Author Topic: The Way Forward for the American Creed  (Read 388964 times)

Crafty_Dog

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ret. Sen Phil Gramm: Obama's legacy can be erased
« Reply #750 on: December 20, 2015, 06:55:10 PM »

By Phil Gramm And
Michael Solon
Dec. 20, 2015 4:06 p.m. ET
163 COMMENTS

President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs he has achieved that goal. But while Roosevelt and Reagan sold their programs to the American people and enacted them with bipartisan support, Mr. Obama jammed his partisan agenda down the public’s throat. The Obama legacy is built on executive orders, regulations and agency actions that can be overturned using the same authority Mr. Obama employed to put them in place.

An array of President Obama’s policies—changing immigration law, blocking the Keystone XL pipeline, the Iranian nuclear agreement and the normalization of relations with Cuba, among others—were implemented exclusively through executive action. Because any president is free “to revoke, modify or supersede his own orders or those issued by a predecessor,” as the Congressional Research Service puts it, a Republican president could overturn every Obama executive action the moment after taking the oath of office.

At the beginning of the inaugural address, the new president could sign an executive order rescinding all of Mr. Obama’s executive orders deemed harmful to economic growth or constitutionally suspect. The new president could then establish a blue-ribbon commission to review all other Obama executive orders. Any order not reissued or amended in 60 days could be automatically rescinded.

Then there’s the trove of regulations used largely to push through policies that could have never passed Congress. For example, when President Obama in 2010 couldn’t ram through his climate-change legislation in a Democratic Senate, he used decades-old regulatory authority to inflict the green agenda on power plants and the auto industry.

This is far from the only example: Labor Department rules on fiduciary standards; the National Labor Relations Board’s ruling that franchisees are joint employers; the Environmental Protection Agency’s power grab over water ways; the Federal Communications Commission’s attempt to regulate the Internet as a 1930s telephone monopoly. All are illustrations of how President Obama has used rule-making not to carry out congressional intent but to circumvent it.

If the new president proves as committed to overturning these regulations as Mr. Obama was to implementing them, these rules could be amended or overturned. And because Senate Democrats “nuked” the right of the minority to filibuster administration nominees, the new president’s appointees could not be blocked by Democrats if Republicans retain control of the Senate.

To accelerate this process, the new president should name cabinet and agency appointees before the 115th Congress begins. He could declare an economic emergency and ask the agencies to initiate the rule-making process promptly. On the first day in the Oval Office the president could order federal agencies to halt consideration of all pending regulations—precisely as President Obama did.

Even when the Obama transformation is rooted in law, by demanding legislation that even the most liberal Congress in 75 years could not vote for in detail, he was forced to avoid program details, granting vast power to agencies to determine actual policy during implementation. Dodd-Frank granted extraordinary powers to financial regulators by leaving objectives vaguely defined: What the Volcker rule on bank trading means, what constitutes an acceptable “living will” for a financial institution, how international regulatory decisions work within U.S. law, and much more. If the new president nominated able, committed cabinet and agency leaders, many of Dodd-Frank’s worst provisions could be revised or reversed without legislative action.

As Congress debates repealing Dodd-Frank, the new president’s appointees could ensure that no financial institution is too big to fail, that Federal Reserve bureaucrats are removed from corporate boardrooms and that penalties for misconduct fall on individual offenders, not on innocent pensioners and other stockholders. The new president’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director will have the unilateral power to overturn each and every barrier erected against mortgage, auto and personal lending.

The Affordable Care Act also grants substantial flexibility in its implementation, a feature Mr. Obama has repeatedly exploited. The new president could suspend penalties for individuals and employers, enforce income-verification requirements, ease the premium shock on young enrollees by adjusting the community rating system, allow different pricing structures inside the exchanges and alter provider compensation. These actions could begin dismantling the most pernicious parts of ObamaCare and prevent its roots from deepening as Congress debates its repeal and replacement.

By relentlessly pursuing an agenda that was outside the political mainstream, Mr. Obama became the most polarizing president of the past century. Had he compromised with his own party and a handful of Republicans, much of his vision might have been firmly cemented into law on a bipartisan basis. But by doing it his way, Mr. Obama built an imposing sand castle that is now imperiled by the changing tides of voter sentiment. All the American electorate must do now is choose a president totally committed to overturning the Obama program—and Obama’s sand castle will be washed away.

Mr. Gramm, a former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Solon was budget adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and is currently a partner of U.S. Policy Metrics.

Crafty_Dog

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Our Declaration of Independence
« Reply #751 on: December 24, 2015, 12:07:51 AM »

DougMacG

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #752 on: December 24, 2015, 07:17:48 AM »
From another thread:

American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action.  All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.

Simple and brilliant.  Not too many writers since the Founders ever stop and express this so clearly.

I would like to share this with my daughter pondering how to approach the issues as she comes out of a confusion called college.  Share this with Bigdog too.  He runs into a few young people.  And Conrad.  

Someone please tell the Syrian refugees and the people crossing our border, America isn't just a place on the map, it is a creed we share.

Creed =  a set of beliefs that guide one's actions.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #753 on: December 24, 2015, 09:02:00 AM »
I am honored you think it worthy of sharing with your daughter.  Please feel free.

ccp

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #754 on: January 13, 2016, 09:21:37 AM »
I just emailed the Conservative review to inquire if they have a scorecard for governors like they do for senators and congressmen.

It is a good resource for those who want to get an objective measure of the conservativeness, if you will, of our elected officials.

Amazingly there are a few Republicans who are less conservative then many Democrats.  Even a few who score lower than even Pelosi or Reid!

I wonder about this Niki Halley SC governor.  She sounds like a rhino to me.  I don't trust her.

ESPECIALLY when even Democrats are lauding her speech.  That is a huge red flag to me!

Crafty_Dog

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Sen. Sasse
« Reply #755 on: February 09, 2016, 08:23:57 AM »
In the tumultuous political times we are currently witnessing heading into this election year, it seems appropriate to be reminded why conservatism is the only chance America has to return to some semblance of normalcy after eight years of progressive politics.  Enter the Republican senator from Nebraska, Ben Sasse, who was recently asked by NBC's Chuck Todd to define conservatism. Sasse was more than happy -- giddy really -- to be asked such a question and delivered a most eloquent answer:

America is the most exceptional nation in the history of the world because the U.S. Constitution is the best political document that's ever been written. Because it says something different than almost any people and any government has believed in human history.

Most governments in the past said, "Might makes right and the king has all the power and the people are dependent subjects." And the American founders said, "No! God gives us rights by nature and government is just our shared project to secure those rights."

