Tag: journalism

The State of the Right

The Portly Politico7 Comments

A major topic of discussion among conservative and/or non-Left thinkers, bloggers, and political theorists is what exactly makes one a “conservative” (or, perhaps more accurately, what combination of values and axiomatic beliefs constitute “conservatism”).  For the philosophically-minded, it’s an intriguing and edifying activity that forces one to examine one’s convictions, and the sources thereof.

I’ve written extensively about the Left and what motivates it.  To summarize broadly:  the modern progressive Left is motivated, at bottom, by a lust for power (the more cynical of Leftists) and a zealous nihilism.  These motivations take on a Puritan cultural totalitarianism that cannot tolerate even the mildest of dissent.  Witness the many examples of how Leftists across time and nations have devoured their own.

That said, I haven’t written too much lately about what it means to be a conservative.  One reason, I’m sure, is that it’s always more difficult to engage in the oft-painful exercise of self-reflection.  Another is that the lines of conservative thought have been shifting dramatically ever since Trump’s ascendancy in 2015-2016, and the cementing of his control over the Republican Party—the ostensible vehicle for conservative ideology—since then.

As such, in the kind of serendipitous moment that is quite common in blogging, today’s post shares two pieces on the lay of the conservative landscape, and the various factions within the broader conservative movement (and, politically, the Republican Party).

One is, by the standards of the Internet, an old essay by Gavin McInnes, “An Idiot’s Guide to the Right.”  Written in 2014, one month before Republicans would win control of the US Senate, McInnes’s breakdown of the Right is still fairly prescient, although it’s always interesting reading discussions of the conservative movement pre-Trump (McInnes, like many conservatives, hoped and believed that Ted Cruz was the last, best hope of the movement; that was certainly my view well into 2016).

The other is a post from Tax Day, “What’s Right,” by an upcoming blogger, my e-friend photog of Orion’s Cold Fire.  He gives a detailed breakdown of the shifting coalition of the Right at present, and his own “red-pilling” is very similar to my own (indeed, photog and I both fall somewhat on the fringes of the “civic nationlist” camp, with toes cautiously dipped into the parts of the “Dissident Right,” a term itself coined by VDARE.com‘s John Derbyshire).

Traditionally (since the end of the Second World War, that is), the old Republican coalition was a three-legged stool, bringing together economic/fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, and national security conservatives.  In the wake of the Cold War, the first two legs ceded more ground to the national security conservatives, some whom consisted of the much maligned “neoconservatives,” themselves reformed progressives who had been “mugged by reality.”

The neocons would enjoy their ascendancy during the George W. Bush administration, and they tend to be the major proponents of the dying Never Trump movement.  Their vehement hatred of Trump (see also: Bill Kristol, Senator Mitt Romney, and George Will) has largely discredited them, and they’ve shown that their true loyalty is to frosty globalism, not the United States.  They also pine for a mythical form of “decorum” in politics that never truly existed outside of the immediate postwar decades.

photog characterizes this group as essentially less strident Leftists, a group that “doesn’t shrink or grow.”  They were the “we need decorum” crowd that went big for the Never Trumpers, but who have largely made an unsteady cease-fire with the president—for now.  Bill Kristol and Max Boot, the extreme of this group, have essentially become full-fledged Leftists (making Kristol’s latest project, The Bulwark—to protect “conservatism,” ostensibly—all the more laughable).

These are the people that don’t want to vote for Trump, but might anyway, because he’s “morally reprehensible,” which is just their way of saying they think he’s icky and boorish.  These are the upper-middle class white women of the Republican Party, the ones I constantly implore to get over their neo-Victorian sensibilities and stop destroying the Republic from their fainting couches.

The biggest group, per photog, are the Conservative Civic Nationalists.  These are the people that love God and country, and like Trump because he represents the best hope to defend those very things.  McInnes, less perceptively, just calls this groups “Republicans,” although his “Libertarians” might fall into this group, too.  To quote photog at length:

The next big class of people are the Conservative Civic Nationalists.  This is the bulk of the Non-Left.  These are the normal people who have always believed in God and Country and that America was the land of freedom, opportunity and fairness.  They believed that all Americans were lucky to be living in the greatest country on God’s green earth.  They believed that the rule of law under the Constitution and especially the Bill of Rights is what made this the closest thing to heaven on earth and anyone living here should be supremely grateful to the Founding Fathers for inventing it and his own ancestors for coming here.  This is the group that has had the biggest change occur in the last couple of years.  But to define the change let’s break this group into two sub-divisions.  Let’s call them Sleepwalkers and the Red-Pilled.  Back in the early 2000s all the Civic Nationalists (including myself) were Sleepwalkers.

