ROGER KIMBALL: Brutal Dictator Castro Finally Dies at 90. “It is especially instructive, I think, to compare the response of President Barack Obama to Castro’s death with the response of President-Elect Donald Trump.”
Archive for 2016
November 26, 2016
Imagine you are one of the anti-Trump folks who believe we just elected a racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-semitic, science-denying dictator. Let’s say that’s the movie playing in your mind. That’s some scary stuff.
Now imagine watching the news as Trump reveals in slow-motion that he’s flexible and pragmatic on just about everything. . . .
As Trump continues to demonstrate that he was never the incompetent monster his critics believed him to be, the critics will face an identity crisis. They either have to accept that they understand almost nothing about how the world works – because they got everything wrong about Trump – or they need to double-down on their current hallucination. Most of his critics will double-down. That’s how normal brains work.
And that brings us to our current situation. As Trump continues to defy all predictions from his critics, the critics need to maintain their self-images as the smart ones who saw this new Hitler coming. And that means you will see hallucinations like you have never seen. It will be epic.
The reason this will be so fun to watch is that we rarely get to see a situation in which the facts so vigorously violate a hallucination. Before Trump won the presidency everyone was free to imagine the future they expected. But as Trump continues to do one reasonable thing after another, his critics have a tough choice. They can either…
1. Reinterpret their self-images from wise to clueless.
or…
2. Generate an even stronger hallucination. (Cognitive dissonance.)
If Trump’s critics take the second option – and most of them will – it means you will see a lot of pretzel-logic of the type that is necessary hold onto the illusion that Trump is still a monster despite continuing evidence to the contrary.
Stay tuned. Buy popcorn.
TAMARA KEEL: Building A Handgun Starter Kit.
THIS ISN’T THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: Life Is so Bad in Japan That Millennials Are Choosing Virtual Relationships Over the Real Thing.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The Harlan Ellison Show.
NEWS FOR THE POST-ANTIBIOTIC ERA: New material inhibits bacteria without penicillin.
DONALD TRUMP ON THE HAPPY OCCASION OF FIDEL CASTRO’S DEATH:
President-elect Donald Trump took to Twitter on Saturday morning after the longtime former Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, died Friday at the age of 90.
“Fidel Castro is dead!” Trump tweeted.
In an official statement released later Saturday morning, Trump referred to Castro as a “brutal dictator” who “oppressed his own people” for decades.
“Fidel Castro’s legacy is one of firing squads, theft, unimaginable suffering, poverty and the denial of fundamental human rights,” Trump said in the statement.
He added: “While Cuba remains a totalitarian island, it is my hope that today marks a move away from the horrors endured for too long, and toward a future in which the wonderful Cuban people finally live in the freedom they so richly deserve.”
Let’s hope. There’s still Raul to deal with.
A GESTURE THAT WILL EITHER BE FUTILE, OR MOVE THE NATION TOWARD CIVIL WAR: Clinton Will Join Wisconsin Recount.
CHANGE: President Trump Could Reverse Obama’s Cuba Policy ‘Fairly Quickly.’ “Everything Obama did to open Cuba could be revoked because it was all done through executive action and regulatory changes, the latter of which were more formal but can be reversed.” Live by the pen and the phone, die by the pen and the phone.
THE BRIDE AT EVERY WEDDING, THE CORPSE AT EVERY FUNERAL, THE PRESIDENT IN EVERY EX-PRESIDENCY: Obama preps for post-presidency feud with Trump. “When George W. Bush left the White House in early 2009, he boarded a helicopter and went home to Texas, where he mostly remained silent about President Obama’s actions. This presidential transition is shaping up a little differently.”
I think this will redound to Trump’s benefit, especially given Obama’s near-certain descent into petty personal attacks.
IN THE MAIL: From David Weber, Shadow of Victory (Honor Harrington – Saganami Island Book 4).
Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 40% off select TEGU toys.
And, also today only: Intex Challenger K2 Kayak, 2-Person Inflatable Kayak Set with Aluminum Oars and High Output Air Pump, $69.99 (30% off).
