Saving Democracy Doesn’t Mean Doing Everything Democrats Want

By Jack Butler

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

When the future of the American republic is at stake, there is only one thing we can do: Give Democrats what they want. Or so you might think after reading Robert Kagan’s Washington Post essay “Our constitutional crisis is already here.” In Kagan’s reckoning, Donald Trump’s continued hold on the Republican Party, his persistence in believing that he won the 2020 election but it was stolen from him, the state-level actions of Republican lawmakers, the expectation that he will run again, the weaknesses of the Democratic Party, and the likely gain of congressional power by Republicans all mean that we are facing a crisis. The U.S., Kagan believes,

 

is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

 

Kagan adds that “the destruction of democracy might not come until November 2024, but critical steps in that direction are happening now.” His appeal is, at least theoretically, aimed not simply at Democrats, but at the Republicans and conservatives who were and remain unwilling to follow Trump down his irrational and destructive post-election rabbit hole of election-denialism. But whatever feints Kagan makes in their direction, his ultimate “bargain” for those who wish to adhere to conservatism yet resist Trump’s excesses is, essentially, to give them nothing in return for yielding to the desires of the Democratic Party, which he presents as the only solution to our present crisis.

 

To understand Kagan, it is first necessary to understand what legitimate points he makes. He is right on the general points that Trump’s post-election claims were lies and that Trump’s attempts to defy the results of the election, culminating in the January 6 Capitol riot, should be condemned. He is right to applaud the “recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to ‘find’ more votes for Trump,” as well as “the reluctance of two attorneys general and a vice president to obey orders they deemed inappropriate.” And there is plausibility to his call for liberals and Democrats “to distinguish between their ongoing battle with Republican policies and the challenge posed by Trump and his followers.” The former, he says, “can be fought through the processes of the constitutional system”; the latter “is an assault on the Constitution itself.”

 

Unfortunately, Kagan’s overall prescription is defective. It is marred, in the first place, by his inability to follow his own counsel. For one, though he ostensibly distinguishes between Republican actions in the more workaday business of politics, in which parties are naturally expected to exist in some measure of opposition to one another, and Trump and Trump-allied efforts to challenge the constitutional system, Kagan asserts that, in fact, “the two are intimately related, because the Republican Party has used its institutional power in the political sphere to shield Trump and his followers from the consequences of their illegal and extralegal activities in the lead-up to Jan. 6.” Kagan believes that it should not be possible to behave, in other respects, as a Republican normally would so long as elected Republicans do not yield to all of his preferences. He is aghast at the audacity of Republicans to “play the role of legitimate opposition” to a Biden administration that, he at least admits, “is not without faults.” But even though such criticisms of Biden might have “legitimacy,” they are a dodge so long as Trump remains out there, plotting his next move.

 

As his worst actors, Kagan has in mind, specifically, Representatives Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, whose efforts against Democratic attempts to investigate January 6 are simultaneously worthy of criticism and an understandable, if inadvisable, response to Democrats’ attempts to convert the events of January 6 — which I condemned at the time — into a partisan weapon. The efforts of Republicans in this area proceed largely in reaction to what Democrats perceive as the lingering political utility of January 6. You could say some Republicans bear a measure of blame for the continuation of this political situation for having declined to use the most powerful political censure available in our system of government to condemn Trumps’ actions, even as it is obvious that Democrats have a vested interest in elevating and extending their hyperbole about January 6.

 

But this criticism does not apply to the Republicans who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial, whom Kagan denounces anyway. He does single them out for a kind of praise, calling their vote “brave” and “a display of republican virtue.” Yet he goes to lament that

 

Republicans such as Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse have condemned the events of Jan. 6, criticized Trump and even voted for his impeachment, but in other respects they continue to act as good Republicans and conservatives. On issues such as the filibuster, Romney and others insist on preserving “regular order” and conducting political and legislative business as usual, even though they know that Trump’s lieutenants in their party are working to subvert the next presidential election.

 

Even these Republicans are, in Kagan’s view, “enabling the insurrection.” To him, even their “brave,” virtuously republican stance against Trump is merely “symbolic.” Claiming to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate Republican efforts and effort-makers, Kagan seemingly concludes that even Republicans who resisted Trump have failed to act virtuously. “Despite all that has happened,” he laments, “some people still wish to be good Republicans even as they oppose Trump.” This describes many who might have been interested in joining Kagan’s efforts, were he not intent on repelling them.

 

So what can a Republican do to secure Kagan’s imprimatur? Simple: Accede to Democrats’ wishes, including their own preferred perversions of the constitutional order. His ask in this area that, superficially, seems most directly connected to the crisis he describes is passage of Democratic efforts at voting reform. It is a suspicious coincidence that a bill which takes power over elections away from states; centralizes it in the federal government; restricts First Amendment rights so broadly that even the ACLU has taken issue; is almost certainly unconstitutional in multiple provisions; and, most dubiously, has been on the Democratic wishlist since 2019 (N.B. before the 2020 election) just so happens to be the solution to all that ails our republic. (So suspicious that Kagan accepts a watered-down version might be necessary.) The 2020 election wasn’t stolen, but Democrats’ proposed election-reform bills have been sweeping enough to seem like, essentially, announcements of an intention to use the federal government to compromise future elections.

 

Kagan does not recognize or condemn any of the politically and legally suspect attempts by Democratic officials in swing states to unilaterally and haphazardly alter election procedures (which, to be clear, did not actually successfully swing the election for Biden). Nor does he acknowledge that pandemic-driven contingency rules about voting — which he innocuously describes as protecting “election workers, same-day registration and early voting” — were designed for emergency circumstances and are well within the purview of state legislatures to change. No, these emergency rules are now the baseline. Any revision thereof is automatically suspect.

 

But Kagan cannot resist restricting his demands merely to this, and thereby gives the game away. The filibuster, now one of the instruments of our constitutional apocalypse but as recently as 2017 endorsed by 30-odd Democratic senators, must also go. And if anti-Trump Republicans were truly serious about their commitment to democracy, they would not just join Democrats in a “national unity coalition” that concerns itself only with “matters relating to the Constitution and elections.” They would further consider allying with Democrats on a “temporary governing consensus on a host of critical issues: government spending, defense, immigration and even the persistent covid-19 pandemic, effectively setting aside the usual battles to focus on the more vital and immediate need to preserve the United States.” Once again, conveniently, acting as a Republican in good faith is impossible, in Kagan’s reckoning. The lingering specter of Trump makes it incumbent on Republicans, for some reason, simply to roll over on other issues.

 

That Kagan would begin with a seemingly earnest attempt to create a coalition united against Trump’s efforts to subvert our constitutional system and transform it into a campaign to pressure Republicans to abandon what they believe is less surprising given the essay’s indications of his own partisan leanings. Take his belief that it was in some way unseemly for Republicans to have dared to seek conservative policy victories, such as “hundreds of conservative court appointments, including three Supreme Court justices; tax cuts; immigration restrictions; and deep reductions in regulations on business” during Trump’s presidency. To make sure you get the point, he hyperbolically compares such behavior to the German conservatives who “accommodated Adolf Hitler.”

 

There is also his generous treatment of Al Gore’s own post-election tantrum in 2000:

 

Al Gore and his supporters displayed republican virtue when they abided by the Supreme Court’s judgment in 2000 despite the partisan nature of the justices’ decision.