The “Red-Pilled” and “Sleepwalkers” dichotomy is one of the most interesting interpretations I’ve read about the Right lately, and it’s certainly true.  Trump awoke a large group of these Civic Nationalists, people that were disgruntled with the government overreach of the Obama era, but weren’t certain about the way forward.

Like myself, photog is cautiously optimistic that these folks will continue to wake up, bringing along non-political Centrists—the squishy, non-ideological middle—to bolster Trump’s reelection in 2020.  The Left’s relentless push for socialism and transgender bathrooms have done much to red-pill these folks, who find themselves struggling to articulate values that they just implicitly know are good, but which the Left insists on destroying.

There’s still much to be said about the current state of the Right, and I will be delving into it in more depth as the weeks progress.  For now, read these two essays—particularly photog’s—and begin digesting their ideas.  American politics are undergoing a major realignment, and we need people of good faith and values to stand for our nation.  Understanding the state of play is an important part of arming ourselves for the struggle.

Lazy Sunday VII: The Deep State

The Portly Politico70 Comments

It’s been a good weekend, and today’s post marks another milestone in this blog’s brief history:  fifteen weeks of consecutive daily posts.  After a change of pace last Sunday, I’m back to Lazy Sunday. This week’s edition looks back at posts about the administrative Deep State that exists in the federal government.  Indeed, it’s an unholy alliance of D.C. insiders, corporate elites, academic Leftists, and social justice warriors, all arrayed against President Trump and his agenda.

The Deep State is, as I’ve written, very real.  We can no longer trust judges to dispassionately rule on or uphold the Constitution; bureaucrats to execute faithfully the president’s orders; or government officials to act in the best interest of the American people.  Further, we cannot trust our elites to even abide by the outcome of a fair, free election.  The long, expensive Mueller probe represented a vague, politically-motivated witch hunt, all designed to de-legitimize President Trump.  That our unelected intelligence agencies played an active role in such treasonous activity further highlights the dire situation in which the Republic finds itself.

Indeed, we’ve entered into a period of praetorian rule in the United States.  No longer is the Constitution respected.  If the people make the “wrong” choice for president, then the full apparatus of the Swamp will swing into action to “correct” the wrongthink of the plebes.  Most Americans do not appreciate how far we’ve passed through the looking glass.  I would urge President Trump to restructure radically our intelligence agencies, making them accountable to elected officials and, therefore, the American people.

These posts detail the perfidy and duplicity of the Deep State.  They only scratch the surface.

1.) “Fictitious Frogs and Bureaucratic Despotism” – this piece examines, in brief, the excesses and abuses of federal agencies that have been delegated lawmaking powers.  Weak-willed Congress’s have readily given up their precious legislative powers, and out-of-control justices have approved this unconstitutional, cowardly activity.  The results have been both absurd and catastrophic, particularly with everyone’s favorite government-agency-to-hate, the Environmental Protection Agency.

2.) “The Deep State is Real – Silent Coup Attempt and Andrew McCabe” – disgraced Deputy Attorney General was going around bragging about his attempt to lead a 25th Amendment removal of President Trump from office, premised on the ridiculous notion—unfortunately axiomatic among Leftists—that the president is insane.  Despite no evidence to suggest as much, McCabe, like other Deep States progressives, merely wanted to remove the president from office.  Of course, to progressives, anyone who disagrees with them is either mentally ill or evil.

3.) “The Deep State is Real, Part II: US Ambassadors and DOJ Conspired Against Trump” – this post kicked off a few days of Deep State reflections.  It’s a “must-read,” as I explain how the notorious Steele dossier, a fake document used to obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap the Trump campaign phones, was commissioned by the Clinton campaign.  With all the claims of “Russian collusion” levied at President Trump, it’s an absurd example of projection:  Clinton was the one “colluding” with a foreign agent (Christopher Steele, the author of the dossier, is a former British spy) to influence the outcome of an American election—and using the backchannels of state power to eavesdrop on an innocent man’s presidential campaign.  That’s far more sinister than anything the Nixon campaign did in 1972 (at least the Committee to Re-Elect the President kept the Watergate burglary domestic).  Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should be in federal prison.

