest, except under the deepest social obligation. Technically, she won the election, in the sense that she received more votes than anyone else, but few voted for her with enthusiasm rather than from fear of the alternative. Her disastrous campaign included repeated genuflections in the direction of social democracy. Even after her defeat, moral if not quite literal, she burbled about a society in which no one was left behind—never mind that it would entail a society in which no one would be out in front, that is to say, a society resting in the stagnant pool of its own mediocrity.
Unfortunately, egalitarianism is a little like Islam in that, just as a moderate Muslim can always be outflanked by someone more Islamic than he, so an egalitarian can usually be outflanked by someone more egalitarian than he: and in the contest between the Conservatives and the Labour Party, no one will ever believe that the Conservatives are more devoted to equality of outcome than the Labour Party. May therefore chose her battleground with a perfect eye for defeat.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect of the election was the recrudescence of the politics of envy and resentment. This is not to say that there are no genuine or severe problems in the country: the stagnation of productivity, the precariousness of income, the deficiencies in public services, the low cultural and educational level of much of the population, the inadequacy of the housing stock, and so forth. But the only solution ever heard to these problems, which are evident the moment you leave a prosperous area whose residents are likely to vote Conservative, is more government expenditure. Even the Conservatives went in for this, though more mildly than Labour. Prime Minister May refused to rule out tax increases, for example.
The Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn radiated dislike of the prosperous, even the modestly prosperous. Corbyn and his party’s solutions to the country’s problems were supposedly to be paid for by higher taxes on the richest 5 percent of the population. This proposal overlooked the fact that the top 1 percent of earners already pay almost three times as much in income tax as the bottom 50 percent combined, and also the fact that wealth is dynamic rather than static, resembling more closely the bloom of a grape than a cake to be sliced. Taxes on capital (in other words, state expropriation) were Corbyn’s obvious next step, with capital flight the equally obvious consequence.
None of this worried the young, who had as yet no stake in property, only what are sometimes called ideals. The Labour Party offered them and others the beguiling vision of living perpetually at the expense of others—Frédéric Bastiat’s definition of the state. The Laffer curve meant nothing to them; punishing the prosperous was more important and gratifying than understanding how to maximize tax receipts.
The election could take Britain back more than 50 years.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of many books, including Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
The Impeach-Trump Conspiracy
By
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/
June 8, 2017
President Donald Trump speaks during a rally at the Rivertowne Marina, Wednesday, June 7. (AP)
Pressed by Megyn Kelly on his ties to President Trump, an exasperated Vladimir Putin blurted out, “We had no relationship at all. … I never met him. … Have you all lost your senses over there?”
Yes, Vlad, we have.
Consider the questions that have convulsed this city since the Trump triumph, and raised talk of impeachment.
Did Trump collude with Russians to hack the DNC emails and move the goods to WikiLeaks, thus revealing the state secret that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was putting the screws to poor Bernie Sanders?
If not Trump himself, did campaign aides collude with the KGB?
Now, given that our NSA and CIA seemingly intercept everything Russians say to Americans, why is our fabled FBI, having investigated for a year, unable to give us a definitive yes or no?
The snail’s pace of the FBI investigation explains Trump’s frustration. What explains the FBI’s torpor? If J. Edgar Hoover had moved at this pace, John Dillinger would have died of old age.
We hear daily on cable TV of the “Trump-Russia” scandal. Yet, no one has been charged with collusion, and every intelligence official, past or prevent, who has spoken out has echoed ex-acting CIA Director Mike Morrell:
“On the question of the Trump campaign conspiring with the Russians here, there is smoke, but there is no fire, at all. … There’s no little campfire, there’s no little candle, there’s no spark.”
Where are the criminals? Where is the crime?
As for the meetings between Gen. Mike Flynn, Jared Kushner, Sen. Jeff Sessions and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, it appears that Trump wanted a “back channel” to Putin so he could honor his commitment to seek better relations with Russia.
Given the Russophobia rampant here, that makes sense. And while it appears amateurish that Flynn would use Russian channels of communication, what is criminal about this?
Putin is not Stalin. Soviet divisions are not sitting on the Elbe. The Cold War is over. And many presidents have used back channels. Woodrow Wilson sent Col. Edward House to talk to the Kaiser and the Brits. FDR ran messages to Churchill through Harry Hopkins.
As for Trump asking Director James Comey to cut some slack for Flynn, it is understandable in human terms. Flynn had been a loyal aide and friend and Trump had to feel rotten about having to fire the man.
So, what is really going on here?
All the synthetic shock over what Kushner or Sessions said to Kislyak aside, this city’s hatred for President Trump, and its fanatic determination to bring him down in disgrace, predates his presidency.
For Trump ran in 2016 not simply as the Republican alternative. He presented his candidacy as a rejection, a repudiation of the failed elites, political and media, of both parties. Americans voted in 2016 not just for a change in leaders but for a revolution to overthrow a ruling regime.