 

Al Gore’s “republican virtue” dragged out the proceedings of an election for months, contributed to the contemporary belief of a large percentage of Democrats that George W. Bush was an illegitimate president, and ratcheted up a bipartisan feedback loop of bipartisan belief in illegitimate elections. That belief was evidenced on the left as early as 2004, when, in the wake of nonsensical theories about Diebold voting machines in Ohio, some congressional Democrats voted to object to the certification of Bush’s reelection victory (they were as wrong to do it as Republicans were to do it in 2020); reared its ugly head in 2016, when many Democrats believed that Russians had hacked Trump’s vote totals; showed up in failed Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams’s lie that she won the 2018 race; and had groundwork being laid for it just in case in 2020, when Democrats were preparing themselves to believe that Trump was conspiring to have the U.S. Postal Service steal the election. Republicans have not been blameless in this area. But if Kagan were interested in genuine conciliation instead of partisan extortion, he might have acknowledged the faults of the Left here.

 

Kagan makes a few other, scattered hints toward concession. But the preponderance of his argument, and its overall thrust, suggests their insincerity. The attempts to magnify and manipulate concerns about what Trump might do in 2024 to extort Republicans and conservatives into abandoning their commitment to what they believe, however, seem quite sincere. In this, he resembles Vox senior correspondent Ian Millhiser, who cannot tolerate the fact that the Supreme Court justices of a tainted president get to remain on the bench (they get no credit for ruling against their appointer, apparently). The common thread here is an inability to separate legitimate political action and interest from subversion of the republic, and a deliberate attempt to blur the lines between the two so that they can be condemned as one.

 

That Kagan would make such an attempt indicates either that he does not actually see this crisis as being as serious as he wants you to think (as otherwise he might consider offering more than token concessions to erstwhile political opponents interested in acting in good faith on this issue), or that he is incapable of rising above his partisan station to meet it. There may well be serious challenges facing the American constitutional system over the next four years. But we will not resolve them by introducing others. Unless or until those on the left end their own attempts at introducing new deviations from the American political order, then those on the right who oppose all forms of constitutional mischief, not just Trump’s, will have to do so alone.

Texas’ New Law Forces Americans to Have the Abortion Debate We Need

By Kevin D. Williamson

Saturday, September 25, 2021

 

One of the problems with abortion law is that it’s difficult to separate how we feel about abortion from how we feel about the law. 

 

This is worth keeping in mind as Texas and Florida Republicans, who are pushing legislatively against abortion, prepare to face down congressional Democrats pushing the other way. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has set a Dec. 1 date to begin hearings in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi case that could end with the high court vacating Roe v. Wade, the 1973 landmark ruling that legalized abortion. 

 

That’s partly why today’s fight is such a bitter one: When the Supreme Court made that decision almost 50 years ago, the ballot box ceased to matter. Roe kept the fundamentals of abortion from being addressed through democratic negotiation, as the question of abortion was entrusted to the pronouncements of semi-mystical figures in black robes. 

 

Abortion opponents were in effect disenfranchised by the Supreme Court. Able to win elections year after year but unable to change the law, they instead were restricted to tinkering around at the edges of abortion policy. 

 

Abortion-rights advocates, forever hysterical, insist that if Roe is overturned, then, overnight, women will be deprived of abortion access from sea to shining sea. But that is not the case. Before Roe, 30 states prohibited abortion and 20 states permitted it in at least some circumstances. These were decisions reached by state legislatures, and that is how these decisions should be made — we have 50 states for a reason and, as even pro-abortion legal scholars will concede in their more honest moments, the Constitution itself is utterly silent on the question. 

 

Before Roe, abortion was a matter for the democratic contest, and both parties had pro-life and pro-abortion elements in them: Dwight Eisenhower was generally supportive of abortion rights and Ronald Reagan as governor had signed the nation’s most permissive abortion law, while liberal figures such as the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Gore were, in those days, anti-abortion. Approaching these divisive questions democratically in the legislatures provides a path to consensus and bipartisan compromise — but resolving them via Supreme Court fiat provides only an opportunity for partisan power politics. After Roe, the mutual weaponization of abortion by each party was inevitable. 

 

Texas’ new abortion law is an attempt to outlaw the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy through a legal arrangement designed specifically to evade a challenge under Roe. Florida’s proposed law is very similar. Congressional Democrats propose to preempt these laws at the federal level, though it is far from clear they have the constitutional power to do so. 

 

The right outcome here is — as it often is — the one that is going to disappoint everybody. 

 

The Supreme Court should overturn Roe v. Wade, not because abortion is evil — though it is evil — but because Roe is bad law, a fantasy woven out of the 14th Amendment, which contains not a word about abortion or the right to privacy the court has alleged to discover there. Its defects are obvious even to liberal thinkers such as Edward Lazarus, a clerk to Roe author Harry Blackmun, who declared that the opinion “borders on the indefensible.” 

 

Congress should keep its nose out of the question, because Congress has no legitimate power to micromanage how states regulate abortion. That will disappoint the pro-choice lobby, who take a bizarrely sacramental view of abortion and a scriptural view of Roe. 

 

But pro-lifers should gird ourselves for disappointment, too. Overturning Roe is not the end of the work but the beginning. Once the subject is returned to the legislatures, some states will abolish abortion in all or most circumstances, some states will maintain abortion regimes that are as permissive as they were under Roe or even more so, and most states will, in all likelihood, follow public opinion in taking a generally liberal approach to abortion in the first trimester and then an increasingly restrictive position thereafter. 

 

Instead of trying to convince five out of nine Supreme Court justices to see things their way, each side of the abortion debate will have to address itself to 100 million or so Americans on the other side, who have a different view. 

 

In other words, we will have to talk to each other. But that is how democracy works. 

The COVID Panic Police

By Christine Rosen

Monday, September 27, 2021

 

On August 23, 2021, the Associated Press re-ported that an astonishing 70 percent of calls to Mississippi’s Poison Control Center were from people who had taken the veterinary medication ivermectin to treat COVID. Similarly alarming news about ivermectin emerged from Oklahoma: Rolling Stone headlined its report “Gunshot Victims Left Waiting as Horse Dewormer Overdoses Overwhelm Oklahoma Hospitals, Doctor Says.”

 

Media personalities such as Rachel Maddow tweeted the alarmist headlines about Oklahoma out to their millions of followers. The narrative was set: Ignorant rural Americans were self-medicating with a horse drug and, because of their foolish behavior, overwhelming the health-care system.

 

Neither story was true. As Mississippi’s chief epidemiologist, Dr. Paul Byers, noted, the percentage of calls about ivermectin was 2 percent, not 70 percent. And, contrary to reports, he said, “no hospitalizations due to ivermectin toxicity have been directly reported to the Mississippi Poison Control Center or the Mississippi State Department of Health.”

 

The Oklahoma story proved even more of a reach. The original source, a report from local news station KFOR, included quotes from an Oklahoma doctor named Jason McElyea—who had not worked at the hospital mentioned in the story for several months. He claimed that “the ERs are so backed up that gunshot victims were having hard times getting to facilities where they can get definitive care and be treated.” He also mentioned having seen some patients who had “overdosed” on ivermectin.

 

KFOR reporter Katelyn Ogle merged these separate observations into a single falsehood with the headline, “Patients overdosing on ivermectin backing up rural Oklahoma hospitals, ambulances.” Neither she nor the many national and international media outlets that picked up the story bothered to call any hospitals to confirm McElyea’s claims. (In fact, some hospitals were overwhelmed with COVID patients, but not with ivermectin overdoses.)

