I caught part of Secretary Hegseth’s speech yesterday.   

I can see where the whole “Make the military a military again” think might get liberals exercised – they tend to see the military as a social program with some regrettable weapons involved.  

The part I heard sounded like it could have been an answer to Edwin Luttwak’s “Pentagon and the Art of War”, in which the historian noted that the Pentagon was overgeneraled, and heavily focused on maintaining a bureaucracy capable of re-fighting World War 2.   

Over generaled?  At the height of the Cold War, the US millitary had roughly one flag rank officer (general or admiral) per 2,500 or so troops.  

Today it’s close to one per 1,000.   

The parts I heard – re-instating male-centered standards for combat arms troops (infantry/armor/cavalry/artillery/combat engineering and the like) in particular – landed with this non-veteran.

Although I suspect the real audience was in Moscow and Beijing (Teheran caught the early show).  

Now, Trump’s bit about sending the military to fight “in the city?”  

Shiny new quarter says he knows it’s preposterous – but he’s trying to get Democrats to support criminals against, ahem, the US military as well as the citizens of those cities.  Hard to see where that’s a bad ideal politically, even if it’s balderdash legally (outside the POTUS’s Article 1 Section 8 power to protect federal facilities and operations – which will no doubt get defined to a fine sheen in court). 

You can, of course, count on Big Left to get the wrong point…:

…although to be fair it’s only Rupar, and he’s too stupid to understand that here, Hegseth was right. The only military that deters aggression is the one people are afraid to test.

Russia didn’t give to farts in the breeze about the German, French or Italian militaries – full of overweight NCOs and planes that don’t fly and units without armored vehicles because NATO turned into a “peacekeeping” force from 1993 to 2020 – when he attacked Ukraine.  Poland, maybe, but Poland can’t wage an independent war against Russia by itself, much to Poland’s chagrin, I suspect.  

“Haha! The FBI says there’s no evidence that Taylor Robinson was a member of any group! That means the killing of Charlie Kirk was non-political!”
So here’s an incomplete list of politically or socially-with-plenty-of-politics-motivated spree killers, terrorists and assassins who *weren’t affiliated with any group*:

• John Wilkes Booth
• Charles Guiteau
• Leon Czolgosz
• Lee Harvey Oswald
• Luigi Mangione
• Richard Reid
• Elias Rodriguez
• Nidal Hasan
• Ted “Unibomber” Kaczinski
• Ryan Routh
• Dylan Root
• Vance Boelter
• Payton Gendron
• Anibal Hernandez-Santana
• Every rioter at the Capitol on January 6
• Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik,
• Thomas Crooks
• Mauricio Garcia
• Micah Xavier Johnson
• Ryan Palmeter
• Robert “Robin” Westman
• Anderson Lee Aldrich
• Audrey “Aiden Williams” Hale
• Omar Mateen

And, let’s be honest, Timothy McVeigh, who *had* been part of a group, of which he and Terry Nichols were pretty much the two remaining members.
The problem is, it’s a big country with a lot of people with mental health issues, and when you spend enough time and effort telling unstable people that “speech is violence” and that some inscrutable murky sinister evil force is going to “erase” you/destroy democracy/steal your future/commit “genocide”/are “Nazis” or “fascists” – people against whom we fought a life or death war two generations ago – eventually someone’s going to connect the dots and start shooting people.

And if you ARE part of a group whose goal is to destabilize society, having people who *aren’t* in your group do the dirty work is a feature, not a bug.

So don’t believe the hype.

Joe Doakes, ex-Como-Parker, emails:

Was the Biden administration THE most corrupt presidency in American history, or merely Top 10?

Whose was worse?

Joe Doakes

Thoughts?

Not long ago, in a discussion elsewhere,  I mentioned that I have a hard time deciding who I dislike more in re the situation in the Middle East – the antisemitic right, or American liberal Christians with academic to-the-point-of-infantile interpretations of “Just War Doctrine”.

Not much I can say or do about the former. 

But as to the latter?

Just War Doctrine outlines reasons that war might be morally justified. It requires a legitimate cause (like self-defense), proportionality in response (there’s your bugaboo right there), and due discretion to minimize harm to non-combatants. It also says you need a legitimate authority to declare war, a reasonable chance of success, and war as a last resort after running out of peaceful alternatives. The doctrine is an academic attempt to balance the moral complexities of armed conflict with the pursuit of peace.

I’ve seen a few of my liberal Christian friends dunk on the Israeli strikes on the Iranian nuke program and military, even though by any *rational* measure, the Israeli strikes satisfy all of these criteria.