Thus this city has never reconciled itself to Trump’s victory, and the president daily rubs their noses in their defeat with his tweets.
Seeking a rationale for its rejection, this city has seized upon that old standby. We didn’t lose! The election was stolen in a vast conspiracy, an “act of war” against America, an assault upon “our democracy,” criminal collusion between the Kremlin and the Trumpites.
Hence, Trump is an illegitimate president, and it is the duty of brave citizens of both parties to work to remove the usurper.
The city seized upon a similar argument in 1968, when Richard Nixon won, because it was said he had colluded to have South Vietnam’s president abort Lyndon Johnson’s new plan to bring peace to Southeast Asia in the final hours of that election.
Then, as now, the “t” word, treason, was trotted out.
Attempts to overturn elections where elites are repudiated are not uncommon in U.S. history. Both Nixon and Reagan, after 49-state landslides, were faced with attempts to overturn the election results.
With Nixon in Watergate, the elites succeeded. With Reagan in Iran-Contra, they almost succeeded in destroying that great president as he was ending the Cold War in a bloodless victory for the West.
After Lincoln’s assassination, President Andrew Johnson sought to prevent Radical Republicans from imposing a ruthless Reconstruction on a defeated and devastated South.
The Radicals enacted the Tenure of Office Act, stripping Johnson of his authority to remove any member of the Cabinet without Senate permission. Johnson defied the Radicals and fired their agent in the Cabinet, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.
“Tennessee” Johnson was impeached, and missed conviction by one vote. John F. Kennedy, in his 1956 book, called the senator who had voted to save Johnson a “Profile in Courage.”
If Trump is brought down on the basis of what Putin correctly labels “nonsense,” this city will have executed a nonviolent coup against a constitutionally elected president. Such an act would drop us into the company of those Third World nations where such means are the customary ways that corrupt elites retain their hold on power.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon’s White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
Friday, June 09, 2017
The Comey Show didn’t live up to the hype
June 8, 2017
Watergate it wasn’t. Not even Clarence Thomas versus Anita Hill. This was Jim Comey’s revenge tour and the former FBI boss threw every bomb, punch and handful of mud he could find at Donald Trump.
Three hours later, the president was still standing. A little dirtier, to be sure, but stronger because he survived the much-anticipated onslaught.
Consider the day from the partisan angles. If you started as a Trump supporter, you still are. You were buttressed by the disclosures that the media got lots of big anti-Trump stories wrong, and not surprised that Comey, like much of the permanent government, was against the president from the start.
At the end of the day, you’re wondering, Where’s the beef? Where’s the crime?
On the other hand, if you’re a Democrat salivating over what you hoped would be the first big step to impeachment of Trump, your dreams were dashed. The most optimistic interpretation of the facts don’t add up to anywhere near an impeachable offense.
Even worse for the left, Comey confirmed that Trump was not under personal investigation in the Russia-collusion probe. That had to hurt like Election Night all over again, with Hillary Clinton losing again.
Even those who tuned in just hoping for a good show had to be disappointed. Comey-palooza, like its protagonist, never delivered on its hype.
It wasn’t for lack of trying. Comey came to destroy Trump, and Dem Senators did all they could to raise the ante on his statements and suggest implications he didn’t. Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia has been especially a nasty partisan, and yesterday was no exception.
But his problem, like Comey’s, is the facts. Not to mention the star witness’s own conduct and his insufferable only-honest-man-in-Washington act.
In one revealing sequence, Comey said he didn’t want to create “a J. Edgar Hoover situation” with Trump, where he held important information as a weapon to be used when needed. Which, of course, is exactly what he ended up doing.
The career prosecutor made extensive notes of his meetings with the president he didn’t trust, yet held them tight as long as he held his job. When he was fired, he gave those notes to a friend to leak to the media with the hope they would lead to the appointment of a special counsel — which they did.
In other words, the so-called whistleblower is the most sneaky, Hoover-like of them all. If this is rectitude in Washington, Heaven help America.
Comey also had concerns about the previous administration.
For example, he believed former attorney general Loretta Lynch was protecting Hillary Clinton’s campaign by meeting with former President Bill Clinton and ordering Comey to call the investigation into her private e-mail server a “matter,” which tracked what Clinton was calling it.
Comey also said there were other events that led him to suspect Lynch, but would only discuss them behind closed doors.
It’s important to know what those other matters were and how Lynch came to decide the investigation was a “matter.” Did Bill Clinton suggest it? Was President Obama part of the decision, or was his public statement that Clinton did nothing wrong sufficient to give Lynch her marching orders?
Yet we may never know because Comey didn’t take notes and kept his concerns to himself, and made all the key decisions about the Clinton case. He hid his misgivings about Lynch just as he did about Trump — until he got fired. Then he became a nonpartisan truth-teller.