 

As with the chain-of-custody process designed to create an unimpeachable record of evidence gathered at a crime scene, journalists are obligated to account for the information they convey as fact in their stories. Who was the original source? Is that source reliable? Can that source’s statements be confirmed by other reliable sources and facts?

 

Basic tenets of journalistic practice are particularly important when a media outlet has already proven to be less than capable of following them. Rolling Stone, which infamously brought the world an invented college-rape story set at the University of Virginia in 2014, should never be considered a reputable source, as it proved yet again with its promotion of this story. Even the photograph the magazine used in its tweet publicizing its coverage was false, taken not outside a hospital this summer, but months earlier during a vaccination drive in the state.

 

And what of our Big Tech guardians against disinformation? Despite all the recent hand-wringing by companies such as Twitter and Facebook about the spread of disinformation, Twitter did not mark Rachel Maddow’s untruthful tweet (which remains uncorrected and was sent out to her 10.5 million followers) as misinformation.

 

Why not?

 

Because the ivermectin story fit the prevailing media narrative—a narrative that prioritizes fearmongering and tribalism over fact. The tone of the coverage was consistently and predictably polarizing: Midwestern rubes (probably Trump voters!), whom television hosts such as MSNBC’s Joy Reid contemptuously called “ivermectin people,” take horse drugs and crowd hospitals. Mainstream-media personalities and journalists believe they are doing the right thing by calling out these yahoos for their irresponsible behavior.

 

No matter that the narrative was pure confirmation bias. These days, confirmation bias functions as adrenaline for many in the mainstream media, and a single local news story can now provide mainstream outlets with just the right amount of salacious detail to justify their portrayal of their fellow Americans as halfwits.

 

The ivermectin narrative also fit neatly into a broader trend in COVID reporting: alarmism. The terrified tone of so much pandemic reporting, understandable early on when so little was known about the virus and when vaccines were not yet created, has become a permanent feature despite gains in treatment and the protection offered by mass vaccination. It is a form of path dependence whereby the default position for reporting about a new virus variant, for example, or about new treatments for COVID symptoms, begins from a point of panic rather than dispassionate fact-gathering.

 

This was evident with much of the reporting on the Delta variant. As COVID cases (overwhelmingly among the unvaccinated) began to rise this summer, albeit with thankfully lower death rates, news outlets shifted away from discussing the raw number of COVID hospitalizations and deaths (which would help readers put the recent wave in context) and instead talked about percentage increases that made the situation sound far more dire than it was—especially given the availability of free vaccines.

 

Story after story on cable news and in newspapers emphasized the dangers of the Delta variant and its supposed deadlier nature (which proved not to be true). In late July, the Washington Post ran a fearful story with the headline “The War Has Changed,” citing an internal CDC slide presentation about the Delta variant that emphasized breakthrough infections (which have proven not to be as widespread as stories suggest) and that claimed (falsely) that Delta was as contagious as chickenpox. By early September, the New York Times front page featured stories such as “Covid deaths surge across a weary America as a once-hopeful summer ends.”

 

There are a few notable exceptions to this trend. David Leonhardt at the New York Times has used his morning newsletter to debunk several COVID-related panics, most recently analyzing the available data regarding breakthrough cases of COVID in the vaccinated population. (His finding: The vaccinated have a 1-in-5,000 chance, at worst, of being hospitalized due to a breakthrough.)

 

Still, most published or aired stories about COVID are negative, alarmist, or both, even when the facts offer cause for optimism. Mixed messaging from public health officials compounds this problem, and together they have made vaccinated Americans feel as if it is unsafe for them to return to any sort of normal behavior.

 

In part, this is because the mainstream media are dominated by people who self-identify as being on the left of the political spectrum. Those same people tend to view themselves as the party of science over superstition, the people who value technocratic-elite directives over common people’s commonsense instincts. From their perspective, they are the ones who “listen to the experts” and do the right thing by living under endless lockdowns and mask mandates, and whose endgame appears to be no return to normal until COVID cases reach zero (everyone else is a danger to society). In fact, the pandemic has proven their total inability to assess risks.

 

As the recent ivermectin kerfuffle demonstrates, it has also proven their insincerity. If you must lie to make the story work, you’re a propagandist, not a journalist. If your source’s statements seem too good to be true because they so perfectly capture your own ideological leanings, they probably are too good to be true—or your leanings have compromised your judgment. Journalists are supposed to approach events (and those in power) with skepticism, rigor, and the dogged pursuit of the facts on the ground regardless of whether those facts support the prevailing narrative. By actively promoting falsehoods about COVID and their fellow Americans, the media are like the boy who cried wolf. When and if they finally do uncover the truth, they will have made it impossible for us to believe them.

Giving Up on the Good-Enough War

By Eli Lake

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

America’s longest war, we are being told, should be remembered for its pain and its folly: the suicides of veterans, the sham of Afghanistan’s military, the greed of the contractors, the immolated wedding parties, the pederast warlords. The valor to be celebrated is now reserved for the airlift that commenced after the fall of a Potemkin regime, not the 20-year mission that allowed that government to survive until it didn’t. As the New York Times news alert to mark the exit of the last soldier put it: “The U.S. Occupation Ends.”

 

This is President Joe Biden’s narrative, a narrative in which America is no different from the past empires whose headstones dot the landscape of Afghanistan. The narrative claims they too tried to tame an untamable country, and we followed foolishly in their footsteps. As Biden quipped to a reporter on July 8, “it’s up to the people of Afghanistan to decide the government they want, not us to impose the government on them.”

 

It is an appealing pose for Democrats looking for a reason to support their president’s betrayal. It also suits the purposes of the America-Firsters who dance to the beat of Donald Trump’s drum. Why are we building schools for girls half a world away when our own schools are failing? they ask. Besides, the Afghans never wanted democracy. If they did, their army would have fought for it, and their government wouldn’t have collapsed.

 

How does this theory account for Afghans such as Hamed Kohistani? He is a doctor at a Kabul hospital who, in 2018, waited for five hours to vote in his country’s parliamentary elections. He told the New York Times, “The problem is not waiting, the problem is security. The longer you wait in line, the more the risk is.” That risk was the Taliban. Throughout the seven national Afghan elections since 2004, the Taliban waged a vicious war on voting itself. They warned Afghans on social media and official communiqués not to show up on Election Day. They targeted poll workers and police chiefs. They sent volunteers and conscripts with suicide vests and car bombs to polling stations. And in the territories the Taliban controlled or contested, they outlawed voting entirely.

 

Yet millions of Afghans showed up to cast their ballots anyway. This fact is all the more remarkable considering how corrupt those elections were. The Taliban’s campaign of terror made it nearly impossible for outside monitors to observe vote counts. A national voter registry was riddled with errors and easily manipulated. Every major Afghan election featured accusations and counter accusations of fraud. Thus, the act of voting itself must be seen as a protest against its potential negation.

 

Successive elections were not the only or even the most important achievement of American and Western arms in Afghanistan. The war was waged in Afghanistan to prevent the next 9/11, and in this respect it succeeded. But the resilience and courage of Afghan voters put the lie to the glib slander that millions of Afghans did not want democracy.

 

Think of the women in the larger cities such as Kabul and Kandahar. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan before their ouster in late 2001, girls were banned from attending school. As of 2020, 3.5 million out of 9 million students were girls. Between 2005 and 2017, the female literacy rate nearly doubled from 20 percent to 39 percent. As of 2020, there were 70,000 women teachers.

