Cromwell

GOD BLESS BEER AND TRUCKS

Blue people looking down on me.

They think my music’s dumb.

I’ve heard it all so many times

It leaves me feeling numb.

But I know something that they don’t.

I know that I don’t suck.

So say it loud and say it proud:

God bless beer and trucks.
———-

I’ll admit it openly:

The riot was ok.

We all know the thing was rigged

No matter what they say.

White Christians are the victims here

For now, we’re out of luck.

But times will soon a-change, my friend,

So God bless beer and trucks.

Putin has been pretty successful at spreading his conservative nationalist ideology through Europe. But here is the irony of it: the Polish government, which is practically his regime’s twin, is fanatically anti-Russian. How does that help him?

It just illustrates a point I made about Steve Bannon years ago: you can’t ultimately build an international movement around nationalism.

When Putin dreams of a better future, this is what he sees: NATO and the EU gone; America disengaged from Europe; and a Russia that includes all of the land in the Soviet Union. It looks a lot like 1914.

There are four exceptions: Poland is an independent state: China is now a threat; Austria-Hungary has been broken up; and while the Russian economy is still tiny compared to that of Germany and France, its military is much more formidable than it was in 1914.

In this dream world, is Putin in a better position than Nicholas II? It depends on what the Germans do after NATO dies. If they rebuild their military and start casting hungry eyes towards the east, he is in trouble.

Why should the concept of national guilt and reparations be limited to America? Thousands of good Saxons were killed or lost their lands as a result of the Norman invasion; shouldn’t their descendants receive compensation from the French?

I would allow damage caused by English troops during the Hundred Years War as an offset.

Joe Manchin’s longing for bipartisanship figures to be an obstacle to the rest of the Biden agenda. How can he be talked out of it?

By persuading him that the stakes of failure are not just a loss at the polls, but the demise of liberal democracy in America. That’s what we’re playing for, folks.

I am thinking about peddling a concept called “The 1607 Project” to the NYT. As the date would suggest, the central narrative of American history is the expropriation of land from Native Americans. The development of an enormously prosperous and powerful liberal democracy, and discrimination against other groups, is disregarded in this story, because we only have room for one narrative. History is a simple business, after all.

Native Americans are clearly entitled to reparations. I would suggest that white people, Asians, and Hispanics should be required to swap places with them, and live on reservations. Black people, whose ancestors came here involuntarily, should be given the option of returning to Africa.

Do you like my chances?

Bret Stephens tells us we should be rooting for the complete success of Netanyahu’s assault on Gaza, because if Hamas is destroyed, the Israeli government will be prepared to treat fairly with a more moderate Palestinian leadership. Is he right?

As if! We’ve seen this movie many times before. Israel can’t destroy Hamas, even if it occupies Gaza, because Hamas is the face of Palestinian opposition to Israel in Gaza, and thus has too much popular support. Hamas can only be eradicated in a war of extermination, which isn’t going to happen. For their part, Hamas and the other related militant groups are accomplishing nothing in a military sense by sending all of those rockets over Israel. They are just blowing off steam, as they do periodically. The episode will end in a few days or weeks with a cease-fire and lots of misery and rubble, as usual.

The bottom line with Bibi is that he doesn’t negotiate with Palestinians when the country is completely secure, because he doesn’t have to, and he doesn’t negotiate when the country is under threat, because that would be a sign of weakness and could end with an unfavorable deal. Better just not to negotiate, period.

The important development here is the violence within Israel. If Netanyahu had any sense, he would do his best to placate his Arab citizens as quickly as possible. It is much more likely that we will start hearing more loud chatter on the Israeli right about collective punishment and stripping the Arabs of their citizenship, instead.

Our old friend Rod Dreher is at it again. In a lengthy blog post cited in a David Brooks column, he compares wokeness to Bolshevism and worries about “soft totalitarianism.” Mind you, he understands Trump’s weaknesses, and thinks the January 6 rioters were a rabble, but clearly, something has to be done to protect decent, God-fearing Americans from the horrors of the woke menace. What might that be?

Like most of his right-wing apocalypse mongers, he doesn’t say. He doesn’t have to, because he makes a big point of telling us that he is posting from Hungary, which is obviously the New Jerusalem for the cultural right. (He probably loves Putin, as well, but he understands Moscow is a bridge too far for an American) Extreme gerrymandering, the destruction of independent media, the politicization of law enforcement and the judiciary, and so on: illiberal democracy is a small price to pay to prevent the left from setting up a Christian gulag.

I can’t speak to the quality of Dreher’s theology, but he’s a terrible historian, and his analogies are ridiculous. The Bolsheviks were a tiny group of conspirators (mostly in exile) unknown to the vast majority of Russians prior to 1917; they came to power by promising a war-weary public peace, land, and bread, and held it by being single-minded, opportunistic, and, above all, ruthless. The woke crowd is a disorganized group of intellectuals operating perfectly legally in universities and on Twitter; it has no aspirations to overthrow our system, and only seeks to change minds peacefully. Not exactly the same thing.

