"Missing the Forest for the Tree"

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Missing the Forest for the Tree”

May 19, 2021

 

“Insanity: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

                                                                                Attributed to Albert Einstein, but also to Mark Twain and others.

 

A principled stand by a politician is admirable. Too often, politicians follow the road of least resistance (or the one with the most voters). But when a principled stand evolves into stubbornness, the forest can be lost in concentration on a single tree. That, in my opinion, is the problem of Elizabeth Cheney (R-WY).

 

Most Republicans do not want to denigrate President Trump, but neither do they want to elevate him. Benign neglect is the preferred path. The good of what he did – freeing up the economy from restrictive regulations and confining taxes, repatriating more than a trillion dollars in corporate cash, raising wages for the lowest income workers, and creating the most jobs ever for Black and Hispanic; taking real steps to resolve the border crisis; addressing the bureaucratic morass in Washington; calling out international governmental bodies for their undemocratic ways; getting NATO nations to pay a greater share of their defense; confronting enemies of freedom like Communist China, Russia and North Korea; signing the Abraham Accords and instigating Operation Warp Speed to get a COVOD-19 vaccine out in record time – was overshadowed by a supersized ego and mean-spirited, feckless Tweets.

 

Democrats, on the other hand, would like to keep the spirit of Donald Trump front and center. While it is true that his ardent Republican supporters do not want to give up on him, neither do Democrat leaders who see him as someone around whom they can rally their troops. Trump Derangement Syndrome helped Mr. Trump with the public when he was President because complaints about him were so outrageous. But it hurts the Republican Party and their chances today when anti-Trump opinions are voiced by other Republicans. “Prudent Republicans,” wrote Andrew McCarthy in the May 15^th issue of National Review, “perceive that the best way to move on from Trump is to stop talking about him.” I agree.

 

If Republicans want to take control of the House and Senate in 2022, they will have to focus on issues, not on the personality of the former President. Single issue politicians detract from legitimate policy debates. In refusing to accept the outcome of the 2020 election, Mr. Trump has done no more than what Al Gore did in 2000 and Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In all three cases (2000, 2016, 2020), there were certainly electoral irregularities, but there always have been. However, from what we now know, none of those elections would have been reversed. “If questioning the results of a particular election were a crime, as many have asserted in the wake of the controversial 2020 election and its aftermath,” writes Mollie Hemingway in her forthcoming book Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections, “nearly the entire Democratic Party and media establishment would have been incarcerated following the 2016 election.” It is not that Mr. Trump’s character should be ignored, but that it must be kept in perspective.

 

As for the January 6 protests that culminated with a number of people making their way past security into the Capitol, an independent commission has been created to investigate exactly what happened. But to call the event an “insurrection” is argumentative and misleading. More than 400 individuals have been arrested, with dozens incarcerated without trial. What ever happened to one of the most sacred principles in American justice, the presumption of innocence? None of those entering the capitol that day, according to reports, carried a firearm. The only individual shot and killed was a thirty-five-year-old female protester, Ashli Babbitt, from California. She was shot by a police officer who has been cleared of any wrongdoing and has never been identified. Would media silence have reigned were roles reversed and had the protester been a Democrat? Nevertheless, we should await the finding of the commission, and trust it will be as non-partisan as possible – a difficult, if not impossible, task in this factional age.

 

While it is still too early to claim the Biden Administration a success or failure, its start has certainly done little to heal a fractured nation, despite promises in his Inaugural. On the other hand, his Administration’s policies have offered opportunities for his opponents. His positive ratings have slipped, while his negative ones have risen. As Gerard Baker wrote this week in the Wall Street Journal, this is what happens “when you construct an ideological dreamscape made up of impossible promises, implausible assertions and dishonest propositions.” A few of the Biden policies that offer opportunity to Republicans: The crisis on the southern border, with children being smuggled in by paid “coyotes,” and sometimes abandoned on remote desert ranches; a rise in urban crime amid continued calls to defund the police; an education system that looks to end meritocracy and free speech, while promoting racial differences rather than encouraging melting pot commonalities; urging schools to adopt the segregationist and Marxist views embedded in Critical Race Theory, and the simultaneous “cancellation” of our history and literature; threatening economic expansion by paying people not to work; a continued rise in federal debt to historic levels; a federal budget that proposes a 16% increase in non-defense, domestic discretionary spending, with only a 1.6% increase in defense spending; a Federal Reserve that seems unconcerned regarding the inflationary consequences of an expansive monetary policy; sharply higher gasoline prices and shortages in six states; abandonment of the Abraham Accords and a rise in Middle East violence; an aggressive China, which threatens Hong Kong and Taiwan; and Russia, with increased troops on Ukraine’s eastern border. 