 

The gains were not limited to women. As the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said in a recent report, “the lives of millions of Afghans have been improved by U.S. government interventions.” In 2018, the SIGAR noted that life expectancy had jumped from 56 to 65. Between 2001 and 2019, the mortality rate for children under five decreased from more than 50 percent to 28 percent. And Afghanistan’s overall Gross Domestic Product tripled between 2002 and 2019.

 

These successes are most apparent in Kabul. Under the Taliban, it was a joyless, culturally barren city. After the American and NATO intervention, Kabul hosted film festivals, art exhibits, and new universities. In 2014, a group of young female orphans formed the Zohra Orchestra, named for the Persian goddess of music. In August, as the Taliban swept to power, the orchestra’s 24-year-old conductor, Negin Khpalwak, prepared for the worst. According to a heartbreaking Reuters dispatch, Khpalwak “grabbed a robe to cover her bare arms and hid away a small set of decorative drums. Then she gathered up photographs and press clippings of her famed musical performances, put them in a pile and burnt them.”

 

It’s a mistake to say America fought a 20-year war only for Negin Khpalwak’s orchestra or female literacy or Kabul film festivals. But it’s also true that the war to keep the Taliban in their caves created the space for civil society to grow, particularly in the big cities.

 

Initially, counterterrorism and nation-building were meant to be complementary. As former National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley told SIGAR in a report released this year, “The goal was to help Afghanistan build a government, provide a prosperous life for the Afghan people, and thus create a resiliency against al-Qaeda’s return.” In other words, nation-building was America’s exit strategy.

 

This may sound ludicrous in 2021. But in the early 2000s, it was conventional wisdom. As George W. Bush put it in his second inaugural address: “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.” This is one reason why Biden’s and Donald Trump’s joint theory of Afghanistan—that this “graveyard of empires” proved the burial ground for the American empire—is wrong. When Soviet special operators invaded Afghanistan in 1979, they installed a puppet. America had the vision and hubris to attempt to make Afghanistan freer. At least that was the stated goal of the Bush administration—and, ironically, the Obama administration in its first term.

 

* * *

 

But there was a catch. Or a glitch. Or an internal policy catastrophe. Take your pick. It’s important to remember that the first forces to land in Afghanistan after 9/11 were not soldiers in the U.S. Army, but CIA officers. The agency had real experience in Afghanistan. It had worked in the 1980s through Pakistan’s military intelligence service to fund and equip the Mujahideen warriors who drove the Soviets out of the country. The CIA learned during that proxy war that Afghanistan was more a patchwork of clans than a nation-state. So it aligned with some of the country’s worst brutes to rent their militias in a war on al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

 

The conduct of one of those brutes serves to exemplify the wider CIA approach. In November 2001, a militia commanded by Abdul Rashid Dostum summarily executed 2,000 Taliban fighters who had surrendered, by placing them in shipping containers and then firing their rifles into them. The CIA ended up building him a mansion. And he later went on to serve as a vice president to President Ashraf Ghani. Men like Dostum may be necessary to defeat a vicious foe like the Taliban. But they can play no meaningful role in the founding of a democracy.

 

If George W. Bush had been more like his father, it’s likely the Afghanistan war would have remained in the shadows, aligning U.S. Special Operations forces with local warlords. But after 9/11, Afghanistan was briefly a whole-of-government project for an angry and idealistic nation. America was fighting two wars in Afghanistan—one to build a resilient, centralized democratic state, the other to crush al-Qaeda through an alliance with the country’s regional warlords.

 

This is where the Democrats got it wrong. The problem with Bush’s handling of the Afghanistan war wasn’t, as John Kerry had claimed in 2004 when he dubbed our greatest enemy “Osama Been Forgotten,” that the pivot to Iraq deprived the Afghan conflict of presidential focus and resources. It was that Bush’s publicly stated goal of building a democracy was undermined by his own CIA’s campaign to align with the country’s regional tyrants.

 

This paradox came to the fore in Obama’s first term. He had campaigned on Afghanistan’s being the good war, and upon taking office, agreed to a surge in forces. General Stanley McChrystal wanted to re-create the counterinsurgency strategy that had quieted al-Qaeda in Iraq. Like Hadley, he wanted to nurture resilient, legitimate local institutions that would win over the population cowed by the Taliban.

 

But when he arrived in Afghanistan, McChrystal found that in the rural provinces in particular, the real power resided with warlords. Their corruption and criminality at times were so rampant that many locals preferred the Taliban, in much the same way that a majority of Palestinians in the 2006 elections supported Hamas over the party of Yasir Arafat.

 

General Michael Flynn, who oversaw military intelligence for McChrystal in Afghanistan, was characteristically blunt about the problem in the first months of the surge. “If we are going to conduct a population-centric strategy in Afghanistan and we are perceived as backing thugs,” he said, “then we are just undermining ourselves.” And undermine us we did. For example, according to SIGAR, the U.S. spent $8.6 billion on efforts to eradicate Afghanistan’s poppy crop and heroin trade. Even as we did so, the CIA was paying off people such as Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the country’s first president, Hamid Karzai, and himself a major drug kingpin. As a result, opium-poppy production in Afghanistan soared after 2002. The U.S. government was literally funding both sides of Afghanistan’s drug war. 

 

This was a pattern. Too often, America was inadvertently funding both sides of its war in Afghanistan. McChrystal, for example, discovered that a major source of revenue for the Taliban was collecting protection money from the truck drivers who supplied U.S. and Afghan forces. The U.S. supply chain became a cash cow for the enemy. Between 2001 and 2011, the U.S. lavished Pakistan’s military with more than $20 billion in subsidy and equipment. All the while, Pakistan’s military intelligence service played a double game, occasionally helping to arrest Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders, but also providing sanctuary, funding, and training for the Taliban in its war in Afghanistan.

 

By 2010, McChrystal was gone. After he and his senior staff voiced their contempt for Obama and his vice president, Joe Biden, in a Rolling Stone cover story, General David Petraeus took over command. And even though he had helped devise the counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, Petraeus was never able to make it stick in Afghanistan. He did recapture territory from the Taliban, but as the subsequent years showed, the Afghans had difficulty holding that territory.

 

Obama’s Afghanistan surge was accompanied by another spending spree. According to SIGAR, by 2010, U.S. funding for reconstruction exceeded Afghanistan’s entire gross domestic product. David Marsden, a former official for the U.S. Agency for International Development, told SIGAR the aid money was “like pouring a lot of water into a funnel; if you pour it too fast, the water overflows that funnel onto the ground. We were flooding the ground.” Take the “justice centers,” walled compounds that housed police stations, courtrooms, and jails. As soon as U.S. forces retreated, these buildings became dormant and rotted away. The power brokers in much of Afghanistan’s countryside had no interest in participating in transparent, Western justice. The old ways were better.

 

By Obama’s second term, he was looking for a way out of Afghanistan. The mission was significantly reduced, to focus on counterterrorism. And despite a much smaller military surge in the first year of Donald Trump’s presidency, even his hawks, such as his second national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, were no longer trying to build a modern, free Afghanistan. Instead, McMaster pressed the president to embrace a “good enough” strategy that would keep a small contingent of troops on the ground, primarily to conduct counterterrorism and advise a wobbly Afghan military in their war against the Taliban.

