James B Conant Out The Window

I keep returning to David Brooks and his thesis in Bobos in Paradise that James B Conant's educational reforms, in particular egalitarian merit-based college admissions policies based on standardized testing, created a new, meritocratic elite made up especially of suburban Jews. Other writers like Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah and Jerome Karabel's The Chosen have sharply challenged this view, arguing that Jewish quotas in particular persist in the Ivy League, and in any case, secretive college admissions policies allow wealthy donors, legacies, influential politicians, and others to bypass putative rules.

My guess is that the 2019 USC admissions scandal, whereby celebrities Lori Loughlin and Felicity Huffman pled guilty to paying as much as $500,000 in bribes to get their daughters into USC, is just the tip of the iceberg. But USC is not an Ivy; it's second-tier, so the actual cash value of an acceptance letter from Stanford, Chicago, or an Ivy can only be estimated. I would guess the amount is big enough that it can simply be legitimized as a charitable donation, but its effect is precisely the same.

But there's also a significant trend toward eliminating those SATs that David Brooks thought were such an egalitarian measure:

At least 1,785 U.S. colleges and universities will not require ACT or SAT scores from applicants seeking to enroll in fall 2022 according to an updated list released today by the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). More than 76% of all U.S. bachelor-degree granting institutions now practice test-optional or test-blind admissions, an all-time high.

“The record number of admissions offices waiving testing mandates reflects widespread satisfaction with those policies,” FairTest Executive Director Bob Schaeffer explained. “Schools that did not mandate ACT/SAT submission last year generally received more applicants, better academically qualified applicants, and a more diverse pool of applicants.”

Schaeffer continued, “Evaluating applications without regard to test scores has become the new normal in undergraduate admissions. More than half of all colleges and universities in the nation have already committed to remaining test-optional or test-blind for fall 2023 applicants. We expect the final percentage to be much higher.”

But the groups most clearly affected by such policy revisions are Asians, who are hard working and achievement oriented, but unlike Jews, are more readily identifiable on a racial basis. In addition, the secularization and assimilation of Jews over the last helf century has also made them less distinguishable, especially as WASP culture has also secularized -- though antisemitism has also recently become respectable in the academy, which may limit this trend.

As a practical matter, these shifts amount to a return of quotas and other overt forms of preference. But I'm not sure how much of this represents a real change, since as Dershowitz and Karabel argue, the Conant innovations were never more than partial, admissions criteria have never been transparent at all, and SATs were essentially a beard of respectability meant to distract attention from the nothing new.

Thus I sympathize with the Penn women's swimmer who went through one version of the Ivy admssions rat race only to find the reward snatched away just as she thought she'd gained it. She's had the ear of sympathetic media and has been quoted anonymously in numerous stories, like this one:

["]They’re just proving, once again, that they don’t actually care about their women athletes,” the swimmer said of the University of Pennsylvania. They say that they care and that they’re here for our emotions, but why do we have to be gracious losers? … Who are you to tell me that I shouldn’t want to win because I do want to win. I’m swimming. I’m dedicating more than 20 hours a week to the sport.

Obviously, I want to win. You can’t just tell me I should be happy with second place. I’m not. And these people in Penn’s administrative department who just think that women should just roll over — it’s disturbing, and it’s reminiscent of the 1970s when they were fighting for Title IX and stuff like that. They don’t actually care about women at all.

This actually reminds me of the Latin motto for USC, Palmam qui meruit ferat, "May he who earns the palm carry it", which is contradicted both in its own bribery scandal and in the wider conundrum of the Lia Thomas scandal. If Thomas were subject to an actual handicap that they had to surmount to compete, their victories would be a genuine achievement. But Thomas is a fully intact cisgendered male who functions perfectly well as a male swimmer; they just don't win male competitions. Thus it simply suits Penn to redefine Thomas as a woman for administrative convenience, which effectively abrogates the bargain under which the women swimmers applied for admission to Penn.

My own experience as an Ivy undergraduate was a disturbing sense that I began to have only weeks after arriving that something was seriously wrong. I couldn't define it; I spent some time with the dean of freshmen concerned that the admissions offfice had made a big mistake. He told me to stick with it; I suppose it was the best of various bad alternatives. But my surmise is that what I thought was wrong in 1965 is just as wrong now. I really sympathize with the Penn women's swimmers.

Bp Barron, Richard Nixon, And President Brandon

Somewhere in his book The Strangest Way, a Catholic apologetic he wrote while a professor at the Mundelein seminary, Bp Barron notes a remark by Norman Mailer about Richard Nixon, that Nixon always seemed to have a little Nixon on his shoulder whispering in the big Nixon's ear telling him how to behave, advice like, "Now look sympathetic"; "Now smile." Bp Barron said no matter how you feel about Nixon, this was a good illustration of the divided self: there's no room for authenticity; you've always got to be gauging how you're coming off to other people.

(I've kept looking for this in my copy but so far have been unable to find the specific reference. If anyone knows where it is, I'll be delighted to update the post here.) But this brings out other associations for me. Mailer covered Nixon in at least two books, Miami & The Siege of Chicago and St. George and the Godfather, which were about the 1968 and 1972 election campaigns. Mailer was by his own admission strangely drawn to Nixon and even tempted to be something of a closet Republican. I suspect he found something human in Nixon that wasn't in the public personae of his political opponents.

He perceived a basic insecurity in Nixon, a neuroticism that made him attractive -- maybe even a little like what made Humphrey Bogart an attractive figure in the Hollywood of the time; he wasn't conventionally handsome like, say, Clark Gable; he was skinny and slight; he was aware of his demons. (Indeed, Bogart went by his mother's name; Humphrey Bogart was a well-known illustrator in the 1920s.)

I think this is perhaps what drew Bp Barron to Mailer's observation of Nixon: Nixon was human enough to use as an example of the fallen condition. He was no Kennedy, no conventional hero, no movie star. He was visibly flawed, as all of us are, whether secretly or not.

But this brings up a different question. The American psychiatrist Hervey M. Cleckley published The Mask of Sanity in 1941. According to Wikipedia,

The title refers to the normal "mask" that conceals the mental disorder of the psychopathic person in Cleckley's conceptualization.

Cleckley describes the psychopathic person as outwardly a perfect mimic of a normally functioning person, able to mask or disguise the fundamental lack of internal personality structure, an internal chaos that results in repeatedly purposeful destructive behavior, often more self-destructive than destructive to others. Despite the seemingly sincere, intelligent, even charming external presentation, internally the psychopathic person does not have the ability to experience genuine emotions. Cleckley questions whether this mask of sanity is voluntarily assumed to intentionally hide the lack of internal structure, but concludes it hides a serious, but yet imprecisely unidentified, semantic neuropsychiatric defect.

Ted Bundy might be the stereotypical example of this kind of personality, handsome, charming, even apparently vulnerable as he sometimes used a cast or a crutch to lure his victims, impressing even the judge who ultimately sentenced him to death. But even if we accept Mailer's characterization of Nixon as someone who needed constant prompting to maintain a mask, this simply acknowledges that in Nixon's case, the mask was always in danger of falling off. Ted Bundy was the conventional movie star; Nixon was the Humphrey Bogart.