Government is not the author or source of our rights and you don't make America great again by giving more power to one guy in Washington, D.C. You make America great again by recovering a constitutional republic where Washington is populated by people who are servant-leaders, who want to return power to the people and to the communities. Because what's great in America is the Rotary Club, it's small businesses, it's churches, it's schools, it's fire departments, and it's little leagues across this country. What makes America great is not some guy in Washington who says, "If I had more power, I could fix it all unilaterally." That's not the American tradition


Crafty_Dog

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Ben Shapiro
« Reply #756 on: March 17, 2016, 05:17:09 PM »
"For years, conservatives have told themselves the pretty bedtime story that they represent a silent majority in America — that most Americans want smaller government, individual rights and personal responsibility. We've suggested that if only we nominated precisely the right guy who says the right words — some illegally grown Ronald Reagan clone, perhaps — we'd win. Donald Trump's impending nomination puts all of that to bed. ... In order to rebuild, conservatives must recognize that they think individually; leftists think institutionally. While the left took over the universities — now bastions of pantywaist fascism hell-bent on destroying free speech — the right slept. While the left took over the public education system wholesale, the right fled to private schools and homeschooling. While the left utilized popular culture as a weapon, conservatives supposedly withdrew and turned off their televisions. Withdrawal, it turns out, wasn't the best option. Fighting back on all fronts is. Republicans need to worry less about the next election and significantly more about building a movement of informed Americans who actually understand American values. That movement must start with outreach to parents, and it must extend to the takeover of local institutions or defunding of government institutions outright. The left has bred a generation of Americans who do not recognize the American ideals of the Founding Fathers. Pretending otherwise means flailing uselessly as demagogues like Trump become faux-conservative standard-bearers." - Ben Shapiro

ccp

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It is about time.
« Reply #757 on: June 27, 2016, 04:16:46 AM »
This article and others like show that the the establishment RIGHT is FINALLY getting it.   It took Trump.  It took Brexit.  I don't know how many believe in these concepts or agree with them (this is still a threat to many of them)  but at least many if not all of them are FINALLY GETTING IT:

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437142/brexit-vote-racism-xenophobia-were-not-cause

ccp

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VDH: American Elite and the American People
« Reply #758 on: July 05, 2016, 07:29:38 AM »
VDH in his usual eloquent detail shows how he "gets it" .  So now I would like him to advise us on what to do about it.  Especially when we are up against the strategies of the left.  Buy votes, corruption, propaganda, and racial , gender and ethnic tactics .

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/437454/american-elite-and-american-people
« Last Edit: July 05, 2016, 04:55:40 PM by Crafty_Dog »

ccp

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Better to let Dems win?
« Reply #759 on: July 10, 2016, 10:12:28 AM »
Is this our time to think like we are on  Dunkirk?

What is very interesting he doesn't mention Trump once.  He obviously has no confidence in Trump.
He also assumes that if we retreat and try to regroup that things will get worse and we can simply blame it on Dems and then come back driving the enemy back across the battle field to victory.  This is a huge assumption.  A huge gamble with EVERYTHING on the line.  All or nothing if you ask me.

https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/listen-conservative-conscience-ep42

ccp

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #760 on: July 11, 2016, 04:00:40 AM »
I took my dogs for a walk yesterday and was thinking about the analogy of Dunkirk when I remembered how lucky the British and the world was.   All Hitler had to do to completely capture the British army (and some French ) was to send in his armored divisions.  His not doing so was one of his biggest blunders.  I don't recall why he didn't.  I think it was he was being too cautious but he sent the tanks in the entire British army would have been captured and Britain lost.

Do using this analogy does anyone really think the Democrats would not send in the tanks if Hillary won?  The SCOTUS would be probably 6 to 3 liberals for possibly decades. 

No I cannot come to the conclusion we should hope Trump loses so the Republicans can "regroup" and plan "Normandy".  Time is not on our side.

ccp

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"us" (Americans) vs "elites" (globalists one world nation)
« Reply #761 on: July 19, 2016, 05:35:25 AM »
Laura Ingraham states the theme should be

"Do we trust ourselves or the 'elites'?"  If we can shift the mentality away from race, gender, sexual preference, and free this and that at least for the "independents" then we have a chance IMHO:

http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/independence-new-capitalism/

ccp

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #762 on: July 25, 2016, 06:18:57 AM »
I am glad to see this on Conservative Review today.  I agree with the opinion.  Interesting he compares Trump to both Samson and John Brown  :lol:

https://www.conservativereview.com/commentary/2016/07/why-i-hope-donald-trump-wins

DougMacG

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #763 on: August 04, 2016, 07:37:12 AM »
We have tried to define the American Creed from our point of view and chart a course for getting back on that track.  Crafty wrote:

American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the consequences of one's action.  All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote.

Sometimes I lament this would be a lot easier if the left was right.  Maybe we don't need individual rights, would be better off ruled by a faraway leftist world government.  Wouldn't it be great if lifting up the incomes and lives of all low wage earners was as simple as passing minimum wage law to any number mandated.  Wouldn't it be great if we could have left Saddam Hussein in power pursuing nuclear weapons, supporting terrorism and nothing bad would have come out of that.  Or we could leave Iraq without a status of forces agreement and nothing bad would happen.  Wouldn't it be great if we could just let Russia be the 'world's policeman' in the Middle East, it will come out fine and the US didn't have to do all the heavy lifting.  Let China benevolently dominate the South China Sea.  Wouldn't it be great if we could endlessly tax the rich and they would ignore the disincentives and keep earning, producing, investing and growing jobs and the economy, and if all of our basics like healthcare for everyone could be free to us, paid for by someone we don't even know or not even paid for at all...

Maybe a way of backing into a 'way forward' strategy is to ask the important questions backwards.  What are all the falsehoods we would have to believe true for the left to have the best path forward and our vision wrong?

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #764 on: August 04, 2016, 11:46:31 AM »
I'm feeling a bit uneasy with "responsibility for the consequences for one's action" because of potential for it being misapplied to progressive purpose.

Therefore I now change it to:

"American Creed= Free minds, free markets, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of contract, right of self-defense (hence guns and knives, etc) property rights, privacy, all connected with responsibility for the disrespect for the rights of others. .  All this from our Creator, not the State nor majority vote."


"Maybe a way of backing into a 'way forward' strategy is to ask the important questions backwards.  What are all the falsehoods we would have to believe true for the left to have the best path forward and our vision wrong?"

A bit leery of this; is there a risk of this putting the attention on them instead of us?


DougMacG

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #765 on: August 15, 2016, 09:43:50 PM »
“the CDC has determined that conservatism can’t be spread by casual contact.”

ccp

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Get rid of name "Republican" party
« Reply #766 on: August 24, 2016, 12:54:12 PM »
How about a proposal :

we rename the party the *Freedom for All Party*.

Most people don't get the concept of "Republican" .

G M

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The Low-Trust State
« Reply #767 on: September 10, 2016, 06:10:02 PM »
http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=8504

The Low-Trust State
Posted on September 7, 2016   

Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.

The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.

The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.

Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.

Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?

The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.

A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.

It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.

The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.

At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.

Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.

Crafty_Dog

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Crafty_Dog

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AM Codevilla: After the Republic
« Reply #769 on: September 28, 2016, 08:29:41 AM »
http://www.claremont.org/crb/basicpage/after-the-republic/
After the Republic
By: Angelo M. Codevilla
September 27, 2016

Crafty_Dog

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Restoring America's Economic Mobility
« Reply #770 on: October 19, 2016, 09:22:35 AM »

ccp

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How does the opposition party compete
« Reply #771 on: October 31, 2016, 12:24:58 PM »
with a party that extorts money from some to give benefits to others?

ttp://www.nationalreview.com/article/441595/voter-demographics-diversifying-republicans-falling-behind

Without simply trying to pander even more?


Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #772 on: October 31, 2016, 11:38:42 PM »
Outstanding question.

Reagan-Kemp answer: Growth, Opportunity, win-win.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #773 on: November 06, 2016, 11:26:22 PM »
For all our foresight about the Clintons, and our anger at her supporters and the pravdas who deceive them, we must also remember too what a profoundly flawed messenger Trump has been for the American Creed.

