Memorial Day

Several years ago on a trip we were at one of the national military parks on Memorial Day and saw the flags at the graves at the cemetery there.  It was something to see.

Memoria Day is a holiday to honor and remember the men and recently women in the armed forces who fought for this country and didn’t make it back.  Americans should remember what we are honoring them for – valor, courage, perseverance, proper patriotism, and steadfastness and fidelity to duty in the face of danger which proved fatal.

Doing so is especially important these days with much of the traditional media in the hands of leftists. From the 1960s through the 1980s American leftists generally publicly despised and demeaned the armed forces. That turned out poorly for them politically, and in recent times they have tried to give an impression in pubic of supporting people in uniform and honoring the dead from America’s wars. Since many  leftists generally speak well of people other than themselves only when they can represent them as members of a class of victims, and as they are unwilling to speak of (and perhaps unable to appreciate or even understand) the qualities mentioned above, they have settled on sacrifice as what they will declare as the praiseworthy thing about the honored dead.

Most conservatives and other thoughtless people in the media have gone along. They shouldn’t have. It is wrong in fact as a simple thought experiment shows. If sacrifice is the criterion, one would have to have more respect for an imagined invasion by soldiers at Normandy or marines on Iwo who marched ashore unarmed and got slaughtered to a man producing a total sacrifice than for the brave men, survivors and fallen, who fought those battles.  It also shortchanges those Memorial Day honors by ignoring or dismissing their quality of character and martial virtues.  It skips over the importance of what they fought for since one can sacrifice for anything. That makes it harder for young people to understand that from these honored dead they should take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. Lincoln understood. The political and media characters these days don’t.  

Morningstar

 A few years ago Morningstar had a fine web site. It was designed for investors to give them useful information and interesting opinions about investing. Some of their stuff was behind a pay wall, but a large amount of it was free to anyone who signed up with his email address.  A reader could look up information about stocks and funds and track prices of investments easily. The usually well written articles were focused on investing rather than politics. They were followed by often lively and informative sections of comments by readers.  It was a good place to do some basic research, get some new ideas, and share thoughts with others with similar interests.

A pessimist would have said it was too good to last, and in this case he would have been right. Things began to change noticeably when Morningstar brought on a climate change and ESG guru to deliver repeating homilies and exhortations on the green religion. Many readers found his stuff annoying, irrelevant, and an inappropriate deviation from Morningstar’s former practice of staying out of the game of political advocacy and said so in comments after his articles. At least they did until Morningstar decided to stop printing comments from readers. From there things have gone downhill. These days the site has gone whole hog on the faith and features multiple ESG puff pieces, sales talks, and infomercials just about every day.  In the last year or so it has begun regularly publishing articles pushing various sorts of  “diversity”, race and sex quotas in businesses, and the supposed need to treat investors in different ways based on their sex or  race. (A recent article pondered what “Latinix” investors might want from a financial advisor. I would think they might want competent help in investing successfully, but that’s just a guess.)

Some of the good writers are still there, and one can still get useful information on stocks and funds, but  the emphasis has changed. That may have created an opportunity for a competitor to come along and do what Morningstar used to do. I’d be a customer, and I think there would be many others.

Mean Tweets

 These days one often sees articles or cartoons on conservative web sites listing, usually accurately, various very bad things coming from Biden and his administration and then saying something like “but at least we don’t have any more mean tweets”. The reference to the tweets is intended to stand for the more general notion that usually Republican voters who did not vote for Trump foolishly made a decision based on not caring for his personality instead of the policies and plans of the candidates and got something substantively harmful to themselves to avoid having to put up with something only annoying.  They have a point. Usually while deciding which candidate is the worse human being matters, learning and judging each one’s plans and beliefs is more important in deciding which is the lesser evil. The things the Biden-Harris gang are doing are very bad, and the things they want to do are far worse. But the conservatives are still wrong.  

All along Trump was an arrogant, dishonest, unprincipled jackass and ignoramus who had no business being president. That would have been plain enough if he had never taken to Twitter. The tweets were just something that highlighted the fact. The best reason to have supported him over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was that she seemed to be an at least equally repulsive person, and her plans and policies were worse. He was still the overall lesser evil in terms of policy in 2020. The important question was whether his character, temperament, incompetence, and lack of principles were exceptionally bad enough to make that not matter. I thought they were but realized that the answer was not obvious, and that many thoughtful people disagreed and planned to vote for him. However, his actions after losing the election changed that, and the answer became obvious.  They were inexcusable throughout, and after  December 14^th he was openly behaving as an enemy of the republic.  The country is better with him gone.

His defenders are also wrong as a matter of practical politics. When a person fouls up and makes a really bad decision, it usually is better to admit the mistake and cut losses instead of throwing good money and good effort after bad. Voters in Republican primaries in 2016 made a very bad mistake in selecting Trump over a number of people who were both qualified to be president and able to defeat Hillary Clinton. That decision eventually led to Republicans losing majorities in both houses, losing the presidency, and temporarily losing some of their natural constituency in suburbs.  Trump was not a Reagan or an FDR bringing net numbers of new voters to his party. He brought some in, but he chased many away. He won a squeaker in 2016 against a remarkably unlikeable opponent, led the party to a beating in 2018, and then lost re-election to an elderly, seemingly mentally slipping bungler who scarcely campaigned. That is not much in the way of winning and winning until you get tired of winning. It is time for Republicans to fold ‘em and walk away or even run.  They need to accept that they bet wrong, take their beating, and move on and try to learn from the mistake and win the next time. The Biden gang is giving them an opportunity to do that.

The Bulwark

 The Bulwark is a very diverse website, in the literal as opposed to the contemporary sense of the word. It will have fine articles by serious and thoughtful writers, well written though wrongheaded public relations pieces for the Democrats, vulgar gonzo-like stuff by someone who may not have realized he is not Hunter S.  Thompson, and crazy leftist screeds about things such as abolishing the Republican party or uncovering a Republican plot to create a one party state, often all on the same day.

There was a recent article by one of the Bulwark’s regulars who writes on legal subjects that at least implied that Attorney General Garland may be going after Republicans such as Giuliani out of pique and a desire for revenge for being denied a seat on the supreme court. That is a harsh and disqualifying thing to say about Garland and something he surely would deny.   However, the author said it as if it were a good thing that would serve the Republicans right. It wasn’t Chelsea Handler demanding to send people to prison without trials, but it was strange enough in a publication which rightly and repeatedly attacked Trump for his lack of respect for propriety and the rule of law.

One can have been right in opposing Trump and predicting how he would behave after losing and still have other opinions that are neither valid, reasonable, or even sane.  Some of Trump’s enemies are, if not deranged, at least unhealthily obsessed on the subject of Trump and Trumpists, sometimes to the point of behaving like him. Some others are leftist authoritarians who, while pretending to fret over a “threat to democracy”,  have less use for the republic and the liberal order than he did.  A few of both write for The Bulwark, and the people running the site seem to like it that way.