Category: Politics

The Last Four Years

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It’s easy to react in the moment, but the Trump Presidency is more than the moment. Now it’s coming to the end, and I want to say a couple of things about it.

First, I’d like to thank the President for being a good President for most of his four years in office.

Dear President Trump,

When I helped elect you in 2016, I hoped that you would be a bulwark against the transformation that eight years of Obama had started, and that seemed destined to continue unchecked under a Clinton administration. I didn’t expect you to be a gracious man, a tactful man, or a conservative chief executive. You were one of those things, and that was enough: you were a conservative President, and you exceeded my expectations.

Thank you, Mr. President, for appointing hundreds of good judges, and giving us a Supreme Court that is likely to show the Constitution some respect.

Thank you, Mr. President, for getting us out of the Paris Accord, and for clearing the way for America to become an energy superpower. Now that we’ve demonstrated that we can do it, perhaps the next President won’t muck it up too much.

Thank you, Mr. President, for presiding over an historic outbreak of peace in the Middle East. Thank you for ending the Iranian deal that would likely have led to that country’s nuclear dominance of the region, with only Israel to keep them in check.

Thank you for expressing love for my country, for not mocking me for speaking only English, for not berating me for being a businessman and building something for myself. Those seem like very low bars, yet the man who preceded you couldn’t clear them — didn’t even try.

Thank you for excoriating a press that is mired in corruption and dishonesty, and that has manipulated and betrayed the citizenry for decades. I think we owe a lot of the current skepticism of the press to your efforts, however rude and sometimes clumsy they were.

Thank you for reminding the Republican party that businesses are both big and small, and that the middle of the country can’t simply learn to code. You promised at your inauguration that you wished to represent all Americans, and you delivered on that promise.

So thank you for four years that were better than I ever expected, four years that stopped and occasionally reversed the damage done by your predecessor. I never thought we’d get a reprieve, but we did and I appreciate it.

I never mistook you for a man of particular dignity and grace, never thought you’d exercise great self-control or restraint. But you suffered an unconscionable amount of abuse, persevered through attacks that would have disheartened most, and continued to work and to stay within the Constitutional boundaries. I never imagined you’d experience the relentless onslaught you did, nor, to be honest, would I have guessed that you’d have handled it as well as you did. I thank you for that as well. You provoked the worst from your opponents; that is probably ultimately a good thing, as we needed to see them clearly.

I think you were cheated out of victory, if not through outright electoral fraud (though I won’t rule that out) then by a unified opposition of liars and censors — mainstream media and tech giants, politicians and institutions. You still have to leave office, and I’d like to see you go with grace and dignity, but as I said I never really expected those things from you and it would be unrealistic to ask you to discover those qualities now. I can accept a graceless and undignified exit now; I require only that you dutifully fulfil the law as you step down.

You did a good job, and you got a raw deal. You spared my country four years of Clinton.

So thank you.
An American

A Comment About Mob Violence

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Let me lay out my assumptions right up front, before making the point I want to make.

  1. The President didn’t incite violence. His comments were within the boundaries of appropriate political discourse, whether or not he was correct in the views he expressed about the election. (In fact, I’m sure he was partially, though not wholly, correct.)
  2. I categorically condemn mob violence, and this instance is no exception: everyone who broke the law should be charged, tried, and, if convicted, punished. Whatever the motives of the lawbreakers (and I don’t know who they are or why they did what they did), I reject any claim they might have to legitimacy in their actions. Lock them up.

There. I hope that’s sufficiently clear. Now here’s the point of this post.

For months, businesses have been destroyed by lawless mobs. Billions of dollars of damage have been done to the private property of American citizens as shops were burned, windows smashed, stores looted. Through it all, the President called for a restoration of law and order, and offered federal support in that effort. In each instance he was rebuffed.

Because the destruction of private property and livelihoods doesn’t matter to folks on the left.

The Capitol break-in didn’t endanger anyone’s livelihood: no one will go out of business because of it, no Senator or Congressman will miss a paycheck or lose his life’s savings because thugs broke in to the building and damaged the nation’s property. Democracy, the Constitution, and the nation were not at risk.

The optics were terrible. But the optics were also terrible when Mainstreet USA was burning; the difference is that we didn’t see that, because the left didn’t care, and so didn’t want us to care either.