Self defense? Iran has been bankrolling terror against the US (not to mention Israel)  for over forty years. The Marine Embassy bombing? Funding and arming Hamas, Hizb’allah, the Palestinian Authority, the Houthis and other terror movements throughout Africa, the Middle East and Asia? Funding all the Intifadas, paying big money to the families of suicide bombers, funding decades of rockets attacks on Israel (and others), having their fingers directly on the October 7 pogrom, and having “eradicating Israel” as a foundational goal (inclding for their nuke program)?

Too many of my liberal Christian friends seem to have gone past “Just War” doctrine and straight on to “Groundhog Day Doctrine” – forgetting all of history when they wake up every morning and starting the entire Middle East conflict over from a clean slate every morning. Israel “attacked Iran” – 40-odd years of terrorism, direct attacks, and apocalyptic ,eliminationist rhetoric be darned.

Proportionality? Forget for a moment that it’s not only an academic concept when actual self-defense is involved – “proportionality” taking to the ridiculous extreme too many history-challenged liberal Christians do, it actually makes wars worse and less “just”. Think about it: a “proportional” response to Pearl Harbor would have involved sinking Japanese ships and calling it even; in 1939, the Allies should have retaken Poland and left everything else in place; Israel should presumably send goons into rural Iran on an anti-Farsi pogrom, taking hostages and killing 1200-ish people – in all cases, leaving the *root cause* of the wars (Japanese and German expansionism, elimination antisemitism) in place.

But you’d have a hard time showing a more “proportional” response in all of military history than Israel’s attack on Iran – thus far, at least. No carpet-bombing, no “Search and Destroy” missions through villages – no conventional ground troops at all. And hardly any contact with civilians outside the nuke program at all (it’s likely 90% of the Iranian population has had no contact with the war outside whatever media reports they’re getting.

They’re not a lot different than Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens, in their own way.

This is an update of a post I ran in 2014

Today would be Ronald Reagan’s 114th birthday.

I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii, my college English advisor and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence.  His eight years were not perfect, and I don’t beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for almost forty years.  His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.

Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century.

But in these difficult times, after (in effect) three terms of a President who promoted  fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire, Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed predecessors – something Donald Trump needs even more, today.

And the most important part? He did it by unleashing something that many thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit.

Ten years ago, I wrote “the best we can hope for from President Trump is that he approaches the job with the same tenacity to match his vision that Reagan had.” The first term was a mixed bag. This past two and a half weeks – well, so far so good. 206 weeks go go.

Oh, there are those who say “today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!” – to which I respond with a contemptuous sigh, before telling the critic to listen to “A Time for Choosing”, and tell me who Reagan more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Scott Walker?

There are also conservatives who pick out their favorite issue – debt, abortion – and ask “what did Reagan ever do for us?”  

Remember – Reagan never controlled Congress.  Republicans controlled the Senate for his first six years, but they were by no means a rubber stamp.   The Democrats controlled the House all eight years, and seized the Senate in 1987.   Trump controlled both houses in 2017, and he does again today; it’s narrow, but it’s more than Reagan had to work with.  Reagan knew he had only so much political capital, and focused it all on his two major issues – defeating the USSR, and reviving the economy.

He succeeded wildly at both.

I’m imagining what Reagan might have done if he’d had Trump’s circumstances – control of Congress and the SCOTUS and that combination of first-term energy and second-term “I don’t have to worry about getting re-elected, so I’m gonna mix stuff up”.

Reagan’s gone. But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people. Most of it, anyway.

So Happy Reagan’s Birthday, everyone!

I’ve never made bones about the fact I’ve been a Trump skeptic.  Eight years ago I voted for Scott Walker, and thought that Trump’s term would be a disaster, hopefully mitigated by a good SCOTUS pick.   I was wrong – mostlly, anyway.  His behavior in 2020 cost the GOP the Senate, and he had an uncanny habit of endorsing bad candidates.  But I held my nose and voted for him.

There was no holding my nose this time – although I make no bones about the fact that I’d really like to see more of the Focused Donald than the Twitter Donald. 

Yesterday was a good start.

Itwas the first inauguration I watched live since Jimmy Carter.  But I picked a good one.

Trump’s speech was the best I’ve seen him give. 

It clocked in at 29 minutes – and didn’t include (many of) the rhetorical tangents that make so many of this speeches feel like rhetorical slalom runs. 

It was by turns pugnacious and intensely optimistic.   I was glad I had a chance to see it.  I think it recapped the tone of his campaign – especially since the first assassination attempt – and laid out the agenda far more clearly than he ever did in his first time.  It was…bracing. 