And: Save big on a certified refurbished iPhone 6s.
Also: Cut the cord and save with a 1byone amplified HDTV antenna.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1297.
GOOD RIDDANCE TO FIDEL CASTRO, Cuba’s Brutal Big Brother.
If this were a just world, 13 facts would be etched on Castro’s tombstone and highlighted in every obituary, as bullet points — a fitting metaphor for someone who used firing squads to murder thousands of his own people.
●He turned Cuba into a colony of the Soviet Union and nearly caused a nuclear holocaust.
●He sponsored terrorism wherever he could and allied himself with many of the worst dictators on earth.
●He was responsible for so many thousands of executions and disappearances in Cuba that a precise number is hard to reckon.
●He brooked no dissent and built concentration camps and prisons at an unprecedented rate, filling them to capacity, incarcerating a higher percentage of his own people than most other modern dictators, including Stalin.
●He condoned and encouraged torture and extrajudicial killings.
●He forced nearly 20 percent of his people into exile, and prompted thousands to meet their deaths at sea, unseen and uncounted, while fleeing from him in crude vessels.
●He claimed all property for himself and his henchmen, strangled food production and impoverished the vast majority of his people.
●He outlawed private enterprise and labor unions, wiped out Cuba’s large middle class and turned Cubans into slaves of the state.
●He persecuted gay people and tried to eradicate religion.
But he was a lefty, so it’s all okay. Just like with Venezuela.
We are witnessing, yet again, the orderly transition of power, one of the most remarkable aspects of U.S. history. True, there remain diehards who refuse to admit that the election is over, but it has ever been thus. We take for granted that the losing side will vacate the halls of power. Yet there is nothing automatic about this. Around the world, there are still lots of places where the governing party calls out the tanks if it happens not to like the election results. Nothing like that has ever occurred in the U.S., and by God’s grace it never will.
Well: Eternal vigilance, and all that.
REALIGNMENT: Will the Midwest Stay Republican? The Democrats should probably spend the next four years calling midwesterners ignorant racists to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Related: What Happened In Minnesota: “Although Donald Trump narrowly lost the state of Minnesota to Hillary Clinton, Minnesota Republicans achieved remarkable results in legislative races. Republicans amplified their majority to an unprecedented number for a presidential-year election in the state House of Representatives and captured a one-vote majority in the state Senate (again, in a presidential election year when the turnout advantage usually accrues to Democrats). The result in the state Senate were striking as well. As Patrick Coolican put it in the Star Tribune: ‘Senate Republicans have endured the indignities of minority status for all but two of the past 44 years[.]'”
THIS IS INTERESTING: Jeb Bush Supports Article V Convention.
I should note that the Tennessee Law Review published a special symposium issue on constitutional conventions a few years ago. I wrote the Foreword, Sandy Levinson wrote the Afterword, and an all-star cast including Randy Barnett, Brannon Denning, Richard Epstein, Tim Lynch, Rob Natelson, and too many other luminaries to mention contributed the stuff in between. Here’s my contribution, which focuses specifically on spending. And here’s video of me talking about it at the Harvard Law School conference on constitutional conventions.
Plus, note this from Robert Natelson: How the procedures for a modern Amendments Convention may unfold.
DON SURBER: Donald Trump Made Black Friday Great Again.
GOOD RIDDANCE. HE WAS A BRUTAL DICTATOR, EVEN THOUGH HE REMAINED THE DARLING OF AMERICAN LEFTISTS. Fidel Castro is dead. The New York Times’ obituary seems sad. The only sad thing is that JFK didn’t manage to kill him and spare Cuba decades of slave-state one-man rule. And I feel sorry for the NYT. First Trump gets elected, now Castro’s gone. Their whole world is shattered. . .
UPDATE: Yes.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Heh.
Yes, an exclamation of pleasure at his demise is entirely appropriate.
PLUS: Yes.
And, of course:
FROM THE COMMENTS: “Reading Juncker’s tweet, Brexit makes even more sense.”