By all means prosecute the thugs who broke the law in D.C. this week, and good riddance. But remember that, when it came to demanding justice for regular American citizens faced with the loss of their jobs, businesses, incomes, and savings in the hundreds of Antifa and BLM riots this past year, it was the President who was calling for an end to the violence and the protection of regular American citizens. And the left fought that at every turn, choosing to side with lawlessness and the mob.

So to anyone who couldn’t be bothered to stand up for regular American citizens all summer long — and that’s essentially everyone in mainstream news and every Democratic politician at the state and federal level: go back and report on the tragedy of all those shuttered businesses and destroyed lives before expressing your faux outrage over this most recent event. And explain to me why all those people didn’t matter while they watched their hopes and futures burn.

We The People are failing our Government

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Airplanes fly because the people who design them understand physics. They know how pressure changes as air flows over a curved surface. They understand lift and drag, and how force and mass relate to each other to determine acceleration. They’re experts in the science of materials, in finite element analysis, in instrumentation and control systems and combustion and ten thousand other arcane details of science and design and manufacture.

None of this means that they get it right every time, as Boeing’s recent travails remind us. But they get it right often enough to make air travel the safest means of transportation.

Imagine for a moment that all those aeronautical designers and engineers were hired by people who knew nothing about aeronautics, and who were neither competent to evaluate the resumes of their potential hires nor to evaluate the work done by them once they were hired — and, worse, that the candidates for the positions knew that their interviewers were clueless. How would that affect the quality of the men and women employed? How would it affect the viability of air travel once a generation or two of wholly unvetted “engineers” had been allowed to fiddle with the existing designs?

Our founders gave us a government. It is a complicated yet elegant machine composed of interlocking parts intended to work simultaneously in concert with and opposition to each other. It was created by men who were experts in the theory and practice of government, men who had diagnosed the failures of numerous prototypes and, based on those diagnoses, designed a new form of government, a constitutional democratic representative union of independent states: a republic with formal restraints on both the reach of the government and the whims of the people.

We the people are tasked with hiring the men and women who staff the critical positions in that government. If we know little of how our government was intended to function, we have no sound basis for evaluating the people we vote into office nor the policies they propose. Today there is ample evidence that we are a nation of civic ignoramuses. How many understand what the much-maligned electoral college is, how we got it and why it’s important? How many understand the damage done by the 17th Amendment to the carefully balanced tension between the House and Senate? How many are equipped to see the sheer lunacy of the Green New Deal’s call for a broad usurpation of our rights as citizens? How many understand even the idea of a constitutionally limited central government that is not merely prevented from performing certain tasks, but rather that is constitutionally authorized to perform only a small number of specific tasks?

We are failing to provide a competent civics education to our children, and have been for generations. We have a population ignorant of the most basic aspects of government but which we nonetheless exhort to vote, as if merely standing in the booth were the totality of civic duty. A large proportion of the electorate has the legal right to vote, but lacks the moral standing to do so because it knows nothing about the thing for which it has a sacred duty of stewardship.

We can not blame the children for the failures of their teachers, who themselves know next to nothing about the nature of our government. I don’t know what it will take to trigger a rebirth of pride and interest in our nation’s history and in the framework on which it was built and the ideas behind it. But if we reach the point where we’re analyzing the wreckage following the crash, it will be too late.

Brexit

Posted on | by hr | Leave a Comment on Brexit

I’m not generally a fan of “direct democracy.” I like our system of constitutionally-constrained representative democracy, and the way it tries to keep both the people and the reprobates they elect from straying too far from the Founders’ plan. When the people are allowed to vote directly on specific issues, it’s good to know that there are safeguards in place to prevent the kind of rookie errors that turn rich countries into Venezuela.

(One more reason to a appreciate the crop of excellent judges this President has installed.)

But when the government asks the people to vote on something that is within their constitutional prerogative, it seems to me that that government should respect the consequence of that vote and the expressed will of the people. When the matter at hand is as momentous as a basic question of national identity and sovereignty, as it was with the British referendum, then the government should not only respect the vote, but should act promptly and in good faith to execute the will of the people.