Side issue – my father, a speech teacher, used to say that nobody in the modern world embodied classical oratory like Southern Baptist ministers.

Rev. Lorenzo Sprewell certainly made the case:

It was a genuine wonder and joy to behold. 

And as someone who grew up seeing “dead air” as the enemy, and believes taped backing tracks are a plague on society, Carrie Underwood did one of the most amazing things a performer can do – took a compete technical clusterf**k and. turned it into a triumph:

Let the metaphors fly. 

The last time I watched a Presidential inauguration live on TV was when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated.  I was in junior high, and they wheeled a TV into our history classroom. 

I missed Reagan’s (twice), Bush I, Clinton (twice), Dubya (twice), Trump’s first, and Obama (all three times). 

I may break my streak today.   Partly to see history.  Partly because I’ve become an accidental, skeptical Trump supporter.  Partly because, let’s be honest, I suspect some lefty is going to try something stupid.

And I don’t mean just this guy:

Speaking of danger:  remember when George W Bush took office?   And the departing Clinton staffers, in a fit of juvenility, pried the “W” keys off of all the computer keyboards in the west wing?

Biden’s pardons, and some of his other efforts to stymie Trump from the great political beyond, are like that – only actually damaging, as opposed to juvenile and spiteful.

So much so that even the elder statesman of “Never-Trump” is sounding off:

Side note:  “Incandescently stupid” is going into my quick-reference lexicon.

…that Donald Trump was literally Adolf Hitler.

Why is Barack “The Lightworker” Obama have a seemingly civil, even amiable, discussion with Adolf Hitler’s reincarnation…

…rather than trying to eliminate, literally, Adolf Hitler?

(To be fair, it looks like Giggles and Mr. Nannynoodler would like to…)

Remember the movie “Miracle”? One of the last great Disney movies?

For a lot of us, the opening credits were intensely evocative:

These credits were as concisely effective a history of the 1970s, especially the Carter Administration, as I’ve seen.

I was 13 when Jimmy Carter took office, and 17 when he left.

I’m not going to pretend that I was an especially well-informed teenager about politics.  More well-read than most of my classmates?  Perhaps, but even then high schools didn’t spend a ton of time on political philosophy, for better or worse. 

But it’d be fair to say I leaned toward whatever passed for the left as a teenager.  My parents were both Democrats – Dad was a union guy, Mom had muted hippie tendencies – so it was the water in which I swam.  Jimmy Carter was “the good guy” in my house.  Not that Ford was the “bad guy”, necessarily – but the white hat/black hat dynamic of the two parties was kinda understood.  

Or at least I understood them that way, and certainly saw politics that way.  In 1980, I went to “Boy’s State”, a weeklong mock government program put on by the American Legion.  Somehow, I got elected state party chairman.  I wrote a platform that would have made Bernie Sanders gush with pride.   I think I knew then what Ken Martin and Governor Klink know now – satisfying peoples surface desires gets you votes. And it did – we swept the statewide offices. 

That fall, I wasn’t old enough to vote.   I certainly wasn’t voting for Reagan.

But I wasn’t going to vote for Carter, either.

While I was not yet an especially well-read or -informed person, I could read the room around me.   A few years before Boys State, I’d listened to Jimmy Carter’s infamous “Malaise Speech”.

And I started to get angry.   The message to me – probably 14 or 15 at the time – was “my generation got ours, but sorry, you young ‘uns, you’re gonna have to suck it up and deal with less”. 

And it kinda infuriated me.  And unlike a lot of things that pissed me off as a cranky teenager, it still does. 

There were a lot of things that started me toward pulling the lever for Ronald Reagan in 1984, and becoming a conservative talk show host in 1986.  

The Malaise speech, and the economic, moral and social malaise that had in fact swept the nation.

The foreign policy impotence that allowed Iran to hold Americans hostage with impunity (or, given the post-Vietnam atrophy of the US military leading to the failure of the rescue mission, even worse than impunity)

Meeting Vietnamese and Polish refugees – and, in fact, watching the Poles’ fight for freedom unfolding in real time.

Reading – at the urging of my English major advisor – Dostoëvskii, Tolstoy, Paul Johnson, PJ O’Rourke, Buckley and all the many other writers who were able to break through my adolescent inertia and show me the corrosive futility of statist utopianism and the power of freedom.

And seeing America find it’s feet – first slowly…

And then picking up speed:

And then definitively. For a decade or so, anyway.

All of those episodes were either direct result of Jimmy Carter’s America, or repudiations of it.