4.) “Mueller Probe Complete, Trump Vindicated” – remarkably, even Robert Mueller couldn’t straight-up lie about President Trump.  I’ll end this Lazy Sunday on a positive note:  President Trump was cleared of any “collusion” with Russia (keep in mind, “collusion” isn’t even a legal term, and is vague to the point of meaninglessness, which is the point:  anyone can read into the phrase “Russian collusion” whatever dark fantasies they want).  Now that the probe is done, President Trump should act with all haste to DRAIN THE SWAMP!

Happy Sunday.  Rest up—we’ve got to take back America!

Other Lazy Sunday Posts:

101 Postmatians – 101st Consecutive Daily Post!

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Perhaps it’s a bit odd to celebrate grinding diligence, but I’m proud of myself.  Yesterday’s post on model bills (a bit of a snoozer of a topic, I’ll admit) marked the 100th consecutive daily post on this blog.

I realized in late December 2018/early January 2019 that WordPress tracks streaks once you hit three consecutive days of posting, so I decided to see how long I could keep the momentum going.  Initially, I was just going to try to get through January.  It’s a slow month in the academic year, a rare moment when I have a sliver of extra time to devote to extracurricular hobbies, like music.

Of course, the more I wrote, the easier it became to churn out posts on any number of topics.  Pretty soon, I’d gotten to fifty posts.  Despite Internet outages (within weeks of each other, both times because a Frontier technician incorrectly disconnected my line), I was able to get some posts up (even if they weren’t of the best quality).

So, to celebrate, I thought I’d take today “off” with a classic retrospective (which I already do once or twice a week with “TBT Thursdays” and “Lazy Sundays“)—a written “clip show,” if you will, of The Streak ’19’s Top Five Posts (so far).

The following are the five posts with the most views as of the time of this writing, presented in descending order (most views to fewest):

1.) “Hump Day Hoax” – it seems these local stories do well (my piece on the fight at the Lamar Egg Scramble has turned up in quite a few searches; I’m still trying to find more details about it).  This piece was about the Mayor of Lamar’s claim that her car was vandalized in a racially-motivated attack, and she expressed relief that the vandal didn’t try to kill her and her husband.  When the Darlington County Sheriff’s deputy came out to investigate, he discovered the mysterious yellow substance was pollen!  That didn’t prevent it from making national news, getting a mention in Newsweek.

At first, I thought our mayor was just trying to get some cheap PR and sympathy for herself, but after discussing it with some other folks, the consensus seems to be that she suffered from stupidity, filtered through a conspiratorial, black victim mentality.  Rather than see the sticky substance for what it was—the ubiquitous pollen that covers our fair Dixie—the mayor’s first thought was a racist attack.

That’s a sad way to live.  As I wrote in this piece, the mayor is a sweet lady, and I think she really wants to do her best to help our little town.  That said, this kind of ignorant hysteria doesn’t help anyone or anything, much less race relations.

2.) “Secession Saturday” – boy, this post generated some views.  The focus of this post was a piece from American Greatness, “The Left Won’t Allow a Peaceful Separation,” by Christopher Roach.  It explores whether or not some kind of peaceful parting of ways between America’s two cultures—traditionalists and progressives—is desirable, and revisits questions the American Civil War resolved—at least for a time—with force of arms (“do States have the right to secede?,” for example).

A panicked former student texted me in anguish, worrying about a Civil War II, after seeing this post on Facebook.  I tried to allay her fears.  But the real point of my commentary was on the idea that the Left is fundamentally totalitarian, and will broach no disagreements.  That’s a key insight Roach and others make, and it’s why I reference back to his piece so frequently.

Of course, it also helped that I linked to this guy in the comments of a more successful blog.

3.-4.) “Nehemiah and National Renewal” & “Nehemiah Follow-Up” – these two posts came amid a week in which I found myself immersed in the Book of Nehemiah (one of my favorites in the Old Testament, as he builds a wall to renew his nation).  The initial post sparked some great feedback from Ms. Bette Cox, a fellow blogger (who, incidentally, preceded me in my soon-to-be-vacated position as the Florence County [SC] GOP Secretary).  She astutely pointed out that my first post missed a key point:  in Nehemiah 1, the prophet falls to his knees and asks for God’s Will.

