RUTHFULLY YOURS

” Our age not only disdains its inheritance, but actively reviles it, and wishes to destroy it. It is a totalitarian impulse. Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit id est semper esse puerum: To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to remain forever a child. To despise what happened before you were born is to remain forever a juvenile delinquent in the thuggish gang of the present tense.”

I had thought the floodwaters of Texas had at least momentarily submerged the left’s war on history. But I see a Hillary Clinton staffer called Logan Anderson has been triggered by a white man with a Confederate flag on his boat rescuing black people in Houston.

At one time, this would have been a heartwarming story – like the Brits and the Krauts playing footie in no man’s land at Christmas 1914. Why, look! Houston’s oldest surviving Confederate general is recognizing our shared humanity by taking his boat to rescue the children of his former plantation slaves! But we live in a sterner age, and the appropriate response to an offer of rescue from a vessel flying the Stars & Bars is to riddle it below the waterline and dispatch its cap’n to Johnny Reb’s Locker.

Elsewhere, the cultural hurricane swirls on. In Memphis, Gone with the Wind is gone with the winds of change buffeting the American inheritance. WREG-TV reports:

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — “Gone With the Wind” will be gone from The Orpheum’s summer movie series, the theater’s board said Friday.

The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.

“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement.

As Scarlett O’Hara presciently observed, tomorrow is another day. Indeed, today is the only day – Pol Pot’s Year Zero as Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day. Upon taking office, Justin Trudeau justified each bit of twerpy modish folderol with the words “Because it’s 2015.” Why have a “gender-balanced cabinet”? Because it’s 2015! Around the toppled statuary of Durham and Baltimore and West Palm Beach, the mob is taking it to the next level: “Because it’s 2017”, and anything that came before must be destroyed.

Totalitarianism is a young man’s game. The callow revolutionaries like to crow that their enemies are all “old white men” who’ll be dead soon, after which youthful idealism will inherit the earth. And it’s true that the surviving German Nazis are all getting a bit long in the tooth. But they were young once, and bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. And to be young was very heaven: in the early Thirties the Nazis were the smooth-visaged lads gleefully torching books in the streets. They were the future, and these elderly monarchists and middle-aged democrats, queasy about the torching of the non-ideologically-compliant past, would all be dead soon enough. As the blond Aryan boy sings in Bob Fosse’s film of Cabaret:

Oh fatherland, fatherland, show us the sign
Your children have waited to see
The morning will come when the world is mine
Tomorrow Belongs to Me!

Ah, but who watches Cabaret in 2017, never mind Gone with the Wind? From The New York Post comes an arresting headline – “Millennials Don’t Really Care About Classic Movies”:

A new study finds that less than a quarter of millennials have watched a film from start to finish that was made back in the 1940s or 50s and only a third have seen one from the 1960s.

Thirty percent of young people also admit to never having watched a black and white film all the way through – as opposed to 85 percent of those over 50 – with 20 percent branding the films “boring.”

My distinguished compatriot Kathy Shaidle remarks:

This is literally the cause of all our problems.

She means it:

You can learn almost everything about life from movies… You will learn, for example, that you are not the first generation to have Problem X or “Solution” Y… Oh, hey, this black and white thing with the stupid title [Goodbye, My Fancy] actually has a “free speech on campus” subplot…

But you can only learn “almost everything about life” if you stumble across movies. Very few people seek out Goodbye, My Fancy (1951). For the ensuing third of a century, it was the sort of thing that would turn up on the Late Show when you weren’t quite ready to call it a night – or on a rainy afternoon when you were overly familiar with that day’s “Leave It to Beaver” rerun and weren’t in the mood for Merv Griffin. Now we live in an age where the haphazard rewards of “stumbling across” have been entirely eliminated: You programme your own tastes on your own device, and you can live within those constraints 24/7.

A president’s pardoning power is absolute, as every judge knows, and just as absolute is the certainty that every pardon will be met by a hail of hosannas and a howl of complaint and grievance from someone.

The liberals and others on the left are beside themselves over President Trump’s pardon of Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, who came a cropper with a federal judge who held him in contempt for enforcing the law on the border when nobody else would.

Sen. John McCain, who would denounce this president if the president gave him a winning lottery ticket, denounced the pardon because “no one is above the law.” Others are treating the pardon as foreshadowing the end of the world.

A columnist at the Detroit Free Press, where locking up everybody might be an attractive solution to crime and mayhem in the sinister streets of Detroit, suggests with typical liberal/progressive/left-wing outrage that it’s time to give up on a country that would elect Donald Trump as its president.