Comey’s actions illustrate why no president ever fired J. Edgar Hoover. They were all afraid of him.
I believe Comey deserved to be fired. But there is no denying that Trump’s private conversations with him, combined with the various explanations for the dismissal, have created a problem of the president’s own making.
Just how big a problem depends on what special counsel Robert Mueller finds, which means Trump is not out of the woods. We don’t know what, if anything, Comey added to his case behind closed doors, and his extensive praise of Mueller should concern Trump.
Ultimately, impeachment is much more of a political matter than a legal one, and it is rarely invoked because of the great upheaval it causes and the necessity of bipartisan support for conviction.
So while politics might ultimately save Trump, politics also present an immediate hurdle. Given his outsider status and outsized personality, his main challenge is to prove that he can govern responsibly enough that Republicans will follow his lead and adopt his agenda.
Yet many in the GOP congress are still skittish, and it hasn’t helped the president that his public approval numbers are low by historical standards.
One result is that most of Trump’s achievements have come through executive orders and on the foreign stage. The House struggled to narrowly pass a repeal of ObamaCare, and, with the notable exception of the Senate’s confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Republican control has produced nothing close to game-changers.
Meanwhile, the hope of tax reform, or even tax cuts, is shrinking by the day. Despite increased optimism and a rising stock market, the economy hasn’t sizzled and high-paying jobs remain elusive in many parts of Trump Nation.
At times, Trump seems to understand as much and what he needs to do about it. His visit to Ohio Wednesday to introduce his infrastructure bill, and his twitter silence during yesterday’s hearing, speak to a focus on the long game and the need for team-work.
At other times, he engages in petty squabbles that send Republicans scurrying for cover. Five months into his tenure, many of those he needs feel secure enough politically to keep their distance.
This is the urgent problem Trump must fix if he is to be a successful president. He needs enough public support to pull congress his way so he can deliver on his promise of jobs, jobs, jobs.
If he can do that, impeachment will remain a liberal fantasy.
Thursday, June 08, 2017
A Conversation
Educational expenditures must increase, we’re told, though we know the problem lies elsewhere.
June 7, 2017
Walking in the main shopping street of my little town in England recently, I was accosted by a canvasser for the local Labour Party candidate in the snap election. (The Conservatives do not have to campaign in my town because they could put a woodlouse up for election and it would win hands down.)
The canvasser was a pleasant lady, and I stopped to discuss educational policy with her. Both main political parties think that more money should be allocated to schools. I said that I did not believe that the abysmally low level of education and culture in much of the country was caused by a lack of money. We spend, on average, $100,000 on a child’s education and yet an uncomfortably large proportion of our children leave school with reading and math skills below those stipulated for 11-year-olds. Moreover, the proportion of such people has remained more or less constant for the last 40 years, despite vastly increased expenditure. The problem, therefore, is not lack of funds, as the canvasser’s party pretended that it was, but something much deeper and harder to solve.
The canvasser was a retired teacher who had taken her retirement as soon as she was able, largely because of the immense number of irrelevant, time-consuming, boring, and intellectually dishonest bureaucratic procedures imposed upon teachers—procedures funded, as it happens, by the increases in education spending.
It also so happened that her daughter was a teacher but had quit after an unpleasant incident. She had given a 14-year-old boy a punishment for bad behavior—he was to stay in school for an extra hour. That night, the boy’s 19-year-old brother came to the teacher’s house and began to smash her car. She was frightened and called the police, who removed the perpetrator from the scene but otherwise did nothing—because, of course, nothing would have been done higher up the criminal- justice chain had they done something: so why bother?
The canvasser’s daughter did not return to teaching. She had undergone what psychologists call one-trial learning. She had taken the opportunity to get a master’s degree and find employment within the educational bureaucracy, into which no misbehaving child might obtrude.
I mentioned that many teachers who had been patients of mine had told me that if they complained to parents of their children’s behavior, the parents blamed the teachers and even became aggressive toward them. This was true in her experience, too, said the teacher.
We agreed, therefore, that there was a profound cultural and moral malaise in the country. The clear implication was that it had nothing whatever to do with insufficient government spending. The schools don’t teach and the police don’t protect, all because of a failure of nerve. We parted amicably, I to my shopping, she to canvassing on behalf of a political party that maintains that all problems arise from lack of government expenditure, problems that will somehow be solved by taxing the rich.
Theodore Dalrymple is a contributing editor of City Journal and the author of many books, including Not with a Bang but a Whimper: The Politics and Culture of Decline.
ALL WE NEED IS LOVE ... AND DEPORTATIONS
By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
June 7, 2017
Khuram Butt and Rachid Redouane, two of the London Bridge attackers (Metropolitan Police)
In Britain, as in the U.S., when an Islamic terrorist is said to be, “known to law enforcement,” the translation is: “He is being actively ignored by law enforcement.”
