ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Can Bo Diddly teach us anything about the 2016 presidential election?
Archive for 2016
June 2, 2016
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1120.
RECREATE ’38! In “Suicide by Self-Importance,” Jason Willick writes at the American Interest:
Of all the displays of political myopia and intolerance in the American academy over the past several years, this story may be the most astonishing: Students and faculty at Northwestern University have forced Karl Eikenberry—a retired three-star general and fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies—to withdraw his appointment as head of a new global affairs institute on the Evanston campus on the grounds that he is a “career military officer.”
The Washington Post‘s report on the story contains a truly remarkable, and telling, quote from one student involved in the crusade against the general (who has contributed to this magazine):
“An ex-U.S. general will likely think about international politics in terms of war and from the perspective of the U.S.’s interests, and the research agenda will be negatively skewed as a result,” wrote Charles Clarke, a Northwestern graduate student and one of the petition’s backers. “Instead, why not appoint someone who will encourage research that is less belligerent and tainted by U.S. bias?”
The petitions condemning the selection of the general display a barely-concealed antagonism toward people who serve the United States in uniform (as Eikenberry told the Post, “This is the worst stereotyping I can imagine and an affront to any veteran”), as well as a snide arrogance toward intellectuals who stray from the academic path.
The obvious analogy is shades of American academia in the latter half of the 1960s; but Eikenberry’s sad fate amongst the campus crybullies also flashes back to Britain’s dissipated university class in the 1930s. As Michael Walsh wrote last year in The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, After World War I, “The cream of British manhood lay dead in Flanders’ fields, while those unfit for military service eventually inherited the country,” a dissipated dilettante bunch, as described by Jonathan Last in a Weekly Standard article:
In 1933, the Oxford Union — a debating society and one of the strongholds of liberal elite opinion — held a debate on the resolution “this House will in no circumstances fight for king and country.” The resolution passed. Margot Asquith, one of England’s leading liberal lights, wrote that same year, quite sincerely: “There is only one way of preserving peace in the world, and getting rid of your enemy, and that is to come to some sort of agreement with him. . . . The greatest enemy of mankind today is hate.”
Churchill disdained the new liberalism, mocking one of his opponents as part of “that band of degenerate international intellectuals who regard the greatness of Britain and the stability and prosperity of the British Empire as a fatal obstacle. . . . ” So deep was this liberal loathing of empire that even as the first shots of World War II were being fired, Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville, witnessed at a theater “a group of bespectacled intellectuals” who, to his shock, “remain[ed] firmly seated while ‘God Save the King’ was played.”
These elites could see evil only at home. The French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir did not believe that Germany was a “threat to peace,” but instead worried that the “panic that the Right was spreading” would drag France, Britain, and the rest of Europe into war. Stafford Cripps, a liberal Labor member of Parliament, feared not Hitler, but Churchill. Cripps wrote that after Churchill became prime minister he would “then introduce fascist measures and there will be no more general elections.”
In an important sense, the British Empire’s strength failed because its elite liberal citizens stopped believing in it.
The parallels with 21st-century America are striking. In little more than 10 years, England went from victory in World War I to serious discussions about completely disarming herself. Talk of a “peace dividend” began with the fall of the Berlin Wall and culminated 10 years later with a major draw-down of forces and the abandonment of the two-war doctrine.
Last’s article was written in 2005; in retrospect, it’s a prescient snapshot of a similar dissipation that would soon befall an America that was also fundamentally transformed. Just as England discovered almost before it was too late (and in the sense of losing the Empire, it was too late), America’s 21st century elites of both parties “have gotten dangerously out of touch with the country. They are being forcefully reminded of this fact, and those reminders are likely to become more frequent, and more forceful, in the future,” as Glenn warned late last year.
ANDREW KLAVAN: Why Trump’s Attacks on the Media Work Every Time. It’s as if Trump has read the left’s playbook!
THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP GOT THE NOMINATION, AMERICAN POLITICS WOULD BECOME A CESSPIT OF RACISM, ANTI-SEMITISM, AND HOMOPHOBIA. And they were right! Tablet Magazine: Donald Trump’s Little Boy Is a Gay Half-Jew With Jungle Fever.
A FISH ROTS FROM THE HEAD: State Department admits tampering with video of tough Fox News question.
Now here’s an interesting evolution: When the State Department was first pressed on why a tough question from Fox News correspondent James Rosen was missing from a Dec. 2, 2013, press briefing, a spokeswoman attributed the matter to a “glitch.” “There was a glitch in the State Department video,” said State’s Elizabeth Trudeau at a briefing in mid-May.
