St. Patrick's Day Note a Month Late

 

Consider the following axiomatic system:

1. Leprechauns exist.

2. Leprechauns are non-human humanoids all of whom are three feet tall or less.

3. Leprechauns occur only in Ireland.

4. Leprechauns’ clothing and possessions consist only of things producible by the technology of the late Middle Ages.

5..Some leprechauns have hair and beards.

These axioms seem consistent. Their consistency is as nearly obvious as that of axioms in some other well known systems.

One can use these axioms to prove meaningful theorems such as

1. Every humanoid over five feet tall is not a leprechaun.

2. Leprechauns do not have cell phones.

3. The clothing of leprechauns is made from natural materials.

One can elaborate the system by adding another axiom such as

“6. A red unicorn lives in the same part of Ireland as the leprechauns do”,

and argue that both it and its denial likely are consistent with the first five. This axiom would be useful in proving theorems not provable by the first five alone.

Of course the system and its conclusions are false and have nothing to do with reality. There are not any leprechauns. One can create a very similar system by replacing the original axiom 1 with “Leprechauns are fictitious creatures of stories and legends.” The new system would be demonstrably consistent and also true, since one easily could display a storybook containing leprechauns satisfying all five axioms.

This fairly silly example illustrates the fact that in considering systems of axioms, one has to look at each axiom and decide whether it is really axiomatic, that is .whether it should be accepted as true about something. One cannot escape from the need to consider meaning. The same thing holds in cases that are not silly.

Trump's Tariffs

 

People have known all along that Trump’s ideas on trade were bad. Now we are getting to see how bad. His tariffs will create more price inflation for Americans, annoy America’s allies (and perhaps alienate some of them), damage American exporters, harm innocent people around the world dependent on trade for their livelihoods, and probably cause a recession and a bad stock market. Other than that, they are just a massive tax increase on Americans delivered by the party that claims to believe in keeping taxes low. (His people are claiming between six hundred and eight hundred billion dollars a year, none paid by the man behind the tree.) I hope his sycophants are right in claiming that they are a ploy to get other nations to cut their tariffs, but I doubt it. Besides being deeply economically ignorant, I think he and his supporters are also motivated in this by a general crude nativism that shows up in some of their other policies and desires. If this goes on, we all may be paying a big price for showing them durn furriners who the big dog is.

There is a useful aspect to all this though. With Republican politicians suddenly turning back flips over a tax increase, it can be a useful lesson to people on just how phony and unprincipled these public servants are.

There is an exception. Nations should not engage in free trade with a hostile foreign power, and particularly should not have a hostile foreign power as a source of any important products. The only hostile foreign power with whom there is much trade is China. It would have made sense for Trump to act to restrict that trade, but that trade alone.

Lesser Evil

 

In November I voted for Donald Trump for the first time in either a general or a primary election. It was entirely a case of trying to select the lesser evil. I knew he was unqualified in ability, knowledge, temperament, and character for the job. I thought his behavior after losing in 2020 and his later demands to overturn the Constitution and return him to power disqualified him from holding any office in the United States. I regretted that the voters in the Republican primaries did not agree. But I finally decided that he was likely to harm the country less than a fourth and farther left Obama administration led by a committed leftist with an unconvincing phony moderate act, a frightening running mate, and an inability to side unequivocally with Israel and civilization against Hamas and savagery.

I still think I probably was right. In just a few weeks Trump has done some good things and some harm. The tariffs and their capriciously changing implementations have been a mess, but there has been a successful beginning on work to cut bad programs and expenditures in the government and shrink its workforce. Trump’s absurd claim that Ukraine started its war with Russia was despicable, and cutting off support for Ukraine even temporarily was inexcusable. Yet he may be able to negotiate an acceptable peace. He selected some poorly qualified people for some important jobs in his administration, and picked a few who were totally wrong for the jobs they got. But he also has selected some strong people who are doing things that needed doing.

As with any other president, we should hope Trump succeeds when he tries to do something good and fails when he tries to do something wrong. I expect there will be plenty of each, and I still wish Republican voters had shown better sense in the primaries.