After the latest terrorist attack in Britain -- at least as of this writing -- Prime Minister Theresa May bravely announced, "Enough is enough!"
What is the point of these macho proclamations after every terrorist attack? Nothing will be done to stop the next attack. Political correctness prohibits us from doing anything that might stop it.
Poland doesn't admit Muslims: It has no terrorism. Japan doesn't admit Muslims: It has no terrorism. The United Kingdom and the United States used to have very few Muslims: They used to have almost no terrorism. (One notable exception was chosen as the National Freedom Hero in this year's Puerto Rican parade in New York!)
Notwithstanding the lovely Muslim shopkeeper who wouldn't hurt a fly, everyone knows that with every tranche of peace-loving Muslims we bring in, we're also getting some number of stone-cold killers.
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair dumped millions of Third World Muslims on Britain to force "multiculturalism" on the country. Now Britons are living with the result. Since the 9/11 attack, every U.S. president has done the same. President Bush admitted Muslim immigrants at a faster pace after 9/11 than we had been doing before 9/11.
Whatever the 9/11 attackers intended to accomplish, I bet they didn’t expect that.
Now we can't get rid of them. Under the rules of political correctness, Western countries are prohibited from even pausing our breakneck importation of Muslims, much less sending the recent arrivals home.
In defense of the poor saps responding to every terrorist attack with flowers, candles and hashtags, these are people who have no ability to do anything else. Western leaders are in full possession of the tools to end Islamic terrorism in their own countries, just as their forebears once ended Nazi Stormtroopers.
Unable to summon the backbone to defeat the current enemy, the West is stuck constantly reliving that glorious time when they whipped the Nazis. In almost every Western country -- except the one with an increasingly beleaguered First Amendment -- it's against the law to deny the Holocaust.
Are we really worried about a resurgence of Nazism? Isn't Islamic terrorism a little higher on our "immediate problems" list? How about making it illegal to make statements in support of ISIS, al-Qaida, female genital mutilation, Sharia law or any act of terrorism?
The country with a First Amendment can't do that -- the most that amendment allows us to do is ban conservative speakers from every college campus in the nation.
But if our elected representatives really cared about stopping the next terrorist attack, instead of merely "watching" those on the "watch" list, they'd deport them.
To this day, we have a whole office at the Department of Justice dedicated to finding and deporting Nazis even without proof they personally committed crimes against Jews. But we can't manage to deport hearty young Muslims who post love notes to ISIS on their Facebook pages.
If the Clinton administration had merely enforced laws on the books against an Afghani immigrant, Mir Seddique Mateen, and excluded him based on his arm-length list of terrorist affiliations, his son Omar wouldn't have been around to slaughter 49 people at an Orlando nightclub last year.
If Secretary of State John Kerry, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson or anyone else in our vaunted immigration vetting system had done his job, Pakistani Tashfeen Malik never would have been admitted to this country to commit mass murder in San Bernardino a year after she arrived. Before being warmly welcomed by the U.S., Malik's social media posts were bristling with hatred of America and enthusiasm for jihad.
We're already paying a battery of FBI agents to follow every Muslim refugee around the country. When they find out that one of them lists his hobby as "jihad," we need them to stop watching and start deporting.
Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, the rest of the useless GOP -- and obviously every Democrat -- have the blood of the next terrorist attack on their hands if they don't make crystal clear that admiring remarks about Islamic terrorism is a deportable act.
But they won't do it. That's "not who we are," as Ryan famously said.
True, most Muslims are peaceful. Guess what? Most Nazis were peaceful! We didn't knock ourselves out to admit as many of them as we could, screening out only the Nazis convicted of mass murder.
Before we were even formally involved in World War II, the FBI was all over the German American Bund. No one worried about upsetting our German neighbors. (Perhaps because they knew these were Germans and wouldn't start bombing things and shooting people.)
But today, our official position is: Let's choose love so as not to scare our Muslim neighbors. Isn't that precisely what we want to do? Facing an immobile government, two British men -- by which I mean British men -- were sentenced to PRISON for putting bacon on a mosque in Bristol last year. One died in prison just after Christmas, an ancient religious holiday recently replaced by Ramadan.
If we can't look askance at Muslims without committing a hate crime, can't we at least stop admitting ever more "refugees," some percentage of whom are going to be terrorists and 100 percent of whom will consume massive amounts of government resources?
No, that's "not who we are."
Until any Western leader is willing to reduce the number of Muslims in our midst, could they spare us the big talk? "We surrender" would at least have the virtue of honesty.
