RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/07-08/americas-great-awokening/

“What, exactly, has gone awry in the Land of Lincoln? For starters, America’s liberals-cum-progressives, including Maher himself, have discarded traditional liberal notions about the sovereignty of the individual. American-style liberalism has committed the Aggregations Fallacy of indiscriminately combining one “good” with another “good”—the rights of the individual with the rights of the group. In an earlier revolutionary era, explained Roger Scruton in The Uses of Pessimism, the Jacobins fervently promoted liberté and égalité without appreciating the conflicting nature of the two concepts, and so ended up with Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”. Today, extrapolating from Scruton, we are witnessing a “despotism of identity”. 

Today not even the stalwarts of American liberalism-cum-progressivism are safe from what television pundit Bill Maher calls the “woke mob”. In an episode of his HBO program Real Time, for example, Maher cited the circumstances of Emmanuel Cafferty, who last year lost his job at San Diego Gas & Electric after being photographed in the vicinity of a Black Lives Matter protest “allegedly flashing a white power gesture”. Cafferty, as it turns out, had been making his way home from work in a company truck when a (white) BLM supporter, David Bentley, snapped a picture of Cafferty’s hand formulating—or seeming to formulate—the OK gesture out of the open cabin window.

Bentley, a quintessential keyboard social justice warrior, posted the offending hand gesture, construed as a sign of white power, on Twitter. He next contacted San Diego Gas & Electric with a link to the “evidence” that one of its employees was a white supremacist. Management terminated Cafferty’s employment. Cafferty, as it happens, is a person of colour and a supporter of BLM, who has a lifelong habit of extending an arm and cracking his knuckles one finger at a time. Irritating, yes, but not exactly an endorsement of white supremacism. Maher concluded his diatribe against the injustice of Emmanuel Cafferty’s sacking and an assortment of other cancel-culture incidents with this barb: “Memo to social justice warriors. When what you’re doing sounds like an Onion headline, stop.”

I doubt that Maher understands the root cause of cancel culture, but he at least appreciates its brutal potential. America’s self-styled Defender of Liberal Principles is aghast that a good and honourable person—that is, a person who shares his progressive feelings—should find himself the target of public shaming for not always having been so enlightened: “Think about everything you’ve ever texted, emailed, searched for, tweeted, blogged or said in passing, or now even just witnessed. Someone had a Confederate flag in their dorm room in 1990—and you didn’t do anything.” The fanaticism of the woke mob, empowered by the omnipresence of social-media platforms, makes everyone a potential victim: “Andy Warhol was wrong … In the future, every­one will not experience fifteen minutes of fame, but fifteen minutes of shame.” Not even the Great Emancipator himself is safe. “[Lincoln] is now cancelled in San Francisco. And they’re thinking about it in Illinois. Yes, the Land of Lincoln might cancel Lincoln.”

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-vanishing-legacy-of-barack-obama

It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness.

— Leo Tolstoy

“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.

One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:

It’s all about you
Girl tonight it’s about you…
Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!

There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.

ps://spectatorworld.com/topic/from-9-11-january-6-capitol-hill-riot/

The season is almost upon us of lachrymose memorials to the victims of 9/11. As a nation we choke each year as the anniversary approaches. We can talk about the heroic firefighters and cops, those first-responders who that day sometimes made their last response. We can recount the lists of the dead and the daring of some survivors. A great many Americans remember in vivid detail how the horrors of that day intersected their own lives. What we don’t have is a strong sense of what 9/11 meant and still means to the nation.

Even in this age of declining historical literacy, we have a ready sense of the defining importance of more remote occurrences: Plymouth Rock, Valley Forge, Gettysburg, D-Day. These days, we should add 1619, Wounded Knee and the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. Those names and dates — and many others —  instantly conjure a larger story about who we are. But 9/11 is oddly opaque. We sense it is significant but it is like a mountain shrouded in morning mist. We know it’s there but we can’t see it.

That may be because the terrorist attacks that day were inspired by militant Islam and executed by Muslim fanatics. It is bad manners to say that aloud or to make much of it. We still say that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’, and we censure those who dissent as guilty of ‘Islamophobia’. Our national commitment, for so it appears, to multiculturalism precludes any frank assessment of the irreconcilable elements between Western liberal democracy and the Islamic Middle East.

As the Taliban move in for the kill in Afghanistan, we once again turn away from the hard questions about how to sustain American pride in the face of people who abhor us and what American values mean if the world meets our ideals with contempt. One answer to these questions is a counsel of capitulation. Let us admit that we are now and always have been a rotten nation made up of hateful, conniving people who only pretended to be good.

That answer has always had a few cynics in its corner, but it has become the presiding doctrine of the American left, a development which is itself one of the defining consequences of 9/11. At some point in the months following the attack, as the momentary sense of national unity cleared, the left began to adopt the ‘we-deserved-it’ narrative. Not everyone was as outspoken as Ward Churchill who called the office workers in the World Trade Towers ‘little Eichmanns’ or the Revd Jeremiah Wright who preached a sermon shortly after 9/11 that said of the attack, ‘America’s chickens are coming home to roost’. But in a quieter way, these ideas took hold. President Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq crystalized the left’s narrative that America’s bellicosity was the problem. We had more to fear from domestic mistreatment of innocent Muslims than we had from Muslims bent on mass murder.

This muddled view has birthed a generation that has nothing but misgivings about American virtue and American power. And it lies in the background of a brand new attempt to sacralize a new date: January 6, 2021.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/567864-still-in-the-game-will-durhams-report-throw-a-slow-curveball-at-key

Texas Rangers infielder Brock Holt went to the mound this week and threw an eephus — a high-arching, off-speed pitch — in a game against the Oakland Athletics. It is believed to be the slowest pitch recorded in MLB history, and A’s batter Josh Harrison stood in disbelief as the 31 mph pitch was called a strike. Harrison just laughed in amazement.