Trump and the Courts

 

It has been interesting to read and listen to reactions from conservatives to federal judges blocking some of Trump’s orders. Most have been irritated. Some have wanted Trump to ignore or defy the rulings. At least one site, the Federalist, has proposed ignoring not only lower courts but also the supreme court if it comes to that. They have argued not only against specific rulings, some of which may be wrong and may be reversed by higher courts, but against the idea of a mere federal district judge thwarting the desires of the president and his administration. They are completely wrong. It is .the job of the federal judiciary to rule on the legality and constitutionality of the actions of the federal government., and cases usually start at a district court. Presidents and other officials have no authority to do whatever they want, irrespective of any claimed mandates, but only what they legally are allowed to do.

It is a little saddening and a reminder of the general phoniness and hypocrisy of people in politics and the political media to recall that many of these conservatives used to claim that as a matter of principle, they were for limited government, constraints on executive power, and the rule of law and generally supported rulings by district court judges blocking power grabs by the Biden and Obama administrations. That changed when their guy got in. They need to reconsider. Questions of honesty and principle aside, they at least should ask themselves if they want the next Democrat president to be able to do as he or she likes by executive orders not subject to review by courts.

.Much of what Trump wants to do with the bureaucracy is right. A lot of what the Doge people have discovered is wrong or even disgraceful. There are many federal jobs, programs, grants, and organizations that should be eliminated. Trump should be free to take any actions in that direction for which he has legal authority and should have to request legislation to accomplish or authorize the rest. The courts and probably the supreme court will have to decide where the limits are. Donald Trump must and his fans should accept the final decisions as binding.

Heroism and Victimhood

 

There were two article at the Free Press this week about men and heroism. Both were well written, but one in particular misunderstood heroism in a way that is typical of out cultural milieu by its emphasis on sacrifice. It is an example of the present and recent tendency to glorify victims and victimhood, sometimes to the extent of an apparent inability to admire or care about much else. It shows up when politicians and media people try to say something nice about veterans and members of the armed forces. It is almost always some cliché about their sacrifice. Yet the real virtue is not sacrifice but valor – doing a tough, dangerous job with honor and fidelity at mortal risk. One can illustrate this with a simple thought experiment. If the men who stormed the beaches at Normandy on D-Day had gone ashore meek and unarmed and been slaughtered to a man while accomplishing nothing, their sacrifice would have been complete. Yet I doubt that reasonable people would have found that admirable or that Americans would rightly be commemorating their deeds eighty years later.

Heroes sometimes fail and sometimes suffer and die, but that is not what makes them heroic. The present day apotheosis of victims and victimhood is not only incompatible with heroism and the desire for the heroic. It is antithetical to them.

A Little over a Week

 

It has been a little over a week since Trump’s inauguration. He has done some good things such as his executive orders on the border, DEI, pausing hiring and new regulations until his people are in place in the agencies, free speech, and ending the de facto EV mandate. He has done some bad things such as pardoning all the participants in the riots of January 6^th 2021. He has done some plain nutty things such as proposing renaming the Gulf of Mexico and threatening to take back the Panama Canal and annex Greenland.

The worst thing he has done is break the law. The order on birthright citizenship is clearly unconstitutional. The only people in the United States not subject to its laws are foreign diplomats and their families. Everyone else in the country is subject to them. (If illegal aliens weren’t, they would not be under the laws defining them as illegal.) Firing the inspectors general without notifying congress in advance is illegal. The order on TikTok requires an awfully strained interpretation of the ninety day grace period for a pending sale not to be illegal. There was no legal authority for offering federal employees a buy out and no appropriation to pay those who would accept it.

His conservative fans ought to care about this. It is not only a violation of principles they claim to embrace, it is a dangerous precedent. I doubt if they would like the country’s next Democrat president defying the law and trying to rule by decree. If many of them have spoken up, I haven’t heard about it. In the meantime the rest of us surely should care about it and speak up.

Trump's First Day

 

Trump’s inauguration and first day went about as I expected. The speech was too boastful political, and rude. The executive orders on the border, DEI, pausing hiring and new regulations until his people are in place in the agencies, free speech, and ending the de facto EV mandate are good. (The last one may take a while and may need to be done with finesse rather than directly, but it will be good when it happens.) The order on birthright citizenship is unconstitutional, and the one on TikTok requires an awfully strained interpretation of the ninety day grace period for a pending sale not to be illegal. The stuff about taking back the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico is just nutty.