COPYRIGHT 2017 ANN COULTER
James Comey’s Latest Statement Is An Indictment Of Comey, Not Trump
By Sean Davis
June 7, 2017
James Comey, former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is sworn in at a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee meeting last year. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg News)
Ahead of former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey’s testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday, the committee released the seven-page prepared statement Comey provided on Wednesday. While it’s clear that Comey and his allies believe the statement is proof that President Donald Trump acted inappropriately, and perhaps even illegally, the statement itself is a much bigger indictment of Comey’s own behavior over the last six months. Not only does Comey’s statement corroborate Trump’s claim that the former FBI director told him three times that the president was not being investigated by the FBI, it also reveals the Beltway game Comey was playing with the investigation.
In his statement, as my colleague Mollie Hemingway noted earlier today, Comey acknowledges the accuracy of Trump’s claim — included in the letter announcing Comey’s firing — that Comey had on three separate occasions informed Trump that he was not being investigated by the FBI. The corroboration of the claim by Comey himself is by far the most newsworthy nugget from the lengthy statement. But several other claims from Comey also do far more to indict Comey than they do to implicate Trump.
The most damning aspect of Comey’s prepared testimony is his admission that he deliberately refused to inform the public that Trump was not being personally investigated by the FBI. Comey’s justification for this refusal to publicly disclose material facts — that those facts might change — is laughable, especially in light of Comey’s 2016 two-step regarding the investigation of Hillary Clinton.
“I did not tell the President that the FBI and the Department of Justice had been reluctant to make public statements that we did not have an open case on President Trump for a number of reasons, most importantly because it would create a duty to correct, should that change,” Comey claims.
Recall that in 2016, Comey had no problem 1) publicly exonerating Hillary Clinton despite the fact that the authority to charge (or not charge) someone with a crime lies with federal prosecutors, not the FBI; 2) using the same press conference to excoriate Clinton’s behavior; 3) telling Congress that the investigation of Clinton was closed; and then 4) announcing days before a presidential election that the FBI had reopened the case and was once again investigating Hillary Clinton. Yet we’re supposed to believe that James Comey had grave moral concerns about disclosing facts that may be subject to change? Please.
If anything, Comey’s latest statement only highlights why Trump was justified in firing Comey in the first place. Comey, according to his own testimony, repeatedly told Trump that the president was not being investigated by the FBI. Not only that, Comey also told Congress that Trump was not being personally investigated. How on earth is it inappropriate, in light of those facts, for the president to ask for those facts to be made public by the very individual asserting them? Trump’s exasperation looks far more justifiable given the behavior to which Comey admits in his own testimony, largely because Comey’s tortured explanation for refusing to publicly explain those facts, even after disclosing them to Congress, holds so little water.
“I explained [to Trump] that we had briefed the leadership of Congress on exactly which individuals we were investigating and that we had told those Congressional leaders that we were not personally investigating President Trump,” Comey writes. “I reminded him I had previously told him that.”
Rather than elevating Comey’s moral stature, the statement he provided only makes him look smaller, and makes the game he was playing that much more obvious. According to his own testimony, Comey repeatedly told the president that the FBI was not investigating him. That’s exactly what you’d expect from a careerist looking to keep his job. It’s why Comey, in his own tortured words, pledged “honest loyalty” to Trump during a private meeting.
If the conversation with Trump had really bothered Comey all that much, he would’ve walked out and quit on the spot. Instead, he did what all ambitious bureaucrats eager to keep their jobs do: he stayed, he pledged his loyalty, and he went home and wrote up a self-serving CYA memo just in case. Here’s how Comey describes what happened:
[Trump] then said, ‘I need loyalty.’ I replied, ‘You will always get honesty from me.’ He paused and then said, ‘That’s what I want, honest loyalty.’ I paused, and then said, ‘You will get that from me.’ As I wrote in the memo I created immediately after the dinner, it is possible we understood the phrase ‘honest loyalty’ differently, but I decided it wouldn’t be productive to push it further.
Really, Jim? Really? That’s how you’re going to try to argue around the fact that you personally pledged your loyalty to the president, only to decide after you were fired that it made you feel icky? And your rationalization of the whole thing is that maybe you understood the phrase “honest loyalty” differently than the president?
Not until after he was fired did Comey suddenly decide to inform the public of all these interactions that he said made him so uncomfortable. Comey’s similar refusal during his tenure to inform the public that the president was not being investigated is also clear evidence of the keep-my-job-at-all-costs game he was playing (if this game looks familiar, it’s the exact same one he played when he took the fall for then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s refusal to prosecute Clinton in 2016). What better way to insure yourself against being fired than to give the impression that you are overseeing a grave investigation of potential wrongdoing by your boss?
The public impression that Trump was being criminally investigated, amplified by the president’s critics in the media, was effectively Comey’s get-out-of-jail-free card. The former FBI director likely assumed that no president would be crazy enough to fire a man whom the public believed to be investigating the president. Only a madman would fire that guy, right? Everyone in Washington knows how this game is played. They all know the tune by heart.