There’s a part of me that wants to study Carter and his supremely checkered legacy in more depth than the above (which is about as deeply as I’ve actually gone, ever).  He’s a fascinating mass of contradictions. 

He was considered a knee-jerk liberal by the standards of the time – but smarting from the humiliation of the hostage crisis, the Annapolis grad and 10-year Submarine officer actually started the military modernization that Reagan continued and accelerated. 

He took over the presidency at one of its peacetime low points – and kept things at a depressing, dare I say “malaise-ridden” plateau.  

He was broadly considered a “good man” – the past 40-odd years have been an endless series of Habitat for Humanity photo ops for Carter.  But he also spent much of the past 44 years trying to impart moral equivalence on some of the world’s worst dictators. 

For my part?  He’s no longer the worst president of my lifetime; all three Obama terms were much worse, for the nation and the world. 

There are signs – tiny sparks, really – that the generation burbling up through high school and universities today are as sick of this nation’s post-Obama moral confusion and malaise as I was of the post-sixties, post-Watergate, post-Vietnam jumble of miseries.   If I can do anything to foster that, I’ll consider it a mission. 

RIP, Jimmy Carter.

Progressives – in this case, a guy who was telling us Joe Biden was stronger and more with it than Chuck Norris in his prime until two hours before Giggle defenestrated him – are not cool with RFK Junior running the DHHS:

So – RFK Jr. is driving his uncle’s car off the bridge and leaving the NIH and Medicaid to drown slowly?

I can’t be the only one to think that, can I?

It’s been a year since the Hamas-led massacre of 1,200 Israelis – the worst pogrom since World War 2. 

It’s a year that’s made me even more ashamed of America’s foreign policy than the previous 2.5 years of POTATUS and Harris had managed to do. 

But it tracks with the same I feel when I look at what the American left has done:

The number of antisemitic incidents in the U.S. has surged over 200 percent this past year, as Israel’s war against Hamas sparked an outpouring of Jewish hatred on college campuses and elsewhere.

From October 7, 2023, to September 24, 2024, the U.S. saw more than 10,000 antisemitic incidents, an increase of over 200 percent from the same period a year before, which saw 3,325 incidents, according to preliminary data released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a left-wing antisemitism watchdog…

…On college campuses, roughly 1,200 antisemitic incidents took place, a 500 percent increase from the year before, when the ADL had recorded about 200 of them. Earlier this year, anti-Israel demonstrations and tent encampments formed on college campuses nationwide, especially after Columbia University’s anti-Israel encampment received national attention and required the NYPD to break it up.

Antisemitic activity and outright advocacy for the extermination of Israel were common around the encampment sites. A prominent example was the Jew-free zones at the University of California, Los Angeles. A judge ruled in August that UCLA must stop aiding and abetting the antisemitic campus activists who attempted to prevent Jews from passing by certain parts of campus unless they disavowed Israel. UCLA initially decided to fight the ruling but quickly pulled its appeal.

Outside of college campuses, rallies across American cities often featured terrorist banners and chants calling for the destruction of Israel. The ADL found that more than 3,000 antisemitic incidents occurred at anti-Israel demonstrations, where protesters chanted in support of Hamas and other terrorist groups.

The potential of a Harris/Walz administration that continues passive-aggressively coddling Iranian aggression seem to be prompting the Israelis to swing for the proverbial fences, to try to resolve the issue before Harris screws it all up, if worse comes to worst. 

I saw the Reagan biopic last week.

The movie was…good.  

Not the great movie the subject or the time of history deserves; Philip Klein points out some of the problems I couldn’t quite articulate, while Jim Geraghty echoed the reasons I left the show so excited anyway:

Reagan is ultimately deeply satisfying for those of us who have fond memories of the 40th president, and packs a lot into its two hours and 15 minutes. The movie gains some focus from its framing device — Jon Voight is a geriatric KGB spymaster, explaining to a young and ambitious Russian leader why the Soviet Union really collapsed. (I started wondering if this was meant to be a secular The Screwtape Letters. I also wondered if the film was attempting to draw a parallel between the Soviet threat of the last century and the coalition of hostile powers facing us today.) It is the best depiction of Reagan in pop culture since the video game Call of Duty.

The movie was clearly a conservative effort – I think most of the “out” Republican actors and entertainers in the business play some part or another (the fall of the Berlin Wall is framed by seminal opening guitar figure from “Sweet Child of Mine” – covered by Christian guitarist Phil Keaggy). And but for that conservative effort, the movie – or an honest movie – about the era would never get made.