 

Trump grew impatient with Afghanistan by the end of his first year. He wanted to get out as quickly as possible. So in 2019, his envoy, war-on-terror fixture Zalmay Khalilzad, bargained away the one red line Trump’s predecessors would not cross: the legitimacy of the elected government in Kabul. He began direct negotiations with the Taliban, cutting out Ghani’s government in the process. It was ironic that Khalilzad would deliver such a blow because he had helped shepherd the process that led to the first national election for Afghanistan since its days as a parliamentary monarchy in the 1960s.

 

When Biden came into office, he was not obliged to continue with Trump’s strategy. He had an opportunity to slow things down and give the “good enough” plan a shot. He inherited a very small U.S. military footprint and a government that could at least secure a kind of freedom for Afghans living in the big cities. He could have pressured Pakistan, which armed and trained the Taliban and gave it sanctuary, to end that treachery. But he decided it was not worth the candle. He finished what Trump started and surrendered to the Taliban.

 

Today, Biden and his administration spin this surrender as prudence. They say the betrayal of Afghan allies was an inevitable consequence of ending a pointless war. They tout an airlift that left so many behind. And they hope Americans will soon forget that for 20 years our national might cultivated a fragile democratic experiment that today lies in ignominious ruins, under the boot of the Taliban. 

The Many Lies That Built the Reconciliation Bill

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

 

In the beginning, President Biden created a $3.5 trillion spending bill. And the bill was without form, and void; and debt was upon the face of the deep. And the spirit of common sense moved upon the face of the country. And so Biden said, let there be lies. And there were lies. And Biden saw that the lies were good. And Biden called up down, and the left he called right, and the trillions he called zero. And Biden made the beasts of the press repeat his lies, made every thing that creepeth upon the Sunday shows follow his lies; and Biden saw that it was good.

 

Everyone else was just baffled.

 

From the moment the Democrats’ plan was conceived, the party has lied about it with abandon. Telegraphing the approach to come, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand contended back in April that the glint in Bernie Sanders’s eye did not represent dramatic or transformational change, but mere “infrastructure.” Trying desperately to counter rumors that Sanders was working on a $6 trillion sequel to the New Deal, Gillibrand maintained that whatever the package ended up containing should be regarded in the same way as, say, a new bridge. “Paid leave is infrastructure,” Gillibrand proposed. “Child care is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.” Presumably, mendacity is, too.

 

Over time, Gillibrand’s Dadaist argument collapsed under its own weight. But her desire to deceive the public is still going strong. We are now six months into this ruse, and, far from coming clean about their proposal, the Democrats have descended fully into Wonderland.

 

Some of the lies on offer beggar belief. Having been told that $3.5 trillion is an extraordinary amount of money to spend — especially in our present circumstances — the Democrats switched this week to the bewildered insistence that, actually, the bill is “free.” “This package — the reconciliation package,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said yesterday with a straight face, “would cost zero dollars.” Psaki’s preposterous asseveration echoed President Biden, who had contended the day before that the cost was “going to be zero,” and progressive darling Pramila Jayapal, who said last Friday, “I just believe that this is going to be a zero-dollar bill.”

 

It’s not. A spending bill that costs $3.5 trillion costs $3.5 trillion irrespective of how you pay for it. Unless the government elects to cut precisely the same amount of spending as the bill adds, there is no such thing as a “free” or “zero-dollar” outlay. One can pay for a $3.5 trillion bill with $3.5 trillion in tax increases, or by borrowing $3.5 trillion, or through a mixture of the two, but, whatever one chooses to do, the cost remains precisely the same: $3.5 trillion. If, as seems to be the case, the Democrats do not want to be seen spending $3.5 trillion, then they have just one option: to decline to spend $3.5 trillion. They cannot get around this with word games.

 

But boy are they going to try. Asked in July whether spending $3.5 trillion might perhaps make inflation worse, Joe Biden submitted that, actually, it would somehow make inflation better. “That won’t increase inflation,” Biden said. “That will take the pressure off of inflation. If your primary concern right now is inflation, you should be even more enthusiastic about this plan.” This idea is evidently popular in the Biden White House, which seems to assume that government policy could not possibly have an ill effect on consumer prices. “There are some who argue that, in the past, companies have passed on these costs to consumers,” Psaki explained yesterday during a meditation upon the prospect of tax increases. But “we feel that that’s unfair and absurd, and the American people would not stand for that.”

 

Got it? Sending people who don’t pay taxes refunds is “infrastructure.” Out-of-control spending reduces the risk of inflation. Companies subject to tax increases do not pass the costs on to consumers. And outlays are “cost-free,” providing that the government takes the money by force instead of borrowing it. Curiouser and curiouser, Alice.

 

And in service of what, exactly, has this whirlwind of dishonesty been sown?  It would take a literary critic to tell. Joe Biden’s Twitter feed tells us that the president stands for “building back” one of those spiffing non–“trickle down” economies that works best for the “folks.” This, as far as I can ascertain, involves taking lots of money from the “ultra wealthy and corporations” in order to pay for the cost of — well, not the cost, exactly, but the gross of — a massive-but not-that-large-really bill that is actually “free”; giving lots of things to the “middle class” on the grounds that — unlike the people who have been enjoying the “free ride” that comes with paying all the taxes — it has done all the American building of late; and making sure that nobody who earns under $400,000 a year — well, nobody whose family earns under $400,000 a year, or, at least, nobody who belongs to a non-smoking family that earns under $400,000 a year — will pay a single cent more, period, bingo, you dog-faced pony soldier.

 

What this all means in practice is largely in the eye of the beholder. For Bernie Sanders, it means spending three, four, five, or six trillion dollars, right now, on anything, everything, and beyond. For Joe Manchin, it means spending one trillion — or maybe one-and-a-half trillion, maybe more, maybe less — at some point this year or next, on “help [for] those who need it the most” without ignoring the “present economic reality.” And, for everyone else involved, it means trying desperately to keep up with the chimera — and, if necessary, telling brazen, gelastic, dishonorable lies in order to do so.

Malarkey, in Trillions

National Review Online

Wednesday, September 29, 2021

 

Joe Biden insists that his overstuffed, $3.5 trillion slop-pail of a spending package “costs zero dollars.” President Biden is, forgive us for noticing, completely crackers.

 

There are a few ways of looking at the cost of a $3.5 trillion boondoggle. The obvious way is to take the price tag at its own word — that, all-in, this package will cost at least $3.5 trillion if Democrats get their way. And that is, of course, correct. Even advocates of the infrastructure plan, such as Ian Bremmer, acknowledge as much.

 

President Biden and his congressional allies insist that the cost is zero because the spending is “paid for.” But the cost of a $3.5 trillion outlay is $3.5 trillion, “paid for” or not. For example, we could cut $3.5 trillion out of Social Security benefits to offset the $3.5 trillion in “human infrastructure” spending, and none of those Social Security beneficiaries trying to make ends meet with reduced incomes would agree that the program cost nothing. Lecture them about “gross” vs. “net” price all you like, and the people who now have fewer benefits will still understand that it costs something, because they are the ones bearing the burden.

 

In the case of Biden’s “Build Back Better” proposal, it would be individuals and businesses paying the price through higher taxes, meaning through reduced after-tax income. Don’t tell them it’s free while you’ve got your hand in their pockets.