Oh, and there is no such thing as “soft totalitarianism.” It’s an oxymoron.

In an effort to protect the fundamental rights of his poor, benighted anti-vaxxer constituents, DeSantis has decreed that cruise ships docking in Florida may not require vaccine passports. When he was told that Norwegian Cruise Lines would stop docking in Florida under those conditions, he responded by saying that a small cruise line was expendable and could easily be replaced.

Norwegian is the third largest cruise line in the world. No word on the impacts to the state budget or the passengers who would appreciate the additional protection from the virus. Their freedom to travel safely from Florida apparently does not count for much.

After the 2016 election, Trump owed little or nothing to the GOP establishment, and both sides knew it. How would the two interact?

Mitch McConnell noted Trump’s personal and ideological unreliability and decided to treat him, not as the party leader, but as an independent third party with whom the GOP would maintain opportunistic alliances on issues of mutual interest. As a result, the GOP and Trump cooperated on tax cuts, deregulation, and the appointment of socially conservative judges. When Trump bashed allies, imposed tariffs, and attacked liberal democratic institutions, however, the party openly objected.

The last straw came with Ukraine. The GOP leadership was harshly critical of Trump’s attempts to coerce the Ukrainian government to support him, and thus joined the impeachment effort. Trump was convicted and removed from office. Mike Pence became president.

When the pandemic arrived, Pence made uninspiring, but reasonable efforts to control it. The public was impressed, and remembered the economy of 2019. The GOP consequently won a substantial victory in the 2020 election without making any allegations of fraud. The McConnell project would continue, but liberal democracy in America was safe, at least for the moment.

Donald Trump had a two-pronged approach to public relations when he was in office. He told moderates and business interests that tax cuts and deregulation were the meat of his presidency, and that the tweets were just empty entertainment for the masses; reactionaries, on the other hand, were assured that the tweets were what mattered, not the tax cuts. In spite of the obvious message inconsistency, the approach worked fairly well until January 6, when Trump finally fell off the horse.

Kevin McCarthy is trying to do something similar in the name of party unity. On the one hand, he is visibly sucking up to Trump, voting to expel Liz Cheney, and changing his story on the riot; on the other hand, he is telling the MSM that the GOP recognizes Biden as the legitimate president in order to keep the party looking respectable to the donor class. These stories are mutually exclusive.

Can he continue to walk the tightrope through the 2022 election? It will be up to the Democratic leadership and the handful of remaining principled Republicans to make sure that the answer is no.

Due to the fecklessness of the Palestinian leaders, the regional danger presented by Iran, and the failures of the Arab Spring, the Israelis have felt themselves invulnerable over the last few years. However, as I have pointed out several times, this is based on conditions that will not last forever. The refusal to take risks for peace, while perfectly understandable in the short run, will cost Israel dearly in the long run.

What are Israel’s vulnerabilities? Here is the list:

1. While the military threat presented by Hamas in Gaza is a flea bite, Hezbollah is a much more dangerous enemy. Contrary to my predictions, the IDF has avoided doing much about it over the last 15 years. At some point, the battle will have to be fought.
2. The autocratic Arab regimes around Israel are ineffective and unstable. A revolution in Egypt or Jordan would have dramatic consequences for the Jewish state. Don’t completely discount the Arab street; the Palestinian cause may not be at the top of its list of grievances, but it still matters particularly if the Israeli government takes provocative actions over the Muslim holy places.
3. The American left, due largely to Bibi’s complete identification with Trump and the GOP, is far less supportive of Israel than it used to be.
4. Years of discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens may turn them into a mortal threat. Unlike the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, they cannot be ignored if they turn firmly against the government.

#4 may be coming home to roost as I’m writing this. We’ll see.

As I was reading Ross Douthat’s NYT column about the Catholic Church spinning out of control as the result of Pope Francis’ equivocal efforts at liberalization, the historical analogy that came to mind was Gorbachev, who saw his country implode when he tried to save the system by shaking it up just a little bit.

If you are surprised or offended by my analogy tying the Church to the Communist Party, don’t be. While the two are poles apart ideologically, they are actually quite similar structurally.

Don’t expect the Church to suffer the same fate as the Soviet Union. It has 2,000 years of experience on its side. That’s a lot of institutional knowledge and inertia.

On the West VA Senator Joe.

He dictates just how far we can go.

Part blue, but part red,

Biden hears what he said

But the left thinks he always says no.

One of the GOP attack lines during the campaign was that Biden was just a figurehead, and that Harris (the dangerous lefty black woman) would actually run the administration. Given Harris’ relative inexperience and lack of firm ideology, this was always implausible, and the electorate correctly refused to buy it. Instead, the power behind the throne, to the extent there is one, is . . . Elizabeth Warren!

That doesn’t bother me as much as you might think. Warren might have been the worst possible nominee in 2020 for identity and culture war reasons, and she is a bit too far to the left for my taste, but her expertise in matters of policy and personnel is undeniable. She is a consistent, reliable source of ideas at a time when they are desperately needed. She earned her influence, if not the right to make the final decisions. She is good for America exactly where she is.