So no, I don’t think that years of stonewalling followed by a call for another vote, for a rephrasing of the question, for just a little common sense you filthy peasants don’t you know what you’re getting us into is appropriate. The British people spoke, and they should be heard — and if they aren’t, they’ll have been robbed of their sovereignty by an establishment that apparently feels a greater allegiance to the Continent than to that musty old relic of a country that elected them.

Britain once ruled the world. Britain stood alone against the German war machine. Britain can work out the details of the Irish border, and survive the temporary confusion of renegotiated trade deals. Her people have demanded their independence. They should get it.

Rock the Boat

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“Make America Great Again”

I never much cared for the slogan, mostly for the obvious reason that I think America remains great and has never not been great. I never much cared for the hat, either: I don’t wear hats, and I’m not a big fan of Trump the man, however much I like his performance in office.

But it seems to me that there’s a serious problem in need of a serious solution, and wearing the iconic orange red cap is, oddly enough, a useful tool for solving it.

The problem is that, in the real world (as opposed to here in the conservative blogosphere or on Fox News), conservatives are well-nigh invisible. The zeitgeist, as portrayed by the the news and entertainment media and most of our institutions, is progressive. Most normal people — people who aren’t political wonks of one sort or another — can go through the whole week without hearing a conservative opinion expressed; they can go a lot longer without hearing one expressed well.

I’ve taken to wearing the hat because it sticks out like a sore thumb, and it communicates, more quickly and effectively than anything else I could wear, that I’m a conservative. It doesn’t say what kind of conservative I am, nor does it reveal whether I’m a hard-core Trump fan (I’m not) or just a guy who is sick to death of conservatives being treated like they are a social disease (yes, that’s it). But everyone who sees it will be able to conclude a few things that I want them to know:

  1. I’m a conservative;
  2. I’m not going to be cowed into silence by the prevailing winds of political fashion; and
  3. if you’re a conservative as well, you aren’t alone.

So I’ll be polite, thoughtful, happy to talk about it with anyone who’s interested, willing to concede the President’s many flaws while nonetheless defending his administration for the many things it’s done well, and an informed and respectful critic of socialism and progressivism and those who, through ignorance or poor judgment, continue to endorse them.

Some will see the hat and leap to the wrong conclusions, but those people were probably already leaping to wrong conclusions, assuming that I’m just like every other silent person who doesn’t rock the boat because he doesn’t think the boat needs rocking.

I’m not going to de-platform myself. I’m going to be counted.

Hat talk: the rest of the story

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While my night on the town began, as related here, at Starbucks, it didn’t end there — nor did it continue in precisely the same vein of tolerance and understanding.

A few hours after I left the iconic cafe with my bag of free coffee and attended a family dinner, I ended up in a local bar doing what I do in bars: acting as designated driver and herder of tipsy friends. I am widely valued for my public temperance, my modestly imposing physical presence, and my capacious vehicle. (I drink, but only moderately and always at home. )

As I sat at a table watching my friends and the other patrons and nursing my third Diet Coke, a youngish woman appeared at my elbow and began talking. She informed me that she was a nurse, that she saw a lot of early-onset dementia, and that she thought people didn’t appreciate how big a problem it is.

(No, I didn’t take it personally: whatever doubts I may occasionally have about my own grip on reality, I do a pretty good job of keeping my peccadilloes under wraps. She was obviously just making conversation with this rakishly good-looking fellow trying — unsuccessfully, apparently — to keep counsel with his own thoughts amidst the noise of a crowded bar.)

I didn’t say much in response, beyond periodic sympathetic noises and an occasional attempt to soften her more hard-edged observations. She thought people live too long and didn’t approve of that; I suggested that we die too long, but that it seemed understandable that we might cling tenaciously to life for ourselves and encourage our loved ones to do the same. But I agreed that senility and dementia were sad and difficult challenges, whether occurring in the geriatric crowd or among my own relatively youthful cohort.

Despite her incipient intoxication, she noticed that I seemed to have a hard time hearing her, and she commented on the volume in the bar. I told her that I have a slight hearing deficiency (true), the product, I believe, of too many years riding motorcycles, scuba-diving, and shooting guns (also true).

“Do you like guns?” she asked me.

“I love them.”

“Do you have a MAGA hat?” From her tone, I took the question to be intended humorously.