Unfortunately for Comey, Trump had no intention of playing that game and dancing that dance. What really happened is that Trump was wise to Comey’s con and finally had enough of it. He figured out what Comey was doing — deliberately refusing to correct a factually inaccurate impression of the FBI’s ongoing investigation as a means of protecting his job — and called his bluff.
Comey’s own words reveal in lurid detail the game he was playing. They reveal that Trump’s claims about the investigation, and his claims about Comey’s characterization of the investigation, were completely accurate. They reveal that Comey was giving one impression to the president and Congress in private and deliberately allowing an entirely different one to gain currency in public. Comey’s mistake wasn’t in thinking the Beltway two-step was the best way to keep his job. His mistake was assuming that Trump wouldn’t dare to stop dancing.
Wednesday, June 07, 2017
Getting Used to It
By Mark Steyn
June 7, 2017
Roy Larner poses with a Millwall flag as he recovers in hospital (News Group Newspapers Ltd/https://www.thesun.co.uk/)
Programming note: Today, Wednesday, I'll be joining the great John Oakley north of the border on Toronto's AM640live at 5pm Eastern. Afterwards, I'll be south of the border with Tucker Carlson on Fox News coast to coast at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. If you're a Mark Steyn Club member and you have a question you'd like me to answer on this week's Clubland Q&A, you can lay it on me right here.
Britain goes to the polls tomorrow, and Theresa May seems all but certain to be extending her stay in Downing Street - despite having fought a remarkably inept election campaign, in the course of which 29 people have been killed in terrorist attacks by "known wolves" so known that one had been reported to MI5 by at least three foreign governments (the French, Italians and Americans) and the other had starred in a Channel 4 documentary called The Jihadis Next Door.
I joked on Monday morning that the latter was Emmy-nominated for Best Jihadist in a British Extremism Documentary, but these days all the satirical fancies are humdrum reality: It seems the show was nominated for Best Documentary in Britain's prestigious Grierson Awards and Best News and Current Affairs in the Broadcast Awards. We are all supposed to be shocked by the recent poll finding that two-thirds of British Muslims would not notify the police if they knew of a terrorist sympathizer, but really one can hardly blame them given the authorities' lethargic attitude to those who do get reported.
Likewise, there is something of a pro forma quality to Fleet Street's coverage of these latest atrocities. The worst civilian massacre in the United Kingdom between the Second World War and the 7/7 attacks of 2005 was the Birmingham pub bombings of 1974. For good or ill, it convulsed the nation. In contrast to the now traditional response that the worst thing about an Islamic terror attack is that it might lead to a "backlash" against Muslims and the urgent priority is for everyone to pretend that they're "united" in "one love", the pub bombings led to the immediate cancellation of the city's St Patrick's Day parade, the third largest in the world, for the next decade. Twenty-one Birmingham pubgoers died that night. Now 22 people get slaughtered at a pop concert, and the public shrug it off with some candles and flowers. Eleven civilians were killed in the 1987 Enniskillen Remembrance Day massacre (a twelfth died after 13 years in a coma), and public outrage was so fierce that the Dublin parliament passed a fast-track UK extradition bill, the IRA apologized, Sinn Féin's electoral support didn't recover for 15 years, and Bono declared on stage "F**k the revolution" - which on the whole I prefer to Katy Perry saying touch the person next to you and tell her "I love you".
The inertia in today's Britain seems telling. We are, as the French Prime Minister and the London Mayor and other eminences have advised, getting used to it. Terror doesn't appear (from this distance) to have played much part in the election campaign: in a certain sense, the remorseless Islamization of Britain seems to have passed beyond politics. If you still think the major parties can ameliorate the situation, Mrs May is just about preferable to Jeremy Corbyn: In a choice between a dissembler and a dupe, vote for the marginally less unsafe pair of hands. If you feel the need (as they did after Enniskillen) to be outraged and impassioned, direct your outrage and passion wisely and join your fellow Britons in excoriating the President of the United States for Tweeting about the Mayor of London. If you feel the need (like Mrs Thatcher after South Georgia) to "rejoice, rejoice", join the patriotic employees of LBC radio in cheering the defenestration of Katie Hopkins, also for Tweeting. If you feel the need (as Mrs May's COBRA meeting did) for an instant policy prescription, then draw the logical conclusion from the above and blame the Internet. The Prime Minister's plans to lean on Google, Facebook et al will discombobulate the next bombers not a whit, but they'll almost certainly lead to a Robert Spencer or Geert Wilders having his YouTube channel taken down or Twitter account suspended, and that's great news, isn't it?