 

With the “forest” so ripe with issues beneficial to Republicans, it would be a shame to let the “tree” that is former President Trump be the focus of Republicans looking to take back the Senate and the House in 2022. While Republican leadership must understand the reasons for Mr. Trump’s popularity (and they must appeal to his supporters), they must also highlight and concentrate on all that which has gone wrong in the first few months of Mr. Biden’s Administration. For Republicans, to repeatedly bang on the anti-Trump drum is a form of insanity that will surely lead to political losses.  On the other hand, the misdeeds and errors of the Biden Administration would be, as Rahm Emanuel might say, a terrible thing to waste.

"It's the Culture, Stupid"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“It’s the Culture, Stupid”

June 8, 2020

“The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation

to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. From the moment

 of his birth the customs into which he is born shape his experience and behavior.”

                                                                                                Ruth Benedict (1887-1948)

                                                                                                Anthropologist

                                                                                                Patterns of Culture, 1934

The framework of a civil society is comprised of multiple threads, representing common traits like etiquette, respect for one another, accountability, deference to one’s parents and teachers. These customs are woven, along with art, music and literature, to form a nation’s cultural fabric. Culture includes traditions, knowledge of one’s own history and the history of one’s country – the good and the bad. It is what allows a civil society composed of those from myriad backgrounds, races, religions and opinions to amicably live together. Without the ability to civilly debate, darkness falls.

In the political world, there have always been extremists who refuse to comply with rules of civility that bind us. Those generally represent fringes of society. But extremism has become more mainstream, as political correctness, victimization and safe places have proliferated on our nation’s campuses. We have lost a moral sense of universal values. For example, the permitting of protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was right. The failure to condemn and confront violent rioters and looters was wrong.

Gerard Baker, in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal wrote about the old liberal order being under siege: “A basic tenet of the old liberal order is the toleration of views we find detestable.”  Today, illiberal Leftism compels submission to identity politics. How else to explain Joe Biden’s contemptuous outburst: “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t black.”

Blame must be found for the killing of George Floyd and what better target than the persistence of “systemic, institutionalized racism.” The irony, of course, is that Mr. Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, a city that has been run by Democrats for forty-two years, with an African-American Police Chief, Medaria Arradondo. Where were the Democrat-controlled police review boards and unions? The five most crime-ridden cities in the United States, according to an August 19, 2019 report in USA Today, are Democrat-controlled cities: St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis and Kansas City, Mo. A list of the top cities for murder rates, according to Rapid City Journal: St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans and Birmingham, Alabama – again, all cities run by Democrat mayors. Yet they look for someone else to blame.

Diversity is a worthy goal and has been aggressively sought in schools, colleges, eleemosynary institutions and businesses. But diversity has been defined only in racial, sexual, religious and ethnic terms, never in terms of freedom of opinion. A few days ago, the New York Times abandoned any sense of impartiality when its publisher and editors gave in to staffers who have no concept of freedom of thought. They revolted over the paper’s running of an op-ed by United States Senator Thomas Cotton (R-AZ), a U.S. Army veteran. In the op-ed he condoned the use of military force to bring peace to cities under mob rule. One can disagree with Senator Cotton’s argument, while still allowing it to be vented. The English biographer of Voltaire, Evelyn Beatrice Hall (1868-1956), once wrote, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” How far we have fallen since those words were penned!

Protests are a legitimate means for citizens to demonstrate against disliked policies. But when peaceful protests become destructive riots, the welfare of people and property become at risk. Rightful protests against the murder of George Floyd by policeman Derek Chauvin morphed into violent acts of vandalism, killing the innocent, wounding dozens, burning police vehicles, looting and destroying stores. In response, some mayors refused to confront the rioters, allowing them free rein to rob some of their livelihoods and others of their lives. Martin Luther King famously said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Regardless of skin color, what sort of character willfully destroys private property? Mob justice is untenable in a civil society. It is associated with the untamed west of the late 19^th Century and the Ku Klux Klan of the early 20th. The Klan wore white hoods. Antifa wears black masks.

This murder has added fuel to the false narrative that the United States is a racist nation. Certainly, there are racists. We are a nation of 330 million people, some of whom are racists, mostly ignorant underachievers whose egos inflate as they belittle others. But, as Heather MacDonald contributing editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week: “A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing.”  A Washington Post data base noted that in 2019 the police shot dead nine unarmed Blacks and nineteen unarmed Whites. While the percentage of unarmed Blacks killed exceeds their percent of the population (34% versus 13%), FBI reports for 2018 show that 39% of murders in the U.S. and 54% of robberies were committed by African-Americans. In 2016, 2,870 Blacks were murdered in the U.S., 90% (2,570) by other Blacks. It is the “why” of these statistics that should concern us.