 

Biden says that the monster spending spree costs nothing because it would not — or so he says — add anything to the national debt. This claim is, of course, preposterous. No one believes it — Penn-Wharton puts the new debt at almost $2 trillion, the Washington Post fact-checkers gave Biden’s claim two Pinocchios and warned that they’ve got a pocketful of Pinocchios if more Pinocchios are warranted, and even the gormless, prostrate Democratic partisans over at the Rachel Maddow Show concede that critics are likely to be proved correct when they complain that Biden is relying on “budget games.”

 

Do you know who else doesn’t believe the Democrats’ BS?

 

The Democrats.

 

That is why they are refusing to submit the program for a Congressional Budget Office score before voting on it. We have our occasional disagreements with the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (that’s Mitch Daniels’s and Leon Panetta’s bipartisan effort), but they are right about this much: “Unless and until a CBO score of the legislation under consideration is released, the House should not vote on the Build Back Better Act.”

 

President Biden pitches this as a “once in a generation investment,” which is, of course, precisely the wrong way to go about managing infrastructure, a sector that is by its nature an ongoing, day-by-day, year-by-year concern. And that would matter if this package were really about infrastructure — but it isn’t. It’s a progressive wish-list, including everything from paying the tuition of every community-college student to paying Elizabeth Warren’s grandkids’ babysitter to corporate handouts for Democrat-aligned businesses.

 

The part of the spending spree that is plausibly about infrastructure, contained in a separate bill which already has been approved by the Senate, would add $256 billion to the debt, according to CBO data. President Biden’s plan at the moment seems to be to pretend that he’s never heard of that bill.

 

If the package were a good one and organized along fiscally sensible lines, President Biden would not be obliged to lie about it.

 

“My Build Back Better Agenda costs zero dollars,” the president says. The word you are looking for here is “malarkey.”

The Left’s Absurd Insistence That America Is Dirt-Poor

By David Harsanyi

Monday, September 27, 2021

 

In a now-deleted tweet, progressive representative Pramila Jayapal made the wild claim that the “U.S. has nearly ONE-THIRD of the world’s billionaires. Meanwhile, our poverty rate is the 4th highest in the world. Tax the rich.” Big if true! But the fact that any elected official could, even for a fleeting moment, believe that the United States had anywhere near the highest poverty rate in the world tells us a lot about the progressive mindset and policy goals.

 

Democrats tend to perfunctorily portray the United States as a poverty-stricken plutocracy where “[t]rillionaires and billionaires are doing very, very well,” as Joe Biden argued the other day when peddling his massive state expansion, but “the middle class keeps getting hurt.” This idea is driven by a zero-sum obsession with “inequality,” and not the reality of a nation where the largest economic movement over the past decade has been from the middle class to the upper middle class.

 

Progressives tend to contrast the fortunes of low-income Americans with their high-income neighbors. And maybe this works as a domestic-populist political attack. Any global comparisons, however, will only illustrate the superiority of American economic life.

 

When Pew analyzed the 111 nations that accounted for 88 percent of the global population, they found that the middle-income range translates to an annual income of $14,600 to $29,200 for a family of four. The U.S. average household income is over three times that amount. Nearly nine in ten Americans find themselves substantially above the global middle-income standard, which is to say that by world benchmarks there are very few impoverished people in the United States. Once all income, charity, welfare, and social benefits are calculated, the poorest 20 percent of Americans likely consume about as many goods and services as any of the relatively wealthy nations of Italy, Spain, and Britain.

 

Put it this way: If the United States invaded Britain tomorrow and made it the 51st state, it would probably be the second poorest behind Alabama and ahead of only Mississippi. If Germany, Sweden, or Denmark joined the union, they would rank in the bottom third of American states in per capita GDP, median annual income, and a host of other quantifiable measure of wealth. Italy, Spain, and Portugal, among others, would be at the bottom. As a highly important forthcoming book details, there is no reason to adopt a European-style welfare-state system.

 

The unemployment rate in the United States is typically one of the (organically) lowest in the world. The United States has the highest per capita wealth in the world and the sixth-highest median income in the world — a somewhat misleading statistic, as it measures the earning power of an individual but fails to take into account the accumulated wealth of Americans. Overall, we have more personal savings than any nation, as well.

 

It should be remembered that the United States creates wealth for 350 million people — in comparison with other top performers, such as the European city-states Monaco and Luxembourg, and the small petrostate of Norway — and is a place that welcomes a constant stream of poor immigrants.

 

And, as numerous economists have pointed out, the world benefits from the spillover of American wealth through trade. Although the United States constitutes less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we generate and earn more than 20 percent of its income.

 

We have the largest economy in the world, and its share has remained basically unchanged since 1980, when it accounted for 25.2 percent of the world GDP. Today, despite the rise of China and India and other developing economies, its share is 24 percent. During that same time, the European Union’s share of the world economy fell from 34.6 percent to 22 percent.

 

While national GDP growth matters, it doesn’t tell us the full story, either. Simply because developing economies such as China and India are experiencing a larger percentage of growth doesn’t mean citizens in those nations are better off than we are (incredibly, this has to be said). There is, after all, only so much room for traditional powerhouses to expand. A better way to evaluate the prosperity of individuals is the change in the value of real GDP per capita. From the pre-coronavirus years of 2016 to 2019, Americans saw $3,413 in real GDP growth per capita, while the next-best Western nation, Finland, saw $2,309 growth, and most experienced under $1,500 growth. We’re also doing better than most in the post-COVID era.

 

Now, by American standards, there are plenty of poor people among us. We shouldn’t pretend otherwise or demean their struggles. There is, however, little evidence that we lag behind any major nation. Nor is there any evidence that our economic system benefits fewer people than any other. Yet, a growing faction of voters are convinced that they’re living in one of the most iniquitous countries in the world. Joe Biden says he ran for the presidency to “change the dynamic of how the economy grows.” But progressive redistributionist policies, as we’ve seen elsewhere around the world, would make us less dynamic, less wealthy, and less innovative.

The Lessons of the Assassins

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

 

“If the 9mm pistol round was worth a damn, Pope John Paul II would have died a martyr.” So declared a hardened veteran, one of those old-school tough guys who says that the reason to carry a .45 is that they don’t make a .46.

 

(Save your breath, fellow gun-nuts: I know, I know. That’s just how the joke goes.)

 

It has been a while since the last assassination, or near-assassination, of a major political figure made headlines in the United States. But we have some assassins and would-be assassins in the news. One of them is 77-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian who is serving a life sentence in California, having been incarcerated since 1968, when he assassinated Robert F. Kennedy in retaliation for his support of Israel.

 

Sirhan is up for parole, having been declared a “suitable” candidate with the support of both Douglas Kennedy and his crackpot brother, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Other members of the family and many in law enforcement oppose releasing Sirhan on any grounds. If he is paroled, he should be put on the first plane to the Palestinian statelet to live out his days there. Forgiveness is difficult, but forgetting would be somewhat easier with him 7,600 miles away. If the experience of terrorists paroled from Israel prisons is any indicator, he’ll be petitioning to remain under the loving care of his imperialist oppressors, where the standard of living is considerably higher.

 

A similar figure of more recent infamy is now entirely at large: On Monday, a federal judge approved the unconditional release of 66-year-old John Hinckley Jr., who shot President Ronald Reagan on March 30, 1981.