5.) “Tucker Carlson’s Diagnosis” – one of the posts from the early days of The Streak ’19, it was also a rare video post from me.  I’ll occasionally embed YouTube videos in my posts, but I tend to avoid writing posts that say, “hey, watch this lengthy video.”

Nothing bugs me more than when I’m out somewhere, having a conversation, and someone thrusts a phone in my face with a YouTube video.  I’ve actually told my friends that if they do this, I will refuse to watch it.  It’s not that I don’t want to share the joke with you; it’s that you’re making me watch a video on a cellphone!  C’mon.  I can barely hear the dialogue (or song, or whatever) on your tinny, bass-less phone speaker.  Furthermore, can’t we have a conversation without resorting to SNL clips?

But I digress.  I made an exception for Tucker Carlson’s powerful monologue about our frigid, uncaring elites.  I’ve definitely jumped on the Carlson populist-nationalist train, and I think he makes a compelling case for preserving—or, at least not actively destroying—small towns and the families they nurture.

So, there you have it—a lengthier-than-planned reheating of my posts during The Streak ’19.

Thanks for all of your love and support.  Here’s to another 100 posts!

–TPP

Model Bills: Trust, but Verify

The Portly Politico2 Comments

I came across this expose from USA Today about model legislation, the practice of a think-tank or industry lobbyist writing legislation that can be introduced in copy-cat form across multiple States.  It argues that this “copy-paste” approach to legislation undermines democracy and benefits corporations.

After skimming the piece, I think USA Today’s concerns are way overblown.  The article’s main issues seem to be the following:

  • Legislators aren’t dreaming up bills organically, but using pre-written bills that are handed to them
  • These bills have misleading titles that don’t do what they advertise
  • It’s not fair introduce legislation this way because…?

Sure, we should want engaged legislators working on our behalf.  But lobbying for legislation isn’t anything new, and it would make particular sense for a think-tank to write up a generic version of a bill that could be adapted to different States’ local conditions.  If anything, I don’t want legislators dreaming up too many new laws:  who knows what wacky stuff they’d produce?

As for the misleading bill titles, isn’t this true for most legislation?  The “Affordable Care Act” didn’t make healthcare any more affordable.  In fact, it didn’t have anything to do with health care, per se, but health insurance.  For that matter, newspapers routinely publish misleading headlines, the articles of which often contain the exact opposite meaning of what the headlines blare.

The USA Today piece looks at several pieces of legislation, including various “right to try” bills, a national version of which President Trump ultimately signed into law.  That law allows patients with severe medical conditions to try drugs that aren’t yet tested.  That’s a brilliant piece of legislation; why wouldn’t you want that copy-pasted to every State in the Union?

The piece notes that corporate lobbying groups use this “model bill” approach the most, followed by conservative groups.  It makes sense that conservative groups would focus on their advantage in State legislatures around the country, rather than trying their luck with Congress; it’s also consistent with conservatism’s emphasis on federalism.

The only model bill that seemed unethical in the piece was one involved shielding companies from mesothelioma lawsuits.  The bill’s name misleadingly suggests it’s about protecting against asbestos, when it’s really designed to pay mesothelioma sufferers out of an asbestos trust before they can file suit against a company.  USA Today breathlessly points out that most victims of the condition succumb in under a year, and don’t get a chance to get their money.

With all respect and love to the folks suffering from mesothelioma, I’m not exactly losing sleep over a bill that seeks to limit ambulance-chasing litigation.  What’s wrong with being paid from an arbitration pool?

Regardless, while the piece is interesting—it’s worth a skim—it’s the same kind of breathless, pearl-clutching, “democracy-dies-in-darkness” pabulum that the media loves to serve up.  If model bills benefited progressive policies, would they be causing such a fuss?

Yes, we should hold our elected officials more accountable, and expect them to do their due diligence.  If they’re approached with one of these bills, they should read it carefully, and weigh it against the needs and desires of their constituents.

Otherwise, this model bill situation seems like a non-issue, or only a very minor one.  My takeaway:  trust, but verify.