“The customs and practices of life in society sweep us along,” wrote Michel de Montaigne more than three hundred years ago. Fundamental to our culture are family life and education. Too often we have failed on both. We de-emphasize the importance of married, two-parent families, and we do not permit school choice for impoverished, inner-city families. Charter schools and voucher programs, desired by aspirant parents, have been shot down by politicians who are financially dependent on teachers’ unions who see any competition as a threat. As well, youth must be taught right from wrong. And they must disabuse themselves of the concept of victimhood, which allows one to disavow personal responsibility. And the definition of diversity must be expanded to include opinions.

The horrific murder of George Floyd convinced many politicians and most of the media that the United States remains a racist nation, which justifies the looting and rioting that followed the protests. However, “without order,” as Andrew McCarthy recently wrote, “our liberties are just parchment promises.” Democrats seek someone to blame for the sorry state of cities they have run for decades. But when something is wrong – and something is – it makes sense to first look in the mirror. Failed, well-intentioned policies should be reviewed. The biggest risks we face are not “authoritarian impulses” of President Trump. (After all, no authoritarian would reduce the role of government by cutting regulations and lowering taxes). The biggest risk is the denunciation by supercilious Leftists of those who do not conform to their prevailing orthodoxies, which were forged in universities, distributed through the media and given expression via left-wing government bureaucrats. Theirs is the way of fascists and communists, not a free people. It is a culture of arrogance that has created this sad state of affairs that must be addressed.

"Michael Flynn and the FBI"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Michael Flynn and the FBI”

May 8, 2020

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community –

they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

                                                                                                Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY)

                                                                                                Tuesday, January 3, 2017

                                                                                                MSNBC

On November 19, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln went to Gettysburg to help consecrate a portion of that battlefield as a new cemetery. He spoke of the government, conceived in liberty, that had been formed eighty-seven years prior, a government in which people are the ultimate power – a government comprised of the people’s elected representatives and the appointees those representatives make; he spoke of the laws and regulations that are made by those elected representatives, and he emphasized that this government is for the people, to ensure the protection of their rights to life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Such a government, Lincoln understood, is rare. It relies on trust that those who labor within it work for the people, not for a party, a cabal or an individual. Once that trust is gone, the fragile edifice that comprises democracy crumbles. The Michael Flynn story is one of government servants subverting their role. No matter one’s political affiliation, the story of what happened to General Michael Flynn should frighten any lover of freedom and democracy.

This story has been ably told by Andrew McCarthy in National Review, Kimberly Strassel in The Wall Street Journal and others, but its consequences are worth considering again, as it unravels. On May 1, Ms. Strassel wrote: “…evidence of law enforcement’s abuse keeps emerging in dribs and drabs. To grasp the outrageous conduct fully, the Flynn documents need to be added to what we already know.” Establishment Washington could not believe that the people had elected Mr. Trump – this allegedly insensitive deal maker, a man who speaks frankly and crudely to and about his political opponents. He was demonized as authoritarian. He was an outsider. He had never served in government, nor in the military. He was a television star, famous for saying, “You’re fired!” In a country where leadership had too often descended into elitism, arrogance and hypocrisy, the mercurial Mr. Trump arrived as a disruptor.

To Washington’s establishment, Mr. Trump was naive. He is smart and shrewd, but the intelligence community is a different milieu, as Senator Schumer observed to Rachel Maddow on MSNBC. “He was not,” as Andrew McCarthy wrote on May 2, “supported by the Republican foreign-policy and national-security clerisy, which he had gone out of his way to antagonize during the campaign.”

On November 17, 2016, a few days after the election, the newly elected President named General Michael Flynn to be National Security Administration (NSA) chief. The three-star retired General had served in military intelligence since the 9/11 attacks. In 2012, he was named director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in the Obama Administration. General Flynn was a scrappy, outspoken officer who at times clashed with subordinates and superiors. Critical of Mr. Obama’s Middle East policies, he was asked to leave in 2014. But he knew how intelligence agencies worked, which is why Donald Trump tapped him as NSA chief, and which was also why his political enemies wanted him out.

