No, Mr. President. Don't Do It

The latest flap is the idea that President Obama might put his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland, on the Supreme Court during the five minutes between the moment of "intercessionary recess" of the Senate between the last gavel of the 114th Congress and the first gavel of the new 115th Congress.

That's because the president has the power to appoint federal officers temporarily without the advice and consent of the Senate when the Senate is in recess.

You can go read the article at the Washington Times where the experts hash over whether this gambit would work. Apparently Teddy Roosevelt tried it in 1903, although not with a Supreme Court appointment.

I guess my reaction would be: Go ahead, Mr. President, Make My Day.

Because this sort of in-your-face phoning and penning from President Obama destroys the comity between the parties and between the lefty culture and the righty culture. It makes us mad. And it takes us another notch towards civil war.

Think that's a bit overdrawn? Maybe. But my Greek-American friend George Maroutsos explained it all to me years ago. It was during the aftermath of the Greek colonels episode from 1969-74 when democracy had been restored to Greece. The key, George explained, was that both the left-wing party should lose an election and give up power to the right-wing party, and that the right-wing party should lose an election and give up power to the left-wing party. That would prove that both parties accepted the right of the other party to exist.

The problem with Obama's executive actions and his transition ukases like putting vast areas of the continental shelf off-limits to exploration and declaring huge parts of Utah as a National Monument -- not to mention Harry Reid's gambit to prevent the use of the filibuster to oppose most federal nominations -- is that it signals to the other side that "these guys will pull every trick in the book" to get their way.

My judgement on the left is that they believe that the rules don't apply to them because they are on the right side of history and represent the oppressed and the marginalized that have been exploited and kept out of the full enjoyment of their human rights. So it is right and proper that young Obamas should act as community organizers and lead the people into the streets in "peaceful protest."

The left might have had a point, back in the day when the workers didn't have the vote, back in the day when Jim Crow disfranchised the blacks of the South.

But the whole point of votes and elections and legislatures is that every significant voice gets heard. So there is no warrant to take to the streets to advertise your grievance. Instead, you can form a committee and talk to your local representative. Mostly, representatives are very responsive to organized committees because they understand that organized groups tend to swing weight at the next election.

The problem with our liberal friends is that their whole political ideology says that only they are on the right side of history, and only they have the right to protest and to demonstrate. If anyone else does it it's fascism.

I'm here to tell my liberal friends that it is this liberal attitude that has brought us Trump. If you are an ordinary middle-class person that doesn't fit into the magic circle of "traditionally marginalized groups," then liberals don't care about people like you. Eventually, you get the message and vote for Trump.

So if President Obama pulls a trick and puts Merrick Garland on the Supreme Court for the next two years, then it will just firm up the growing sentiment in non-liberal America: no more Mr. Nice Guy.

Look, it's right there in the iterated Prisoners Dilemma. You trust everyone the first time, and keep trusting them as long as their actions are trustworthy. But as soon as a counterparty "defects" you stop trusting them. Period.

That is something that our liberal friends don't seem to understand.

Mideast: Replay of Europe 1600

The Middle East is the despair of well-born western elitists everywhere. Educated to a fare-thee-well in their Ivy League secular seminaries and finishing schools, so that they know the currently approved orthodoxy and know to avoid heresy and also have learned the "social graces and upper class cultural rites as a preparation for entry into society," these tender souls cannot understand why the folks in the Middle East have not embraced Peace and Justice.

Well, there are those nasty Israelis, of course. But for them the arc of history would be bending towards...

But what do you expect after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire? And after European dead white males, educated in all the usual state seminaries and finishing schools, had mucked around in the Middle East for a century with their foolish attempts to create a European style region. As Alan Massie writes,

None of these creations was a nation-state. There was the idea of the Arab nation, and it’s an idea that has never found practical expression. In most of the new states people felt loyalty to their tribe and their religion, not to the state.

Let's take a look at the Middle East. It has numerous tribes and enclaves, and mostly people identify themselves by blood and kindred. It has two competing versions of Islam. It has a holy site, in Mecca. And it has great powers interfering all the time, just because they could.

Gee, that sounds familiar. How about the German lands in 1600, or so. You had the dozens of principalities and even bishoprics. You had the memory of a lost empire in the Holy Roman Empire that was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. You were the front line between Protestantism and Catholicism. You had the holy center of Christendom down the street at the Vatican. And you had great powers, like France and Sweden, meddling in German affairs, because they could.