 

Nordlinger on the Arts

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Jay Nordlinger, a guy who gets paid to write about classical music for a living (I’ll confess, I’m a bit jealous), has a piece about the role of government in the arts, and arts in society, politics, etc.  It’s in the form of a questionnaire of generic questions the ubiquitous critic often receives, along the lines of “should the government support the arts,” “should artists make political statements with their works,” etc.

Nordlinger—not only an excellent critic, but a master of the emphatic incomplete sentence—handles these questions well.  I particularly like his response to the question about politics in art.  Here is an excerpt, including the question (italicized) and Nordlinger’s response (unformatted):

You will concede that politics has a place in art, right? Many artists think it is incumbent on them to deal with the politics of their day. To make directly political art. Is there such a thing as political art? There’s art with politics in it. Most of the time, I think it’s pretty boring, because, somehow, the art takes a backseat to politics. And the politics is of a hectoring quality.

Politics is often a spoiler of art, because of that very quality: “Eat your peas.” It may well be that political art is yet another excuse for people to lecture. (Lecturing has its time and place, needless to say.) Better, I think, is to do things subtly. I like a movie that way, for example. A movie may convey a message — a great many of them do. But you don’t have to do it in a honkingly obvious way. Weave it in, you know?

I think of Shakespeare, which is cheating, because he is the greatest of all artists, but let’s do it anyway. Many of his plays are political — or rather, they have politics in them. But the art of them transcends the politics. The politics means practically nothing to us today. Same with Verdi’s operas, some of them. Un ballo in maschera is stuffed with politics — but we don’t give a damn about that, and rightly so. The music and the human drama are what counts.

Nordlinger is spot-on here.  I am very “political,” in the sense that I write about politics and rarely hide my political leanings (unless trying to enjoy myself in the midst of a gaggle of progressives—not exactly the friendliest of situations for dissenting viewpoints and wrongthink).  But I’m also a musician, and I avoid writing anything overtly political in my music.

My song “Hipster Girl Next Door“—the closest thing I have to a “hit,” as it’s frequently requested at live shows—has one oblique line that says, “And though you hope for change, I hope I’m never estranged/from my Hipster Girl Next Door.”  The song is more a humorous critique of the hipster, coffee shop culture and its trappings, not a diss track against the Obama administration.

I also started writing an over-the-top, sci-fi rock opera back in 2013, The Mystic Chords, that was to embody William F. Buckley’s admonishment “don’t immanentize the eschaton” (in other words, don’t try to create heaven on Earth).  I think that work, though, were it ever to be completed, would fall under the Shakespearean rubric of “a work of art with politics, but about the human condition.”

Otherwise, I understand that people don’t want to be bludgeoned over the head with half-baked political ideas in their music.  You might cater to a specific niche, but you’re going to alienate a big chunk of potential listeners.  And pedantic hectoring and lecturing in otherwise fun music isn’t going to win anyone over.

The best art, when it does have something to say, does so with subtle suggestion.  Subtlety is incredibly hard to pull off.  It’s like when jazz musicians says, “It’s not the notes you play, but the notes you don’t play.”  I honestly have no idea what they mean by that, but I think the same concept applies to art, especially humorous, slice-of-life, tongue-in-cheek songwriting like mine:  it’s not so much what you say, but how you say it, and how you say things without saying them.  Implication, in other words (there’s a Nordlingian incomplete sentence for you).

But I digress.  Those are my slapdash, off-the-cuff observations at the end of a hectic week.  My Internet is finally restored, so I should be back to some degree of normality.  Spring Break is approaching, too, and I can tell teachers and students need a well-earned rest.

If you’d like to support my art, please visit www.tjcookmusic.com, or pick up a copy of my EP, Contest Winner EP, at any number of online retails (see my website for direct links).  You can also pick up my digital EP, Electrock EP:  The Four Unicorns of the Apocalypse, for just $4!

Gay Totalitarianism

The Portly Politico7 Comments

I’ve been writing a good bit lately about the inherent totalitarianism of the Left.  Christopher Roach’s piece about secession—and how the Left would never allow it—argues that, even if a peaceful separation of traditional and progressive Americans were desirable or feasible, the latter group would not—philosophically could not—permit it.