In similar spirit, the aforesaid mayor has called for the aforesaid president's upcoming state visit to be kiboshed. Given the current levels of vigilance by UK officialdom, it wouldn't entirely surprise me if Trump were to be declared persona non grata but still sailed through British immigration to bang on the door of Windsor Castle asking where his state banquet is. Or perhaps I'm doing the amusingly named "UK Border Force" an injustice: Unable to prevent even the most obvious "Soldier of Allah" from breezing past the desk at Heathrow in his Isis T-shirt, they mysteriously discover hitherto unknown levels of efficiency when faced with such threat priorities as Pamela Geller or Michael Savage. Maybe Mrs May will set up a PREVENT program to prevent Katie Hopkins, or Douglas Murray's book tour.
That's not an idle fancy: the Prime Minister is no friend of free speech, and, as we've seen in the last few days, the biggest obstacle to "getting used to it" is a relatively small number of people who keep harping on about it.
Mayor Khan is a slippery customer, and he used a slippery phrase in reassuring the public after Saturday's carnage: London, he declared, was "one of the safest global cities in the world". "Global city"? What is the difference between a "global city" and a mere city? The latter are more or less ethnically homogeneous places with insufficient vibrancy and diversity for the likes of Mr Khan. A "global city" is a microcosm of the global. Saturday's dead, for example, number four of Her Majesty's subjects (one English, one Canadian, two Australian) and three citizens de la république française. In part because of the socialist sclerosis of that republic, London has become home to one of the largest French populations on the planet. That's a "global city" - where an Aussie can head across London Bridge to a fashionable pub and fall into conversation with a charming demoiselle.
All these Canadians and Australians and Frenchmen were killed by a jihadist born in Pakistan, another born in Morocco, and a third from either Morocco or Libya. In London and the other "safest global cities in the world", a New Zealander can meet a nice Danish girl and be blown up by a Yemeni on the way home. The conceit of the global city is that there is no distinction between a Dane and a Yemeni.
In his new book The Strange Death of Europe, Douglas Murray returns periodically to a vital question: What happens when global cities become "global countries"? By 2011, "white British" were a minority in 23 of London's 33 boroughs. A similar transformation is well advanced in every city down the spine of England from Manchester and Leeds to Birmingham and Bristol, in all of which Islam is the principal source of population growth. For the most part, citizens of the new west accept that as a normal feature of life - while still expecting to find Cornish villages full of Cornishmen or Welsh market towns full of Welshmen. But soon we will have not just global cities but "global villages". Sweden, where most ethnic Swedes now alive will end their days as a minority within their own country, is already trending that way. A few months ago, I passed a pleasant few hours with a young couple who'd moved out of Östersund after a sexual assault by, um, "youths" and settled in a small town about an hour away in order to get away from the aggravation of said "youths". Not as easy as it was. They'd rented a place in a pleasant two-story apartment house only to find, as the chap put it to me, "I've got a f**kin' mosque in my basement." In a municipality of under a thousand people.
There's a funny thing you notice about "global cities". In Camden and Chelsea, the French and the Aussies and the Danes and the Kiwis all jostle along side by side. But in other parts of the metropolis the world city gradually becomes less worldly: in much of the East End, in the neighborhoods where the police were conducting their post-terror raids, the Jews have gone, and the gays, and a lot of the pubs and fish'n'chip shops are closing up. You can detect the same phenomenon in the heavily Muslim neighborhood of Manchester where Salman Abedi grew up. In the new global cities, certain areas are less interested in celebrating diversity than in enforcing homogeneity. There is only, to borrow from Ariana Grande, "one love".
Zachary Gray has a new column looking back to America Alone, with the somewhat depressing (for me) headline: "It Has All Come True: Revisiting Mark Steyn's Predictions." At the time of the book's publication, I was told by British politicians that there was still plenty of time to solve this thing. A decade on, they're now saying, implicitly and sometimes less so, that it's too late to solve it. Neither statement is true. But before there can be action the British people have to rouse themselves to demand action. On Saturday night in Borough Market, when the three knife-wielding jihadists stormed in to the Black & Blue restaurant, they found themselves confronting a 47-year-old football fan. "F**k you," said Roy Larner. "I'm Millwall" - a footie club with supporters of surpassing ferocity. He held the Soldiers of Allah at bay with nothing but his fists, enabling other diners to escape, and is now recovering in hospital with stab wounds to his arms, head and chest.
"F*k* you, I'm Millwall" turned out to be the "Let's roll!" of the night. If you're having trouble keeping your London rail termini straight, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton; the Battle of London Bridge was won on the playing fields of Millwall. Mr Larner seems disinclined to get used to it - and "F**k you, I'm Millwall" is a more encouraging sign of a societal survival instinct than "one love".
But normality soon reasserts itself. This morning, a woman en route to the nursery school where she works was stabbed by three girls shouting "Allah will get you!" Hey, don't worry, the police say it wasn't terrorism, just ...daily life in "one of the safest global cities in the world". Millwall vs Allah: We are the world.