As Klein points out, it’s far from perfect; the movie tries to jam a lot of story into two hours, and doesn’t always do it elegantly.  Sometimes the shortcuts are intentionally hilarious – the film jams the rapid-fire deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko into sixty seconds via one of the more hilarious little segments I’ve seen since Terry Gilliam worked for Monty Python.  Sometimes – like the meet cute between Reagan and Nancy Davis, his future wife – they feel like plot devices that I hoped were homages to Reagan’s B-movie background.

So the movie was…good.   It’s clearly low-ish budget, and feels like it. 

But the story is one that direly needs telling to a whole new generation.  Probably two generations. 

Is Reagan the movie to do it?  Maybe not. 

If it prompts those of us who were there to tell the story to those benighted generations?  

Now there, we’re onto something. 

Because the story is heavily-laden with nods to our current environment.   At the beginning, Jon Voight’s KGB agent – the narrator for the movie – reminds the viewer that communism always sought to conquer both by force of arms and, more insidiously, from within. 

And Reagan saw that clearly when he was with the Screen Actors Guild, long before he even became a Republican, thirty years before he became president. 

The movie hits the high points – some of them hard (the Brandenburg Gate speech, Rejkjavik, the clarifying moment that was the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II), some much too quickly (the economic comeback from the ’82 recession and the ’84 debate with Mondale);  the story really deserves a trilogy – perhaps separate stories for his genesis as an anti-communist, the domestic story, and the part they said couldn’t be done, his leadership in pressing the fall of the USSR. 

But this’ll do for now. 

For those who remember them, seeing the renditions and backstory of the Brandenburg Gate speech was a misty bit of nostalgia that resonates all too hard as we see tyranny resurging, around the world and at home. 

But perhaps the most redolent moment was one I was too young to remember live – the Time for Choosing speech, one of the most magnificent bits of oratory in this nation’s history.

Since my old friend Michael Brodkorb chose to misappropriate it in his Strib op ed endorsing Kamala Harris, I think the real thing needs a lot of airing. 

We cannot buy our security, our freedom from the threat of the bomb by committing an immorality so great as saying to a billion human beings now enslaved behind the Iron Curtain, “Give up your dreams of freedom because to save our own skins, we’re willing to make a deal with your slave masters.” Alexander Hamilton said, “A nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master, and deserves one.” Now let’s set the record straight. There’s no argument over the choice between peace and war, but there’s only one guaranteed way you can have peace – and you can have it in the next second – surrender.

Admittedly, there’s a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson of history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face, that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand, the ultimatum. And what then, when Nikita Khrushchev has told his people he knows what our answer will be? He has told them that we’re retreating under the pressure of the Cold War, and someday when the time comes to deliver the final ultimatum, our surrender will be voluntary, because by that time we will have been weakened from within spiritually, morally, and economically. He believes this because from our side he’s heard voices pleading for “peace at any price” or “better Red than dead,” or as one commentator put it, he’d rather “live on his knees than die on his feet.” And therein lies the road to war, because those voices don’t speak for the rest of us.

You and I know and do not believe that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery. If nothing in life is worth dying for, when did this begin – just in the face of this enemy? Or should Moses have told the children of Israel to live in slavery under the pharaohs? Should Christ have refused the cross? Should the patriots at Concord Bridge have thrown down their guns and refused to fire the shot heard ’round the world? The martyrs of history were not fools, and our honored dead who gave their lives to stop the advance of the Nazis didn’t die in vain. Where, then, is the road to peace? Well it’s a simple answer after all.

You and I have the courage to say to our enemies, “There is a price we will not pay.” “There is a point beyond which they must not advance.” And this – this is the meaning in the phrase of Barry Goldwater’s “peace through strength.” Winston Churchill said, “The destiny of man is not measured by material computations. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we’re spirits – not animals.” And he said, “There’s something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty.”

You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.

 

The speech deserves better than to be hijacked in support of a couple of actual communists. This record will be set straight.

Pass it along.

Using a ghost-writer today:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.–Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

As I’ve noted in my “evergreen” broadcast on the Saturdays closest to the 4th, one can say most of the same things about the administrative state today as they did about George III in 1776.

POTATUS – or “Doctor” Jill, or the social media intern – spoke last week:

Question: do any of them know how this nation started?

Or why?

I first wrote this piece in 2009.   I’ve updated it, bit by bit, on successive D-Day anniversaries.  I’m reprising it today:

It was sixty-seven years ago today that the Allies started taking Western Europe back from the Nazis.

The first, inevitable step was to get past the Westwall – perhaps the most immense set of fortifications ever built, with the intention of making the beaches from Denmark to the Spanish border a bloodbath for any troops trying to cross the beaches.