I think giving pardons to the participants in the riots of January 6^th 2021 is mainly wrong. (Exceptions would be for any innocent people who were convicted unjustly, for any who were denied a fair trial, for those who have been jailed for years without trial, and for those who were convicted of offenses worse than ones they committed.) However, I do think that commutations for most of the rioters would have been appropriate. They deserved punishment, but it should have been condign punishment based on what the did and their prior records, not vindictive and excessive punishment because of their politics.

I think we are better off with Trump than we would have been with Harris and a fourth and farther left Obama term. Some bad trends have to be reversed. That does not mean we will be as well off as we could have been if voters in Republican primaries had shown better sense.

Laughing at the Jefe

 

I know many people are worried about the state of the republic. There are things to worry about - from Trump and company, from their opponents, and especially from authoritarian left and right wing enemies of the liberal order and liberal principles of individual rights. People who care about that order and those principles should expect to have to stand up and promote and defend them.

However, they should not let worry get the best of them or become too fearful. I agree with those who have pointed out how lucky we in America are to live in a country where the maximum jefe, in command of the armed forces and the federal secret police and prosecutors, announces he is altering the fundamental law of the nation by decree, and people just laugh at him, and nothing happens. It is still a great country. It would be a better one if we could create a political environment in which even a demented big chief and his gang would know better than to try such a stunt. But we should recognize and appreciate how well off we are.

DEI in LA

 

Besides the obvious direct diminution of quality in organizations that hire and promote based on diversity and equity rather that ability, performance, and effectiveness, there are important, sometimes subtle, secondary harmful effects.

Esprit matters in groups or organizations, especially when working on something tough or difficult. So does a hard, masculine ethos (which women certainly can and do adopt) of competence and getting the job done. The sort of things that have gone on in California damage the first and reject the second. Preaching the hardcore DEI/leftist stuff of condemning logical thinking, objectivity, can do attitudes, and urgency as evil attributes of white supremacy would make things  even worse. I think there has been some of that in California as well.

None of this caused the fires, but it is a good guess that it may have made them worse.

Carter

 

Since Jimmy Carter died very few people have said he he was a good or even an adequate president. That would be a hard sell. Instead there has been a consensus from people in the traditional media (much like the years long consensus that Joe Biden was mentally competent) that after leaving office he had a great post-presidential life and career, perhaps the greatest of any American president.

That would be wrong even if people restricted their consideration only to the benign or beneficial things Carter did. To cite three obvious examples, John Quincy Adams served several terms in the house of representatives after leaving the presidency, consistently opposed slavery in those years, and in the Amistad case successfully defended the kidnapped Africans who had taken over a Spanish slave ship. William Howard Taft served years as chief justice of the United States supreme court after losing reelection. Herbert Hoover worked to provide food and other relief to people in devastated areas of Europe after World War II and served the Truman and Eisenhower administrations as the head of commissions on reorganizing the administrative branch of the federal government.

However, a lot of what Carter after did after 1980 was neither benign nor beneficial. He meddled consistently in foreign policy, often excusing or even defending anti-American tyrants and terrorists. People who accused him of being an antisemite had evidence for doing so. He supported the anti-Israeli BDS movement, likened Israel to an apartheid state, and defended terrorist violence against Jews in Israel. While not as bad  an ex-president as he had been a president, he was bad enough.

A New Villain

 

As recently as a couple of months ago the party line from Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media was that Trump was a dangerous, out of control, megalomaniacal would be Duce who would try to lord it over us as a dictator.

That did not work out for them. Trump won, and according to polls is popular with the public. It became time to try something else. So the story this week is that Elon Musk is is the villain and real president calling all the shots and leading poor, hapless, helpless weenie boy Trump around by the nose. In its characterization of Trump, the whole thing is a fast one eighty suggesting 1984.

