rogerwmbennett

Compare and contrast

Cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to [our country]. . . . Think and speak of it as the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts. For this you have every inducement of sympathy and interest. Citizens, by birth or choice, of a common country, that country has a right to concentrate your affections.

Washington’s Farewell Address, via Towards a Conservatism of the Heart: A Roadmap for ISI’s Future - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

[Insert here your favorite Trump post-Election Tweets and ejaculations.]

Compare and contrast.

Republicans living in Orange Man’s Alternate Reality

Apparently, the two Georgia Republicans vying for U.S. Senate seats in a January runoff election cannot (yet) use their best argument:

If Democrats control Senate:
Leader Schumer
Budget Chair Bernie
Finance Chair Wyman
Judiciary Chair Feinstein
Deciding Vote Kamala Harris

They can’t use it because it is premised on Biden/Harris having won the election. In Donald Trump’s alternate reality, that is false and treacherous to assume. And what Orange Man believes, tens of millions profess with unseemly zeal.

ACLU, ADF, Becket Fund

Someone observed that the ACLU stopped taking several constitutional rights seriously after it started casting the net far more widely for money. That made sense of how it became just another left-wing group contemptuous of the favored rights of The Deplorables.

Recently the penny dropped: ADF is, as I have irritably complained, fully integrated into Conservatism, Inc., and probably because it, too, casts a very wide money net.

Becket Fund remains principled.

News from the Idiocracy

Sen. Mike Braun in a conference call Tuesday declined to acknowledge that Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 presidential election … “When you look at how close the election was, basically a tie vote in the popular vote if you take out the margin of difference in California.”

One of my two Senators, neither of whom, I predict, will ever measure up to Richard Lugar or even Dan Coats.

Yes, Mike, and if we had some eggs, we could have ham and eggs if we had any ham.

Money saved

I thought I might donate to put David Perdue back in the Senate, but not after the contemptible back-stabbing theatrics he and Kelly Loeffler engaged in.

I wouldn’t give a rats ass about Trump’s support if it meant humping his leg like this. “Some things,” as Antonin Scalia said of his friendship with Notorious RBG, “are more important than votes.”

This eats at me

It bothers me less that 70-some million voted for him than that some bitter-ender, Christian-adjacent folks (i.e., heretics) believe “stolen election” and the prosperity gospelers’ maniacally mistaken identification of this demonic man as God’s choice for America.

Do you think for a second that Antichrist cannot deceive?

Abysmal smart person ignorance

To be a free speech defender on America’s college campuses can be an exercise in constant disappointment in administrators’ knowledge of the First Amendment, but just when we thought we had seen it all… a University of North Texas administrator has declined to issue a statement condemning vandalism of a political display because administrators at the college believed they shouldn’t interfere with the First Amendment right to engage in the “heckler’s veto.”

Dear University of North Texas: the ‘Heckler’s veto’ is not a good thing

He cannot concede

He will not concede. He cannot concede — because he would suffer a psychic break if he did. And what we witnessed Thursday night, in his drained yet still despicable rant, was a picture of a sad, lost, delusional person, a man utterly unfit to hold the office he holds, lying and lying and lying, spinning paranoid conspiracy theories like a drunk on Tumblr.

Andrew Sullivan, Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived - The Weekly Dish

Donnie from Queens

… The writer Jamie Kirchick says that everything Trump says makes sense if it is preceded by the following words: “And now, Donnie from Queens, you’re on the air.” Many people heard Trump exactly that way, and couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. They weren’t endorsing his madness. They were looking past it. They were, in my opinion, wrong to be so cavalier. But I don’t think most were malignant extremists of any kind, or unaware of the hideous personal qualities of Trump.

Andrew Sullivan, Trump Is Gone. Trumpism Just Arrived - The Weekly Dish

Shy Trump voters?

I still see no evidence for shy Trump voters. Or else you need to explain shy Collins voters and shy James voters. The senate polling was just as far off or more so. Stop blaming respondents; start blaming the weighting formulas!

Sarah Isgur

Game over

“If you’ve got a penis, mate, you are a bloke. If you’ve got a vagina, you are a woman. Game over.”

Truth-telling is a revolutionary act. Especially about transgenderism » MercatorNet

Notable

Why 14 Critics of “Social Justice” Think You Shouldn’t Vote Trump - Areo

Why JHK will vote for DJT

“Are you against the principle of free speech? The Democratic Party is.”

So opens James Howard Kunstler’s posting today. I think it’s substantially untrue that the “Democratic Party” is against free speech, though they do need their noses rubbed good and hard and repeatedly in the damnfoolery of the extremist members of their alliance (who they dare not suppress). Also, I cut Kunstler rhetorical slack as he vents against his (former?) party, just as I tend to rant against mine. There’s something like that in the Lord’s Prayer, as I recall.