In places, it worked:

In some places, the troops had to overcome the near-impossible:

And yet by the end of the day, nine allied divisions were ashore, a toehold for a bridgehead that would eventually expand, ten months later, across Western Europe.

There were troops from the US, of course, on the two western beaches…

…and farther east, beaches with Brits…

…and Scots…

And in the middle, linking the two and meeting the worst resistance other than Omaha, the Canadians:

…along with troops-in-exile from elsewhere in occupied Europe; French commandos – some of whom had spent four years in exile, and who spent the next year belying the notion that the French were cowards…:

…and Norwegians, who’d been without a homeland for four years…

HNoMS Svenner – sunk by German gunfire off Sword Beach.

…and Poles, who’d been in exile for five years and would, in some cases, remain there for forty-five more:

The world may see nothing like it again.

So – thank a D-Day veteran.

Here’s President Reagan’s address to the survivors of the US 2nd Ranger Battalion, thirty years ago today…:

…who at this time seventy years ago, French Time, were still a day away from being relieved by the troops coming in from Omaha Beach.

Normally I’d call this evidence that Joe Biden is the worst president of my life time, Foreign Policy division:

Of course, that’s not quite true; Obama is still the president, in every way that matters.

So Obama remains comfortably ahead of Jimmy Carter.

…from our younger generation.

Almost 80 years ago, this was what a group of 18-22 year olds did:

Today?

Well, this may be the modern generation’s analog:

A bunch of guys (lefties call them “frat boys” which I suspect means “any college student that doesn’t have blue hair or non-intuitive pronouns).

We don’t expect much – but by golly, someone delivered!

Today is the 32nd anniversary of the mostly peaceful LA Riots.

And of perhaps the greatest testimony for the 2nd Amendment in modern times – the impromptu armed resistance of the merchants of Koreatown:

Here’s one take on the story (some language NSFW).

We are in a state where the current political majority believes that the rioters hold the moral high ground, and who would likely punish the Koreans more than those who were attacking them.

Anyway – salute.

The “American Political Science Association” has released the quadrennial cesspool that is their rankings of American presidents.

You may have already figured out it’d be a leftist screed. You’d have figured largely right.

From top to bottom, with my comments interspersed:

1 Lincoln – Couldln’t see that one coming…
2 FD Roosevelt – Are you kidding? He prolonged the depression, and gave Eastern Europe to his buddy, Stalin? And he’s ahead of…
3 Washington – the guy who could have been king, and chose representative democracy?
4 T Roosevelt – Naturally – a greater triumph of image over Iprogressive) accomlishment than even Wilson. Real shocker there.
5 Jefferson
6 Truman – The victory of Democrat narrative over substance – one of many.
7 Obama – The person who did more to exacerbate America’s decline than any President of my lifetime? Of course they put him in the top ten.
8 Eisenhower
9 LB Johnson – The man who went long on Vietnam, laying the cultural groundwork for the modern “Progressive” movement? The man whose “Great Society” destroyed the black Middle Class?
10 Kennedy – The victory of romantic narrative over hard fact.
11 Madison – That he’s this far down the list shows us the APSA doesn’t really care much for federalism.
12 Clinton – Actual intellectual honesty would call for making Newt Gingrich – who was actually responsible for most of Clinton’s success – at least a co-president for purposes of this exercise.
13 J Adams
14 Biden – Biden. A potato. Ahead of Reagan, Adams, Coolidge, and over a dozen merely mediocre presidents?
15 Wilson – Without him, there’d have been no rise of Naziism. No explosion in central power. No federalization of Jijm Crow, and quite likely an acceleration of desegregation. And they put him ahead of…
16 Reagan – …the man who did more than any to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union – which was the only reason Clinton was able to reign in such prosperity.
17 Grant – 17? Perhaps this pack of historians at least figured that Grant had among the toughest jobs a President has had, and generally did well?
18 Monroe
19 GHW Bush
20 JQ Adams
21 Jackson
22 Carter – About 20 places too high. A poor president, and a few Habitat houses notwithstanding, a fairly loathsome ex-president (speechwriter for Yassir Arafat, supporter of Hamas, and a disaster in foreign policy).
23 Taft
24 McKinley
25 Polk
26 Cleveland
27 Ford
28 Van Buren
29 Hayes
30 Garfield
31 Harrison
32 GW Bush
33 Arthur
34 Coolidge – Absolutely criminal. Coolidge was in the top five, in policy terms. More later.
35 Nixon
36 Hoover
37 Tyler
38 Taylor
39 Fillmore
40 Harding
41 Harrison
42 Pierce
43 Johnson
44 Buchanan
45 Trump – Let this be your warning – no matter what your policy accomplishments, mind those tweets!