“I do. It’s in the car,” I answered. As, in fact, it was.

That’s when the ugliness of the passionately uninformed revealed itself.

“I wouldn’t have guessed,” she said, sounding sincerely perplexed. “You listened so politely while I was talking.”

What went through my head at that moment was almost precisely this:

“You little idiot. Sixty million people voted for Donald Trump. Do you think they’re all such mean-spirited intolerant wretches that they can’t listen to someone talk about the challenges of managing dementia in the hospitalized elderly without feeling compelled to give vent to their inherent misogyny and/or fascist tendencies? What kind of bubble do you live in?”

That’s what I thought. What I said was that I didn’t understand why that would surprise her.

I listened to her prattle on for another little bit. She wanted to educate me on the “truth” about abortion law, but I told her I was pretty knowledgeable about it already, and that she and I probably wouldn’t agree. Then she told me about her “ex-boyfriend” who was recently arrested for sexual misconduct, though she thinks he’s been falsely accused. Seriously. She couldn’t have teed it up better if she’d tried, but I let it go: don’t argue with foolish people, and particularly with drunk foolish people. (Friends who know of the incident later assured me that she’s mistaken, and that the fellow in question is pretty awful.) 

I don’t know how many on the left share this silly woman’s bigoted assumptions about the half of America that voted for the Republican. I do know that, when I wear the hat, I make a special effort to be pleasant. I’d like to think that, by being unexpectedly nice, I’m responsible for a little painful cognitive dissonance, a little uncomfortable opening of smug little minds. Certainly, that’s my hope.

I’m not saying it’s the hat, but…

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I ran out of coffee at home yesterday, so last night while I was in town I stopped at the local Starbucks to pick up a bag of dark roast. As I pulled into my parking spot I noticed an Obama-Biden sticker on the car next to me. I figured that meant overt displays of political affiliation were allowed, so I grabbed my Make America Great Again cap from the dash where it lives, popped it on my head, and went inside.

My favorite gay bartender/barista was on duty, so after nodding a quick hello to him I grabbed a bag of Verona and walked up to the counter, where a young fellow I didn’t recognize, a bearded college-age kid, was waiting to take my order.

I handed him the bag of beans, asked him to grind it for flat-bottom drip, and fished out a Starbucks gift card that, I figured, had enough left on it to complete the transaction. The young fellow rang up my order and turned away to grind my coffee. When he came back and I held out my card, he waved it away and said “we got it, you’re all set.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I have a ton of coffee credits. Employees get them. I put it on mine,” he told me.

I asked if he was serious, and if he really wanted to do that. He said he was, and wished me a nice day. So I thanked him, picked up my bag of ground coffee, and walked out.

I have yet to experience any negative feedback while wearing the Make America Great Again hat. I’ve had a few positive comments, a couple of unexpected but pleasant conversations with strangers during which politics was never mentioned — and, yes, maybe an odd look or two. But free coffee? That’s a first.

Collusion and Obstruction: Two Different Kinds of Crime

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If the President had been found guilty of Russian collusion — that is, of participating in a criminal conspiracy with the Russians to undermine our election — then it would have indicated that he is a particular kind of villain. It takes a particular kind of villain to knowingly work with our enemies to subvert the democratic process. That represents a treasonous betrayal of our country.

On the other hand, being oafish and ignorant of the nuances of executive authority in the context of a legal investigation, while it may arguably appear to meet the legal definition for a charge of obstruction of justice, need not suggest that the President is a villain. Rather, it may simply indicate that he is an amateur on matters of law and politics, and that he is accustomed to speaking his mind without considering the unique legal implications of doing so while the head of federal law enforcement.

I never thought the collusion charges made much sense, and Mueller’s finding that no collusion occurred surprises me not at all.

As to obstruction, I find it much more plausible that the President expressed his frustration at what he rightly considered a relentless and unjustified witch hunt that was undermining his administration, and that he explored various avenues for putting an end to it — but that, finally, he both allowed the investigation to continue and cooperated with it. We know that he resisted the temptation to invoke executive privilege, even when he might plausibly have done so.

I understand his frustration. I appreciate his transparency. I particularly appreciate the people who counseled him to let the investigation run its course.