 

Hinckley was, thankfully, a terrible shot with a relatively low-powered weapon, a .22-caliber revolver. (Sirhan Sirhan had used a .22 revolver to kill Robert Kennedy — it is a humble weapon, but still a deadly one.) Hinckley fired six shots and missed Reagan with all six. But, even so, the damage was considerable: Reagan was struck and nearly killed by a ricochet; press secretary James Brady was shot in the head, suffering a wound that left him with a permanent disability and brain damage that ultimately killed him; Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy caught a bullet in the chest that damaged a lung and his liver; D.C. police officer Thomas Delahanty was shot in the neck, suffering damage to his spinal cord that forced him into retirement.

 

That was in late March of 1981. In May of the same year, the Turkish fanatic Mehmet Ali Agca shot Pope John Paul II in St. Peter’s Square, possibly on orders from the socialist regime in Moscow, which was intent on keeping the pope’s native Poland under its thumb. Two weeks later, the president of Bangladesh was assassinated. In August, it was the president and the prime minister of Iran. In October, it was Anwar Sadat of Egypt.

 

In 1984, the Irish Republican Army attempted to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her entire cabinet; Thatcher survived, but five of her Conservative Party colleagues were killed in the bombing of their party conference. That was on October 12.

 

On October 31, Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for her bloody removal of Sikh separatists from the Golden Temple at Amritsar, resulting in the death of Sikh pilgrims and damage to the temple. Her death was followed by a period of terror in which some 8,000 Sikhs were massacred in reprisals.

 

The rest of the 20th century continued to be bloody for heads of government and heads of state: The president of Palau was assassinated; the prime minister of Sweden was gunned down; the prime minister of Lebanon died in a car bombing; the president of Burkina Faso died after a coup d’état; the president of Lebanon died in another car bombing; the president of the Comoros died after a coup d’état; a combination of assassinations and coups claimed the lives of the chief executives of Liberia, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Burundi, Rwanda, Burundi again, Rwanda again, one or two such deaths almost every year leading up to the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. After that, things did not stop but slowed down a little, with a decade passing between the death of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011 and the deaths of the presidents of Chad and Haiti in April and July of this year, respectively.

 

The majority of these murders were straightforwardly political. But, in some cases, the closer you look the further away politics seems to be. John Hinckley Jr. was famously obsessed with Jodie Foster and seemed to believe that assassinating Reagan would get her attention: Foster had been cast (at age 12) as a prostitute in the celebrated film Taxi Driver, in which Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle contemplates assassinating a political candidate.

 

Mehmet Ali Agca had a number of political enthusiasms — from Turkish ultra-nationalism to Marxism and Palestinian liberation — but he seems to have been mostly just crazy. (He may have been a tool of more put-together fanatics.) Pope John Paul II went to extraordinary lengths on behalf of the man who tried to murder him, ultimately securing a pardon for him, and Agca, in turn, showed up at St. Peter’s to lay roses on the sainted pope’s tomb after his canonization. But he also has spent years predicting the imminent end of the world, now declaring his desire to become a Catholic priest, now declaring: “I am Christ eternal.”

 

John Hinckley Jr. was working at a Virginia antiques mall before COVID-19 interrupted commerce. It’s a funny old world.

 

This raises a few points.

 

One, we are always telling ourselves that we live in the most dramatic times, the most critical and urgent times, the times when everything we love and hold dear is most at stake. But that isn’t true. The 32 years between the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in Tel Aviv were bananas. When Andy Warhol got on the wrong side of angry feminists, he didn’t get canceled — he got shot. And if we don’t remember that all that well, it’s because Bobby Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. got shot the same year, and Warhol lived. After King’s assassination, there were coast-to-coast riots in which dozens of people died, thousands were injured, and tens of thousands arrested. I don’t think we should minimize what happened on and around January 6, but, as I have argued before, the riot is the least of it. Riots are, for Americans, normal — it’s the effort to discredit and delegitimize the election that is remarkable and more dangerous. Which brings us to:

 

Two, politics attracts kooks, including kooks to whom politics is only incidental to their kookery. Religion is the same way. Everybody who has ever been to a Latin Mass or a hot-yoga class has encountered people who were going to be neck-deep in kookery one way or another, and happened to light upon one kook perch instead of another. Anybody who has ever been to a political rally, party convention, or election night afterparty has had the same experience. Democrat or Republican, Left or Right, there will always be a contingent of kooks — conspiracy nuts, people who dream about overthrowing the government, fanatics who believe that we would be well on our way to utopia if we just made one big policy change, etc. (The Fair Tax guys and the Universal Basic Income guys are basically mirror images of one another.) Every kook has a class of kulaks he wants to liquidate. There’s no bright line of demarcation on the journey from Sean Hannity to Michael Savage to Alex Jones to Flat Earth Mystery Cult Neo-Nazi Hobbits.

 

Do you know what Mehmet Ali Agca wanted to do when freed? Write a book with Dan Brown, the Da Vinci Code guy.

 

And, laugh all you like, but there are not very many novels that have outsold The Da Vinci Code — in fact, there are only eight — and, with the notable exception of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, they mostly are books that have been in print for a the better part of a century or more, the most recent being The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, in print since 1950. The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, has outsold The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885, four-to-one.

 

It’s a kook’s world, and we’re just living in it.

Another Defeat for Election Truthers

National Review Online

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

 

Once again, an investigation into the claim that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen” has revealed nothing that changes the outcome. Once again, this has made no difference whatsoever to those who demanded that such an investigation be conducted and will now predictably demand some other one. After five months, and millions of privately raised dollars, the Arizona “audit” has arrived. And it shows that . . . Joe Biden received 360 more of the 2.1 million ballots that were cast in heavily populated Maricopa County than had previously been thought. Acknowledging this fact, the auditors concluded that “there were no substantial differences between the hand count of the ballots provided and the official canvass results for the County . . . and there is no reliable evidence that the paper ballots were altered to any material degree.”

 

And Donald Trump claims vindication.

 

America’s election truthers move from debunked claim to debunked claim with no loss of enthusiasm. Upon its announcement back in April, we were promised that the Arizona “audit” would blow the lid off the election scandal at last. Now that it has found nothing of consequence — despite its having been both funded and conducted by people who desperately hoped to find fraud — it has been relegated to a mere “good start.” Downplaying its findings, Representative Paul Gosar complained that the auditors “weren’t given the tools.” But how could they be? How could anyone? From the very beginning, the insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” has been based not upon a series of falsifiable contentions, but upon the self-sustaining premise that Donald Trump must have won because Donald Trump cannot possibly have lost.

 

Apologists for the audit point excitedly to its claim that 23,444 mail ballots were cast by voters who moved prior to the date of the election — “phantom voters,” Donald Trump called them. But this is weak. As the report itself notes, not only was the methodology used to arrive at this number sufficiently flawed as to yield “some error,” but there are a myriad of “potential ways” in which the ballots could have been cast that “would not violate the law” at all. And a third of those voters were Republicans.

 

In another section, the auditors contend that 10,342 Arizonans may have voted twice. Here, too, their methodology is off. That number was arrived at by comparing the names and birth years of around 2.1 million voters in Maricopa County to the names and birth years of all voters in other Arizona counties — a patently imprecise way of going about such a comparison that, in a state of 7.2 million people, was bound to yield false positives.

 

In the wake of this latest forlorn episode, it seems clearer than ever that the GOP has a choice to make. It can look to the future, outline an attractive political vision, and get ready to capitalize on the unfurling disaster that is the Biden presidency. Or it can spend its time assuaging Donald Trump’s ego, stupidly relitigating the past, and suicidally damaging the trust that its own voters have in the electoral system. Only one of these courses will lead to another Republican president. And it’s not the one that involves tin foil.

