I made the point that even if Donald Trump was 100 percent right in claiming he was wiretapped by President Obama (he wasn’t), it would still be foolish to say what he did in those tweets. Put aside that Trump based his accusation on some flimsy news articles he had read. Let’s imagine he had a credible source with real evidence to back up the claim. The correct response would be to call in the heads of the NSA, CIA, DOJ, and FBI and get to the bottom of it. Then, after you’ve completed a behind-the-scenes investigation, press charges against those responsible.
Trump went a different way, and a month of his first 100 days has been eaten up by the furor. I added that, politically, this whole thing was a huge waste and distraction, including the response by my friend Devin Nunes. He, as the House Intelligence Committee chairman, may indeed have some important revelations to make. But the whole thing could have been handled better.
I say with all humility: I was 100 percent right.
The response, however, from Trump’s amen corner was the usual outrage and ridiculous claims: “Trump was vindicated! He’s playing four-dimensional chess! Shut up! Etc.”
.. Obama really believed that he was a post-ideological president who only cared about “what works.” This progressive understanding of pragmatism is a kind of exquisite confirmation bias. We’re not ideological, we just want to do the smartest, best thing (which just happens to line up with our undisclosed and unacknowledged ideological biases).
.. During the election, lots of people told me that a businessman would cut through all the politics by running the government like a business. Jared Kushner is apparently heading up the latest version of this incredibly hackneyed and ancient idea. The simple problem is that government isn’t a business (never mind that Donald Trump is not a typical businessman). The incentive structure of politics is entirely different than the incentive structure for a businessman. A CEO can walk into a meeting and explain to his employees that if they don’t hit their widget sales quota, no one will get their bonus. Politics doesn’t work like that.
.. If you don’t think politics matters, keep in mind that the incentives for GOP congressmen to cooperate with Trump drops in tandem with his approval ratings.
.. The people who think that the way to help conservatism is to support everything Trump says and does simply have it wrong. If he tweets “2+2=5,” you don’t help him (or the cause or the country) by saying “He’s right!” or “This is a brilliant ploy to deconstruct the ‘alt-left’ mathematical establishment!” The best thing you can do is say “Trump is wrong and he should spend his time doing what he was elected to do.”
.. Trump’s one truly great success so far was the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. Why was that a success? Because he outsourced the task to Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society and Mitch McConnell — two guys who relied on a tried-and-true playbook.
.. The essence of conservatism is to respect practices, customs, norms, and values that have survived the brutal acid of trial and error. “What is conservatism?” Lincoln asked. “Is it not the adherence to the old and tried against the new and untried?”
.. Acolytes of Trump’s cult of personality don’t want to hear it, but the worst thing they can do is keep shouting “Let Trump be Trump!” If he’s going to succeed, Trump needs to start acting like a normal president who deals with the reality of politics.
Watch Ted Koppell Tell Sean Hannity To His Face He’s Bad For America
Yes, Sean, you are bad for America.
“You have attracted people who are determined that ideology is more important than facts,” Koppell said.
DELINGPOLE: Environmentalists Aren’t Just Wrong. They’re Loathsome And Evil Too.
because when the evidence isn’t on your side (as it hasn’t been for a long time where the alarmist cause is concerned), blustering appeals to authority, affectedly high-minded ridicule and below-the-belt cheap shots are pretty much the only weapons left to you.
.. There many reasons why the alarmist establishment – the Climate Industrial Complex as Myron Ebell calls it – is so totally loathsomely evil.
One is that they’re such hypocrites: if you really cared about the environment in the way these fascistic loons claim they do, then you’d be vigorously opposing renewable energy (such as the bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco-crucifixes defacing our landscape and slicing and dicing our avian fauna) and instead going all out for fossil fuels.
.. their commitment to environmentalism owes much more to quasi-religious ideology, to straightforward greed and to anti-free-market control-freakery than it does to a genuine love of nature.
.. only the brave – or the elderly, who have nothing to lose – who speak out.
.. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef isn’t actually being wiped out by man-made global warming. Sure, it has experienced some serious bleaching in some parts – probably the result of the recent El Nino – but not nearly on the scale that has been claimed
.. it will recover, just like reefs always do and have done for millennia, sometimes in warming far more extreme than anything we have experienced today.
.. Delingpole is clearly a stooge for the oil industry but his denial of the Great Barrier Reef’s damage over the last two Australian summers is lowdown and dispicable even for him.
The guy is actually , properly mentally unwell and should quite clearly be sectioned before he becomes a danger to himself and others. I mean what other explanation is there for peddling a belief so comprehensively wrong.
Trump’s Budget Asks the Right Questions for Conservatives
While America’s libertarian streak is often wildly exaggerated, this much is not: most people don’t like the idea of a government that runs a zillion programs they have never heard of, to help some special interest they’ll never meet, and which have little accountability for actually generating results. This structure is a recipe for a lot of such programs.
.. the 1986 Reagan tax reform, widely viewed as a model for those who want to broaden the tax base: rather than trying to tidy up the wild proliferation of tax exemptions that had grown up since the inception of the federal income tax, they went after all of it at once. In the resulting melee, there was simply not enough bandwidth for all the lobbies to make their case; congressmen have only so many hours in the day.
.. while there is a coherent conservative argument to be made for many of these cuts, I would not go so far as to say that the budget as a whole has a coherent conservative logic.
.. While I am probably friendlier than most libertarians to high levels of military spending, I do not see a pressing need to make them higher still.
.. Some of the EPA cuts look like ideological warfare more than a carefully-thought-out program of agency reform
.. This is the sort of thing that the federal government should be doing, because there are great economic benefits in having national standards for companies that operate across state lines, and great economies of scale in developing this sort of research and expertise once, rather than trying to duplicate them fifty times. Similar arguments hold for scientific research, controlling pollution (no respecters of state lines), and space exploration. These things have a clear goal, that goal is worthwhile, and it is best achieved at the federal level. Conservatives should be no happier than liberals if they go.
.. it isn’t really a small government budget; it’s just a poke in the eye to blue states.