But this brings me to Joe Biden. If we continue with the Norman Mailer model of Nixon's personality, the one thing Biden simply lacks is any sort of little Biden on his shoulder telling him the right thing to say or do. His gaffes, his misstatements, his hot mic moments, his fabulations, his insults, his outbursts are constant and unapologetic. There is simply no neuroticism. On one hand, he's no Nixon. Despite his nerdiness, Nixon defeated McGovern in a historic landslide. But neither is he a Kennedy, with no aristocratic movie-star glamour. The likelihood of Biden prevailing in the 2024 election is not high.

Nor is Biden a Truman, or if he is, a Truman-like strength of character and authenticity are yet to emerge. I briefly considered Warren G Harding, who seems not to have been apologetic about his own flaws, but Harding was nevertheless a more conventional back-slapping, baby-kissing politician whose demise came about in a highly extroverted political tour. Biden is retiring, even secretive, not a barnstormer.

As a type, Biden strikes me as completely new. He isn't neurotic like Nixon or Bogart; he isn't a hero like Kennedy; he isn't a conventional psychopath like Bundy, but there's pretty clearly some pathology there that he isn't making much effort to conceal, no mask. We're simply told to deal with it. I'm not sure what to do with this.

The UK Daily Mail Goes There

The one absolute no-no in 21st century etiquette -- surpassing all others, I think -- is to ask whether a transgendered person has had their plumbing repaired. (I assume "repaired" is the correct word, since the assumption is that the original plumbing, though functional, was incorrectly installed.) In one of the consummate gaucheries of our time, the UK Daily Mail has nevertheless asked this about the transgendered Ivy League swimmer Lia Thomas.

Sharing a locker room with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas has become a point of contention for some of her University of Pennsylvania teammates, who feel uncomfortable changing in the private space with someone undergoing gender transition, the DailyMail.com can reveal.

'It's definitely awkward because Lia still has male body parts and is still attracted to women,' one swimmer on the team told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

Lia has told her teammates that she dates women.

While Lia covers herself with a towel sometimes, there’s a decent amount of nudity, the swimmer said. She and others have had a glimpse at her private parts.

She stated that team members have raised their concern with the coach, trying to get Thomas ousted from the female locker room, but got nowhere.

'Multiple swimmers have raised it, multiple different times,' the UPenn swimmer said. 'But we were basically told that we could not ostracize Lia by not having her in the locker room and that there's nothing we can do about it, that we basically have to roll over and accept it, or we cannot use our own locker room.'

'It's really upsetting because Lia doesn't seem to care how it makes anyone else feel,' the swimmer continued. 'The 35 of us are just supposed to accept being uncomfortable in our own space and locker room for, like, the feelings of one.'

But equity!

This raises an awful lot of questions for me. The first is that, although Thomas has taken some sort of hormonal treatments, there doesn't seem to be any sort of surgery in the plan, and while Thomas somehow qualifies as female for the purpose of the swim team, they continues to function sexually as a male. The only concession to outward norms, leaving hormonal treatments aside, is that they shaves their chest, armpits, and legs and probably peroxides their forearms. As far as I can see, there's been no chest enhancement surgery. Thomas's coy pose in the photo is probably to conceal this as much as anything -- well, maybe to cover their Adam's apple, too.

So at this stage, we may call Thomas's status something like "transgender lite". In fact, it seems like when their collegiate swim career is over, assuming they don't go for the Olympics, they can just re-transition and go back to being a guy with no regrets and maybe even a book deal. (I would guess that even for a guy competing as a woman, the Olympics would still be too much commitment and too much work.)

But this leads to another question. Thomas appears to be standing next to a male swimmer competing as a male, wearing a male swim suit. What prevents Thomas from simply announcing that since they identifies as female but has not had any surgery to look female, there's no reason they can't compete on the women's team wearing a male swimsuit? Are there Ivy League or NCAA rules on which gender's swimsuits must cover what? Or is this just some sort of pro forma thing to make it all seem more legitimate?

My next questoin is just how big a charade is this whole story?

A biological female member of the University of Pennsylvania women’s swimming team said she believes her transgender teammate Lia Thomas colluded with a Yale transgender athlete so she could lose to prove a point, according to a report.

. . . Her biological female teammate told OutKick on condition of anonymity that she believes Thomas and Henig hatched a plan during the recent meet.

“Looking at [Lia’s] time, I don’t think she was trying,” she told the outlet. “I know they’re friends and I know they were talking before the meet. I think she let her win to prove the point that, ‘Oh see, a female-to-male beat me."

It's interesting that this is all intra-Ivy as well. But it confirms my sense that Thomas is not so much focused on trophies or records, but they gets some sort of inner satisfaction from controlling a larger narrative about transgenderism.

Who benefits? This is the biggest question. Those who suffer from gender dysphoria, if this is even a legitimate condition, are an extremely tiny segment of the population, but there's a massive effort to readjust the whole culture to accomodate it. It isn't Marxist; as I keep saying, Marx had nothing to say about it, and the only use the Soviets found for gays was as bait for blackmail.

And strangely, the trend is currently most visible in the Ivy League, where this already privileged white dude is trying to carve out an even more privileged tiny niche for themselves. All for equity or something. Can someone explain this to me?

About Those Creepy Pictures

I've always been more or less aware of photos on the web of Hunter Biden posing with the big guy, often with their heads pointed in the same direction and very similar smiles as though they're in on some big joke. It's almost as if they're trying to be Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin in some kind of dance routine. But looking for one to illlustrate posts in the last few days, I've come across others, like the one yesterday and the one above here that are just plain creepy and even verge on softcore porn.

Here's another:

Compare it to this well-known photo of Anderson Cooper and his husband:

But heretofore, the usual questions about the big guy went more to photos like this:

I ask which photo is creepier, the one just above or the one at the top? They both show a troubling lack of boundaries, but the sexier ones with Hunter are clearly posed, deliberate, and probably even taken by a professional photographer in a scheduled shoot. Or actually, given that Hunter and the big guy are dressed differently in one of them (it looks like the one yesterday and the one at the top today were the same shoot), at least two different scheduled shoots with professional lighting. The hair sniffing, in contrast, is a grab shot by a press photographer; nobody planned it. The really creepy shots were planned and paid for.

Up to now, I'd thouight that the Frank Sinatra-Dean Martin dance routines were as bad as things got:

I thought this kind of thing was basically marketing collateral, illustrations that showed any money you gave Hunter was baksheesh to Joe, a safe and productive investment. That may be the case, but there's something else very strange going on here.

Ukraine Must Be A Really Pesky Place

It seems like there's more and nore -- or maybe less and less, dependiong on how you look at it -- to the whole Ukraine kabuki:

President Joe Biden's failure to nominate an ambassador to Ukraine more than a year into his presidency is raising concerns among U.S. officials and regional experts as Russia moves closer to launching a full-scale invasion.

"President Biden has undermined the U.S.-Ukraine relationship by failing to even nominate an ambassador to Ukraine—it is a dereliction of duty and contributes to the instability we're seeing unfold today," Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Ala.), ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, told the Washington Free Beacon.

. . . Regional experts say diplomacy through social media is not helping the tense situation. A qualified American ambassador would have been able to reassure Zelensky in person and prevent a public disagreement with the White House that many saw as a boon for Russia.

"It is a horrible time for the United States to not have a Senate-confirmed ambassador in Kyiv," said Brad Bowman, a former Senate defense adviser who serves as senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies' Center on Military and Political Power. "A year into the Biden administration, there is zero excuse for the White House's failure to nominate someone."