DougMacG

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #774 on: November 07, 2016, 07:30:12 AM »
For all our foresight about the Clintons, and our anger at her supporters and the pravdas who deceive them, we must also remember too what a profoundly flawed messenger Trump has been for the American Creed.


Watching Hillary and Dem closing commercials, Trump is quite the flawed messenger based on these clips of un-Presidential utterances.  We warned Pat and others about that.  Commercials show children watching a TV with Trump saying nasty, bleeped things.  Clinton is worse but not on the surface level.

On policy, he is partly right and partly wrong.  A muddled message for me but he is connecting with other people on other levels, anger about globalization etc.

We still don't have a candidate who can explain why capitalism is better than socialism and freedom better than tyranny.

Wrong direction polls 2:1 over right course and we have a toss up election running against more of the same - at best.

It's an easy call for me to vote for him versus a crook who has her policies all wrong.  But it's a hard time to our use influence with others, moderate and liberal, to persuade them this is the time to jump to our side.


DougMacG

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The Way Forward, no end zone dance, just work to do.
« Reply #776 on: November 10, 2016, 06:03:22 PM »
President George W Bush made this statement in his first press conference after the 2004 election that was perhaps the start of his rather sudden fall:

"The people made it clear what they wanted, I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/04/uselections2004.usa20

This week conservatives and Republicans won the Presidency, Senate, House, 32 Governorships and close to 70% of the state legislative chambers across the fruited plain.  Someone wiser than George W Bush used to say something about the excessive end zone dance celebrations we often see, "act like you've been there before'.  That was former Minnesota Vikings Head Coach Bud Grant.  The play was designed to go to the end zone.  That's where you expected it to go.  You are a professional, paid to do that and you did it.  Give the ball to the referee and get back to your team ready to play the rest of the game.

If Republicans or Trumpists think they already won it all, achieved it all, have political capital and are going to stick it to the other side just because of the outcome of the close vote count on Tuesday night, they might soon learn otherwise.  There is work to do.  

21 million people will lose health insurance in January if Trump and the Republicans simply cancel Obamacare without having a better plan in place.  Whatever the legislation is, it needs to go through a 51-49 Senate where rules require 60 votes - depending on what the meaning of rules is.  There will be a fight.

Tax reform has been talked about since the Harding administration.  Yes it can be done.  No it won't be easy.

The Penny Plan to cut spending is simple.  Telling Sean Hannity you support it was easy.  But no one has ever done it.

The first Supreme Court nomination is all but ready, coming from a list made and released.  Getting and winning a vote on the nominee is another matter.  A couple of Democrats on the committee (and all their activists) might still be pissed off.

20 or so candidates opined on how they would defeat ISIS.  Trump was the least specific about it.  Yet ISIS controls a good part of the Middle East and has attacks already planned all over the west.  This isn't a debate question anymore.  The plan you're not going to telegraph to the enemy needs to be in place, like now.  Good morning Mr. President, here is your briefing.  Guess what?  The real attack on the homeland isn't in the briefing.  Have a nice day.

Building the wall isn't an artist's rendition anymore.  Deciding who to deport and how isn't a political hypothetical anymore.

And for the Republicans in Congress, writing or repealing real legislation isn't as simple as opposing a President from the other party.  Real laws have real consequences, unintended ones too.

Britain, Canada and Mexico have all signaled willingness to re-open trade deals.  There is a hint of an opening with China too.  That doesn't mean these countries will accept our terms.  Simpler and better trade deals is a great idea.  The threat of a 40% tariff on consumers, a trade war or a new depression is not.

How about the federal dilemma of addressing the legalization of marijuana happening in many of the states, still against federal law.  Is there going to be a civil war against Colorado, Washington, California, Oregon and Massachusetts over pot laws or is the federal government going to make accommodation for what is now a reality in the states?  Even if legalization was a bad idea...

Nice election.  Everybody deserves a little credit.  We defeated an incompetent, inexperienced candidate under federal investigation with no charisma by -300,000 votes.  

Now there is work to do.
« Last Edit: November 11, 2016, 12:02:40 AM by DougMacG »

G M

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #777 on: November 10, 2016, 06:55:23 PM »


”Nice election.  Everybody deserves a little credit.  We defeated an incompetent, inexperienced candidate under federal investigation with no charisma by -300,000 votes. “

Doug wins best line of the week
:-D

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #778 on: November 10, 2016, 08:07:37 PM »
 A lot of wisdom in that!!!

DDF

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #779 on: November 11, 2016, 06:11:54 AM »
Wow..... put that way, just wow.

Edit: I'll add Doug, that not only do I agree with GC and GM, but that it is nice to have someone a little more to the Left around. You point out things that hadn't occurred to me, the leftist politicians being angry for instance. Senate 60 vote rule.

I have often wondered, just exactly what it was, Obama told every Republican in all of those last minute, phone calls and private meetings, in order to get them to flip their vote for Obamacare. Did he threaten them with death? Who knows... but they certainly flipped.

It will be interesting to see Trump's strategy. Similar to what you have stated... this isn't a game show anymore. "You're fired," isn't going to cut it.

It is curious what Obama said to them though, in order to get that to pass. Hell, they hadn't even read it. I read it and it took me a week. What did he tell them?
« Last Edit: November 11, 2016, 06:25:34 AM by DDF »


Crafty_Dog

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WSJ: C. De Muth: A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival
« Reply #781 on: November 25, 2016, 09:45:18 PM »
This piece is addresses themes we have explored here previously and IMHO is worthy of serious contemplation.
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A Trump-Ryan Constitutional Revival
Wariness of Trump might inspire Republicans in Congress to give up lazy delegation and relearn the art of legislating.
By Christopher DeMuth
Nov. 25, 2016 5:11 p.m. ET

A central purpose of the American scheme of checks and balances is to draw out the distinctive strengths of the two political branches, executive and the legislature, while containing their distinctive weaknesses.

The scheme has not been working well of late. The consequences are unbridled executive growth into every cranny of commerce and society, and a bystander Congress. We have lapsed into autopilot government, rife with corruption and seemingly immune to incremental electoral correction.

These pathologies were a significant cause of the Trumpian political earthquake. And one of the many astonishing results of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Republican sweep on Election Day is that they have set the stage for a constitutional revival.

No, not by President Trump’s nominating and the Senate’s confirming Scalia-worthy constitutionalists to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts. That prospect was widely understood and apparently on the minds of many voters. Rather, the new president and Congress are poised to revive constitutional practices in their own branches.

One of these practices is results-oriented policy making—so-called transactional politics—an approximation of what the Founders meant by “deliberation.” Another, “checks and balances,” is vigorous policy competition between the executive branch and Congress. Both practices have fallen into disuse in what had seemed, until now, to be a continuing downward spiral of dysfunctional government.

A standard complaint about Washington politics is that it has become hyperpartisan and gridlocked. The complaint is lodged by Democrats and Republicans when they are not getting their way, and they are right. The federal government is frequently hostage to ideological posturing in both parties and pre-emptive rejection of compromise with the evildoers in the other party. Recent examples include ObamaCare—a huge (in the pre-Trump sense of the term) expansion of the welfare state enacted on strictly partisan lines; the collapse of the 2011 Obama-Boehner debt-reduction deal following a White House stab at new tax increases; the Ted Cruz-inspired 2013 government shutdown; and the constant Tea Party sabotaging of the Republican leadership at the least hint of legislative compromise.