Let's say that the German problem started with Martin Luther and his 95 Theses in 1517, kicking off the schism in Christianity. About a century later you had the Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648. The end of the war saw the Treaty of Westphalia and the advancement of the idea of the Nation State.

That was cool for the non-German powers, because they were already nation states. But what about Germany? Too bad. It took another 200 years of war and revolution before the Germans got themselves a nation state, courtesy of the genius of Otto von Bismarck. Then, of course, the heirs of Bismarck mucked things up and got Germany into two world wars of Germany-vs.-the-rest.

So the result of all that religion and war and revolution is that the Germans are checking out of the world, with their women refusing to have babies and their German lands being overrun with migrants from the Middle East.

Here we have 500 years or so of complete elite cock-up in Europe, and you chaps are all wigged out about the fact that the Middle East hasn't yet settled down in a mere 100 years after the end of the Ottoman Empire?

What planet are you living on? Or more to the point, which secular seminary did you get your orthodox faith from? And which finishing school gave you your social graces?

I say let's give the Middle East another couple hundred years of war and mayhem before we decide to send in Graham Chapman and "The Colonel" to stop the silliness.

On the other hand, perhaps we should encourage Arab on Arab mayhem. Imagine if the Arab Middle East ever unified into a single entity, bursting with energy, whether religious or linguistic or national.

I don't think that would be much fun for the rest of us.

So maybe the result of Barack Obama's foolishness in the Middle East is the best possible outcome. He has managed to dissolve the whole place into wars and revolutions and terror and massacre. No chance for a unified Arab world on his watch. Yay Barack!

Geroge Soros Doesn't Get It

George Soros is a remarkable man, a Hungarian Jew that escaped the gas chambers of Hitler's Germany and then lived to become a wealthy speculator and a follower of Karl Popper and his idea of an Open Society.

And so he has spent tons of money over the years promoting what he believes to be the idea of the Open Society.

Now he has written a kind of manifesto, telling us what he thinks, and why, and what has gone wrong and what needs to be done. Here is the center of his political system.

I distinguished between two kinds of political regimes: those in which people elected their leaders, who were then supposed to look after the interests of the electorate, and others where the rulers sought to manipulate their subjects to serve the rulers’ interests. Under Popper’s influence, I called the first kind of society open, the second, closed.

OK, he writes, that is too simplistic. But when the EU was founded he supported it.

Which means that George Soros supports the idea of an unaccountable elite whose rulers could seek "to manipulate their subject to serve the rulers' interests." Which is what the EU elite has done.

Just a thought, George. I would say that an open society is one in which -- never mind how it is elected -- the government is limited and the intellectual elite labors night and day to create a national culture that marginalizes the eternal yearning in everyone to live at the expense of others, through government free stuff.

And now Germany has become the hegemon of Europe, and is doing a bad job at it, according to Soros. Meanwhile the whole of Europe is coming under the influence of Vladimir Putin, "whose concept of government is irreconcilable with that of open society." Writes Soros:

I hope that Europe’s leaders and citizens alike will realize that this endangers their way of life and the values on which the EU was founded.

And of course, Donald Trump is a real problem. Under him, "the US will be preoccupied with internal struggles in the near future, and targeted minorities will suffer."

So now we know why Soros is anti-nationalist and pro Black Lives Matter, as I wrote in the American Thinker. He's all worrited about "targeted minorities." You mean like the white working class, George, marginalized since the 1970s by liberals like Norman Lear in his All in the Family?

The fact is that George Soros is a man of his time and class, and bows to the false gods of the global elite, just like an Obama or a Kerry. His idea, like the rest of his buddies, is that a wise, evolved elite will rule the world as a kind of transnational cabal.

But the truth is that government, all government, is a shambles. Above all, politics and government are a problem because they attract people that are interested in power and the use of force.

But the notion of social animals, and humans as social animals, is how to limit force and its destruction. How do you slow down the chaps and the chapettes that are interested in power? How do you arrange institutions so that people are encouraged to serve their fellows with products and services rather than guns and bullets?

The overarching fact of the last century or so is that rich kids all over have fallen for the notion that the peace of the world depends on people like them getting political power to fight against the bourgeoisie and lead the marginalized into safe channels by bending the arc of history towards justice. And they have made the biggest mess of things ever every time they have been given that power.

George Soros is, no doubt, a clever man, and a successful speculator. But when it comes to government and politics he is a fool, blinded by the ruling-class shibboleths of the age.

He just doesn't get it.