That’s because the Left is, at bottom, all about power, and forcing blind acceptance to its cause du’jour.  Actually, it seems to be about power and something else, because even blind power wouldn’t participate in some of the insanity, the outright depraved lunacy, of progressive Leftism.

Consider Pedro Gonzalez’s recent piece for American Greatness, “Our Queer Decline.”  He writes about Nikki Joly, a lesbian activist in Jackson, Michigan, who secured the passage of a “nondiscrimination law” (which, Gonzalez perceptively notes, “institutionalized discrimination against the heteronormative”).  Ms. Joly, crestfallen that the conservative town didn’t start rioting, supplied the victimhood herself by burning down her own home.

There’s a sick logic at play here:  preferred “victim” groups know they can stage hoaxes, immediately eliciting widespread sympathy (and media attention, and perhaps money).  The pendulum of justice may ultimately swing in their direction, but as we’ve seen with high-profile hoaxer Jussie Smollett, if you’re the right color (not white) and sexuality (not straight), you’ll get a pass.

The Jussie Smollett case is particularly infuriating, not least of all for the Chicago Police Department.  Smollett’s original claims were cartoonishly over-the-top—wearing a noose around his neck, claiming his attackers tried to bleach his skin—but they were treated seriously and investigated thoroughly.  The evidence against him is airtight:  he wrote a personal check to two Nigerian cast members from his show, Empire, and staged the whole thing.

Then, all the charges against poor Jussie were dropped.  State’s Attorney Kim Foxx dropped the prosecution’s case, perhaps at the behest of the Obama Crime Family.

You get what you incentivize.  There was always a pull to fake a hate crime against yourself if you were a visible minority or engaged in some sexually deviant behavior.  But the push against it was the threat of eventual prosecution.

Now, if you’re kind-of-black, sort-of-gay enough, you have reason to believe you can cast about wild accusations with few concerns.

Of course, questioning this unfortunate situation aloud in mixed company is a social—even professional—death sentence.  Don’t want to bake a cake for a gay couple’s “wedding”?  Better be ready to take it to the Supreme Court, buddy.

Do what you want in your personal life.  But stop using the power of the state in a vain attempt to normalize your deviancy.  No one cares what you do, until you use the implied (and explicit) threats of violence and financial ruin to foist your bedroom antics on the rest of us.

Avenatti Arrested

The Portly Politico1 Comment

President Trump was vindicated Friday.  Yesterday, attorney Michael Avenatti—the attorney who represented porn star Stormy Daniels, making him a star among Democratic sycophants—was arrested on charges of extortion and fraud, and could face fifty years in prison.

I wrote yesterday that the end of the Mueller probe, with its lack of any charges of collusion or obstruction of justice against Trump, felt like the 2016 Election, Part II.  That sense of victory—and intense satisfaction—deepened with Avenatti’s arrest.

Here is a brief excerpt from that National Review breaking news piece linked above:

Avenatti worked “to extract more than $20 million in payments from a publicly traded company by threatening to use his ability to garner publicity to inflict substantial financial and reputational harm on the company if his demands were not met,” according to SDNY prosecutors. Those threats, which were made over the phone and in-person meetings with Nike’s attorneys, were recorded.

“A suit and tie does not mask that fact that, at its core, this was an old-fashioned shake down,” U.S. attorney Geoffrey Berman said when announcing the charges Monday.

Democrats were trumpeting Avenatti as a presidential contender in 2020.  He began to believe the hype before deciding not to run (he probably realized he, unlike the president, actually had committed some heinous misdeeds).

Progressives make a huge deal about how they’re guardians of “principle” and “decorum” in the “Age of Trump,” yet they cling to whatever crass personality says mean things about the president the loudest.  They don’t even believe their own tripe.  Political victory is all that matters—by any means necessary.

That’s why substance-less hacks like Avenatti—or low-IQ race-baiters like “Auntie” Maxine Waters—are such darlings to the Left.  They promise to “impeach 45” and to uncover misdeeds, so they can do whatever they want (like encourage their supporters to commit violence against conservatives, as Congresswoman Waters did).

Trump did nothing wrong.  Avenatti tried to use his unearned media clout to shake-down a publicly-traded company for his own personal gain.

I fully expect the Dems will quickly throw away Avenatti now that he is no longer useful to their cause.  There’s a lesson there for us all:  revolutions eat their own.  But they’ll keep fabricating charges against President Trump.