The Age of Progressive Misinformation

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, September 28, 2021

 

How does a stupid and ridiculous lie come to be embraced and promulgated by top officials of the United States government?

 

Well, as it turns out, it’s easy.

 

You start with an easily misinterpreted news photo that seemingly confirms progressive opponents’ assumption about immigration enforcement: that the agents policing our southern border are cruel racists.

 

Then you work up a Twitter mob saying that the photo has captured a tableau of hideous abuse.

 

You add open-borders advocacy organizations and civil-rights groups denouncing the supposed misconduct in the harshest possible terms.

 

You throw on top a vice president and a White House press secretary who have no regard for the truth and are happy to push any narrative convenient to them.

 

Finally, as the pièce de résistance, you deploy a president of the United States who is too cynical or doddering to bother with the facts — and who is usually following the crowd rather than leading it — and you get him to make a statement endorsing the ludicrous fictions about the misleading photo.

 

This was the path to President Joe Biden’s condemnation of mounted Border Patrol agents for having “strapped” Haiti migrants at Del Rio, Texas; this is what led him to declare that they “will pay” for their “horrible” and “outrageous” behavior.

 

Never mind that there was no strapping, that the border agents did nothing wrong besides trying to enforce a border crossing while working for an administration fundamentally uninterested in the task, and that there is an ongoing investigation of the agents — itself a travesty — that Biden was prejudging.

 

Sawyer Hackett, an apparatchik running Julian Castro’s PAC, was an early proponent of the whipping lie on Twitter. He tweeted the picture showing a border agent on horseback grabbing at the shirt of a migrant — his reins flying in the air — and said agents were “rounding up Haitian refugees with whips,” and this represented “unfathomable cruelty.”

 

It was, to the contrary, entirely fathomable and not the least bit cruel. The agents were, in a common, long-standing practice, using horses because of the difficulty of the terrain, and they were attempting to block migrants from entering the country illegally. They didn’t have whips but were twirling reins to control their horses. Within hours of the photo creating a stir, these facts were readily ascertainable.

 

Even Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas defended the agents before getting the memo from his superiors that they had become hated figures to be used as punching bags.

 

Days later, media stories still made reference to the nonexistent whips supposedly wielded by the agents.

 

Advocacy groups simply willed the whip story to be true, and for a swath of America — basically anyone foolish enough to take what Harris and Biden say at face value — they have succeeded.

 

Despite the haze of misinformation, the fact-checkers didn’t descend en masse. No Twitter accounts were suspended. All the people who pride themselves on purportedly defending American democracy from falsehoods and propaganda spreading on social media (and there’s unquestionably a lot of it) stood aside or joined the pile-on.

 

Press outfits went out of their way to label falsehoods promulgated by President Trump as such. Indeed, they gave every indication that they relished doing it.

 

In contrast, the New York Times story about Biden castigating the agents didn’t suggest that he might be wrong. In fact, the original version of the article reinforced his smear by referring to “the images of agents on horseback chasing, and in some cases using the reins of their horses to strike at running migrants.” The paper had to run a correction.

 

It has long been the case on college campuses that woke narratives have the power to trample facts and fairness. This phenomenon has escaped the confines of academe and now plays out at the highest echelons of American political power. Neither hacks on Twitter nor the president of the United States cared what really happened at Del Rio, not when the lie was more seductive and useful.

The Party of Misgovernment

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Monday, September 27, 2021

 

Not long ago the Democrats flattered themselves as “the party of government.” The implication was that Democrats, because they believed in using the government, were naturally more capable of manning the actual beast itself. Although it was never implied directly, you could add the fact that because most of the many millions who work for the executive branch are themselves Democrats in sentiment and orientation, Democrats would be more natural leaders. And, to be perfectly honest, there was at least a little credibility to the claim, once we saw Donald Trump in office and saw how elected and unelected Democrats were able to work with their friends in the intelligence community and other parts of the government to frustrate and even outright block Trump. His secretary of energy, for instance, once vowed to abolish the Department of Energy. Or, at least he tried to vow as much.

 

So now that Democrats are in charge, are things running smoothly? Well, not exactly. Let’s consider Afghanistan and our southern border. It’s here that we begin to understand what they mean by government.

 

Having taken whichever Afghan was closest to the departing plane — no need to vet them, or check to see whether they had, in fact, offered help and were interpreters — we have now brought a few obvious criminals to America. Very few of the 124,000 Afghan evacuees we got were on the priority list, and Bloomberg immediately reported that a number of them seemed to be coming with child brides. Now we are getting more specific info about one evacuee who is alleged by the FBI to have sexually assaulted two children at Fort McHenry. At Fort Bliss, a female U.S. soldier has also reported a sexual assault by Afghan evacuees. Hadn’t these new Americans read the news the past five years? You don’t commit your sex crime at a military fort right away. You wait until New Year’s parties.

 

While it was ongoing, this evacuation was deemed a massively enormous success by part of government, which bragged about “the largest airlift in U.S. history.” I guess that’s one way of trying to shine up the worst military humiliation in most of our lives, one in which Joe Biden extended the deadline for our withdrawal several months, allowing the Afghan national government more time to collapse and the Taliban more time to advance and make the whole thing look worse and create what is virtually a hostage situation.

 

Not a single planner at the Pentagon or senior military person has been fired or disgraced about the foul-ups at the airport, or the 20-year failed mission. Not one!

 

Now let’s look at another panicked exit. The migrant encampment at the bridge in Del Rio, Texas, has been cleared. Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas has admitted that the government has transferred to the interior of the country more than 12,000 Haitians who have arrived in a human wave at Del Rio. Think they all have court dates? Think again. HHS is too backed up with the child brides to follow up. About 2,000 others were deported. This is a strong signal to tens of thousands of other Haitians who may want to move forward with their plans to emigrate to the U.S. on foot from Panama, Peru, and Columbia.

 

So has anyone at Border Patrol or HHS been fired for releasing well over 10,000 illegal aliens into the country without court dates or follow-ups? Without even the COVID testing that will be required of every American or visa holder who enters this country legally? No, of course not. Instead, they are investigating and disgracing the Border Patrol agents whom we have paid to enforce our laws.

 

The Department of Homeland Security has launched an investigation of the few Border Patrol agents who were photographed while they were on horseback and holding the reins. Coastal media falsely declared that the reins were whips. And even though they were not — even though the video of these events never showed a Border Patrol officer using the reins as whips, President Biden vowed, “I promise you those people will pay,” adding that there would be “an investigation under way now, and there will be consequences.” How could he possibly know that there will be consequences before an investigation has gathered the facts — the facts that are apparent to anyone who watched the whole video? Who needs them? The vice president already has said that the incident evoked “times of slavery.”

 

Bringing criminals into the country — that’s commendable. Trying to keep any out, according to our laws — that’s something for which you’ll pay. Now wouldn’t a party of government understand that there might be recruitment problems when Border Patrol agents are publicly tongue-lashed by the president, based on a lie? Wouldn’t a party of government understand that failing to investigate and disgrace the military personnel overseeing the spectacularly failed Afghanistan withdrawal would disincentivize competent leadership in the future?

 

My worry is that our leaders do know this and don’t care. My worry is that the real party of government is the media. The media wanted to cheerlead the airlift and the evacuees, so criticism of the Biden admin’s botch of a withdrawal has now been muted. And the media are against the idea of borders, so they can’t get too honest about the human wreckage resulting from their campaign to dissolve them.