Thomas Sowell is a Great Phrasemaker

If we look back at the conservative movement of the turn of the 21st century, two of the most worthy names must be Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. They are, of course, black, and have paid the price for not getting with the program and bending the knee to the liberal orthodoxy.

Sowell and Williams are also men that made their bones before the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s and before African Americans became the little darlings of the ruling class. So they have the toughness and pride of the self-made man, and I like that.

This week Thomas Sowell, at 86, has announced that he will stop writing his weekly syndicated op-ed column. In response many in the conservative firmament, and some of us occupying a sub-lunar position, have written about what Thomas Sowell has meant to us.

I myself have ten of his books on my bookshelf, out of the 30-odd that he has published over a hard-working lifetimes. So that ain't bad.

But I think that the great contribution of Dr. Thomas Sowell has been his talent for the catchphrase, or apothegm.

Here is the Dark Lord Vox Day and his list of Sowellisms.

Here is Michell Malkin and her list; she started reading Sowell in college, "no thanks to my college."

Here is Steven Hayward, biographer of Reagan and Powerline guy with his list of Sowell aphorisms.

Here is Christine Rousselle, at Townhall.com.

Here is WikiQuote's list of Sowell quotes.

And here is Thomas Sowell himself, with his favorite quotations from others.

I don't think that Thomas Sowell broke any new ground in economics or history, although he did yeoman work in diversity, showing that there is no such thing as the right proportion of workers in any field, and he showed that affirmation action and quotas are poison, whenever and wherever they are tried across the world.

My appreciation of Thomas Sowell is that his talent for the catchphrase is no small thing. For instance, I have tried to find pithy quotes in the work of Friedrich Hayek without much success. Hayek was a German writer, and wrote in paragraphs; it is very hard to find a catchphrase in his work. But the first thing that people think of in regard to Thomas Sowell is his talent for the pithy quote.

And for that we shall be eternally grateful to the mind and the pen of Thomas Sowell.

Lost in a Legacy Media Wonderland

It's lovely to read the chaps at the Carlos Slim blog as they try to figure out what hit them. So here is Jim Rutenberg doing an end-of-year piece on the media landscape.

This much is obvious, but it bears repeating before the year turns: If the news media is going to do its part in maintaining a fact-based national debate, it’s going to have to learn important lessons from 2016. 

Oh dear, Jim. Ain't you ever read nothing? For instance, how about reading Benjamin Disraeli's political novels like Sybil and Coningsby? There are three characters that define already in the mid 19th century what the modern media is all about. There is Rigby, who writes "slashing articles." And then there are Taper and Tadpole, the political operatives, always asking "What is our cry?"

So nothing has changed, Jim. Already in the dark ages of the 19th century the media was right in the middle of the political game, putting its weight on one side or the other. In Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now, we have three, count 'em, three ink-stained wretches writing, er, fake news to catch the eyeballs of the reading public. There is Mr. Broune of the Morning Breakfast Table. Broune is middle-of-the-road. Then there is Mr. Alf, of The Evening Pulpit, a title with an air of "wonderful omniscience." Finally there is Mr. Booker, of the Literary Chronicle.

At no point do Disraeli or Trollope give us any impression that this wonderful cast of characters is the least bit interested in "a fact-based national debate." Not a whisper. They are all in the business of catching eyeballs.

And that is the business that Carlos Slim's blog is in. Only Carlos Slim is what you might call the original robber baron. He made his bones as the guy with a monopoly on cell-phone service in Mexico. Golly; I wonder how Slim got and kept the cell-phone monopoly in Mexico.

How much fact-based national debate can you expect from a newspaper owned by a crony capitalist?

So it is utterly ridiculous to whine about "fake news." All news is fake news; it all has an angle.

For instance, here is Joel Kotkin talking about the blue cities, supposedly the thriving heart of the new urbanist movement that is revitalizing America's cities.

In reality, if we go beyond the big-city boosterism that dominates media coverage, poverty, crime, and economic stagnation still characterize many urban core neighborhoods even as many downtown districts have recovered. For all the talk about gentrification, concentrated urban poverty has been a persistent and growing problem, with 75 percent of high-poverty neighborhoods in 1970 still classified that way four decades later.

What in the world could he mean with his "big-city boosterism?"

The urbanists are all about "light rail and trolley projects designed to appeal to upscale riders and developers," according to Kotkin. Yeah, and here in Seattle we have just voted for $50 billion in light rail and trolleys.