"Deputy chiefs of mission can be incredibly effective, but there is simply no substitute for an ambassador," Bowman said, adding that "the Senate can be slow in confirming nominees, but you can't blame the Senate if you haven't even nominated someone. This borders on diplomatic malpractice by the Biden administration."

I can actually think of one very good reason President Brandon wouldn't want to nominate an ambassador to Ukraine: Senate confirmation would be an invitation to open the Hunter can of worms, since Ukraine was a major funnel for payments to the Biden family, and as far as anyone can tell, both Hunter and the big guy had extensive involvement with policy there while the big guy was vice president. Well, son of a bitch!

The guy doesn't want to touch Ukraine, period, and it sounds as if the current regime there has no particular affection for the Biden family, either. It's likely in his personal and poltical interest simply to have Ukraine go away, not least because since Bill Clinton in 1998, we've had no fewer than three bogus "impeachments" by both parties, which are doing nothing but taking impeachment off the table as a remedy for actual high crimes and misdemeanors.

The problem for Biden is that the US Constitution does specify that the “President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States” shall be removed from office if convicted in an impeachment trial of “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Not hanky-pank in the oval office bathroom, not someone's interpretation of who said what to whom, but, er, bribery, for instance.

Biden would basically just like Ukraine to go away. The problem is that, while it suits Putin to have it destabilized for now, and indeed, Biden is playing into his hands by working to destabilize it, it likely isn't in Putin's interest to stage a full invasion. There's too much value to him for the time being in having a Ukrainian regime that feels threatened more by Biden than by Putin and likely has ammunition against Biden it has yet to expend.

One thing we can be pretty sure of -- Putin will still be around long afer Biden. He'll deal with Ukraine at his leisure, but he won't interfere while his enemy is destroying himself now.

Help Me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, You're My Only Hope?

Let's look at the conventional media narrative here: Vladimir Putin, AKA Darth Vader, is threatening Planet Ukraine, part of the Rebel Alliance, with the Death Star. Princess Leia, AKA Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, has sent an urgent message to Obi-Wan Kenobi, AKA President Brandon, begging for his help against the Empire. The suspense now, although not canonical to the original Hollywood version, is whether Obi-Wan, 79 years old, is either too senile or too irresoulute to respond.

Got it? Except that even an updated version of the Star Wars salvation history isn't going to explain how things are actually turning out. President Zelensky, AKA Princess Leia, appears not to be on the same page with Obi-Wan at all:

Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council Secretary Oleksiy Danilov told reporters on Tuesday that Kyiv considers – and intelligence reports from the West agree – that “internal destabilization” caused by panic over a potential further Russian invasion is “the number one issue,” not any potential invasion.

With this “destabilization” – leading to generalized panic and the collapse of the national currency, the hryvnia – “the Russians have nothing to do here,” Danilov asserted, according to state outlet Ukrinform.

The remarks follow multiple national addresses from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky urging Ukrainians to disregard agitated statements from the administration of President Joe Biden and its allies predicting an imminent Russian invasion deeper into Ukraine than Moscow already is.

In other words, the real problem isn't Darth Vader, the problem is Obi-Wan himself. This is puzzling. How can the whole Star Wars narrative resolve itself otherwise? Is Obi-Wan misinterpreting Princess Leia's message? Is Princess Leia's message some kind of false flag meant to further Obi-Wan's secret agenda? But there are other signals from elsewhere in the Rebel Alliance, AKA the European Union, that something's hinky:

The European Union will not follow the US move to evacuate diplomatic staff and families, largely because the US hasn’t explained why we’re doing it. “We don’t have to dramatize,” EU foreign policy minister Josep Borrell told the press today as European nations met to determine their path forward in confronting Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.

Borrell told reporters that Antony Blinken will brief the EU later, but at least as of this morning, they don’t see any threat to diplomatic facilities or staff.

The Ukrainians vehemently agree with Borrell. Volodymyr Zelensky has already objected to the withdrawal of personnel and staff from the Kyiv embassy, calling it an “overreaction.”

In other words, Darth Vader is less of a threat to Planet Ukraine than President Obi-Wan himself, who is actually using a giant kabuki to destabilize Ukraine. Er, why would President Obi-Wan conceivably want to do this to poor Planet Ukraine, part of the Rebel Alliance? A possible answer:

Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg believes that President Joe Biden essentially gave Vladimir Putin the green light to invade Ukraine because the Ukrainian energy company Burisma stopped bribing him after the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump.

Speaking with politics editor Matthew Boyle on Breitbart News Saturday, Nunberg expanded on a tweet he posted Friday suggesting that Biden abandoned Ukraine due to Hunter Biden’s corruption.

But Darth Vader didn't even need a green light to destroy Planet Ukraine with the Death Star. All Vader had to do was maneuver the Death Star in ambiguous ways, which is what Putin is doing with troops on the Ukraine border. Then President Obi-Wan can use the situation to destablilize Ukraine by making it plain that if Putin does invade, Ukraine can simply expect a repeat of Kabul, with US civilians and embassy staff already ordered out prematurely. President Brandon's mental fog and uncertainty aren't a bug in this case, they're a feature. Interesting that Europeans beyond Ukraine seem to be thinking the same.

Maybe if President Zelensky were to rethink putting Hunter back on the Burisima board, things could change? Just sayin'.

What about this morning's other great puzzle, Speaker Pelosi's decision to run for re-election to the House?

With that in mind, I’m not at all convinced Pelosi will actually serve out another two-year term. It seems perfectly possible to me that if and when Democrats get blown out in November, she’ll change her mind. As I’ve said before though, to do so before the midterm vote would be catastrophic, and she knows it.

. . . Still, politics aside, there’s something deeply disturbing about an 81-year-old politician refusing to hand over power like this. Blame it on people living longer than they used to or something else entirely, but the American government has been turned into a quasi-oligarchy, where decrepit geriatrics rule the roost, enriching themselves, and serving until they kick the bucket.

I think the pseudonymous Bonchie is getting closer here. Another election for Pelosi, another round of baksheesh. She'll cross the post-November bridge when she comes to it. For Joe, it's payback to Planet Ukraine, which stopped the baksheesh in 2016. Well, son of a bitch.

Just sayin'. All those Europeans are pretty darn realistic, if you ask me.

Biden vs Kennedy vs Nixon

Yesterday I started thinkng about Biden and Ukraine vis-a-vis Kennedy and the Cuban missile crisis. I realize the circumstances are only very generally equivalent, but they do represent rare and potentially consequential direct confrontations betweeen the US and the Soviet Union or its successor. My conclusion yesterday was that in 1962, Khrushchev was a weak leader with backing that turned out to be unreliable, and he was badly played by Kennedy, who had speechwriters who'd studied Cicero in Catholic school, a highly effective media operation, and a telegenic persona. It didn't hurt that he lived with his family in London from 1938 to 1940 and saw Winston Churchill at close hand.

No matter there was a behind-the-scenes deal whereby the US removed missiles in Turkey that were an equivalent threat to the Soviets, that wasn't public, and Kennedy came off as the young, resolute, dynamic Leader of the Free World. From a domestic political standpoint, his handling of the crisis was a tour de force. Indeed, Khrushchev's performance was the opposite and led to his removal.

Let's look at Kennedy's television address to the nation on October 22, 1962. The first thing to note is its position in the timeline.

October 14, 1962: A U.S. U-2 spy plane piloted by Maj. Richard Heyser takes hundreds of photos of newly-built installations in the Cuban countryside. . .