The “what” of what happened to Michael Flynn is clear – that the FBI set a perjury trap based on a meeting he, as newly named NSA chief, had had with the Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, a conversation that the FBI had taped, so knew his conversation and knew he had said nothing wrong. In January 2017, the FBI “interviewed” Mr. Flynn, without telling him his rights or without a lawyer present – in fact, telling him one was unnecessary. However, handwritten notes from Bill Priestap, assistant director of the FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Division from 2015-2018, disclosed two weeks ago, made clear that the FBI “engineered” the “crime:” “What is our goal? Truth/Admissions, or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Without a lawyer present, they got him to contradict some of what he had said earlier to the Russian Ambassador. They got him fired.

The “why” is the question that concerned Andrew McCarthy and which he addressed in his May 2 essay in National Review. The Obama Administration had had a Trump-Russia collusion investigation underway for several months. And the FBI and former members of the Obama Administration wanted it continued after the election. Michael Flynn stood in the way. A new Administration might discover how the intelligence agencies had been weaponized against domestic political enemies. And General Flynn would see what had been done. As well, he was despised by the hubristic James Comey. The latter feared Flynn would hamper the FBI’s ongoing investigation into their contrived story – that Mr. Trump had colluded with Putin about the election. The investigation culminated in Robert Mueller’s query as Special Counsel, which became a persistent and constant nuisance to the Trump Administration. The investigation took two years and consumed $35 million. It ended in finding that no role had been played by Russia in helping Mr. Trump – a conclusion obvious to anyone with an ounce of common sense. Why would Putin want an unknown, supposedly volatile man as President when he could have a woman he had worked with, who had given him a “re-set” button, and from whom he had acquired 20% of U.S uranium deposits in the Uranium One deal? The accusation never made sense. (My guess is that Putin was most interested in sowing seeds of suspicion and doubt about our electoral process. In that, he succeeded.)

However, because of the FBI’s entrapment, General Flynn’s days at NSA were numbered. He quit on February 13, 2017 and spent the next two years, and millions of dollars in legal fees, trying to clear his name. When the FBI threatened to go after his son, he relented and admitted to a plea deal, of lying to the FBI. We also know that the FBI used fraudulent means to obtain FISA warrants against two members of Mr. Trump’s campaign staff, George Papadopolous and Carter Page.

Yesterday, the Justice Department dropped all charges against Michael Flynn. While that news is welcome, the facts remain that the FBI exceeded its powers. It had framed General Flynn. He should receive financial restitution for legal costs incurred, and the guilty parties should be punished.

When government servants abuse their powers, when they put politics above the will of the people, democracy shudders. No American citizen should experience what happened to General Flynn. People must be responsible for their actions, and government agencies must be accountable to the elected representatives of the people; they cannot be a law unto themselves. We should all – Democrats, Republicans and Independents – be thankful that Attorney General William Barr is conducting a full investigation into what happened. In this case, the accused was exonerated. Nevertheless, three years of his life were destroyed. Mr. Flynn should be compensated. The guilty parties should not be allowed to retire; they should be jailed. Lincoln would be abashed.

"Viva the Protesters"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Thought of the Day

“Viva the Protesters!”

April 28, 2020

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens

can change the world, Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

                                                                                    Attributed to Margaret Mead (1901-1978)

                                                                                    Anthropologist, Author

Protests have been around for centuries. The Protestant Reformation in northern Europe in the early 16^th Century was a protest against the universality of the Catholic Church. Americans protested England, beginning with the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and ending at Yorktown in 1781; the French stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. The Russian Revolution of 1917 toppled the Tsars. Mao Zedong’s Communist revolution in China in 1949 forever changed that country, killing an estimated 20 to 40 million people. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 followed protests. In our country, in the past half century, we have seen marches for civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights. We have had anti-war protests. More recently we had the Tea Party movement, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Woman’s March and March for Life. How productive they have been is a matter of debate. Writing last year in “Perspective Magazine,” Chaya Benyamin wrote: “Protest rhetoric is more about preaching to the choir than it is about changing hearts and minds.” A Harvard study of the Tea Party movement, three years ago, had similar nebulous conclusions. But, as an observer, it seems that all these protests resulted in change, some revolutionary.

A reader in Louisiana, a retired lawyer, e-mailed a week ago: “President Trump’s having essentially accepted the epidemiologists’ over-reaction to an admittedly dangerous virus will be historically judged to be by far his greatest first-person policy error.” I tend to agree. Never before, in the history of this Country, was a decision made to intentionally shut down the nation’s economy. In an essay titled “Innovation versus the Coronavirus,” Bill Gates referred to the current pandemic as “the first modern pandemic.” But is it? The 1957-1958 H2N2 virus was called a pandemic, as were the 1968 H3N2 virus and the 2009 H1N1 pdm09 virus.  Those three pandemics killed 2.25 million people worldwide, including 230,000 in the U.S.