A different story issued today from the State Department’s podium. Asked about the situation, Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs John Kirby said that an internal probe into the matter had revealed that a “specific request was made to excise” the video.
Given the circumstances of the disappearance, that is not a shock.
To review the facts: In February 2013, Rosen posed a prescient question to then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland: Was the U.S. government engaged in “secret, bilateral” discussions with Iran? No, came the response from Nuland. By December of that year, rumors surfaced that such Iran-United States talks had indeed been ongoing. . . .
After Samuels’s story kicked up a Washington mediastorm, Rosen asked a colleague to check for the video of Psaki answering his question about diplomatic mendacity. The colleague came back with an eerie response: The exchange was gone from the videotape, replaced by a flash of white light. The gap was evident not only on the State Department website, but also on its YouTube page. State Department officials, in a series of briefings, struggled to explain the matter.
Welcome to the age of Obama, where we’re happy to let enemy nations scroll through our secrets, but we go out of the way to keep the American people in the diark.
ROGER SIMON GOES BARNSTORMING WITH THE DONALD: Roger flies on Trump’s press plane to his campaign event in Sacramento, and brings back plenty of photos.
WELL, POSSIBLY: Trump’s Republican Party is not so much a new party, however, as a restoration of the GOP’s original principles.
Plus: “That’s something the Republican establishment has forgotten. Its members deny that we’re immobile; or if we are, they blame it on drug-abusing workers who as a class deserve to die out; or they say it can’t be helped, that it’s caused by the move to a high-tech world. But other, more mobile countries aren’t living in the Stone Age, and most Americans understand that we’ve become immobile. When surveyed, they report that they don’t think their children will be as well-off as they are. That’s new, and it’s transforming our politics.”
Want to increase economic mobility? Stop tying it to expensive educational degrees and substitute cheap competency testing. And instead of telling employers not to ask people about criminal records, bar them from asking where people went to school. That would be a revolution.
AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.
Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.
Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.
And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Hillary Discovers She’s Not As Smart As Henry Kissinger.
MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: “Are we at another Weimar moment now?”
The 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent global recession were nowhere nearly as painful as the Great Depression. But the effects are similar. The heady growth of the 2000s led Europeans and Americans to believe they were on firm economic ground; the shattering of banks, real estate markets and governments in the wake of the crash left tens of millions of people at sea, angry at the institutions that had failed them, above all the politicians who claimed to be in charge.
Why, voters ask, did the government allow so many bankers to behave like criminals in the first place?
The New York Times won’t like the answer, and the couple at the center of it:
Another answer the New York Times won’t much like — as Allan Bloom noted in the Closing of the American Mind, America’s been in a “Weimar Moment” for quite some time.
HEY RUBE! “America is under relentless attack — from within,” says…Kathleen Parker?
Democracy, freedom, civilization — it all hangs by a thread. America was always just an idea, a dream founded in the faith that men were capable of great good. It was a belief made real by an implausible convention of brilliant minds and the enduring courage of generations who fought and died. For what?
Surely, not this.
Meh. Parker tacitly asked that question in 2008 as well, and made her choice, thus ensuring this election year.
STANDING UP TO ERDOGAN: Germany Angers Turkey By Acknowledging Reality Of Armenian Genocide.
ASHE SCHOW ON BAYLOR: Yet another example of why colleges shouldn’t adjudicate campus sexual assault.
Following a report that Baylor University provided a “wholly inadequate” response to accusations of campus sexual assault – and in one case retaliated against an accuser – members of the media have been quick to demand the school update its policies.
And make no mistake, Baylor should make some changes, but its failures are yet more evidence that schools shouldn’t be adjudicating accusations of campus sexual assault.
The investigation into Baylor’s policies began in August 2015 when the school contacted the law firm Pepper Hamilton “to conduct an independent and external review” of the school’s treatment of sexual misconduct accusations. The report was damning, and specifically called out the athletic departments for protecting athletes from accusations.
The law firm had access to all relevant documents and materials from Baylor, and interviewed five current and former employees and students. Its report, released late last week, found that Baylor failed to adhere to the anti-gender discrimination statute known as Title IX (which has been reinterpreted by the Education Department to cover sexual assault), properly train staff and educate students, conduct prompt and equitable investigations and prevent potential hostile environments, among other problems.
The report brings up one of the major problems with schools currently handling these accusations – the decision of whether to investigate if an accuser doesn’t want to. The Pepper Hamilton report knocks Baylor for failing “to appropriately weigh a request not to move forward against the University’s Title IX obligation to investigate or otherwise determine what occurred.”