GOOD: Carson at HUD spells trouble for Obama’s diversity rule.
Ben Carson’s appointment to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development likely would mean trouble for President Obama’s new housing diversity rule and would put a noted skeptic of many government anti-poverty programs in control of many of them.
The famed neurosurgeon and former presidential candidate will spend Thanksgiving thinking about the possibility of serving as President-elect Trump’s HUD secretary, a spokesman said Wednesday.
If he takes over the agency, many housing advocates will be left to wonder what his agenda is, given that he has no record on housing-related issues. . . .
But Carson has made his feelings clear on one politically sensitive topic, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule finalized by Obama HUD Secretary Julian Castro.
The rule, meant to implement the 1968 Fair Housing Act, is intended to promote diversity across municipalities and counties by comparing levels of inclusion and diversity.
In a 2015 Washington Times op-ed, however, Carson described the rule as an example of “government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality” bound to fail and compared it to unsuccessful busing efforts in the 1970s and 1980s.
I’m happy to see HUD enter a post-Castro era.
WALTER OLSON EXPLAINS THINGS TO CLUELESS EDTIORS: There is no ‘hate speech’ exception.
The confusion in your editorial begins with its headline, “Hate speech is not free speech.” Under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, there is no “hate speech” exception to America’s general rule of free speech.
Speech cannot be punished simply because someone thinks it embodies hatred unless it independently falls into some recognized exception such as threats, incitement of imminent violence, targeted harassment and so forth, If speech does fall into such an exception, it lacks protection whether or not it expresses hate. That is the view of the U.S. Supreme Court. . . .
You appear to regard walkouts in which some Montgomery County students have taken to the streets during school hours as a “healthy expression of protest,” even though (legality aside) they cause serious disruption to classroom learning and pose various risks to traffic and people (as in the attack on one student by several others during a march in Rockville).
If public schools are to maintain a semblance of political neutrality, they must not greet some walkouts favorably (as with a liberal excused-absence policy) unless they would extend similar indulgence to students who walked out of class to march on the opposite side of the same questions.
All sorts of institutions are now making explicit what has long been inferred from their actions: That they’ve taken sides.
SHOCKER: Teachers Union Leaders Devastated that So Many Members Voted Trump.
Apparently one in five members of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) voted Trump and one in three — an even higher percentage of members of the National Education Association (NEA) — went for the real estate mogul despite what union leaders advocated, according to USA Today.
As a result, union leaders are scrambling to try to figure out why so many of their own members broke for the GOP on Election Day. But at least one union chief is calling her own members “sexist” over it all.
In recent comments, AFT President Randi Weingarten accused her own membership of sexism for refusing to vote for Hillary.
“Frankly I was always concerned about whether the country was ready to have a female president,” Weingarten said. “There was an intensity of hatred that male political figures never get. So I think we’re never really going to understand it.”
Why are people in Democrat-dominated professions so sexist?
JONATHAN ADLER: Whatever happened to Michael Mann’s defamation suit? (2016 edition).
As I’ve noted before, I think this should be a relatively easy case. However offensive or intemperate the posts at issue, they should be recognized as protected speech. To hold otherwise would be to confuse hyperbolic rhetoric for actionable defamation. Moreover, insofar as the statements at issue reflected the defendants’ sincere belief that Mann manipulated his data to exaggerate the threat of climate change and that PSU’s cursory investigation into his conduct was insufficient, they do not demonstrate the degree of “actual malice” or “reckless disregard” for the truth necessary for a defamation claim, a point recognized even by folks who share Mann’s general views on climate science (such as UCal Berkeley’s Daniel Farber). Under Mann’s theory, George Zimmerman could sue anyone who claimed he “got away with murder” after killing Trayvon Martin. (Ditto equivalent claims about O.J. Simpson, Timothy Loehmann, etc.). It’s no wonder that so many media groups and others filed amicus briefs on the defendants’ behalf.
Mann doesn’t act like a scientist confident in his data and his interpretation. He acts like he has something to be ashamed of.