Pirates outfielder Maurice Van Robays coined the term in the 1946 All-Star Game, explaining, “Eephus ain’t nothing, and that’s a nothing pitch.” But as Holt demonstrated, sometimes a “nothing” slow pitch can amount to a great deal.

That is equally true about the occasional criminal eephus that takes everyone by surprise. For example, U.S. Attorney John Durham’s investigation has been slow in coming, but on Friday, a report surfaced that he is pitching evidence to a grand jury in an investigation started back in May 2019. The Durham investigation is now longer in duration than former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, and many people long forgot that Durham — made a special counsel at the end of the Trump administration — was even still in the game.

The report in The Wall Street Journal said Durham is presenting evidence against FBI agents and possibly others in the use of false information or tips at the start of the Russia investigation in 2016. Those “others” could include a virtual who’s who of Washington politics, and even if they are not indicted, Durham could implicate some of the most powerful figures in politics in his final report, expected in the coming months.

Even for those of us who followed and wrote on the Russia investigation for five years, much has been revealed in the last year. It was disclosed in October, for instance, that President Obama was briefed by his CIA director, John Brennan, on July 28, 2016, on intelligence suggesting that Hillary Clinton planned to tie then-candidate Donald Trump to Russia as “a means of distracting the public from her use of a private email server.” The date was significant because the Russia investigation was initiated July 31, 2016, just three days later.

Throughout the campaign, the Clinton campaign denied any involvement in the creation of the so-called Steele dossier’s allegations of Trump-Russia connections. However, weeks after the election, journalists discovered that the Clinton campaign hid payments for the dossier made to a research firm, Fusion GPS, as “legal fees” among the $5.6 million paid to the campaign’s law firm. New York Times reporter Ken Vogel said at the time that Clinton lawyer Marc Elias, with the law firm of Perkins Coie, denied involvement in the anti-Trump dossier. When Vogel tried to report the story, he said, Elias “pushed back vigorously, saying ‘You (or your sources) are wrong.’” Times reporter Maggie Haberman declared, “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”

It was not just reporters who asked the Clinton campaign about its role in the Steele dossier. John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, was questioned by Congress and denied categorically any contractual agreement with Fusion GPS. Sitting beside him was Elias, who reportedly said nothing to correct the misleading information given to Congress.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/our-ridiculous-way-of-fighting-wars/

As we look at the disgraceful coda of the Global War on Terror and the tens of thousands of our countrymen who have been maimed or killed with scant results, it is clear to all but few (sadly, those few seem to occupy a lot of Defense Department jobs and think tank posts), there must be a better way to fight our wars. If we look to history, and even demands from the anti-war Left, we might find a better way forward.

Believe it or not, the anti-war Left does have a strong point. No, their point was not to be found in their human barricading of military posts or yelling in congressional meetings with ridiculous costumes. It was in their demand for the third rail of military intervention everyone dismisses: Timelines. 

We are told we cannot set timelines. We are there until “mission accomplished” (or it loses funding, as we have seen). But what if we looked at our past and realized that when a war goes beyond four or five years of mobilization, beneficial results are difficult to identify? Which “victory” was more decisive: World War II or Vietnam? Are we to believe that timelines are beneficial to every type of work (construction, budgets, school testing, sports), but when it comes to deploying our military efforts that is the one thing that somehow needs zero accountability for how long it takes?

Why can we not have a five-year timeline requirement on each war declaration/force authorization? What would a five-year timeline require? Massive deployment of forces. Massive manufacturing of equipment, mobilization of forces, etc. (think of the old World War II movies of assembly lines, etc.). Few realize we fought Desert Storm with a larger Army deployed than our total Army is now. What if we had a manpower/equipment requirement (two Armies, 600 ships, 4000 planes, etc.) before we fight? Somehow, this idea would be dismissed as ludicrous (despite it being automatic in wars we cared to win), but yet having soldiers deployed in combat for half their careers is not?

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/14/killing-art/

I recently had occasion to quote Charles Péguy’s observation, from a 1905 essay called “Notre Patrie,” that “It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive.” 

The cowardice in question can be intellectual or moral as well as physical, something that is vividly illustrated by Holland Cotter’s moist, mincing, over-the-shoulder-glancing review for the New York Times of a small but exquisite exhibition of paintings by the great Venetian Renaissance painter we know as Titian (d. 1576). The exhibition, “Titian: Women, Myth & Power,” is ending its three-city run at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. The show centers around six large, mythological paintings commissioned by the future Philip II of Spain in the 1550s. 

Based on themes drawn from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the six paintings, reunited in this exhibition for the first time, are among Titian’s most celebrated, and for good reason. Painted between 1551 and the early 1560s, they show Titian at the apex of his powers. Cotter recognizes and affirms the greatness of the paintings but he is nervous, very nervous. You’ll know why when I tell you that pride of place is given to the Gardner’s own, newly restored work, a depiction of the Rape of Europa, a story illustrated by many artists, including Rubens, Guido Reni, and Goya, but not a theme likely to find approbation among contemporary feminists, the audience to which the Times is chiefly concerned to cater. 

The story is a familiar one. Europa, out picnicking with friends, is approached by Zeus in the shape of a bull (this story’s metamorphosis). He charms her, abducts her, and whisks her away to Crete where, as Ovid himself put it in another poem, cetera quis nescit.