Spectacles such as these have given rise to a new school of political realism, led by Jonathan Rauch,Richard H. Pildes,Frances E. Lee and other scholars. Their essential argument, in Mr. Rauch’s words, is “that transactional politics—the everyday give-and-take of dickering and compromise—is the essential work of governing and that government, and thus democracy, won’t work if leaders can’t make deals and make them stick.”

The realists vary in their personal politics. They are united in understanding that, in a nation of diverse and conflicting views, civil peace and productive government require more than trumpeting one’s own positions and seeking to defeat one’s opponents at the ballot box. They also require accommodation through dialogue, negotiation and practical compromise.

The Trump insurgency was long on trumpeting. The president-elect fought his way to victory with unorthodox, fiercely controversial policy positions, insulting criticism of his opponents and the Washington establishment, brazen defiance of every canon of political correctness and a taste for overstatement and talent for entertainment.

All of this was, however, accompanied by a strong basso continuo: the candidate’s business experience, financial independence, and fabled prowess at negotiation and “the art of the deal.” Office seekers always say that their particular experience is what the times require, but Mr. Trump was doing more. When reporters complained that his brief, broadly worded tax-reform proposal lacked specifics, he replied dismissively that detailed campaign position papers are media fodder of little interest to voters. If he were elected, the specifics would depend on negotiations among “me and lots of congressmen and lots of senators.”

In combination, candidate Trump’s audacious policy positions, belligerent rhetoric and zest for deal making seem designed to establish his bona fides as the people’s own Washington wheeler-dealer. The postelection reports on his “backing off” or “reneging” on some of his campaign commitments miss the larger dynamic. The Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito reports that many Trump voters are also thorough political realists who trust their man. The president-elect, in his election night remarks, insisted that his victory would be as “historic” as everyone was proclaiming only if he did a “great job” parlaying it into practical results.

In attempting to make great on his electoral triumph, President Trump will not have the reflexive support of party stalwarts on Capitol Hill that his recent predecessors have enjoyed. His triumph in the Republican primaries was a hostile takeover. He treated congressional Republicans and their leaders with contempt throughout the campaign. Many of them made clear the feeling was mutual, and some refused to support him.

The bruises will heal to some extent—and practicing politicians have to be impressed at how the outsider’s bold proposals and roughhouse style attracted millions of new voters. Yet sharp differences will remain. While some of the president-elect’s positions are solidly Republican (ObamaCare replacement, tax reduction, deregulation), others are nervous-making departures (immigration) and some are outright heresies (trade protectionism, antitrust activism, public-works projects). And Mr. Trump’s aversion to entitlements reform has undercut House Speaker Paul Ryan’s long and careful preparations for finally facing up to the problem.

Under the circumstances, Congress is bound to recover and assert many of its long-neglected legislative prerogatives. In recent decades, our scheme of separated powers has been supplanted by party solidarity between presidents and their congressional co-partisans. (“Separation of Parties, Not Powers” is the title of an influential 2006 study of this development by Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes.)

Members of Congress have increasingly acted out of loyalty to party rather than to Congress as an independent constitutional branch. They support or obstruct administration initiatives along partisan lines, and when in support they receive fundraising and bureaucratic favors from the president in return. During periods of party-unified government, congressional majorities delegate broad lawmaking powers to the executive, as in the Affordable Care and Dodd-Frank acts, that are almost impossible to recover when divided government returns. Congressional minorities allied with the president, employing the Senate filibuster and other supermajority rules, ensure that Congress turns a blind eye to executive abuses, as in the recent IRS and Veterans hospital scandals.

Party partisanship is one (not the only) cause of the emergence of unilateral executive government. That’s where the president and the hundreds of agencies reporting to him exercise legislative powers that previously required congressional action. But our new president is more populist than partisan, and the Republican Party has suddenly become, thanks to him, a true big-tent party, as heterogeneous and raucous as the Democratic Party of the mid-20th century.

If the congressional Republicans want to be full players in this new dispensation, they are going to have to reinstitute annual budgeting and appropriations for executive-branch agencies. This is essential for calibrating how the funds are spent, and also for using “budget reconciliation” to begin reforming the Senate’s incapacitating supermajority rules.

If they want to participate in charting new courses for health-care, tax and immigration policy and financial regulation, they are going to have to give up lazy policy delegation to the executive and relearn the arts of legislating and collective choice. And if President Trump should try to settle these and similarly momentous matters through Obama-style executive decrees, they are going to have to cry foul and make it stick.

The hard intraparty contention of the 2016 campaign has prepared the congressional Republicans for this. President-elect Trump’s obvious relish for transactional politics, and the largeness of his ambitions, suggests that he is prepared as well. The likely evanescence of Barack Obama’s Congress-free domestic and foreign initiatives—the already voided immigration policies, the Clean Power Plan, the Iran deal, national rules for bathroom etiquette—should inspire everyone to stay at the table. It is true that candidate Trump expressed admiration for President Obama’s executive unilateralism. But it is also true that Congress often resorts to equally dubious micromanagement of executive-branch operations. Herein are the makings for a mutually productive entente.

These would be healthy developments for our constitutional order. Presidents have the strengths of action, decisiveness, high aspiration and a national political mandate—along with the weaknesses of overreaching, insularity and concentration of power. They oversee a bureaucratic empire too vast for any one man to keep track of, and so powerful that abuse and corruption are commonplace.

Congresses have the strengths of full-spectrum political representation, 535 state and local mandates, and responsiveness to shifting popular concerns and a soft spot for human-rights minorities at home and abroad—along with the weaknesses of parochialism, irresolution, decision-by-committee and herd mentality.

We need more of the strengths and less of the weaknesses. But transactional politics and interbranch rivalry are no guarantee of happy outcomes, which depend ultimately on the constitution of the participants. The record of tough-guy political outsiders is less than great. Businessman Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger in California, came to office promising to upend the status quo. But when they discovered how entrenched and hard-bitten the status quo really was, they promptly folded, contented themselves with mere celebrity, and accomplished nothing.

A separate risk is from the bipartisan innovation, going back to the 1970s, of continuous borrowing and increasing debt to sustain popular entitlement spending for the time being. Relaxing the fiscal constraint—the need to match spending on current consumption with current tax revenues—can make results-oriented political bargaining all too easy. With these and other temptations abundant in modern politics, we may say that constitutional government is a necessary but not sufficient condition of democratic recovery.

Mr. DeMuth is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute. He was formerly president of the American Enterprise Institute and worked at the White House and Office of Management and Budget in the Nixon and Reagan administrations.

ccp

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #782 on: December 08, 2016, 05:55:46 AM »
As always the LEFt has to turn everything into a race issue.  It is not about race.  It is about our country.  It is about globalism vs nationalism.  It is not because Brock is Black or the witch had female genitalia.  The Right has to shift the phony arguments .  They have not done a good enough job.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/poll-racial-vulnerability-linked-youth-vote-choice-080820556--politics.html


ccp

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #784 on: December 17, 2016, 09:34:33 AM »
One has to wonder if tax breaks and deregulation get enacted will we all do better or will the wealthiest imply control 99.99 % of everything vs the 99 % now?

I am thinking the former but if we are astounded by the masses of wealth into the hands of just a few now wait for 4 to 8 yrs of this. I don't begrudge others for getting rich if done honestly and by the same the rules the rest of us have to follow.  And if everyone else who contribute benefits.   

ccp

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The Koch brothers to invest $ 300 to 400 dollars million the next 2 years
« Reply #785 on: January 28, 2017, 08:23:40 PM »
to political causes with conservative principals:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/koch-political-network-spend-300m-400m-over-2-001528120--election.html

I strongly recommend they donate to this website and its' staff of writers who have been dedicated to debating political issues with a view from the Right.