Apart from the dubiously broad brush, his is

the choice some fairly influential figures who claim to be liberal are making. “Frankly going to unhappily vote Republican, including Trump, until the left walks this shit all the way back,” wrote James Lindsay, an Intellectual Dark Web fixture and ardent critic of critical theory, last week. The “this shit” in question? An article in The New Republic calling for the left to eventually seek to abolish the Constitution. In quote-retweeting Linday’s tweet, fellow IDW figure Eric Weinstein added, tagging two mayors who are very unpopular among the anti-woke, “InCons are a force this year. Involuntary conservatives are real. As I’ve told you: the failure to condemn @MayorJenny & @tedwheeler, acknowledge ANTIFA, admit to media bias or to level about cognitive issues etc. in a near octogenarian has created the Never-Trump Trump voter.”

Jesse Singal (likely paywall)

Excerpts from Kunstler’s pungent case for Trump (for whom I nevertheless will not vote):

Are you against reason itself? For all your talk about the primacy of science, your agenda militates furiously against it: Math is “racist,” there’s no biological basis for understanding sex, all science is a “white colonial way-of-knowing,” masculinity is “toxic,” women can have penises and men can menstruate. Do you really believe these absurd fantasies manufactured in the graduate schools in the service of academic careerism at all costs — or do you just go along with them for the sake of protecting your own careers and perquisites?

…

By the way, did you notice that Jeffrey Toobin has not been fired from his positions at The New Yorker magazine and CNN for jerking-off on-screen during a Zoom meeting of his professional colleagues last week? None of them have even publicly criticized him. Why do you suppose that is? I suppose it’s because he is a favored member of the Woke Journalists club and enjoys special protection from professional ruin — though the truth is he’s thrown away his credibility as a legal commentator, whether the Wokerati like it or not, especially on matters of public conduct. But that’s just one example of the hypocrisy that Wokesterism is full of, and reveals its chronic disingenuous insincerity.

…

I’m under no illusions that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again in the way that many of his supporters understand that slogan. The USA is headed into a terrible ordeal of economic disorder that I call the long emergency. Mr. Trump won’t stop it, and it may yet make a fool out of him. But the Democratic Party’s agenda would add an extra layer of tyrannical and sadistic insanity to the process that will only bring more suffering to more people, and I don’t want that to happen. I believe that Mr. Trump will probably win the election, but we’ll have to see what kind of nefarious dodges his opponents will employ to prevent any resolution of that outcome.

James Howard Kunstler, interrogating “former friends who have dumped me on account of my support for Mr. Trump’s re-election” in Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral

How many ways does he dishonor us?

Donald Trump dishonors America in so many ways that it isn’t possible to keep them all in mind and still remember to brush your teeth.

George Packer, Donald Trump’s Refugee Policy Is Bureaucratic Sadism - The Atlantic

Secularism in disguise

Maybe European secularism is simply more honest in the idioms it employs. It has abandoned the language of Christianity as it has repudiated the teachings of Christianity. What you see is truly what you get. In America, is it possible that religion itself has become part of the idiom of the secular mindset? After all, an evangelicalism that finds voting for Trump (or Biden) to be a moral imperative for all, and a Catholic hierarchy that allows Biden to oppose with impunity so many of its cherished teachings, would not seem to be particularly pungent in their Christian distinctiveness. Is such “Christianity” merely secularism in a religious key?

Politics Is a Dirty Business | Carl R. Trueman | First Things

Let it be …

Another reader makes a prediction:

We know that the Tea Party came about largely in reaction to Obama and lost much of its raison d’etat after Trump’s election. Wokeness could be a similar political phenomenon. For that reason alone, I think it is too early to say that wokeness is winning. If Trump is defeated next month, many who now support wokeness —particularly those outside of academia — will revert to MLK-style liberalism.

Andrew Sullivan, The Psychedelic Election

Is Biden too woke?

I don’t see Biden as a radical figure, except with climate change, where it seems to me radicalism is absolutely necessary. And I don’t think he represents even a smidgen of the threat that Trump poses to liberal democratic norms. If he wins, we will indeed have to fight the woke and illiberal left in his administration and elsewhere, a fight I relish and look forward to. But the alternative — a deeply corrupt, fantastically incompetent, psychologically sick, congenitally dishonest, wannabe strongman — is unacceptable …

Similarly, James Lindsay, who has done sterling, vital work exposing the ugly fraud of critical theory, regards the threat of wokeness as the core issue, and so is voting Trump. That is his prerogative. But what I think he misses is how Trump has facilitated, exacerbated and legitimized wokeness more than any other figure on the right or left. He has made anti-wokeness toxic by association. If we are to make progress in weaning the elites off this poison, we have to sever that link.

Andrew Sullivan, The Psychedelic Election