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Bob Dylan On The Road To Damascus
By
June 6, 2017
Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize lecture was pretty good. I was first struck by his account of his artistic epiphany, his own Road to Damascus moment. It happened at a Buddy Holly concert:
He was powerful and electrifying and had a commanding presence. I was only six feet away. He was mesmerizing. I watched his face, his hands, the way he tapped his foot, his big black glasses, the eyes behind the glasses, the way he held his guitar, the way he stood, his neat suit. Everything about him. He looked older than twenty-two. Something about him seemed permanent, and he filled me with conviction. Then, out of the blue, the most uncanny thing happened. He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.I think it was a day or two after that that his plane went down. And somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Leadbelly record with the song “Cottonfields” on it. And that record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.
This is a religious story, don’t you see? Dylan then talks about how he entered into an artistic apprenticeship, teaching himself the folk and the blues canon. These songs gave him a framework for understanding his calling and expressing it. Once he mastered contemporary music, he didn’t stop there:
I had all the vernacular all down. I knew the rhetoric. None of it went over my head – the devices, the techniques, the secrets, the mysteries – and I knew all the deserted roads that it traveled on, too. I could make it all connect and move with the current of the day. When I started writing my own songs, the folk lingo was the only vocabulary that I knew, and I used it.But I had something else as well. I had principles and sensibilities and an informed view of the world. And I had had that for a while. Learned it all in grammar school. Don Quixote, Ivanhoe, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels,Tale of Two Cities, all the rest – typical grammar school reading that gave you a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by. I took all that with me when I started composing lyrics. And the themes from those books worked their way into many of my songs, either knowingly or unintentionally. I wanted to write songs unlike anything anybody ever heard, and these themes were fundamental.Specific books that have stuck with me ever since I read them way back in grammar school – I want to tell you about three of them: Moby Dick, All Quiet on the Western Front and The Odyssey.
He goes on to discuss those three novels, and how they affected his understanding of the world, and in turn, his music. One of the greatest popular musicians of the 20th century, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, got his start in what we now call classical education — one that gives the student “a way of looking at life, an understanding of human nature, and a standard to measure things by.”
Here’s part of his description of The Odyssey. He makes it sound like a folk song. He makes it sound like real life:
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have had drugs dropped into your wine. You too have shared a bed with the wrong woman. You too have been spellbound by magical voices, sweet voices with strange melodies. You too have come so far and have been so far blown back. And you’ve had close calls as well. You have angered people you should not have. And you too have rambled this country all around. And you’ve also felt that ill wind, the one that blows you no good. And that’s still not all of it.
Let me not take away from you the delight of reading the whole thing.
Again, I read this as Dylan’s mingling religion with art. What is this story but a retelling of St. Paul on the Damascus Road, then after his conversion, using his deep knowledge of Hebrew religion to both break with the tradition and extend it in new and revolutionary ways?
Isn’t this what all serious religious pilgrims and truth seekers do? After their epiphany, they submit to tradition — not just the more recent tradition, but big-T Tradition. They know that books and works of art and teachings that have survived for so long must in some way speak truth about the human experience. You know my own story: how I found my own troubled life 21st century life, and the way out of the dark wood, in the 14th century Commedia of Dante Alighieri. Not a week goes by in which I don’t think in some way about how our own life today is in some profound ways a repetition of events in the Commedia. Because that’s what real art does.
In a lot of ways, some of these same things have happened to you. You too have been thrown out of your community for things you didn’t do. You too have made an idol of a woman, and suffered because of it. You too have been spellbound by the voice of a charismatic teacher who led you wrong. You too have faced a wall you could not break through, until divine assistance came. You have seen the hard faces of the damned, and heard the sweet consolations of those grateful for mercy. You learned that things you used to believe were important actually don’t matter. You have won hard wisdom, and faced the temptation to rest too early, before your journey’s proper end. And that’s still not all of it.
This is also the journey of the religious believer. There are those who wrongly believe that the Damascus Road moment is the end of the journey, and that they do not have to submit themselves to any tradition, or root themselves in any commitment. For them, their religious journey is a lifelong attempt to recapture the thrill of the Damascus Road. But notice: St. Paul’s journey only began on that road. He had incredible adventures ahead of him, in the service of the Lord he met on the road to Damascus. In truth, if you are to understand the meaning and purpose of Damascus Road, you need to start listening to those who have walked it before you — and even those who sought the light but never found it there, and those who found it but veered off into a dark wood.
If you do, maybe you will be able to receive the grace from the Creator that allows you to participate in His creation through making great art. And the greatest art is the artwork that is your life.
Posted in Religion, Art & Architecture, Culture. Tagged religion, tradition, Odyssey, All Quiet On The Western Front, Dante, Bob Dylan, Moby Dick, Leadbelly, Buddy Holly.
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