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #786 on: January 28, 2017, 09:38:21 PM »
To inquire about how to make donations email me at crafty@dogbrothers.com   :-D

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« Last Edit: January 29, 2017, 05:19:28 PM by DDF »

DougMacG

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #788 on: April 27, 2017, 09:13:55 AM »
Newt wrote above regarding the transition:  "If Trumpism succeeds in replacing the 80-year-old bureaucratic model of government...[he will get credit]"  Big deal.  If Trumpism succeeds, this nation will survive and prosper.

Trump has made many significant moves, but seems to be stuck on the largest ones.  One reason we can't move on the big items is that there doesn't seem to be an overriding theme.

He scaled back the scope of the EPA and things like that.  Nothing in the bureaucracy was lost that won't return if the other sides just takes charge again. He got what seems to be a good Justice into the seat that was Scalia's.  A similar victory for a Breyer or Ginsburg seat would be real change, but the conservative justices are aging at the same rate.  Believers in the American Creed won't hold the Court without holding the Presidency and the Senate too, and no side will hold all the seats of power for an extended period without giving the people a reason.  Meanwhile no lower court appointments or confirmations are happening.

The only things we have going for us is the proof of the failure of leftist overreach and current Democrat disarray.  Republicans have been quietly winning massive electoral gains and yet haven't succeeded in changing the thinking much across the country.  The Republican party seems hopelessly divided, the freedom seekers are in the minority, and the President is still chasing shiny objects.

We haven't moved much past the pinnacle of failure symbolized by the Republican Presidential debates with 17 candidates all attacking each other instead of painting a vision.  Rand Paul doesn't know he lost, nor does Lindsay Graham and others.  John Kasich is still running for President, planning to challenge Trump in 2020 no matter how the Presidency goes.  Same with almost all of the others.  Rubio has been choosing his battles carefully, mostly in line with the President, Cruz too, but neither conceding who will represent which faction in the next go round much less uniting on a single vision.  

Molly Ball, leftist at The Atlantic made a good point to Hugh Hewitt.  If Trump flipflops from wrong to right in the eyes of much of the conservative movement, it is still a flip flop.  Enforcing a redline in Syria, backing off of a currency fight with China, staying in NATO, NAFTA, no new tariffs etc.  Great, but at some point he loses his base without gaining anyone else.

Who else leads our movement if not Trump?  If Trump fails, the next President isn't going to be Republican, nor is the future Senate and House.

The only answer I can think of is  to go Reaganesque, which means Simplify.

1.  Peace through strength, as he seems to be doing, but articulate it, everyday.  Defense budgets can't have waste and they can't go up and down.  Defense needs funding and purpose, which is to build enough to deter war and loss of life.
2.  Grow the economy.  Like it says on the hard to find, not ready for prime time, tax proposal.  It needs to be spoken, shouted, explained repeated, argued and won.  Why do economies grow?  HOW do they grow?  Why do they stagnate?  How did our existing policies lead to this stagnation?  Where will it lead if we do nothing?  How do these pro-growth proposals Make America Great Again?  Win the argument and then do it.
3.  We saw a spending plan with cuts.  Then nothing.  EXPLAIN why we need to shrink the size and role of government and then do it.  Not pretend cuts, negotiating cuts, but structural cuts.
4.  In true Trump form, fight the media head on, starting with the static scoring of his health and tax plans is ANTI-SCIENCE.  Explain why the status quo is wrong, isn't working and has to be changed.Take them on and win.  Don't go on a listening tour of a divided country in disarray where the loudest voices are the worst ones.  Give us the right answer and LEAD!  Pass the best set of policies that can be passed and do it now.

Or live under leftists for the rest of our lives and our children's and grandchildren's lives because that is where we are heading if we fail to figure this out and do something about it RIGHT NOW.  [my humble opinion]
« Last Edit: April 27, 2017, 10:16:31 AM by DougMacG »

Crafty_Dog

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Re: The Way Forward for the American Creed
« Reply #789 on: April 27, 2017, 10:25:02 PM »
It has been 100 days.  He has never held elected office.  For all his fukups, I'd say a pretty good case can be made that he is a very quick study.


Crafty_Dog

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Newt: New Theories for National Security Success
« Reply #791 on: September 13, 2017, 09:04:35 PM »
 


The U.S. Needs New Theories for National Security Success

Every major American national security victory began with a theory for success. Those theories were used to build strategies, which were then executed through operations and tactics. Success always begins with a theory, and you cannot achieve success in national security without first starting with a theory.

For example, President Lincoln developed a theory for defeating the Confederacy in the early days of the Civil War based, in part, on General Winfield Scott’s plan to blockade the South by controlling the nation’s coasts and waterways. The influence of Scott’s 1861 Anaconda Plan contributed to the North’s overall strategic initiatives throughout the war, which led to the Union’s victory in four years.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and their chiefs of staff constructed a theory for victory in World War II over a three-week period around Christmas of 1941, just weeks after the United States had formally entered the war. The Allies achieved victory in Europe and Japan in the spring and summer of 1945, respectively.

The National Security Council outlined a theory of Soviet containment in a 1950 paper called NSC-68, which President Harry Truman used to initiate a long-term strategy of alliances. Forty-one years later, the Soviet Union collapsed – just as the Security Council’s theory suggested it would.

Now, look at today.

Sixteen years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States is not winning the war on terrorism – or many of the other major national security challenges we face.

Consider:

•   Islamic supremacism is more powerful today as a transnational movement than it was on September 11, 2001.

•   The Taliban is still in Afghanistan and the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in Pakistan.

•   The Iranian dictatorship is steadily growing in power and influence.

•   North Korea’s nuclear weapon and missile program is proceeding at an accelerating rate.

•   We are unable to respond effectively to Russia’s system of hybrid warfare, which utilizes political pressure, propaganda, and fluctuating violence to achieve warlike outcomes, while avoiding full war.

•   Cyber and intellectual property theft by China have been debilitating our nation for at least a decade.

The list goes on and on.

This ineffectiveness in the face of aggression is not due to a lack of resources or willpower. Instead, it is largely because we lack appropriate theories for success for national security.   Without the right theories, we cannot develop sustainable and executable strategies that will lead us to victory.   While America meanders aimlessly on the world stage, reacting to one crisis after another, our competitors are taking advantage.

The Chinese and Russian regimes work every day to dominate us through economic development, alliance building, technological advancement, and long-term investments that have the potential to strengthen their military capabilities. This is all part of an ongoing competitive engagement that looks nothing like the wars we have fought in the past – but remains no less threatening to our survival.

Further, our theory gap creates more deadly challenges. Since we are failing to keep nuclear weapons away from places such as North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan, we must also develop a doctrine for minimizing American casualties during a potential nuclear war.

So, what can we do?

We must renew the basis of American power. This requires developing a national security theory of succeeding in education and the economy. It also requires assessing the national security implications of public health crises, like the opioid crisis.

A unhealthy, uneducated, and unproductive America will not sustain a global national security system and may not even be able to defend itself.

Specifically, to be successful over the next 20 years, we must develop national security theories for:

1.   Shrinking and eventually eliminating Islamic supremacism as an ideology capable of recruiting soldiers willing to engage in terrorism.