The real best and worst lists – coming tomorrow.

“Things that can’t be sustained, won’t be”.

China is headed for some serious problems – as we’ve discussed not so long ago.

Russia is having its own problems – not the same, but similar. Russia in its current form is not sustainable .

And that may well be the bad news:

Very much worth a watch.

Bob Beckwith was the FDNY firefighter who stood with then-President Bush during one of the moments in my life when I was proudest to be an American.

It occurs to me there’s a generation for whom “FDNY” isn’t instantly mentally associated with tragedy, heroism, and that particular moment 22 years ago.

This is a piece from 2020. It’s been slightly updated.

Today would be Ronald Reagan’s 114th birthday

I’ve been writing about Reagan – who, along with PJ O’Rourke, Solzhenitzyn, Dostoevskii and Paul Johnson is the reason I’m a conservative today – as long as this blog has been in existence.  His eight years were not perfect, and I don’t beatify my presidents, even if they’ve been out of office for over three decades.  His last term wasn’t as stellar as his first, and his last two years were very difficult.

Still and all, he was the greatest president of the second half of the 20th Century, and head, shoulders and ankles the best of my lifetime.

But in these difficult times, after two terms of a President who promoted  fear and malaise in the guise of “change” and “doing something”, and four years of another for whom “conservative principles” were a tactic to be slipped on and off like a power tie, it’s worth remembering Reagan’s example; when times seemed at their most dire, Reagan walked onto the scene with a smile and a vision, and a backbone of steel, and cleaned up the mess lefty by his failed predecessor – something our next president will need even more of in 2024.

And the most important part? He did it by unleashing something that many, then as now, thought was dead – the inner, optimistic, take-charge greatness of the American spirit – something that feels largely beaten into submission as this is (re)written, in 2021.

Oh, there are those who say “today’s GOP wouldn’t nominate Reagan!” – to which I used to respond with a contemptuous sigh, before telling the critic to listen to “A Time for Choosing”, and tell me who it more resembles; Arne Carlson, or Rand Paul?

In the Trump era party, where the GOP regards spending as just as inviolate as the Democrats do, and when the worst communists aren’t across the Oder river, but roaming our campuses?   It’s simultaneously possible that the GOP wouldn’t endorse him, and him (or an heir to his legacy) is exactly we need more than anything .

Reagan’s gone. But that spirit, the one he understood, almost alone among American politicans of his era, lives on in the American people. Half of it, anyway.

So Happy Reagan’s Birthday, everyone!

NOTE: While this blog encourages a raucous debate, this post is a hagiography zone. All comments deemed critical of Reagan will be expunged without ceremony. You’ve been warned.

You have the whole rest of the media to play about in; this post is gonna be gloriously one-note.

(This post was originally written in 2017, and has been slightly touched up for 2021). 

I don’t get the National Review hate – that might be worth a letter from Joe in and of itself.

Anywayt, Joe Doakes emails:

I know better than to read National Review Online but sometimes I can’t help myself.   The recent article about Nikki Haley reminds me why that’s such a dumb thing to do. 

I hate ‘gotcha’ questions.  They are inevitably out of context and intended for use in a slanted, partisan media campaign.  For instance (paraphrasing):

Q: What was the cause of the Civil War?

A: It was a dispute about who decides how a state will be run – the federal government or the people living in the state.  

Q: You didn’t mention slavery. 

A: Well, what do you want me to say about slavery?  That wasn’t the cause of the war.  

GOTCHA!!!!

Except she’s right.  Elimination of slavery was not the cause of the war.  We know this from two crucial pieces of history.  You can look it up and should, because almost everything being said today is wrong. 

First of all, if abolishing slavery was the reason for the war, why did four slave states – Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri – fight for the North?  If those states had wanted to abolish slavery in their state, they could have done it any time.  Instead, they joined the Union side to fight against the Secessionist side. Slavery was not the issue.  Secession from the Union was the issue.  

Second the publicity campaign to make the war about abolition of slavery came with the Emancipation Proclamation, announced long after the war was already going.  It only applied to the states in rebellion – NOT to the slave states in the Union – further evidence that the abolition of slavery was not the reason for starting the war in 1861, but was simply a tactic intended to divert attention from federal government over-reach to a high moral crusade of abolition which would justify Lincoln’s unconstitutional actions during the war.  