October 15: CIA analysts spot launchers, missiles and transport trucks that indicate the Soviets are building sites to launch missiles capable of striking targets nearly across the United States. . .

October 16: President John F. Kennedy meets with a team of advisers known as Ex-Comm, to discuss how to respond to the missile threat. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara presents JFK with three options: diplomacy with Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, a naval quarantine of Cuba, and an air attack to destroy the missile sites, which might kill thousands of Soviet personnel and trigger a Soviet counterattack on a target such as Berlin.

Kennedy rejects the attack, and favors a quarantine to buy time to negotiate a missile withdrawal. JFK and his advisers are careful to call it a quarantine because a blockade is considered an act of war.

October 22: In a dramatic 18-minute television speech, JFK shocks Americans by revealing “unmistakable evidence” of the missile threat, and announces that the United States will prevent ships carrying weapons to reach Cuba, while demanding that the Soviets withdraw their missiles.

Meanwhile. U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union Foy Kohler delivers to a letter from JFK to Khrushchev. Kennedy writes: “the one thing that has most concerned me has been the possibility that your government would not correctly understand the will and determination of the United States in any given situation, since I have not assumed that you or any other sane man would, in this nuclear age, deliberately plunge the world into war which it is crystal clear no country could win and which could only result in catastrophic consequences to the whole world, including the aggressor.”

. . . October 28: Khrushchev concedes, writing an open letter to Kennedy saying that the Soviet missiles will be dismantled and removed from Cuba.

The Kennedy White House portrayed the withdrawal as the result of the president’s tough stance in the face of Soviet aggression. In reality, as Kornbluh says, “the resolution of the crisis owed to the president’s commitment to negotiate and find common ground in a dangerous nuclear world.”

Kennedy's television address was also rhetorically brilliant in itself, I would guess, again, because his staff was capable and had read Cicero.

The 1930's taught us a clear lesson: aggressive conduct, if allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged ultimately leads to war. This nation is opposed to war. We are also true to our word. Our unswerving objective, therefore, must be to prevent the use of these missiles against this or any other country, and to secure their withdrawal or elimination from the Western Hemisphere.

Our policy has been one of patience and restraint, as befits a peaceful and powerful nation, which leads a worldwide alliance. We have been determined not to be diverted from our central concerns by mere irritants and fanatics. But now further action is required--and it is under way; and these actions may only be the beginning. We will not prematurely or unnecessarily risk the costs of worldwide nuclear war in which even the fruits of victory would be ashes in our mouth--but neither will we shrink from that risk at any time it must be faced.

Acting, therefore, in the defense of our own security and of the entire Western Hemisphere, and under the authority entrusted to me by the Constitution as endorsed by the resolution of the Congress, I have directed that the following initial steps be taken immediately:

First: To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. All ships of any kind bound for Cuba from whatever nation or port will, if found to contain cargoes of offensive weapons, be turned back. This quarantine will be extended, if needed, to other types of cargo and carriers. We are not at this time, however, denying the necessities of life as the Soviets attempted to do in their Berlin blockade of 1948.

. . . The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are--but it is the one most consistent with our character and courage as a nation and our commitments around the world. The cost of freedom is always high--and Americans have always paid it. And one path we shall never choose, and that is the path of surrender or submission.

Our goal is not the victory of might, but the vindication of right- -not peace at the expense of freedom, but both peace and freedom, here in this hemisphere, and, we hope, around the world. God willing, that goal will be achieved.

There are certainly echoes of Churchill here, and they're entirely appropriate. The problem right now is that the contrast with Biden couldn't be greater. The Ukraine crisis has been festering for weeks, and Biden's main contribution has been his stumbling remarks on January 19

President Joe Biden on Thursday sought to clarify his stance on a potential Russian incursion in Ukraine, cleaning up remarks from the prior day's news conference during which he suggested a "minor incursion" by Russia would elicit a lesser response than a full-scale invasion of the country.

"I've been absolutely clear with President Putin. He has no misunderstanding. If any -- any -- assembled Russian units move across Ukrainian border, that is an invasion. But it will be met with severe and coordinated economic response that I've discussed in detail with our allies, as well as laid out very clearly for President Putin,"

But it's plain that his response has been essentially panic, ordering embassy staff to be evacuated from Kyiv:

The European Union will not follow the US move to evacuate diplomatic staff and families, largely because the US hasn’t explained why we’re doing it. “We don’t have to dramatize,” EU foreign policy minister Josep Borrell told the press today as European nations met to determine their path forward in confronting Russia over the crisis in Ukraine.

Also,

A Ukrainian journalist asked State Department Spokesperson Ned Price why the U.S. was evacuating personnel in the capital city of Kyiv, which is 500 miles from the border with Russia, and whether that meant the capital was a target of invasion.

Ukraine and the EU are displaying far more calm and resolution than Biden, who has so far abdicated any pretensions at being the Leader of the Free World.

But I mentinied Nixon. Right now, Biden is looking much more like Nixon:

President Joe Biden broke his 2020 campaign promise Monday not to bully the news media when he called Fox News’ Peter Doocy a “stupid son of a bitch” on a hot mic in response to a question about inflation at the White House.

Doocy took the insult in stride, later joking that no one had “fact checked” the president’s claim. On Fox News’ Hannity, Doocy revealed that the president had called him to tell him the insult was not “personal,” though he stopped short of saying that Biden had apologized.

Biden’s insult was only the latest example of an irascible attitude toward the press that has dogged him throughout his media career. Last week, for example, he snapped at a reporter during a press conference: “I assume you got into journalism because you liked to write.

Journalist Daniel Schorr was number 17 on Nixon's enemies list, and early in the Nixon administration

he angered the President by reporting, accurately, that there was no evidence to support Nixon's claim that he had programs ready to aid parochial schools. His reward: Nixon ordered the FBI to investigate him.

All politics is domestic, which Kennedy understood. This is not a good sign.

What If Things Keep Getting Worse?

It seems to me that the Ukraine situation could potentially work out for Biden the way the Cuban missile crisis worked out for Kennedy. According to this article,

President Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban missile crisis significantly contributed to his strong overall job approval scores. From the fall of 1961 until the spring of 1962, his approval ratings held steady at almost 80 percent (table 10). They then slowly, but steadily, subsided, dropping to a low of 61 percent in mid-October 1962. The Cuban missile crisis then pushed approval up to 74–76 percent from November 1962 to January 1963.

Should Biden manage to appear strong and decisive and then manage to look as if he'd forced Putin to back down in some way, he'd achieve a reset -- though as the link points out, Kennedy already had high job approval, well above Biden's. On the other hand, Putin isn't Khrushchev, who was in power for about a decade before being removed, while Putin has been de facto chief of Russia for 23 years so far, continuing to rule via both elections and other political maneuvering. His final term could theoretically end in 2036.

Khrushchev was reckless and not entirely stable; in Cuba he overplayed his hand and was removed largely in consequence. Putin is a more careful opponent who is focused on methodically reassembling a traditional Russian empire. I don't need to repeat Obama's own reported assessment of Biden's abilities. As a result, I think a Cuban missile crisis style outcome isn't likely for Biden; something like his existing precedent in Afghanistan seems more probable.