2.   Creating an American response to the Russian model of hybrid warfare which operates with the same capabilities.

3.   Developing systems, strategies, and structures for sustaining continuous competition with China and Russia.

4.   Being prepared for constant change across every career, institution, and system brought about by emerging technologies.

5.   Constantly communicating with Americans and allies to help people understand that mastering the scale and pace of change will be the key to success.

This is a daunting agenda, but it is historically and realistically the right agenda.  Anything less will increase the risk of America’s defeat within the next generation.

Your Friend,
Newt
P.S. This newsletter focused on challenges from abroad, but America faces threats from within as well. The Left is determined to erase our history and undermine the values and principles that have made America prosperous and free.

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Crafty_Dog

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Polarization in American History
« Reply #792 on: February 04, 2018, 09:30:58 PM »
Polarization Is an Old American Story
Gordon Wood, the noted historian of early America, says Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans were far more divided than today’s political parties.
By Jason Willick
Feb. 2, 2018 6:22 p.m. ET
WSJ
Providence, R.I.

He’s been called the “dean of 18th-century American historians,” but Gordon Wood’s biggest claim to fame is that Matt Damon once mentioned him in a movie. In a barroom scene from 1997’s “Good Will Hunting,” a haughty Harvard grad student bloviates in a bid to impress two women. Mr. Damon’s character, a working-class prodigy, cuts him down to size: “Next year, you’re gonna be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood, talkin’ about, you know, the prerevolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.”

Mr. Wood says a student told him about the mention immediately after the film’s Cambridge, Mass., premiere. But he is fond of pointing out that he isn’t the historian Mr. Damon’s character most admires: “If you want to read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s ‘People’s History of the United States,’ ” Mr. Damon says in another scene. “That book will really knock you on your ass.”

And the truth is that today the pompous grad student would be likelier to quote Zinn’s progressive indictment of America than Mr. Wood’s work. “I’m considered on the wrong side,” Mr. Wood, energetic and alert at 84, tells me over lunch at the faculty club of Brown University, where he is a professor emeritus. “American history is now a tale of oppression and woe. And if you don’t say that . . .” he trails off.

Mr. Wood graduated from Tufts in 1955, served in the U.S. Air Force in Japan—“I was lucky, I was between two wars”—and enrolled in Harvard’s graduate history program in 1958. He had hoped to study with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. , but the latter was gearing up for the Kennedy presidential campaign. Mr. Wood enrolled in a seminar with Bernard Bailyn, a just-tenured early-American historian, and never looked back.

Over six decades of work on the colonial period, the Revolution and the Founding, Mr. Wood has accumulated virtually every award available to historians—the Bancroft Prize for “The Creation of the American Republic,” a Pulitzer for “The Radicalism of the American Revolution,” and the National Humanities Medal, which President Obama presented him in 2010.

But as his star rose, his field suffered an extended decline amid the late-20th-century backlash against “dead white males.” Experts on revolutionary politics retired and weren’t replaced. Social history—“bottom up” accounts of marginalized groups—gained prestige. The New York Times reported in 2016 that in the previous decade universities posted only 15 new tenure-track openings for American political historians of any kind.

“I understand what they’re doing, and it’s important,” Mr. Wood says of the social historians. “We know more about slavery than we ever did.” But he argues the academic literature has grown unbalanced, neglecting crucial questions, including about the political divisions that shaped the early republic. “It’s not that they’re wrong about the killing of the Indians and slavery, but there are other things that happened too, and it’s a question of which ones do you emphasize.”

He describes the attitude of some of these scholars: “I want to show how bad things were so people will wake up and do something about the present.” Many Americans tune out instead. Weary of “one tale of oppression after another,” they turn to popular historians, many of whom have no formal training in history.

Meanwhile, many scholars retreat further into narrow subspecialties and esoteric jargon. These days, he says, professional history is “almost like a science” in that the work is unintelligible to laymen. But whereas “physicists can show us what they’ve done” by engineering real-world applications, historians’ work must stand on its own. They have a responsibility to make it vivid and meaningful for the broader public.

What happens when they abdicate this responsibility? For one thing, a lack of historical perspective can lead to apocalyptic thinking about the present. “History is consoling in that sense,” Mr. Wood says. “It takes you off the roller-coaster of emotions that this is the best of times or the worst of times.”

His latest book, “Friends Divided: John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, ” provides an illustration. The antagonism between Adams’s Federalists and Jefferson’s Republicans in the 1790s was far more fundamental, and therefore more threatening, than American partisanship today: “I think we’re going to survive easily,” Mr. Wood says.

By contrast, Adams, Jefferson and their coalitions came close to killing the republic in its cradle. They disagreed on as fundamental a question as whether the new republic should be democratic. Jefferson had a romantic faith in democracy and the wisdom of ordinary people; Adams predicted that “democracy will infallibly destroy all civilization.”

Jefferson’s view was partly self-serving. “The leadership of the Republican Party, which is the popular party, is Southern slaveholders,” Mr. Wood says. “They don’t fear the people,” because the gentry-aristocracy effectively controlled electoral outcomes. Jefferson was akin to today’s “limousine liberal” in that he was insulated from the policies he promoted. (Eventually, his ideas would prove potent in arguing against slavery.) Meanwhile, Adams’s Federalists “are coming from New England, where you have far more egalitarian societies, far more democratic societies,” he says. “But for that very reason, the leaders are more scared of populism, of democracy.”

That may make Adams sound like a member of today’s “establishment.” Yet some of his other ideas would be more amenable to populists like Donald Trump. Adams said to Jefferson, in Mr. Wood’s paraphrase: “You fear the ‘one’ of monarch, I fear the ‘few,’ meaning the aristocrats.” Adams argued that domination by oligarchs was a grave threat to liberty. “It’s his way of justifying the strong executive who will act as a check on the few,” Mr. Wood says. Adams wanted the executive to have some of the powers of the Crown.

That was anathema to Jefferson, whose life mission was “the elimination of monarchy, and all that it implies, which is hereditary rule, hierarchy and corruption.” He saw around him “a world of privilege in which ordinary people are abused. . . . From our point of view, he’s very sympathetic because he’s destroying that world,” Mr. Wood says.

The Federalists feared that Jefferson’s leveling vision would prove destructive to mediating institutions. Mr. Wood cites a recent book by political scientist Patrick Deneen, “Why Liberalism Failed,” which argues that the West’s commitment to individual autonomy—in both markets and culture—has undermined communal connections, leaving people lonely and isolated. That’s what the Federalists feared—“this awful kind of world, where the individual is alone and without any kind of connections with anyone.”

Another Jefferson-Adams disagreement that still resonates is what we now call “American exceptionalism”—the idea that “we’ve transcended the usual definition of a nation, and that we had a special responsibility in the world to promote our way of life.” Jefferson strongly believed it. He thought that “war is caused by monarchs” and “republics are naturally pacific,” so peace would follow if the American model were adopted everywhere. In that sense, he sounded very much like today’s liberal internationalists and neoconservatives. To Adams, meanwhile, America was “just as sinful, just as corrupt as other nations”—a view both Presidents Trump and Obama have sometimes echoed in different ways.

The most poignant comparison, however, is the bitterness of the divide. For much of the 1790s, neither Adams’s Federalists nor Jefferson’s Republicans “accepted the legitimacy of the other,” Mr. Wood says. “And of course, the Federalists never thought that they were a party. They were the government,” and Jefferson’s Republicans a malignant faction trying to take the government down. The Republicans, for their part, “thought that the Federalists were turning us into a monarchy and reversing the American Revolution.”