So where does the boosting of metro-city urbanism come in the arc of justice between "fake news" and "fact-based national debate?" Ain't you heard, Jim? The Germans decided 200 years ago that there was no such thing as "facts." As Kant said, we cannot know things-in-themselves, we can only know appearances, and those appearances go through our minds before we construct the picture of them that we call reality.

I have found that over the years liberals have sneered at the FoxNews catchphrase "fair and balanced." Don't you guys get it? Fair and balanced is a joke, son. It is an ironical comment on the conceit of the liberal media that they deal in facts and genuine reportage.

And that was before WikiLeaks and the emails that showed your average liberal reporter groveling before the big beasts of the Democratic Party.

The Left's Trifecta of Delusion, Incompetence, and Spite

Last weekend the boys at Instapundit rang down the verdict on the Obama administration. My version is this:

The Obama era was conceived in delusion, executed in incompetence and delivered with spite.

But why limit this notion to the Obama administration? Any fool can see that this trifecta of delusion, incompetence, and spite applies to the whole Leftist project.

First, there is the lefty delusion about the economy. Its ground of faith is that economic power must be subordinate to political power; otherwise people will be oppressed and exploited by the capitalists. But this is a delusion. The fact is that people subjected to the full force of capitalist economic power have experienced the Great Enrichment of the last 200 years from per-capita income of $1-3 per day to over $100 per day. But people imprisoned in lands where the political sector dominated the economic sector have starved and died. See Venezuela, land of the Bolivarian Revolution.

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. Science tells us that such rule is bound to be incompetent, because administrative systems cannot compute market prices. But lefties are too incompetent to listen.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to rule over the economic sector. The natural leaders of the economic sector, that conjure up prosperity with innovation and pluck, must be named and shamed as "robber barons" and "malefactors of great wealth."

Anyway, as my sister reminded me, we have a name for the nation in which the political sector dominates the economic sector: we call it fascist.

Second, there is the lefty delusion about politics. Its ground of faith is that political power, in the hands of the right people, can be salvific; political power can bend the arc of history towards justice. But this is a delusion. Political power is a necessary evil. It is beneficial only because it is civil war by other means, with the sham fights of elections instead of the real thing of teenage boys and twenty-something men with guns running in the streets. The trick with politics is how to limit its power without leaving the people defenseless against robbers and invaders.

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. The whole point of social animals like humans is to replace the war of all against all with a zone of peace where people agree not to resort to force and resolve their conflicts peacefully. And the rulers of the land where politics is king incompetently mobilize the whole nation as if for war, little caring that war is about destruction, not construction.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to mobilize the whole people into a political army. There must also be enemies of the people, reactionaries and their bribed apologists, and these must be sought out and hunted down, and shoveled into mass graves as monsters and scum.

Third, there is the lefty delusion about religion and culture. Its ground of faith is that church and state must be combined into a single totalitarian power structure. The left demands not just to dominate your work and your political community. It is determined to use political power to enforce its secular religious beliefs and dominate your mind. But this is a delusion. Indeed it is a contradiction. The left believes in a vanguard of the evolved and the enlightened, the people of the creative self, empowered to spread their expressive individualism throughout the land. But what of the creative expression of the next generation of expressive creativity? How will they persuade the previous generation of creative rulers to accept their new creations?

But it gets worse, because those lands ruled by the deluded left have suffered under the incompetence of their rulers. The whole point of humans as in this mortal coil is that the meaning of life, the universe, and everything is a profound mystery. And the lesson of the last two hundred years and its scientific and cultural revolutions is that the meaning of it all has become curiouser and curiouser. It is profoundly incompetent to imagine that the true meaning of life, the universe and everything can be intuited by any political elite, and carefully taught to a subservient multitude.

But it gets worse, because the rulers of the deluded, incompetent left have oppressed their peoples with spite. It is not enough for them to imagine that politicians and their bribed apologists can dictate the meaning of life, the universe, and everything to their subjects. The subjects must also be made to care. There can be no backtalk, no dissent from the papal bulls of the political elite, and anyone that dissents from the political line must be anathematized as racists, sexists, and homophobes, and cast into outer darkness.

Charles Taylor, the Canadian liberal Catholic philosopher, argued that the modern era and its "immanent frame" requires a two-fold culture to resolve the cross pressures that each of us feel, from materialists that respond to the aesthetic in poetry to religious believers and Romantics that still want the rational structure of human rights. Taylor proposed a two-dimensional solution. First, we must honor ordinary human flourishing: forming families, owning property, doing it for the children. Second, we recognize that we all search for something higher and fuller. The problem then is how to live ordinary life while still embracing the transcendent, and how to reach for the stars in terms that do not “crush, mutilate or deny what is essential to our humanity[?]"