But an Afghanistan style outcome would be just one potential further disaster for the party in power. Another, as I've been thinking about since last week, would be new focus on Hunter and Joe's financial arrangements with him. As of last night, new allegations are emerging:

The Biden family scored $31 million from five deals in China, all with individuals with direct ties to the Chinese spy apparatus, according to a bombshell new book.

Multiple financiers with direct ties to Chinese intelligence partnered with Hunter Biden during and after his father’s time as Vice President — including the former head of the Ministry of State Security and the head of foreign intelligence recruitment — and some of those relationships remain intact, according to Red-Handed: How American Elites Get Rich Helping China Win, by Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer.

. . . “The hazard of a Chinese businessman with close ties to the top ranks of Beijing’s spy agency conducting financial transactions with the son of the U.S. vice president cannot be overstated. How this did not set off national security or ethics alarm bells in Washington is a wonder in itself,” Schweizer writes in Red-Handed.

Another problem is that Ukraine was also a major sphere of Hunter's activity, and the potential fallout from events there could also prove extremely damaging to Joe. Just one potential angle also came out yesterday:

Former Trump aide Sam Nunberg believes that President Joe Biden essentially gave Vladimir Putin the green light to invade Ukraine because the Ukrainian energy company Burisma stopped bribing him after the 2016 election of former President Donald Trump.

Speaking with politics editor Matthew Boyle on Breitbart News Saturday, Nunberg expanded on a tweet he posted Friday suggesting that Biden abandoned Ukraine due to Hunter Biden’s corruption.

“Hunter Biden was paid by Burisma $80,000 a month to simply sit on the board,” Nunberg told Boyle. “Fortune 500 companies don’t pay $80,000 a month to board members . . ."

Beyond that,

Two Republican senators are demanding answers after the Secret Service refused to hand over details about Hunter Biden's trips to Kazakhstan, Russia and China.

Biden, now 51, was granted Secret Service protection while his father was vice president from 2009-17 - although he requested it cease in July 2014.

At the time, he was a globe-trotting businessman, and Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa are investigating Biden for 'his use of government-sponsored travel while he conducted private business.'

The senators have requested documents relating to Biden's travel, and so far have received 259 pages from the Secret Service. But in a letter to director James Murray, they said that they 'have serious concerns about the production'.

They note that the pages are heavily redacted, which they say is unnecessary for members of Congress, and they complained that they were missing entire years - 2010, 2011 and 2013.

I've got to trust that responsible members of both parties are recognizing how quickly things could go south and are mulling appropriate strategies for negotiating a Plan B. Even third-rate thinkers are now suddenly remembering Spiro Agnew.

What Are The Lizard People To Do?

Two third-rate minds of the center right have come to the same conclusion. Glenn Reynolds, a moderate Hefnerian and a transhumanist, wrote in the New York Post,

It’s time to admit it. Less than a year in, Joe Biden’s is a failed presidency. Biden knows it, the press knows it, and voters know it. And our foreign adversaries like China and Russia know it. Somehow, the cabal that put Biden in power will scheme to winkle him out of power. It is unlikely to be as straightforward as it was with Richard Nixon. Biden is not hated so much as he is held in contempt. And with Nixon, the Democrats were fortunate that his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, was corrupt in a good, old-fashioned, straightforward political way. It turns out that he liked simple brown bags, especially ones filled with cash. Agnew would have been as unacceptable as Kamala Harris, but the blatant corruption made it easy to get rid of him before proceeding to tackle the big fish of Richard Nixon.

As I say, I doubt removing Joe Biden will be so easy. It will be interesting to see what the deep-state committee comes up with. They put him in power, instructing Bernie Sanders and the other Democrats to drop out in 2020, and they will figure out a way to remove him from the 2024 presidential equation. It’s also time to look at the “cabal” of business, labor and political leaders who foisted the Biden administration on us. That won’t be hard, as they were openly bragging about their efforts less than a year ago.

. . . As Time magazine reported shortly after the 2020 election, a “cabal” — Time’s word — of “left-wing activists and business titans” worked to get rid of Trump. It pushed mail-in voting. It moved to block election fraud suits brought by Trump and supporters. It employed social media censorship to mute pro-Trump arguments and amplify anti-Trump arguments. It sponsored protests.

Over the weekend, Roger Kimball, a truly awful writer who is apparently respected for being well-respected, said (after the usual pompous and gratuitous references to Aristotle and Dr Johnson),

I continue to cling to the conviction [Biden] will not remain the occupant of the White House through to the morning of January 20, 2025. . . . If I am even remotely correct about this, Biden’s situation presents the unnamed committee who actually runs the presidency with a huge and delicate problem. Biden’s behavior long ago passed from embarrassing to dangerous. We can see that all around us.

After detouring through Mt Vesuvius and 79 AD, he continues,

Somehow, the cabal that put Biden in power will scheme to winkle him out of power. It is unlikely to be as straightforward as it was with Richard Nixon. Biden is not hated so much as he is held in contempt. And with Nixon, the Democrats were fortunate that his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, was corrupt in a good, old-fashioned, straightforward political way. It turns out that he liked simple brown bags, especially ones filled with cash. Agnew would have been as unacceptable as Kamala Harris, but the blatant corruption made it easy to get rid of him before proceeding to tackle the big fish of Richard Nixon.

As I say, I doubt removing Joe Biden will be so easy. It will be interesting to see what the deep-state committee comes up with. They put him in power, instructing Bernie Sanders and the other Democrats to drop out in 2020, and they will figure out a way to remove him from the 2024 presidential equation.

I first mentioned Agnew fully six months ago, also in the context of the lizard people. It's taken two crack Ivy League public intellectuals this long to reach the same conclusion.

I think it's also taken several days for the full impact of Biden's January 19 press conference to sink in. Indeed, I would guess that many on Kimball's committee are still in denial. But Rand Paul has said out loud what many more people are clearly thinking behind the scenes: this guy is dangerous. He should not be making decisions in matters where he's already been a disaster:

Fox News' Pentagon correspondent is reporting early Saturday that all family members of US embassy personnel in Kiev, Ukraine have been ordered to evacuate. "State Department orders families of U.S. embassy personnel in Ukraine to begin evacuating the country as soon as Monday: U.S. officials," Fox's Lucas Tomlinson reports.

It first emerged Friday that the Biden administration was mulling a plan to evacuate diplomats' family members from Ukraine as a "precautionary measure" amid the continued crisis wherein Washington has predicted some level of a Russian offensive on the Ukraine border.

The problem is that the lizard people haven't updated their plan since mid 2020, when the decision was taken to nominate Biden but appease Sanders by pushing his agenda. On Friday, Press Secretary Psaki consoled the Bernie bros (and sisters) by telling them to have a margarita but keep on fighting come Monday morning. And Bernie dominates today's talks:

The star guest: Progressive-in-chief Bernie Sanders, who’ll chat with “Meet the Press” and “State of the Union” about his effort to ringlead primary challenges to Manchin and Sinema but mostly Sinema. He’ll also discuss the prospects for a revived, if pared down, version of Build Back Better.

Plan A is toast. There's no Plan B.

Quick Hillary Update

On January 17, I noted here that the Clintons and their old retainer Dick Morris have been trying to create a Hillary wave. At the time, I noted that Morris said,

“Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.

How's that working out? According to Paul Bedard,

In the first polling deep dive into her chances to win the 2024 Democratic presidential primary and eventual race against Trump, Clinton turned out to be no more popular than Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and far less popular than Vice President Kamala Harris and former first lady Michelle Obama in a potential primary.