So Baylor was faulted for moving forward when an accuser didn’t want to, yet the Education Department has been faulting schools for not moving forward even if an accuser didn’t want to. Michigan State University and the University of Virginia were both condemned for not continuing with an investigation even though an accuser didn’t want to. Sexual assault activists have argued that accusers should be the ones driving the investigations, and the Baylor report seems to agree, but the Education Department sees things differently.
Baylor was also criticized for applying a “by the book” approach to investigations “that treated all respondents equally, regardless of their status as a student-athlete.”
My goodness, how terrible to not give special or poorer treatment to one group of students over the other!
To call these kangaroo courts is an insult to kangaroos.
“MAYOR STEVE ADLER IS SCAMMING THE AUSTIN TECH COMMUNITY…Adler and the City Council knowingly work to make Austin less safe. Think I’m exaggerating? Here’s a quote from the hearings:”
>> Mayor Adler: And people driving intoxicated on the road, do you think if we took a decision that had the practical effect, the loss of tncs [Transportation Network Companies, i.e. Uber and Lyft] at scale, that would make the city less safe?
>> I think you asked the same question. And I’ll try to answer it as best as I can. Or let reiterate the question to you. Are you asking me to make the decision of what makes the city less safe, having no tncs, and potentially more DUIs, or having consumers getting a ride from somebody –
>> Mayor Adler: Absolutely not. There was nothing in my question that talked about the sexual assault issue. You and I discussed the sexual assault issue. I thanked you for that and put the topic aside. The questions I’m asking you now about DUIs on our streets. I’m asking you, if this council makes a decision that has effect of losing tncs at scale, would that make the city less safe?
>> Yes, it would.
>> Mayor Adler: Thank you.
[Applause ]
Plus: “The City of Austin is the hot girl from high school who wanted you to do her homework and then just go away.”
Read the whole thing.
TRUMP AS TRIBAL LEADER:
If you lived and worked in a cultural environment in which you were at risk at every moment of saying the “wrong” thing, and being made to pay a severe price for it — even when you are merely stating a conventional conservative opinion — well, wouldn’t you be emotionally attracted to a man like Trump? Again, many liberals haven’t the slightest idea how their own behavior has fueled the rise of Trump.
Earlier: “Obama: Don’t Blame Me for Donald Trump’s Rise.”
Well if it’s any consolation champ, there’s plenty to go around – besides the post turtle president, those who put him there should shoulder the blame as well.
OBAMA’S SECRET IRAN STRATEGY: The president has long been criticized for his lack of strategic vision. But what if a strategy, centered on Iran, has been in place from the start and consistently followed to this day?
How can our administration go wrong with great men like Obama, Ben Rhodes and John Kerry at the helm?
RECREATE ’68! Progressive activists decry San Diego P.D. for preventing Trump rally riot.
(Classical reference in headline.)
Related: California legislators move closer to giving felons the right to vote.
I HEAR IT WORKS WITH HILLARY: Feinstein Dangles Chardonnay Before Casey, Portman.
DRAMATIC MOMENT POLICE TASER ISLAMIC EXTREMIST AFTER HE SLIT RANDOM VICTIM’S THROAT IN LONDON TUBE STATION (VIDEO): “Images of murdered soldier Lee Rigby and British Islamic State executioner Jihadi John were among extremist material found on a Tube station knife attacker’s phone, a jury has heard,” the Telegraph reports.
Enoch Powell, call your office.
Flashback: “The release of a previously unseen document suggested that Labour’s migration policy over the past decade had been aimed not just at meeting the country’s economic needs, but also the Government’s ‘social objectives’.”
Gosh; good thing nothing like that could happen in America.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: PJM Alumnus Michael Malone on A Lost Generation of American Entrepreneurs.
From Obama’s perspective, it’s all good — they didn’t build that, anyway.
HIGHER EDUCATION IMPLOSION UPDATE: Internal Documents Show Backlash Over Virginia Tech’s Disinvitation of Jason Riley.
Earlier this year, Virginia Tech’s business school invited conservative commentator Jason Riley to speak to its students. Then suddenly, 10 days later, Riley, the author of a controversial book about race, received an email informing him the lecture was off. The department head and others on campus were “worried about more protests from the looney left if you were to give the lecture,” the email said.
But instead of helping the university avert a backlash, retracting the invitation actually sparked one—with a firestorm of negative media coverage and threats to cancel donations.
Read the whole thing.