My guess is that the Rasputin story won’t work, and pretty soon we will be told that Musk is just another sycophant with no real authority, that the real danger is someone else (probably Trump again but maybe RFK), and that no one in the know ever thought otherwise. It is galling to be lied to so amateurishly and unconvincingly by people who think you are so stupid they do not have to keep their stories even semi-straight over short intervals. It can insult people’s intelligence and make them angry.

More War on Christmas

 

I wrote this last year, and I decided to post it again.

Conservatives often complain this time of year about a war on Christmas by the leftists – generally attributing it to leftist disdain for Christianity. Many leftists do have a problem with the Christmas season. It has become a point of political correctness not to say Merry Christmas. There are scolding warnings in various media that references to Christmas should be avoided to avoid offending or “marginalizing” people who do not celebrate the holiday. Ads for retail companies talk only about holiday shopping and holiday gifts, not Christmas shopping and gifts, as though the corporate weasels running those companies expect to make their numbers and get their bonuses based on purchases of Kwanzaa gifts or New Year’s presents. The conservatives have a point, but I think their explanation misses something important.

There surely are leftists who are hostile to Christianity, and that likely explains some of the so-called war on Christmas, but not all or, to me, even most. Leftists usually say or do nothing about Easter, and Easter is a far more nearly completely religious holiday than Christmas. Christmas in our time is as much a secular holiday as a religious one, and many non-Christians enjoy Christmas and the Christmas season. Santa, Rudolph, Frosty, decorating trees, decking halls, giving presents, Christmas dinners, and a season to be jolly have little or nothing to do with Christianity. I think that for many leftists, the real difficulty is not with the Christmas but with the merry. A season of ordinary, unsupervised people enjoying themselves and their lives, vigorously displaying good will to the people they meet, giving and receiving presents, and generally feeling benevolent and happy, on their own without external direction goes against many of the left’s fundamental notions of how the world is and should be. It is no wonder many lefties do not care for it and feel uncomfortable with it or even threatened by it.

They might feel worse if they knew how little effect their feelings and opinions have had. Except among cowardly corporations which can be bullied into just about anything and the generally left leaning traditional media, their efforts seem to me to have been mainly a failure. In their private lives people behave as they like and enjoy Christmas. That’s good. They should keep it up.

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Happy New Year.

Not Dead Yet

 

Many Trumpists and conservatives are gloating that the results of this year’s election show that the traditional media organizations have lost their power to influence the country or even have become moribund. I think that is wrong, and those in the traditional media did remarkably well, given the cards they had drawn. One should remember that back in the spring Kamala Harris was less popular than Joe Biden and  publicly noticed mainly as an object  of ridicule.

Then Biden dropped out and she was picked as the candidate, giving the traditional media people the task of selling a foolish, unlikable, inarticulate, leftist, lightweight as America’s sweetheart. It was a hard job, and they did it fairly well. She did not lose by much. They were helped by the fact that her opponent was Donald Trump, but what they did is still impressive.

They are not dead yet, and those who do not care for them need to realize that and be ready to play the next hands. The game is not close to over.

Following the Party Line at the Museum

 

Last week Debby and I went to an exhibit at the Kimbell museum of Dutch art from the great days of the Dutch republic, with most of the paintings and prints coming from a museum in Boston. It was magnificent. Anyone who can should take in the exhibit. We went twice.

However, the notes accompanying the paintings are better skipped if one is interested in art instead of dulling, repetitive, irrelevant, woke sermonizing. A beautiful painting of ships is attached to a note reminding readers that some sailing ships were used to transport slaves. A still life of luxury items has a note about slaves or exploited locals in some of the countries where the items originated, and so on and on and on.

What is appropriate in a history book or seminar is not at an art exhibit. In an art exhibit it is both jarring and distracting and an example of how pernicious and pervasive the critical race/DEI stuff is and of how hostile it is to Western civilization. I doubt that an exhibit of artifacts from ancient Egypt curated by the same writers would be accompanied repeatedly reminders that the pyramids were not built by skilled union labor or that notes accompanying an exhibit of Chinese art would dwell on the prevalence of slavery in China throughout its history or that an exhibit of Indian sculpture would feature commentary on the evils of the caste system.