The historical evidence supports Haley but you can’t convince anybody of that today.  Slavery is everything and always the most important thing, to Liberals and RINOs alike.  Haley didn’t mention slavery so GOTCHA.  

Infuriating.

Joe Doakes no longer in Como Park

I’m going to stake out one (actually two, given that I don’t get the zing at NR) difference Joe.

“Secession was the issue”. And what were they seceding about?

• “Preserving the Union” – and what was the political issue breaking up the union? Slavery.
• “Economics” – And what was the economic issue? Competition between an industralizing society and an agrarian plantation society based around slavery.
• “Why were border states exempt?” – For the same reason the US allied with a rogues gallery of dictators when it was in their interests.

“Abolishing slavery” wasn’t the reason for the war – and yet all of the reasons for the war were one degree of separation away from slavery.

So the real answer, as usual, is everyone is wrong.

20% of young people believe, to one extent or another, that the Holocaust was a “myth”.

That sounds bad – and it is, but probably not for the reasons that jump out at you.

As Ilya Somin at Volokh points out, part of it is an artifact of the survey question: While 8% of Americans between 18 and 29 “strongly agree” that the Holocaust is just a scary story, 12% indicated they “tended to agree” that it was a myth – which, Somin points out, could many anything from strong doubts down to nit-picking the numbers.

He also points out something that might be even worse: some kids doubts may be due to ignorance:

A second relevant ambiguity is that the question doesn’t distinguish between people who know what the term “Holocaust” refers to and those who don’t. The latter may seem implausible. Who doesn’t know what “Holocaust” means. But much evidence shows widespread public ignorance of basic facts of history, science, politics, and even the basic structure of government. A majority of Americans can’t name the three branches of government, don’t know when the Civil War happened, and support mandatory labeling of food containing DNA (the latter probably because they don’t understand what DNA). And most surveys of political and historical knowledge find that it is inversely correlated with age; that is, younger people tend to know less than older ones. The latter phenomenon isn’t confined to the present generation of young people. Survey researchers found the same thing with previous generations when they were young.

“People in general are ignorant, and young people generally more so” is a pretty common, simple and accurate observation.

The real problem isn’t just ignorance of the Holocaust, so much as complete ignorance of all of Big State’s atrocities over the past century – the Great Leap Forward, the Gulag and the Holocaust:

The point here is not to suggest that ignorance about the Holocaust is unimportant, or that the Great Leap Forward and other similar communist atrocities were necessarily worse than the Holocaust…. I lost several relatives in the Holocaust myself, and have no desire to somehow downgrade its importance.

Rather, the point is that ignorance about the Holocaust is part of a broader pattern. Any solution to the problem probably cannot focus on the Holocaust alone, but must consider the broader issue of historical and political ignorance, as well. For reasons elaborated in my book, Democracy and Political Ignorance, increasing public knowledge of politics and history is likely to prove a much tougher challenge than some imagine it to be. In the meantime, public ignorance about the Holocaust, communist mass murders, and other historical events makes it more likely that we will fail to learn the lessons of these tragic events, and thus be at greater risk of repeating them.

Our society has had a couple of generations of not having to fight against nature or other humans for its very existence. I suspect that that fact alone has caused a degrading of the nation’s aggregate intelligence.

Today is the 82nd anniversary of Pearl Harbor.

For those who observe.

As I often have over this past few decades, I call out the fact that the first shots at Pearl Harbor were fired by a crew of Navy Reservists from Saint Paul, who’d been mobilized earlier in the year as part of Roosevelt’s build-up to the war everyone knew was coming.

The ship – which was built during World War 1, was thoroughly obsolte, and had been pressed back into service to fill the gaps until new ships could be built – was converted into a fast transport in 1942.

The men of that crew are all gone, now – Alan Sanford, the last survivor, died in 2015. And the Ward itself didn’t survive the war – it was lost in action off the Philippines, three years to the day after it fired the first shot of the war, on December 7 1944.. The Ward was hit by a Kamikaze and crippled.

In a bit of historical poetry almost too unbelievable to be in a Hollywood script, after the ship was abandoned, the ship was sunk by gunfire from another destroyer, the USS O’Brien, who’s commander, WIlliam Outerbridge, had been the Ward’s CO at Pearl Harbor. (And, just because I’m a geek for this kind of thing, I’ll note that O’Brien was built just down the waterfront from this ship, which I wrote about a while back).

But while Sanford, his shipmates and the Ward ˆitself are long gone, the gun they crewed lives on…

…on the State Capitol grounds, acquired from some naval armory decades ago.

Wonder what pretense the Walz administration will use for removing it?