We hear plenty of similarly apocalyptic rhetoric today, but much of it is cynical and self-consciously exaggerated. What was striking about the 1790s, Mr. Wood emphasizes, is the extent to which each party sincerely believed the other posed an existential threat.

The differences came to a head as Americans split over the French Revolution, which Jefferson saw as vindicating his idea of human liberation and Adams as confirming his fears about how a society might be rent apart. The Federalists alleged Republican collusion with France—and unlike today’s skirmishes over Russian meddling, there was then an acute fear of invasion and mass defection. There was organized violence in Philadelphia, the capital, which to Federalists “seemed to be dominated by all these Frenchmen.” The terrified Federalist Congress enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts to suppress dissent. “We came close to a civil war in 1798,” Wood says. “It didn’t happen, and therefore historians don’t take it seriously.”

Adding to the chaos were Alexander Hamilton’s imperial designs. “Hamilton is full of visions of what he’s going to do with this army,” Mr. Wood says. He’s going to “go into Mexico maybe, and he’s going to ally with some of the leaders in South America” in a grand anti-French alliance. In a swipe at popular history, Mr. Wood says the “Hamilton” musical offers a “distorted” picture of a man who was really an antiliberal “Napoleonic figure”: “Things might have gotten to a point where Hamilton actually sends an army into Virginia,” the Republican stronghold.

In the campaign of 1800, Adams’s allies viewed Jefferson much the way opponents saw Donald Trump 216 years later—“stirring up trouble” and “destroying legitimate leaders.” Jefferson won, and Adams declined to attend his successor’s inauguration. The transfer of power was so momentous that Jefferson called it “the Revolution of 1800.” At that point, Mr. Wood observes, the Federalists “assume that he’ll fail so badly that they’ll be back into power before long.” They assumed wrong—the Federalists never won the presidency again and faded altogether by 1820.

Mr. Wood has written that most of the Founders “who lived on into the early decades of the nineteenth century expressed anxiety over what they had wrought.” Federalists rued the excesses of democracy, which undermined their aspirations for classical deliberative politics. “People began saying, look, if I don’t have people of my own kind in the government, I don’t feel confident,” Mr. Wood says. “You don’t trust people who aren’t like you, and that’s what feeds the anti-elitism,” which today takes the forms of populism and identity politics.

As for the Republicans, the federal government grew beyond anything they imagined. Today, limited government is associated with conservatism, “whereas in the late 18th century, it’s the radical position.” Jefferson believed a strong state would exacerbate unearned privilege and lead to monarchy. Yet America’s sprawling government today—the welfare state at home and military abroad—largely exists to promote Jeffersonian values of equality and American exceptionalism.

The ways in which both Adams’s and Jefferson’s visions have been frustrated illustrates one of Mr. Wood’s broad insights about the value of history. “History is a conservative discipline in that the one lesson that comes out of it is, nothing ever works out the way you think it’s going to,” he says. “That’s why Nietzsche said if you want to be a man on horseback, forget history, because it’ll stifle you—you’ll get full of doubts.”

History could teach today’s partisans on both sides that their ideas are less radical than they think, that the American republic is stronger than they fear, and that the nation’s divisions are more surmountable than they imagine. At a time when serious historians are proving less and less capable of reaching the wider public, Americans could do worse than to regurgitate lessons from Gordon Wood.

Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.

Crafty_Dog

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The Age of Outrage
« Reply #793 on: February 21, 2018, 10:37:23 PM »

Crafty_Dog

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A Hillary Staffer goes to CPAC
« Reply #794 on: March 02, 2018, 11:16:04 AM »


A Hillary Staffer Goes to CPAC
‘Try not to get killed,’ a friend warned. But I was greeted with open arms.
By Annafi Wahed
March 1, 2018 7:19 p.m. ET
111 COMMENTS

‘Make sure to check in with us!” one friend told me. “Try not to get killed,” another warned. I wasn’t off to a war zone or a spy mission in Moscow. I was riding a bus from New York to Washington to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference.

To be sure, I’m a tiny, talkative South Asian woman who spent four months on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign staff. I wasn’t exactly in my element surrounded by people in “Make America Great Again” hats chanting “Lock her up! Lock her up!“ But there was more to CPAC than that. In four days, I spoke with more than 100 conservatives, most of whom greeted me with open arms and thanked me for being there and having an open mind. They happily engaged me in meaningful political conversation and invited me for drinks and after-parties.

Where some saw a circus, I saw a big tent. I spoke with Jennifer C. Williams, chairman of the Trenton, N.J., Republican Committee and a transgender activist. Twenty feet away, I spoke with a religious leader who opposes same-sex marriage. While a panelist touted capital punishment, several attendees crowded the Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty booth. Hours after President Trump recast Oscar Brown Jr. ’s song “The Snake” as an ugly anti-immigrant parable, several influential Republicans were asking me, a naturalized citizen, how they can support my startup.

In retrospect, I’m embarrassed at how nervous I was when I arrived. I found myself singing along to “God Bless the USA” with a hilariously rowdy group of college Republicans, having nuanced discussions about gun control and education policy with people from all walks of life, nodding my head in agreement with parts of Ben Shapiro’s speech, and coming away with a greater determination to burst ideological media bubbles.

Among liberals, conservatives have a reputation for being closed-minded, even deplorable. But in the Washington Republicans I encountered at CPAC, I found a group of people who acknowledged their party’s shortcomings, genuinely wondered why I left my corporate job to join Mrs. Clinton’s campaign in 2016, and listened to my arguments before defending their own positions.

Although CPAC attendees were as passionate about policy as my liberal friends, they took a more lighthearted approach. At one after-party, they alternated between taking selfies with Milo Yiannopoulos and engaging in a thoughtful, substantive discussion with a Democrat. One notable exchange: I exclaimed, “Of course the Department of Education is necessary!” which drew the rejoinder, “Great! Let’s make 50 of them!”

As I look back on all the people who greeted me warmly, made sure I didn’t get lost in the crowd, and went out of their way to introduce me to their friends, I can’t help but wonder how a Trump supporter would have fared at a Democratic rally. Would someone wearing a MAGA hat be greeted with smiles or suspicion, be listened to or shouted down?

At Hillary rallies, we always filled the stands with our biggest supporters. At CPAC, most of the few liberals in attendance had media credentials, as I did. I’m new to this, but shouldn’t we want to engage with people who aren’t convinced of our viewpoints? Why aren’t there more conservatives at Democratic rallies and more liberals at CPAC? What are we afraid of?

Ms. Wahed is founder of TheFlipSide.io, a daily digest of liberal and conservative commentary.


Crafty_Dog

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« Last Edit: May 29, 2018, 03:40:07 PM by Crafty_Dog »

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Real Conservatives Refuse To Kneel Before Their Liberal Overlords
« Reply #797 on: May 30, 2018, 06:31:33 AM »
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2018/05/28/real-conservatives-refuse-to-kneel-before-their-liberal-overlords-n2484875

Real Conservatives Refuse To Kneel Before Their Liberal Overlords
 Kurt  Schlichter  |Posted: May 28, 2018 12:01 AM
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not represent the views of Townhall.com.
 
 

There's a great scene in the movie Witness where a bunch of bullies start picking on some Amish farmers, and then they pick on Harrison Ford, who is sporting Extreme Mennonite drag. They knock off his straw hat, laugh at him, and then he beats the crap out of them.