So, go to the exhibit. Skip over the notes. And maybe drop the people at the museum a text or email saying what they are doing is wrong, because it is. And people should speak up. We and our civilization do not have to take this lying down.

Mandates

 

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.” -

George Washington

Trump and his supporters are claiming their narrow victory has given them a mandate to do as they like. This is not a surprise. It is what our politicians do when they win. Biden and the Democrats treated his narrow victory as a mandate to do as they liked. The fact is that there are no mandates from the people for politicians to do as they like. Politicians just like to say there are. Politicians are and must be restrained by the laws and the Constitution regardless of how many votes they get. They also should remember that one election is just one election and that the nation does not speak in unison. Even in the landslides of FDR, LBJ, Nixon, and Reagan, around four of ten voters opposed the winner. LBJ’s and Nixon’s parties lost the presidency the next time around after their victories. A party has won three presidential elections in a row only once since World War II. Politicians should not assume that their victories mean “the people” love them or even are willing to tolerate them enough to stick with them over time.

Victorious politicians should go easy, respect the rights and opinions of those who opposed them, recognize their victories as the ephemeral things they are, and behave reasonably and moderately. In neither of the two major parties have they been doing that. They should pay attention to the words and warning of a better man than any of them and start.

Trouble Already

 

I have written very harsh things about Donald Trump. I still believe them. I wanted the senate to convict him after his second impeachment. I wanted Republicans to move on from him after he left office in disgrace. I wanted Haley or DeSantis to stop him in the primaries. I wanted the Democrats to replace Biden with a moderate opponents of the left could support. I still wish one of those things had happened, but none of them did.

Last week I voted for Trump. It was not because I thought Harris was a worse human being or a bigger fool. I did not think that. It was because I finally decided that, by my best guess, the country would be worse off and suffer more with four years of her and the Democrats than with four years of Trump and the Republicans.

So I voted for Trump, despite expecting him to do some very bad and foolish things. Well he has started. Matt Gaetz is a completely inappropriate choice for attorney general that the senate definitely should reject. Surely there will be four Republican senators to join with the Democrats and vote his nomination down. Of course I can hear my friends who voted against Trump saying maybe not and don’t call me Shirley. I hope they do not get the last laugh.

Post Election Follies

 

“I Haven’t Seen Democrats This Mad

Since Republicans Freed Their Slaves”

-post election internet meme

 A person does not have to be a fan of Donald Trump to be amused by the stuff coming from some Democrats since the election (not the ordinary Democrat voters who are disappointed and concerned but keeping their heads). We have shaved heads, sex strikes, people checking with Google to see how to get to Canada, tearful TV late night show hosts, Harris people blaming Biden, Biden people blaming Harris, somebody blaming almost everybody except Obama, various friends of democracy blaming the voters for being too stupid to appreciate them, all sorts of people blaming men, and colleges and law schools offering students cookies and coloring books to ease their suffering. It’s a show.

There is also the phoniness that has been revealed in the last few days. As Kat Tempf and others have noticed, all the people on leftist TV outfits who claimed they would be imprisoned if Trump won showed up for work after the election as if nothing had happened. One would think that if they believed what they had said, at least one of them would have gone into hiding or run for the border. Since none has or likely will, one may assume they were lying all along. The same thing goes all the more so for those who claimed Trump was another Hitler who would become a dictator and end the republic. If they really believed that, surely at least one of them would be getting out while the getting is good.

I think a special prize for phoniness should go to those such as some of the gang at the Bulwark who have spent the last few years proclaiming preserving democracy as the crucial issue of the age and their role in defending it as a high calling. That was before the election went the wrong way for them. Now they are declaring that the demoi are fools not to be trusted, that their stupid choice should not be respected, and that its implementation should be resisted and sabotaged starting immediately. A person half expects them to follow the Babylon Bee’s lead and come out for abolishing both the electoral college and the popular vote to save our democracy. It may become hard for them the get people to take their “we have no tribal loyalties; we’re just warriors in the sacred cause of democracy” pitch seriously.

I voted Republican against the left rather than for Trump, and I will oppose some of the stuff Trump plans to do. But you have to give the guy credit for both triggering some fine entertainment and highlighting some serious phoniness in the last week.