I think it’s time his critics stepped back and considered the possibility that they’re trying to trap a normal person in a web of legal technicalities in an effort to undo, by hook or by crook, the result of a legitimate election that happens to have led to an outcome they find offensive.

Trump2020: A Response to One Objection

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One objection to re-electing President Trump in 2020 is that, because he exhibits so many of the personal traits which conservatives have traditionally condemned, his election by Republicans casts the latter as hypocrites and removes character as a dimension on which future Republicans can differentiate their candidates from those of the Democrats.

While I made this argument during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I think it is no longer relevant. Republicans have already elected Trump; failing to re-elect him will not in any way redeem Republicans. We live in a hostile, left-leaning media environment, and there is no voice on the left that will speak well of Republicans for rejecting President Trump in 2020. That would require a degree of charity the left is completely unwilling to extend.

Whatever damage to the moral standing of Republicans that the election of President Trump can do has been done, and nothing will reverse it or make it significantly worse. Those who think otherwise are crediting the left with more grace than there is any reason to believe it possesses.

I continue to believe that, on balance, the arguments in favor of re-electing President Trump remain compelling.

Skynet and Paper Ballots

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“The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.” – A T-800

Not surprisingly, Skynet objects and destroys most of humanity. This is usually what happens when sentient computers are given life-or-death authority over all of mankind. The good folks of Cyberdyne should have seen it coming: the same thing happened way back in 1970 when Charles Forbin’s attempt at achieving pax cybernetica led to the immediate subjugation of humankind by his Colossus supercomputer (in what is, incidentally, the best computer-takes-over-the-world movie yet made).

The lesson should be clear: don’t trust computers, and certainly not with anything as important as the nuclear arsenal.

And don’t trust them with our elections, either.

Now of course we needn’t be concerned that our voting kiosks will become self-aware and declare war on the electorate. That’s silly. What isn’t silly, however, is the potential for fraud, corruption, and espionage, and the near certainty that widespread electronic voting will undermine, and deservedly so, confidence in the legitimacy of the vote.

Trust in the integrity of the electoral process depends on the electorate’s confidence that a proper chain of custody can be maintained over ballots, and that contested results can be audited, recounted, and confirmed. Even with those assurances, one can be excused for doubting the veracity of the results in problematic districts. What is essential is that we have a reasonable confidence that the overall process is fair and honest, and that the ultimate outcome reflects the will of the electorate.

What is essential is transparency. Unfortunately, transparency is precisely what’s lost when ephemeral software replaces paper ballots.

Consider the disputes that arise from something as seemingly simple as the handling of paper ballots, where the physical items can be counted, sealed into boxes, and observed as they move from one location to another and ultimately into secure storage from which they can be summoned for recounting should the need arise. Even this entirely observable and comprehensible process is subject to both deliberate and accidental corruption, as we discover again every election season.

What does that process look like when voting is done by computer? It looks like binary word shifts and bitwise xoring, finite field multiplication and modulus operators and countless loops through increasingly scrambled cyphertexts. It looks like math, stuff that only a relative handful of software people (and we’re a notoriously geeky, math-enthused lot) can follow.

Those inclined to embrace conspiracy theories (and that includes virtually all of the mainstream media) have spent the last two years in a tizzy over the possibility that Russia subverted the 2016 election using YouTube and Facebook; a comprehensive investigation and its voluminous negative results are unlikely to quell their concerns.

Imagine if the claim were that a hostile foreign power such as Russia or China — or, if you’re a progressive, Israel — interfered with a computerized election. Imagine the complexity of the forensics, the difficulty of determining what went wrong, and the near impossibility of conveying the findings in a comprehensible way to a skeptical public. Any remotely plausible claim of a digitally hacked election would permanently taint the outcome in the public’s imagination; no amount of arcane expert opinion would convince the losing moiety of the election’s validity.

Most electoral changes that have, as their ostensible motive, improved efficiency and increased ballot access work against the integrity of the voting process. Early voting, extended voting hours and days, mail-in ballots, absentee voting, provisional ballots — all of these make it harder to secure ballots and maintain a clear chain of custody, and invite fraud and abuse. Widespread computerized voting will, if implemented, open the process to vote tampering and election rigging by means cryptic and obscure, and on a scale impossible with paper ballots.