The President was put in an untenable position. In early January, when China knew of how contagious and deadly the virus could be, scientists and medical experts around the world, including the WHO, CDC, FDA and Dr. Anthony Fauci of the NIAID downplayed its malignancy, as did politicians from both Parties. It wasn’t until February that models, many using erroneous data inputs, began showing horrific projections. So personal and political fears, as well as the dread of litigation, obviated a calculated, rational response. Politicians did U-turns, with the media, which had been largely silent in January, jumping aboard. Lockdowns were imposed. Executive Orders were issued and, if not obeyed, offenders could be arrested. In truth, the virus was worse than Pollyanna’s first claimed, but not as bad as Cassandra’s later suggested.

Nevertheless, a cataclysm was unleashed. The consequences have been grim: the biggest increase in unemployment in the nation’s history; the bankruptcy of thousands of small and big businesses; the biggest deficit spending plan in the nation’s history; the possible default of states, counties and cities, and a reckless printing of money by the Federal Reserve. President Trump’s, and others’, calls for negative interest rates will only add fuel to a future inflationary cycle. The decline in incomes will negatively affect future tax receipts, propelling higher deficits of federal, state and local governments. Should shutdowns persist, the result will be a surge in suicides and deaths from opioids and other drugs associated with depression.

We have entered an economic sinkhole from which extrication will be difficult. Politicians will be watching their backsides. Businesses, without some form of limit on liability, will be worried about class action lawsuits, and consumers have been so frightened by the effects of the virus that a return to “normal” will take months, if not years. And any reopening must include protection for those most vulnerable to the savages of COVID-19 – the elderly, the obese; those with preexisting health conditions. People and businesses must respond by being personally and socially responsible – health consciousness, social distancing and commonsensical behavior will become the new norm.

Across the country, protests have begun over the lockdowns, and a few states have begun to lift restrictions. Twenty-six million people have lost their jobs in the past five weeks. Many of these people live paycheck-to-paycheck and for whom the dignity of work is important. Avik Roy, president of the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, wrote in an op-ed in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal, “Reopening the U.S. Economy:” “Reopening the economy is not merely about livelihoods, but also about lives.” Andrew McCarthy, in the National Review on the same day, noted that “…governments have a compelling interest in public safety…It is, nevertheless, the foundational conceit of the American republic that governments are created to secure fundamental rights of a nation’s citizens – our rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Moreover, the legitimacy of government is dependent on the consent of the governed.”

The media has pilloried protesters, characterizing them as “right wing,” exemplifying “white privilege” and that behind them stand “the quiet hand of conservatives.” Politico had a recent article about how a tea party-linked group planned to “turbo charge lockdown protests.” Katherine Shaver, writing in the Washington Post on Saturday, quoted George Rutherford, an epidemiology professor at the University of California in San Francisco” Letting people decide for themselves because they’re bored is not a good way to do it.” Perhaps Professor Rutherford should familiarize himself with the Constitution, and, no, they are not protesting because they are bored but because they need jobs to pay for rent and food. As well, protesters provide cover for governors skittish about re-opening their economies. Blame for subsequent increased hospitalizations and deaths can be put on those who lobbied for a reopening. Early on, President Trump endorsed the protesters. He has since backed off but has encouraged re-openings when done safely.  

Despite myriad groups working on vaccines and therapeutics, there is little doubt that the virus will linger, and deaths will persist. But the nation cannot afford many more weeks of hibernation. We need a vaccine and we need more tests, which will give assurance to consumers and employers and that will provide officials with a more thorough picture of the spread of the virus. We need government officials to be honest with the people, as to the cause and facts related to morbidity. We need a press that dispenses factual information, rather than sensationalizing personal stories of tragedy. We need more detailed reporting of those who have died: age, gender, preconditions that played a role in death, geographic locations and workplace. Such information will offer perspective and should instill confidence in those least likely to be subject to the most harmful effects of the virus.

Confidence needs restoring, not just so consumers can return to their role of generating 70% of the nation’s GDP, but so businesses will not be censured by politicians, condemned by reporters, or harassed by trial lawyers. Examples of countries like Sweden and of states that did not impose draconian lockdown laws (or have since lifted them) should give inspiration to an economic resurgence. The protesters have played the role of a citizen’s revolt. Viva the protesters! As the song goes, “The people has risen, we’re free again.”[1]

                                                                       

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[1] “Risen,” by Shawna Edwards