Getting too Worked Up

 

There are stories in the news about people breaking with friends or even relatives over displeasure with which candidate and party they favor in tomorrow’s election. This strikes me as being both wrong and a little nutty. Yet it seems to happen a lot. (I experienced a mild version of it in early 2017 after Trump became president. A relative ordered me out of his house, not for voting for Trump, which I had not, but for joking about Trump. Apparently to him Trump was so dark an evil as to make humor or levity on the subject too inappropriate or immoral to tolerate. That was strange and not profitable for any concerned.) It is not only that a person’s voting preferences are not the most important thing about him. It is that they usually are among the far less important things about him and a truly asinine criterion for judging him as a human being. It is a corrosive thing to see politics as more important than it is, to make it determinative of one’s opinions of others and even one’s outlook on life. It’s just politics after all. In this election we have two lousy candidates, one of whom will win and do some bad things. It matters, but we are lucky to live in a country where it does not matter that much. The country’s culture, principles, and people are far more important and far better than its politicians and government. Regardless of which of the two losers wins the election, the country and the republic will abide. People on both sides who are giving apocalyptic warnings about the other side should look around, calm down, and see that. They are not doing us any good.

Strange at the Bulwark

 

Despite the claims of being committed to defending liberal democracy without tribal loyalties or partisan prejudices, for a long time the work of the Bulwark mainly has been shilling for the Democrats. Lately its writers have gone well beyond that to something pretty nearly Manichean.

Today there was a silly piece on the site condemning libertarians for the sin of “bothsideism” (that is, accurately recognizing that there are threats to liberty from both Republicans and Democrats) and not automatically throwing in with the Dems as all right thinking people should.

Other writers at the Bulwark have been equating voting for Trump to favoring authoritarianism, fascism or, lately, actual Hitlerism, and seeing it as evidence of something frightening and “dark” in the people who will do it. This of course is nuts. Millions of people will vote for Trump despite not liking him or even disliking him, because they see him as less bad than the leftist alternative. And among the ones who do like him, I would guess that the number of them wanting a right wing authoritarian state is smaller than the number of Democrat voters wanting a Marxist one.

It is all a little strange. It’s a political campaign, for gosh sake, not Armageddon. Maybe part of what is going on at the Bulwark is just panic over the increasing likelihood that Trump will win. It surely is not good for the country. I think either Trump or Harris would be a bad president, but I do not plan to anathematize people who vote for either of them. We are all still Americans, and the partisan fanatics and tribalists at the Bulwark should stop seeing half of us as children of darkness. Besides, it makes them sound a whole lot like Trump at his craziest and nastiest.

How I Will Vote

 

I dislike Donald Trump. I have never voted for him in either a primary or a general election. I have written some very harsh things about him, and I still believe them. I wanted the senate to convict him after the second impeachment in 2021. I wanted the Republicans to move on from him after he left office in disgrace. I wanted Jack Smith to convict him of one of his crimes. I wanted DeSantis or Haley to defeat him for the Republican nomination. I wanted the Democrats to replace Biden as their nominee with a moderate rather than a leftist. I still wish any of those things had happened.

But none of them did. So now we get to choose between Trump and Harris as to which would be the lesser evil (which is a different question from which of them is the less bad human being or the lesser fool). The choice is not an obvious one, but I think it is likely that the country would be better off and suffer less with a Trump administration than a Harris one.

There are issues on which each of them is better or less bad than the other. However, on the important issues of national defense, illegal immigration, personal freedom, the economy, and siding with Israel and civilization and against Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and barbarism, Trump and the Republicans are better than Harris and the Democrats. A Trump administration would be likely to be harder on our enemies and to move America’s armed forces away from spending time and effort on various irrelevant or even harmful leftist fads and causes and make them more nearly fully directed toward the crucial mission of deterring and, if necessary, defeating the country’s enemies. Trump would try to  restrict illegal immigration, while Harris probably would keep things much as they are now. On personal freedom, Trump and the Republicans would be likely to restrain federal bureaucrats, cut at least some regulations, and generally make Americans a little freer to live their lives as they like, while Harris and the Democrats would be likely to do the opposite. (Some point to abortion as an exception to this, but as a practical matter, abortion is moot at the federal level. The filibuster is not going away, and there will not be sixty votes in the senate for new laws restricting abortion. The issue will stay with the states.) Trump has some bad economic schemes, but overall, Harris’s are worse. Finally, the Republicans mainly are clear that in the present conflict Israel is right and should win decisively, and its enemies are wrong and should lose disastrously. Too many Democrats including Harris are “nuanced” or worse on that.