. . . “The new hope of a revived Hillary Clinton gets beaten by Trump, 51% to 41%, with Trump beating her among independents, 52% to 37%; among suburban voters, 52% to 39%; and taking 19% among liberals, 13% among Democrats, and 10% of Biden 2020 voters,” he told us.

While it throws cold water on a Clinton run, the survey is the latest to show Trump is not only in charge of the GOP but he's also the pick of Republican voters to run in 2024.

The Democrat party has moved to the left and feminized itself in the years since Hillary has been out of public office -- note that the top Democrat primary contenders other than Biden listed above are Hillary, AOC, Kamala Harris, and Michelle Obama, notwithstanding Hillary has more substance than any of the others in a very weak field.

On the other hand, if Trump for whatever reason is unable to run, there are other strong Republicans who seem to be positioning themselves for 2024, including DeSantis and Mike Pompeo.

Politico Looks For Causes

A headkine on Politico yesterday: Why Schumer picked a filibuster fight he couldn't win.

Chuck Schumer doesn’t typically lead his caucus into losing votes that divide Democrats. He made an exception for election reform.

The Senate majority leader has run a 50-50 Senate for a year now, longer than anyone else. The whole time, Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin have consistently communicated to Schumer that he wouldn’t get their votes to weaken the filibuster, no matter the underlying issue. But his decision to force the vote on the caucus anyway — and get 48 Democrats on the record for a unilateral rules change dubbed "the nuclear option" — will go down as one of Schumer’s riskiest moves as leader.

Politico does all it can to spin it as a some sort of secretlly brilliant move for Schumer, but it keeps trying to answer that pesky question -- why.

Schumer usually touts his caucus' unity, declining to engage in extended debates over issues that divide his 50 members. This time, Democrats were fine with isolating the holdouts.

. . . Republicans view the real leftward pressure on Schumer as coming from outside the chamber.

“He’s feeling incredible pressure from his progressive base. And also, his own political future may depend on his performance, too, to avoid a difficult primary,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a frequent sparring partner of Schumer’s.

But having asked the question, however indirectly, Politico never quite comes up with a satisfactory answer.

Some Democrats suggested that Schumer's move on Wednesday was only the start of a long campaign to peel off Manchin and Sinema. Another unilateral rules change vote this year isn't off the table for the party.

But as the midterms approach, now only ten months away, time for that "long campaign" is growing short, while at least for now, the prospects for success after November seem unpropitious. And in that case, is there a Plan B? This is the problem I keep seeing. Faced with the collapse of Plan A, President Biden and Leader Schumer keep insisting they can get Plan A done anyhow. John Fund in the UK Daily Mail circles a little closer to the real issue:

For Washington insiders, the decision to keep his current team into his second year as president is inexplicable.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Republican not known for his partisanship, called on Biden to fire his chief of staff, Ron Klain, for pushing a 'guaranteed-to-fail vote' on killing the Senate filibuster that he argued was a political ploy.

'It's CYA (cover your ass) week in Washington,' Sasse told Fox News. He said the vote was held in part 'so that Ron Klain can throw some chum at the Democratic Party's progressive base.'

. . . Sasse focused on Klain, because it's common knowledge that the 60-year-old backroom operator has unusual power in the Biden White House.

Klain first worked with Biden in 1987, when he was counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee while Biden was chair and assisted Biden during his ill-fated 1988 presidential campaign. That campaign ended after Biden was caught plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, head of Britain's Labour Party.

Klain later served as Biden's chief of staff when he was Barack Obama's vice president.

As President Biden's chief of staff he has been dubbed 'the most influential chief of staff of recent vintage' in an admiring New York Times profile and The Master of Disaster by his critics.

But neither account -- Politico's theory that the failed filibuster vote was actually evidence of Schumer's unacknowledged brilliance, nor Fund's theory that it all goes back to Ron Klain and Biden's unwavering faith in him -- explains the why in any satisfactory way. Schumer can be brilliant only if he pulls the rabbit out of the hat before November, which is not a realistic prospect. Klain is nothing but a chief of staff, whom presidents routinely fire no matter how much they like them.

It's hard to avoid the choice Politico wants to avoid, that the pressure for the failed filibuster vote came from outside the senate with the cooperation of Klain. My sense of things continues to be, though, that it's related to the putative deal that was made for Sanders to drop out of the 2020 Democrat nomination race in favor of Biden, in exchange for Biden's support for the Plan A agenda. The problem continues to be that there's no Plan B.

What You See Is What You Get

I dipped in and out of Biden's press conference yesterday. As of this morning, there are many takes on it, but what struck me in particular was this sequence, in response to a question from (I think) Peter Doocy:

Why are you trying so hard in your first year to pull the country so far to the left?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, I’m not. I don’t know what you consider to be too far to the left if, in fact, we’re talking about making sure that we had the money for COVID, making sure we had the money to put together the Bipartisan Infrastructure, and making sure we were able to provide for those things that, in fact, would significantly reduce the burden on the working-class people but make them — they have to continue to work hard. I don’t know how that is pointed to the left.

If you may recall, I — you guys have been trying to convince me that I am Bernie Sanders. I’m not. I like him, but I’m not Bernie Sanders. I’m not a socialist. I’m a mainstream Democrat, and I have been. And mainstream Democrats have overwhelmingly — if you notice, the 48 of the 50 Republi- — Democrats supported me in the Senate on virtually everything I’ve asked.

This is remarkably disingenuous. He cites primarily the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill. but he omits Build Back Better, which was his 2020 campaign theme, and on which he was at length defeated in the senate. Build Back Better was so important to the House Progressive Caucus that they held the bipartisan bill hostage to it, insisting they be passed together. Speaker Pelosi did all she could to enable this, and Biden certainly appears to have been on board as well. Eventually, neither the Squad nor Speaker Pelosi nor Biden could prevent the two bills being separated and BBB's eventual defeat.

He then says he isn't Bernie Sanders, but in saying that, I think he unintentionally reveals the basic deal that got him the 2020 nomination: although early in the primary contest, it seemed like Sanders would get the nomination, the lizard people decided he couldn't beat Trump, but Biden could. However, at the core of the deal I'm pretty sure was an agreement that in return for the nomination and the support of the party left, Biden would support an essentially Sanders style platform, and that's what he's done over the past year. His real agenda was set by Speaker Pelosi, Sen Sanders, and the Squad.

The analysis I've seen this morning basically mentions nothing new -- the press conference was full of the usual stumbles, misspeaks, gaffes, insults, and outbursts. The conclusion was essentially unanimous, pro or con, Biden will make no course corrections. This isn't reassuring. Bill Clinton, faced with losses in the 1994 midterms, recalibrated and changed course in 1995 and pivoted off the Oklahoma City bombing to become a triangulator. He was able to use charm and flexibility to stay in office, first against Dole in 1996, and then against impeachment in 1998.

Biden clearly has neither charm nor flexibility. I still think he's not impaired or mentally unfit, at least insofar as he is thought to have a medical problem related to dementia. His ability, systematically if unconvincingly, to deny and deflect even the mildest criticisms of his performance yesterday reflects this. He is, though, shallow and obtuse.

Insofar as he has a plan, it sounds like he'll attack the anticipated results of the November midterms by calling them illegitimate. I'm not sure if it was wise for him to telegraph this now, as it gives the Republicans time to plan a counter strategy and work on other issues like Hunter's business deals and whether Joe profited from them, as he certainly must have done.