It has been the central conceit of the left that it had solved the problem of human flourishing by making it into something higher and fuller.

But now we know that its entire project was built on a delusion, implemented with blind incompetence, and enforced with spite, and that everywhere the left has ruled it has crushed, spindled and mutilated human flourishing, human community, and human spirit.

All that is wanting is a little boy to observe that the emperor has no clothes.

Democrats Blundering in Denial

Get a load of this, from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg and his daughter Anna in The New York Times.

President Obama will be remembered as a thoughtful and dignified president who led a scrupulously honest administration that achieved major changes.

I guess the advantage of that statement is that is reveals the liberal agenda for Barack Obama's "legacy." You will agree that President Obama was "thoughtful and dignified," etc., or we will know the reason why.

Yep, people will disagree about Obama's "impatience with politicians and Republican intransigence denied him bigger accomplishments" but he saved the economy, passed Obamacare, and committed the nation to climate change. Yay!

But then Greenberg has to deal with the fact that Democrats have experienced astonishing losses during his administration. So what went wrong? Here is Greenberg's list:

• The president declined to explain his initiatives effectively.
• He focused on helping the "ascendant... multicultural America... rather than the continuing economic struggle experienced by a majority of Americans."
• He offered "tepid support" for the labor movement.
• His presidential campaign technology did not help in mid-terms and 2016.
• His campaign messages were all about "progress and growth."

I think the way to get past the partisan bubble-thinking is to start with the first paragraph reproduced above.

• "Thoughtful and dignified?" The guy that told his supporters to bring a gun to a knife fight?
• "Scrupulously honest administration?" The one that sicced the IRS on its political opponents and whose Attorney General met Bill Clinton, husband of a woman of interest to the FBI, for a little chat on the tarmac?
• "Achieved major changes?" As in rolling over the opposition without bothering to achieve consensus?

Do liberals really believe this, or does Stan Greenberg believe that the liberal base isn't ready for the truth yet?

Because I live in another universe.

Here's my report card on the Obama administration.

• Obama was foolish to push a Democrat-only stimulus. I'd say that the science tells us that big-government stimulus doesn't work.
• Obama was foolish to push Obamacare before getting the economy back on track. Big government programs are a weight on the economy, something we didn't need after the worst financial crash since 1929.
• Obama was foolish to push Dodd-Frank financial regulation on a weak economy.
• Obama was foolish to push climate-change subsidies and regulation before getting the economy on track. Subsidies and energy regulation are a weight on the economy. See above.
• Obama was foolish to abandon the Moynihan Rule, that you need a 70-30 vote in the Senate to pass big policy changes. Instead he passed Obamacare with a partisan majority and hid his radical changes in a torrent of executive actions and regulations, most of which can be rolled back.

But those are the tactical issues. The official Christopher Chantrill Strategic Appreciation is more important, and more compelling:

• Liberal faith in political power is the folly of the age. Humans need protection from enemies foreign and domestic. But the age-old problem is who will protect us from the protectors: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? from Jouvenal's Satires. Sorry liberals; you are not going to make the world a better place with political power.
• Liberals still believe in big government administration and regulation. That's a century after Mises statement that socialism couldn't work because it couldn't compute prices, 60 years after Hayek said that a bureaucrat couldn't outperform the market, and 45 years since Stigler's article on regulatory capture. It's the Science, liberals.
• Liberals are using government power to push their secular religion. Sexual liberation, divorce, abortion and LGBT may be the wave of the future, but this secular religion should not be a government-established church, and its precepts should not be imposed by government fiat or by elite Supreme Court ukase. This cannot end well.

But don't think that I don't appreciate President Obama. I do, I really do, and here is why.

In my view, the recovery from the 2008 financial crash would have been slow, whichever president and party was in power. See the Crash of 1873 and its great depression, and the Crash of 1929. And the president and party in power would have suffered just because it all happened on their watch.

So I thank God we had a Democratic president during the disappointing and slow recovery from the crash. And nobody dared criticize the president, because racism. Imagine if Republicans had been in power! Why, in was in 2003, a mere two years after the Tech Crash of 2000 that Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) started complaining about a "jobless recovery." Imagine what Nance would have said during a Republican presidency after 2008!

I reckon that if it weren't for President Obama we wouldn't be seeing the Republican Party in its best political position since 1928. Instead we would be seeing the Democrats in their best position since 1937.

And best of all, it looks like Democrats still don't get what hit them.