While both want to do things I think are seriously wrong, Trump would have the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, and  the traditional media working against him as he tried to do some of the bad things he  wants to do, while Harris would have the same people working with and for her as she tried to do some of the bad things she  wants to do. Because of that she probably is more capable of doing harm than he is.

So I will vote for Trump. I don’t like it. I am displeased with the stupid voters in Republican primaries for putting me and the country in this predicament. But I’ll do it. It won’t be fun, but I’ll do it.

Finishing the Job

 

The Israeli armed forces have begun a land campaign on Lebanon against Hezbollah. This war and their continuing war against Hamas in Gaza are conflicts of civilization against savagery and barbarism. Americans should be unequivocally for Israel in this war and against the savages. I would guess most of us are. However, our government is not. In Gaza the Biden administration has advocated consistently for an end to the fighting that would leave Hamas surviving as a functional organization, an outcome which would be a strategic victory for Hamas and Iran. In Lebanon it has pushed for restraint and diplomacy at a time when Israel seems to be in a good position to eradicate the menace of Hezbollah, a diplomatic outcome which would deprive Israel of a needed victory and leave Hezbollah in place, dangerous, and functioning. Here at home Biden and Harris have treated pro- Hamas, antisemitic, anti-civilization leftist as very fine people, and officials have appeared less concerned about attacks on and threats against American Jews than about conservative parents getting uppity at school board meetings.

The whole thing is disgraceful, and, for Harris, disqualifying. I hope the Israelis ignore our officials and get the job done fully and decisively both for themselves and the rest of us.

Cheney and Kennedy

 

When Robert Kennedy went against his political party and endorsed Trump, Democrat party flacks in the traditional media denounced him as a political traitor. When Dick Cheney went against his political party and endorsed Harris, Democrat party flacks in the traditional media praised him for his courage and independence.

When Robert Kennedy went against his political party and endorsed Trump, Republican party flacks in the conservative media praised him for his courage and independence. When Dick Cheney went against his political party and endorsed Harris, Republican party flacks in the conservative media denounced him as a political traitor.

I think both Kennedy and Cheney deserve some respect for what they did. Neither had much or anything to gain by doing it. Each of them would have done just fine keeping his mouth shut. Each probably knew he would be attacked by former friends, colleagues, and even, in Kennedy’s case, by relatives. Whatever else you think of them, they both showed some nerve.

It probably is easier for me than for some people to appreciate both of them, because I agree with both of them in their negative opinions. Kennedy is right that Harris should not become president. Cheney is right that Trump should not become president.

Harris and Trump

 

The last nominee for president from either major party who met even minimal criteria for knowledge, experience, character, intelligence, and fidelity to the Constitution was Mitt Romney in 2012. Since then things have been bleak, and this year we have Trump and Harris. The question for voters in this election is not which of them should become president. The clear answer is that neither of them should. The question is which of them is likely to do less harm.

Both have authoritarian tendencies, Harris from leftist ideology and Trump from non-ideological power mania. Both have authoritarian leaning running mates (though to be fair, both Vance and Walz had different opinions when it was expedient for them and so may be just ordinary lying political scoundrels at heart). On foreign policy Harris is too soft on Hamas and Iran in Gaza, while Trump is too soft on Putin in Ukraine. Both are a little vague on dealing with the strategic threat from China. Trump has talked about the need for strong and unequaled armed forces and is probably better than Harris on national defense. (At least he seems unlikely to appoint people who write about the need for “queerness” in nuclear policy to important positions dealing with nuclear policy.) On illegal immigration Trump wants to deport too many people, while Harris wants to keep the southern border effectively wide open. On economic issues, Trump’s worst scheme is for a huge increase in tariffs and restriction on international trade. Harris’s bad ideas include price controls, taxes on unrealized capital gains, dictating what sort of vehicles and appliances people can buy, race and gender quotas, and generally a more powerful and robust regulatory bureaucracy, especially on green issues. Neither of them has a serious plan for reducing or eliminating the annual federal deficit. While bad enough, Trump’s plans here are less harmful.