Mueller Probe Complete, Trump Vindicated

The Portly Politico6 Comments

The long national nightmare is overThe long national nightmare is over—the Mueller probe/expensive government boondoggle/politically-motivated, Deep State witch hunt is finally complete, and President Trump is in the clear:  there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

Now that the world finally knows what we all suspected for the past two years, the Left is in complete meltdown mode.  The mental gymnastics to which they’re resorting is humorous, but sad.  A key lesson to remember is that what the Left can’t achieve politically or socially, it will achieve through the courts (or violence).

For two years, the Left assumed that their inside man, Robert Mueller, and the rest of the Clintonian, globalist Deep State would produce (or, if need be, fabricate) the “evidence” needed to oust a duly-elected President of the United States.

Now, they’re magic wand has turned into a limp stick, incapable of conjuring up the fabled “collusion” the Left dreamed about for two long years.

President Trump emerges victorious.  It’s a huge blow to the Deep State, and almost like Part II of the 2016 election:  an outside figure, facing enormous odds and an entire media-government-business establishment arrayed against him, has won a hard-fought battle, even with the deck stacked against him.

There are still investigations in New York involving the perfidious and mendacious Michael Cohen, but those will, most likely, similarly yield nothing but bitter fruit for the Left—and more vindication for Trump.

In the meantime, it’s a great day to be on the Trumpian Right.  MAGA MAGA MAGA!

–TPP

P.S.—Here’s a great video c/o my younger brother:

Out of Control Feds

The Portly Politico1 Comment

A benefit of writing this little blog is that I read (and, usually, skim) a great deal of material from all over the web, and come away knowing more than I otherwise would.  My hope is to take some of the flotsam and jetsam I come across and condense and give context to it.

Such was the situation with Jim Treacher, the pseudonym of Sean Medlock.  Treacher/Medlock is a lukewarm Never Trumper (from what I can gather) who writes for PJ Media.  Treacher wrote a piece earlier in the week about “conservative” website The Bulwark, which is unhinged neocon Bill Kristol‘s new pet project since The Weekly Standard was unceremoniously shuttered a few months ago.

That piece, “In What Sense is The Bulwark Conserving Conservatism,” is not the point of this post, but it is a disturbing read.  Treacher examines the self-righteous scribblings of Molly Jong-Fast, who covered CPAC for The Bulwark.  CPAC is the major event in conservative activism, and every year generates plenty of controversy between the warring factions of Conservatism, Inc.  Jong-Fast (hyphenated names make my skin crawl) basically spent the entire conference shuddering about how “anti-choice” the conference was, and making jokes about a group of conservatives wanting to limit the size and scope of the federal government.

What did you expect, baby?  CPAC isn’t a meeting of the D.C. Workers’ Soviet.  Yeesh.  Read the piece to get the full flavor for this foolishness.  It proves the claims from Dissident Right figures that modern “conservatism” doesn’t conserve anything, and yesterday’s Leftist utopia is today’s “conservative principle.”

Tough words to type, but in the case of Kristol and his ilk, terribly true.  Regardless, in the piece Treacher mentions in passing being struck by a State Department vehicle in 2010, which prevented his attendance at CPAC.

That took me down a frightening rabbit hole:  a State Department vehicle struck Treacher, who was in the crosswalk at the time.  The State Department agent driving the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not apologize to Treacher; indeed, Treacher was issued a ticket for jaywalking—while in his hospital bed!

Some key excerpts from The Daily Caller‘s piece about the incident:

An agent in the vehicle, Mike McGuinn, did not identify himself to Medlock at the scene, or apologize for running him down. Indeed, Washington, D.C., police drove to a local emergency room to serve Medlock with a jaywalking citation as he lay prostrate in a hospital bed, while a man who identified himself as “special agent” stood by watching and taking notes….

At the hospital, DC police officer John Muniz arrived to issue Medlock a $20 jaywalking ticket. Medlock was lying sedated on a gurney, so Muniz delivered the ticket to a Daily Caller colleague, who was at the hospital with Medlock. He looked embarrassed as he did so. Behind him stood a man dressed in a dark suit who identified himself as a “special agent.” He said nothing but wrote in a notebook.