Biden's basic problem is that the Götterdämmerung strategy, the overall Democrat plan to implement a great reset by 2022 and not worry about the post-midterm consequences, has failed. The main takeaway from yesterday's press conference is that there's no Plan B, while Speaker Pelosi, the main architect of Plan A, is heading toward political limbo. Biden himself, while not senile, doesn't have the capacity to come up with a viable new plan himself.

The Real Political Alignment

Few photos from the past weekend's news illustrate more clearly the current real US political alignment. With even legacy media beginning to ask whether President Brandon needs to change direction following a disastrous first year, let's parse out the current situation. My first observation is that the current Democrat coalition is anything but Marxist, pace Mark Levin. My second is that President Brandon has no choice but to do everything he can to appease that coalition as it exists.

The contradiction in the news photos of the looted container trains in Los Angeles over the weekend is the distant view of the alabaster city framed by stately palms contrasted with the third-world conditions on the rail right of way in the foreground. This is one key nexus of the current coalition, which the rail shippers fully recognize:

Photos and videos showing piles of empty boxes littered alongside rail tracks in Los Angeles County, California have gone viral as shipping companies say they've seen a dramatic spike in railroad theft. Some of the boxes are packages from companies like UPS, Amazon and FedEx.

Union Pacific, one of the country's largest railroad companies, says it may avoid operating in Los Angeles County following the spike in thefts, which it blames on lax prosecution of crimes. The containers and trains are locked, but can be broken into.

This reflects the alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, Marx's criminal class, which is fostered by a new crop of prosecutors who won't prosecute violent crime, as well as bail reformers who oppose cash bail. On one hand, to Marx, the Lumpenproletariat are not reliable allies for the working class. On the other, petty criminals in the ghetto and barrio prey almost entirely on their own communities with drugs, shootings, robbery, and prostitution.

The most recent tendency for organized smash-and-grab retail theft and more wholesale looting of trains victimizes the poor and working class, where the retail stores close in their neighborhoods due to such losses, while the supply chain for consumer goods is interrupted, prices rise to compensate for the looting, and jobs disappear in the stores and shipping hubs. But so far, the demagogic politicians -- the Squad and others -- who claim to be acting on behalf of their consituents prevent attempts to remedy the problem and insist on defunding law enforcement. Regarding the lootings,

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has not appeared to take any action or issue a formal reaction to reports of looting from cargo trains near Los Angeles, even though he has taken credit for incremental progress on the supply chain crisis.

President Brandon and his allies in the Democrat establishment can't afford to alienate the Squad, and in any case, Secretary Buttigieg is not there to fix any real transportation issues. Meanwhile, the jobs of the elites don't depend on local retail and distribution, while they're protected from porch pirates in security buildings, well-policed enclaves, and gated communities.

A second factor emerged in the weekend's news, the reemergence of Islamist terrorism in the US, which had been largely inactive since the San Bernardino shootings of December 2015 and the Orlando nightclub attack of June 2016. It's especially significant that the FBI, a Democrat deep state ally, was forced to backtrack on its initial statement that the Coffeyville, TX synagogue hostage crisis was not "specifically related to the Jewish community." Clearly this is a sensitive issue to the Democrat coalition.

Antisemitism and the larger, related issue of "decolonization" are also a key issue for the Squad and its allies in the coalition. Again, the current extremely narrow majorities the Democrats hold in congress mean President Brandon can't afford to alienate even the most extreme adherents of these views. "Decolonization", the view that reason, responsive government, meritocracy, and economic choice are oppressive measures of European domination over people of color, has an associated anti-Christian component, as we saw in the post yesterday in which advocates attempted to restore the Aztec religion to remedy such grievances.

It's worth pointing out that Marxism is philosophically atheist and materialist, although Marx himself was of Jewish ancestry, and the early generations of Soviet and international communists were also of heavily Jewish ancestry. It would never have been part of Marxist doctrine to advocate revival of Islam or Aztec religion, and Marxism was far less specifically antisemitic than National Socialism, which which early Islamism was closely allied,.

Another part of the coalition is, broadly speaking, pansexualists, now including transgenderists. The goal here is increasingly strange, with the most prominent current public figure now Lia Thomas, an Ivy League biological male who competes as a female swimmer. Of all things, the Ivy League as a body has endorsed this:

The Ivy League is, and always has been, of, by, and for the wealthy established elites. It has consistently followed, and continues to follow, discriminatory admissions policies. Just as it endorses transgender athletes, it also now moots dropping standardized admissions tests, once thought to be a meritocratic innovation. Marx never had anything to say about gender dysphoria, although in his personal life he appears to have been well beyond a mere traditionalist in his view of the dominant male role. These people are not Marxists by any stretch.

The public is incresingly aware of the current alignment and is making decisions accordingly. Gallup has found "a dramatic shift over the course of 2021, from a nine-percentage-point Democratic advantage in the first quarter to a rare five-point Republican edge in the fourth quarter." Although Gallup themselves mention that the opinion shift is a remarkable reversal of the polls immediately following the 2020 election, they don't mention an inevitable takeaway from this, that the electorate is collectively reviewing that election and determining that it made a mistake.

The Democrat problem is that it can't change course in any meaningful way, since its current legislative majority is so thin that it can't afford to offend any of its allies.

In additioni, COVID and the associated moral panic were a major factor in the 2020 outcome. We're still coming to terms with what happened.

Fun With The Establishment Clause

The Establishment Clause in the First Amendment to the US Constitution says, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . ." I ran into an interesting recent case that illustrates yet again how useful it is.

The state of California has agreed to remove an “Aztec chant” from its ethnic studies curriculum following a legal settlement with several plaintiffs

The new curriculum would have had students praying to the Aztec dieties Tezkatlipoka, Quetzalcoatl, Huizilopochtli and Xipe Totec.

Part of the chant read “Xipe Totek, Xipe Totek, transformation, liberation, education, emancipation. imagination revitalization, liberation, transformation, decolonization, liberation, education, emancipation, changin’ our situation in this human transformation.”

The co-chair of the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, Tolteka Cuauhtin, had said the chants were to “regenerate indigenous spiritual traditions” as Christians had committed “theocide” to “oppress marginalized groups.”

It occurred to me that pretty much the whole theme of Judeo-Christian scripture, as well as the history of the Church, is theocide, whereby false gods are often quite ruthlessly exterminated. It's just as well the state isn't involved in choosing sides, because at this point, it's almost guaranteed to come down on the wrong side. The story continues,

The Thomas More Society filed a lawsuit in September challenging the chants on behalf of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation and three parents. Special Counsel Paul Jonna said “The Aztecs regularly performed gruesome and horrific acts for the sole purpose of pacifying and appeasing the very beings that the prayers from the curriculum invoke.”

The Thomas More Society site explains further:

“The curriculum’s unequivocal promotion of five Aztec gods or deities through repetitive chanting and affirmation of their symbolic principles constitutes an unlawful government preference toward a particular religious practice,” added Frank Xu, President of Californians for Equal Rights Foundation. “This public endorsement of the Aztec religion fundamentally erodes equal education rights and irresponsibly glorifies anthropomorphic, male deities whose religious rituals involved gruesome human sacrifice and human dismemberment.”