“With one reckless stroke of his pen, [Mr.] Trump last week trashed all those notions of American exceptionalism, and raised serious questions about whether this republic might survive his presidency, or whether it even deserves to.” An editor at the Free Press should give the poor fellow an aspirin, and let him lie down until he feels better.

Mr. McCain could use a good lie-down, too, perhaps not with an aspirin but something stronger, and remind him that a pardon can’t be above the law, because it’s a part of the law. All presidents have used their constitutional power to pardon those whom they think deserve it (and sometimes when they don’t). Some presidents, like Bill Clinton, have profitably pardoned the undeserving.

The New York Times called in one of its usual suspects to express the usual contempt for the president and his sin of the day. Prof. Martin Redish of the Northwestern Law School, with a novel theory of the Constitution, thinks Mr. Trump could be successfully challenged on constitutional grounds because Sheriff Joe, as he was popularly called when he tried to resolve the hell on the border, was convicted of violating constitutional rights, “in defiance of a court order involving racial profiling.”

“Good luck with that theory, professor,” observes the New York Sun. “The thinking at Northwestern seems to be that one can be pardoned for kidnapping, murder or espionage — any federal crime — only so long as constitutional rights weren’t violated.” The professor obviously needs a refresher course in the law, and there are correspondence law schools where he could take a tutorial without having to miss teaching any of his own classes at Northwestern.

Most pardons are controversial, whether by presidents or governors, and every pardon, whether for a real crime, or contempt, which is only contempt of a judge. Not very nice, of course, but judges often have skin as thin as tissue paper, and the judge who sentenced Sheriff Joe, U.S. District G. Murray Snow is infamous among Arizona lawyers for his exceedingly thin skin, and his sometime preference for upholding personal whim, if not the law.

“President Trump must wake up and realize the damage that Generals Kelly and McMaster are inflicting on his policies and on those who have been loyal to his ideology. President Trump should know that Israeli history is littered with heroic generals on the battlefield who were weak appeasers in national security when they became prime ministers, such as Israeli chiefs of staff Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak. He should realize that just because they are generals they are not necessarily the right advisors to implement Trump’s tough-minded agenda.”

As an Israeli who supports Trump and attended Trump’s inauguration to celebrate his win, I read with a heavy heart the reports leaking out of the White House that Sebastian Gorka did not resign but was forced out of his position as a security advisor to the President by General H.R. McMaster and General John Kelly.

Mr. Gorka is the seventh Trump loyalist McMaster has forced out in recent months from the President’s National Security Team. All have been attempting to carry out President Trump’s campaign promises to combat Iranian and radical Islamist terrorist threats, and to support Israel and the U.S.-Israel alliance.

Gorka was the third Trump loyalist forced out since General John F. Kelly, an old military colleague of McMaster, was appointed to be the chief of staff and reportedly encouraged McMaster to make any staffing changes he deems necessary.

If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it is a duck. Maybe it does not sound yet like a “purge” and an ideological coup, but it is starting to look like one, engineered by Generals McMaster and Kelly. It is designed to eliminate President Trump’s national security agenda of support to Israel, opposition to the Iran deal, and determination to name and combat radical Islamist terrorism.

On Friday, in a letter reported by the Federalist, Sebastian Gorka’s explained his “resignation” by expressing his unhappiness with the direction that the Trump administration’s foreign policy has taken as signaled by the President’s recent speech on Afghanistan. Gorka stated:

“Regrettably, outside of yourself (President Trump), the individuals who most embodied and represented the policies that will ‘Make America Great Again’ have been internally countered, systematically removed, or undermined in recent months. This was made patently obvious as I read the text of your speech on Afghanistan…. The fact that those who drafted and approved the speech removed any mention of Radical Islam or radical Islamic terrorism proves that a critical element of your presidential campaign has been lost.”

On Sunday, in an interview with the Jerusalem Post, Gorka offered harsh criticism of McMaster’s stance towards Islamists saying:

“McMaster sees the threat of Islam through an Obama administration lens, meaning that religion has nothing to do with the war we are in.… He believes and he told me in his office that these people are just criminals.”

A source close to the White House said that after Bannon was forced out, anti-Bannon factions began erecting bureaucratic roadblocks to undermine Gorka internally.

Yahoo News reported that Kelly revoked Gorka’s security clearance, making it difficult if not impossible for him to continue his job. Other news outlets reported that Kelly has been restricting access to Trump as McMaster’s detractors are trying to reach the president.