Curiously, the ticket says that Medlock was struck at an intersection four blocks from where the accident actually took place. And it claims that Medlock was walking diagonally across the intersection at the time. In one of his strikingly short conversations with the Daily Caller, agent Mike McGuinn acknowledged that Medlock was not jaywalking at all, but walking “outside the crosswalk when the incident occurred.”

The question is: Did the federal agent driving the SUV, faced with potential liabilities from the accident, encourage local police to issue some sort – any sort – of citation to Medlock, to establish his culpability?

Three years later, Treacher wrote a piece for The Daily Caller detailing the State Department’s practice of hiring law enforcement personnel with checkered pasts.

Here we have a federal bureaucracy utterly indifferent to the lives of the citizens it ostensibly serves.  In Treacher’s case, I can’t tell if it’s malignant indifference, or rank incompetence.  Bureaucracies of all stripes try to avoid liability and controversy—they exist to protect and expand themselves, after all—but only the federal government could get away with running someone down in a crosswalk, ticketing that person, and never owning up to its mistake.

I wrote yesterday about the presence of Deep State, anti-Trump actors in the State Department, and of their collusion with the Obama administration’s Department of Justice.  If they have the gall to attempt the takedown of a duly-elected President, then imagine their contempt and disregard for us.

Now that the Mueller probe has ended (I think that’s the takeaway from the promise that there would be no more indictments), Deep State perfidy will only grow more sinister.  Gird your loins, President Trump.

The Deep State is Real, Part II: US Ambassadors and DOJ Conspired Against Trump

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Congressman Mark Meadows (R-NC) dropped a bombshell earlier this week:  Obama-era US ambassadors conspired with the Department of Justice against President Trump.  Every site I find points back to the original Washington Examiner piece linked above, although the blog Independent Sentinel has a bit more commentary, tying it back to the fake Christopher Steele dossier.

You’ll recall the Steele dossier is a document the Clinton campaign commissioned through back-channels (a law firm), which was then used to obtain a FISA warrant to wiretap then-candidate Trump’s communications.  That mendacious original sin spawned the odious “Russian collusion” narrative that lingers around the Trump Administration like a bad fart.  Andrew McCarthy in National Review calls the dossier a “Clinton-campaign product.”

Regardless, if Meadows is correct, it serves as further proof that the Washington “Deep State”—the “Swamp”—is very, terrifyingly real.  It will stop at nothing to disrupt President Trump’s America First agenda, and subvert a free and fair election.

What’s most chilling about all this chicanery is not that it targets President Trump particularly (although that certainly creates its own problems—few good, conscientious Americans will choose to run for public office, especially as conservatives, unless they have the cash and the guts to risk everything).  Rather, it suggests that our experiment in self-government is dangerously threatened by a group of unelected elites cloistered in the Washington foreign policy and law enforcement establishment.

America stands at a crossroads.  We’ve arrogated ever-more power to an unaccountable federal bureaucracy.  Many conservatives—myself included—hoped that the extended government shutdown would aid in the draining of the Swamp.  So far, though, it seems that the president is still surrounded by enemies.

We have a choice:  we continue down the current road, ceding more power to the government, and hoping against hope for some kind of “enlightened, constitutionalist despot” to restore as much of our constitutional framework as possible.  President Trump’s difficulties weeding out seditious bureaucrats suggest that path is incredibly difficult, and it will make presidential contests—as well as Supreme Court nominations—increasingly vicious.  The progressive Left has an edge in the culture, the institutions, government, and on the streets.

The other option is weed out the federal bureaucracy, strike down the administrative state, and restore power to Congress.  Restoring power to the States would also reduce the emphasis on national politics über alles.

But conservative politicians have been peddling those nostrums for years, without much headway.  Thus, we find ourselves struggling along with a feeble Congress, a dictatorial federal court system, an arrogant administrative regime, and a presidency that is both excessively powerful and, paradoxically, unable to control its own bureaucracy.

Something has to give.  President Trump has fought back ably overall, but one man alone cannot restore our constitutional order.  Indeed, that’s the whole point of our system—to diffuse power broadly.  He’s done what he could through the constitutional powers at his disposal.

I don’t know what the future holds, but if we want to continue the grand experiment in self-government, we have to hobble the Deep State—indeed, it must be destroyed.