The complaint submitted to the court details the California State Board of Education’s approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, which includes a section of “Affirmation, Chants, and Energizers.” Among these is the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which invokes five Aztec deities. Although labeled as an “affirmation,” it addresses the deities both by name and by their traditional titles, recognizes them as sources of power and knowledge, invokes their assistance, and gives thanks to them. In short, states the complaint, it is a prayer.

. . . Attorneys sent a demand letter to Tony Thurmond, the California Department of Education’s State Superintendent and former California State Assemblyman, on August 26, 2021, asking for removal of the Aztec prayer from the curriculum. A response was requested by September 2, 2021. When none was received, the lawsuit was filed.

The Thomas More Society was among the public interest law firms that were instrumental in securing a ruling from the US Supreme Court that prevented health departments from declaring religious services non-essential.

Hillary 2024?

I think we can safely say that Hillary Clinton is eyeing a run for the presidency in 2024. Dick Morris, a sometime Clinton intimate, is making the case:

Morris said Sunday that if Democrats lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will be toast — paving the way for a second Hillary bid, with husband Bill playing an architect to her strategy.

“There’s a good chance of it,” said Morris, referring to a Hillary-Trump rematch, to John Catsimatidis on the radio host’s WABC show.

“Hillary has set up a brilliant strategy that nobody else is able to do,” Morris added. “Knowing the people around her, I believe there is only one person capable of that level of thinking — and that’s her husband, Bill.

. . . ​”She has set up a zero-sum game where the worse [Biden] does, the better she does, because she’s positioned herself as the Democratic alternative to Biden. Not just to Biden, but to the extreme left in the Democratic Party,” Morris said.

I think Morris is in something of an alternate universe here. As far as anyone can tell, both the Clintons now appear to be old beyond their septuagenarian years, and they're both sick. What on earth did Bill do to contract sepsis from a urinary tract infection? My bet is that Bill was just being Bill and paid the price -- over my working life, I knew lots of guys who came back from Vegas with UTIs. And by 2024, on her current pace, Hillary will look like a cross between Angela Merkel and Golda Meir.

I've already speculated here that Hillary's best chance is to be the candidate to replace Kamala Harris as vice president under the 25th Amendment if Harris resigns. Then she can either step in for Biden before 2024 if Biden resigns or is incapacitated, or she can try for the nomination then if Biden is still in office.

The problem with that is that the Democrats have moved to the left even since 2016, but beyond that, Hillary isn't really credible as a moderate alternative to Biden or Trump. Biden, after all, was supposed to be the Clinton-style modrate himself, but the story of his presidency so far is that he's caved consistently to Pelosi and the Squad. How would Hillary be different? And to move in as vice president under the 25th Amendment, she would need a majority in both houses of congress.

Up to November of this year, this means she'd need the approval of the Squad. After November, it's likely one or both houses would be under Republican control, and Republican majorities likely wouldn't approve a candidate who'd use the post to campaign in 2024. They'd probably want a non-controversial figure, possibly even a moderate Republican, who wouldn't be a serious 2024 contender. A difficulty there is that many potential names, like Colin Powell, are no longer available.

A Trump-style Republican who runs in 2024, Trump himself or someone like DeSantis, would probably use a "fool us once" strategy against any Democrat who claims to be a moderate, which Hillary is not in any case. They'd simply say you voted for Biden thinking he wasn't what he turned out to be. How can you trust anyone else who needs the support of the far-left Democrat base?

I don't see it. Actually, I thought Dick Morris was smarter.

Trump Is Back

I was looking at the conservative aggregators this morning, and most reported optimistically about Trump's Florence, AZ rally last night. The surprise was this report from The Atlantic, Trump Soft-Launches His 2024 Campaign.

Tonight, deep in the Arizona desert, thousands of people chanted for Donald Trump. They had braved the wind for hours—some waited the entire day—just to get a glimpse of the defeated former president. And when he finally appeared on stage, as Lee Greenwood played from the loudspeakers, the crowd roared as though Trump were still the commander-in-chief. To many of them, he is.

“I ran twice and we won twice,” Trump told his fans. "This crowd is a massive symbol of what took place, because people are hungry for the truth. They want their country back."

. . . Trump chose Arizona for this moment for a reason. In this state, the Big Lie thrives. Trump only lost Arizona by 10,000 votes in 2020, giving him and his supporters the space, apparently, to allege that the close outcome was the result of left-wing chicanery, the result of ballot stuffing and interference by Venezuelans, among other false claims. State lawmakers who spent the past year reviewing the ballots ultimately found zero evidence of mischief. But that didn’t matter to Trump’s supporters. GOP politicians across Arizona adopted Trump’s lies anyway. Many of them were guests of honor tonight.

Now, I'm not quite sure what qualifies as a "lie" here. Let's take another well-known example:

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I “But Joe, you’re ten years dead”
“I never died” says he,
“I never died” says he.

Is this a lie? I would call it rhetorical hyperbole.

One Republican talking point, independent of Trump, has been that the circumstances of 2020 temporarily legalized ballot strategies that indeed favored Trump's opponent, and the For the People Act that died in the Senate last week was a failed attempt to make those temporary strategies permanent. There can be no disagreement that electoral reforms in states like Georgia, which President Biden has specifically and angrily denounced, were implemented to eliminate the advantage the 2020 temproary electoral changes gave Democrats.

Even if detailed reviews of ballots showed no irregularity under unique 2020 conditions, it doesn't mean that temporary loosening of ballot requirements didn't influence the election's outcome -- Biden's own objection to Georgia's electoral reforms in the wake of the election argue persuasively for that conclusion. If Trump says he "won twice", it seems to me that's allowable in this context.

In addition, Trump voters are overwhelmingly acting as though the election was legitimate, at least under the conditions at the time. There have been no armed insurrections contesting any local, state, or federal 2020 election. (Get serious, the Januatry 6 Capitol demonstration was not any such thing.) The Trump voters are beginning to organize to exercise legal and constitutionally protected redress in upcoming congressional elections. This alone is a recognition of the process's legitimacy.

The Atlantic article strikes me as disingenuous in its implication that a coup is somehow in the works:

Now that the midterm season is fully underway, Trump will be out and about more often, hosting rallies and stumping for the any Republicans desperate enough to lie about the election in exchange for his support. He will in some ways be reintroducing himself to the country: Here I am, America, back after a stolen election, ready to win by any means possible.

I asked a group of older attendees if they were excited to see Trump run again in 2024. They all were. Two of them argued about whether he could take office before 2025. "It's not possible," a retiree named Michael, who declined to give his last name, said. "I think it is!" a retiree named Susan Higgins said. "The military has to come in, and take [Biden] away."

By the end of the evening, Trump was having trouble pretending that he isn’t actively running for president. He previewed his lines of attack on Biden over Afghanistan, immigration, and inflation, recited a litany of policy changes a Republican-controlled Congress would be able to make, and promised that “in 2024, we are going to take back the White House.” Sam and Dave’s “Hold on I’m Coming,” played as he exited, and the song sounded like a promise.

Trump himself is not quoted as making any remark that implies he intends to do anything but support candidates in the midterm elections who in turn support his agenda, and it's generally recognized that he will be a kingmaker in the 2022 midterms. In 2016, his nomination came as enough of a surprise that there could be no organized effort to reform the rest of the Republican party along his lines, and that was a disadvantage that limited his effectiveness during that term.

At this point, his period out of office is beginning to look like an opportunity.