Both have well earned reputations as ignorant, arrogant, dishonest, power hungry, repulsive people who cannot be trusted. But bad as Harris is, she never tried to overthrow the government or called for overturning the Constitution, things which should have disqualified Trump from holding any elected office in the United States. On the evidence she is the less bad human being.

It is a truism of strategic analysis that one should consider not only the enemy’s intentions but, also and especially, its capabilities. It is likely that Harris’s capability for doing bad things is far greater than Trump’s. Trump would have the traditional media, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, and most of the country’s big money and large tech companies working against him. Harris would have the same people mainly working for her, giving her a higher likelihood of getting what she wants done. That is major point in Trump’s favor, though it is a little saddening to have to evaluate presidential candidates the way one does hostile foreign nations.

Though I dislike saying it and thought I never would say it, if I had to vote for one of them today, I would vote for Trump. But I surely don’t like it and surely respect the opinions of those who see Trump administration as likely to be worse than a Democrat one. Before Gaza and the selection of Harris, I did too. I do have trouble respecting the opinions of people who think either of them is hot stuff. They both are bad news.

Harris, Shapiro, and Walz

 

Mr. Taggart: I got it! I know how we can run everyone out of Rock Ridge.

Hedley Lamarr: How?

Mr. Taggart: We’ll kill the firstborn male child in every household.

Hedley Lamarr: Too Jewish.

-Blazing Saddles

So apparently was Josh Shapiro. On the evidence Kamala Harris and the Democrats were set before the weekend to select Governor Shapiro of Pennsylvania as their candidate for vice president. They announced that there would be a big kickoff event for their ticket Tuesday in Philadelphia. Pennsylvania is a state that a Democrat pretty much has to win to become president. Shapiro is very popular there, and people thought that having him on the ticket might swing the state away from Trump. He is also what passes for a moderate among Democrats these days and might have helped with some voters who would be wary of a hard leftist such as Harris. The selection seemed obvious to lots of people, an easy slam dunk of a decision.

It probably would have been except for one thing. Shapiro is a Jew, and not only a Jew but a Jew who supports Israel in its war against Hamas. The best guess is that that outraged the party’s pro-Hamas leftists enough that Harris found it necessary to drop him and choose instead a leftist governor who seems to add nothing to her chances of winning.

If so, the antisemitism it shows is not even the worst thing about it. The war in Gaza is not only a conflict between Israel and Hamas’s savages. It also is part of a world wide struggle between liberal civilization and its illiberal and barbarous enemies in China, Russia, Iran, and elsewhere. If Harris and her party are too afraid of, or worse sympathetic to, those who side with the savage and the barbarous to do not only the right but even the apparently politically expedient thing, it says a lot about her and the entire party.

Pressuring Judges

Many years ago on road trips with my parents, I would see billboards along the highway reading “Save our Republic. Impeach Earl Warren.” They were put up by members of the John Birch Society who disliked some of the Warren court’s legal opinions and saw him as in league with or at least enabling communists in the United States. There was never any chance that Warren would be impeached, and it seems likely that many of the Birchers knew it. Probably the idea was to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

This week Joe Biden announced proposals for term limits for justices on the supreme court. Since this would require a constitutional amendment, there is no chance that it will happen, and it is likely that even Biden knows it. Probably the idea is to stir up hostility to the court and pressure it to take a different direction in its rulings.

Making political threats against judges whose opinions one dislikes is a bad idea. There are good reasons the constitution established a judiciary independent of and equal to the legislative and executive branches of government. The Birchers were a bunch of cranks that few people took seriously. Biden is the president of the United States with many members of his party supporting his scheme. It is almost enough to make a person take the cynical view that Democrats and their public relations people in the traditional media might not be sincere in their bleating about saving democracy and preserving guardrails and restoring norms of political conduct, but only pretending for political advantage.