The bullies are shocked, stunned, and bewildered. Why, he’s not supposed to fight back! Why, the Amish, they’re better than that! But Harrison’s not. As his buddy says, he’s from Ohio.

I am not better than that either. How about you?

Because today, being “better than that” means being willing to allow other people to control you by defining you, and the definition is always “a pushover.” You’re supposed to be “conservative,” our conservasuperiors tell us, and we must therefore rigidly adhere to their precious “conservative principles.” But these bear no resemblance to real principles, much less conservative ones.

Allow me to sum up these fake principles:

            Don’t ever fight.

            Don’t presume to exercise your own right of free expression.

            Lose like a gentleman.

            Yeah, no. Hard pass, Fredocons.

 Last week, the NFL, broken by our informal boycott, took action against those kneeling jerks, and the elite – including its True Conservative™ collaborators – wet their collective panties all over the Internet about it. How horrible – we flexed our muscles, stopped watching these pampered jerks’ antics, and the NFL caved. We’re not supposed to do that. We’re supposed to behold these goofs’ glorious free speech, which consists of waving middle fingers in our mugs, and just nod politely. We aren’t the ones who should be exercising our freedom of expression. We are the ones who are supposed to cave. We are always the ones who are supposed to cave.

I guess we missed the memo.

Oh, and how Task Force Pearl Clutcher lectured us for not adequately defending the First Amendment that a bunch of us were physically defending when the vast majority of them were back home getting their masters in 17th century philosophy and sipping Zimas. Worse, they shamefully took to the enemy microphone that is the New York Times op-ed page to scold us and spew out exactly what the liberals wanted to hear – that we conservatives should never, ever take our own side in a fight.

Apparently, the going rate for professional conservatives is thirty pieces of silver and a byline in American Pravda.

Liberals never seem to have this blue falcon problem, because they understand power. But then, those of us less concerned with getting an invitation to talk to donors at the National Weekly Liberty Forum for Eagle Family Liberty Standard Coalition and Cruise than not having progressive Birkenstocks ground into our faces forever, understand power too. And, scandalously, now we’re using it.

The liberals were likewise beside themselves at the results of our push back, prompting them to go into one of their trademark sessions of coordinated but inept gaslighting. Why, how dare we Normals take offense at this peaceful protest of love!

Baloney.

This kneeling thing was mindless performance art designed by these leftist jerks, and enabled by the liberal elite and its slobbering media lapdogs, to insult us to our faces by committing an act of calculated disrespect to our country and to the Normal Americans who built it, feed it, and protect it.

 It was a scam and a lie from the word “hike.” This dimwitted protest was always directed at us, and no one else. If it wasn’t us, who was it? The America-loathing elite that was cheering them on?

These preening primadonnas did not have to choose the football game venue, one we attend to escape from things like politics and condescending lectures. They did not have to choose the National Anthem, a symbol of the country we love and serve. If these overpaid, pampered, posing fools wanted to protest whatever it is they are protesting, they could have done it differently, but then doing it differently wouldn’t have freaked out the squares. That was the point, and now they are mad because we took their insult exactly as they intended it to be taken.

And they aren’t even man enough to admit it. Their new story is that this has nothing to do with us Normals, that it's not an insult. No, it's a heartfelt plea for…something. I guess the pig-cop socks and Castro T-shirt were gestures of respect.

Let’s get real. They wanted to rub our faces in their contempt, to laugh at us as we had to endure it, humiliated by our own powerlessness. We were supposed to just sit there and take it. We are never supposed to use our own power to fight back.

RECORD SCRATCH!

Oops. Look who’s laughing now. Turns out we can throw a punch as well, and did, slugging the feckless NFL right in the wallet. You want to politicize everything? This is politicizing everything. Enjoy. We’re playing by the New Rules too.

I warned them they would hate the New Rules.

But gosh, we can’t do that. Oh well, I never! “How dare you Normal Americans get militant and actually fight back,” whine the kneelers of Team Principles. Real conservatives don’t fight back. See, that’s not who we are.

 No, that’s not who they are.

 We understand something the Conservative, Inc., goofs never seem to figure out. They howl that all we are about these days is “owning the libs” and “winning,” but here’s the thing. Sometimes, you have to win. Sometimes, you have to stop yapping and start performing. Once in a while, you have to put points on the board. Otherwise, people stop listening to you. It’s possible to spend your whole career inside Conservative, Inc., drifting from cheesy think tank sinecure to lame magazine scribbling gig, never actually winning anything. But out here, in America, we want to, and need to, prevail. Our rights and our dignity are merely theoretical constructs to the Fredocons, and are of no significance to them. But our rights and dignity matter to us. And we are acting and voting accordingly.

These cruise-shilling nags have delivered nothing but tiresome scoldings and a never-ending series of capitulations. No wonder they can’t seem to sell out those two-twin bed deluxe cabins along the Lido Deck anymore.

 No wonder Normal Americans turned to someone like Donald Trump when these pathetic losers were only offering us more defeat and more humiliation at the hands of our enemies in the culture war.

 We reject the bizarre notion that we are somehow obligated to stoically take guff from people who despise us without responding because doing so is “unconservative.” We decline to be commanded by conscientious objectors.

 Here’s how we roll. When the enemy deploys its power against us, whether it’s some football jerk dissing us via Old Glory or some tech titan deciding to not allow us access to social media, we will fight back using whatever power we have. We’ll bankrupt the NFL before we just sit there watching them flip us off. And we’ll leverage our political power to regulate the Twittfacegrams into submission if they keep trying to exclude us from participation in our own culture. There is no conservative principle that requires you to not use your most effective weapon in your own self-defense. None.

 “But that’s not conservative!” the sissies whimper.

 That’s true only if you adopt a definition of conservatism that presumptively surrenders whenever it meets resistance. The simple, undeniable fact is that punishment works. Retaliation works. If you want the Old Rules back in effect – I’d prefer that – then you need to teach the enemy that it can’t apply New Rules without feeling the same pain it inflicts. That’s a real conservative principle.

 Unilateral disarmament doesn’t work.

 Remember, nothing in conservatism ever obligates you to accept an end-result where you must silently endure disrespect, where you are excluded from participation in your own governance, or where your rights are voided. None, though a bunch of allegedly conservative racketeers disenfranchised by the revolution that led to the election of Donald Trump are still trying to sell you on that idea.

 Laugh at them and their fussy complaints about how you fail to conform your life to their labels. Fight back. Remember, militant Normal Americans aren’t from Washington. They’re from Ohio.

DougMacG

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The Way Forward for the American Creed, VDH, economic growth
« Reply #798 on: June 13, 2018, 07:42:26 AM »
Picking one pearl of wisdom (famous people agreeing with me) out of a column full of astuteness.

"The goal of government in a Western constitutional state should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater..."
https://www.hoover.org/research/ten-paradoxes-our-age

Ten Paradoxes Of Our Age
by Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, June 6, 2018

9. The goal of government in a Western constitutional state should be conceived of in terms of economic growth, such as by achieving an annual GDP rate of 3 percent or greater, an unemployment rate of 4 percent or lower, and a rising middle-class per capita income—not an increase in state subsidies, state bureaucracies, and state regulations. Those in the state who exude empathy often cannot deliver it; those in the private sector who rarely mention compassion, often deliver it. A good job, not state sustenance, is the fountainhead of a good life.