It’s Monday, February 20th, 2017…but before we begin, we take a moment to bid Omar Abdel-Rahman bon voyage on his journey to the nether regions: 

Here’s your reward…

…now enjoy eternity.  Oh, and give our regards to Ernst Stavro…

…should you happen to see him.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, writing at his personal blog, the brilliant Victor Davis Hanson relates what we truly hope presages…

The End Of Identity Politics

It’s what “E Pluribus Unum” means you benighted boobs!

“Who are we? asked the liberal social scientist Samuel Huntington over a decade ago in a well-reasoned but controversial book. Huntington feared the institutionalization of what Theodore Roosevelt a century earlier had called “hyphenated Americans.” A “hyphenated American,” Roosevelt scoffed, “is not an American at all.” And 30 years ago, another progressive stalwart and American historian Arthur Schlesinger argued in his book The Disuniting of America that identity politics were tearing apart the cohesion of the United States.

What alarmed these liberals was the long and unhappy history of racial, religious, and ethnic chauvinism, and how such tribal ties could prove far stronger than shared class affinities. Most important, they were aware that identity politics had never proved to be a stabilizing influence on any past multiracial society. Indeed, most wars of the 20th century and associated genocides had originated over racial and ethnic triumphalism, often by breakaway movements that asserted tribal separateness. Examples include the Serbian and Slavic nationalist movements in 1914 against Austria-Hungary, Hitler’s rise to power on the promise of German ethno-superiority, the tribal bloodletting in Rwanda, and the Shiite/Sunni/Kurdish conflicts in Iraq.

The United States could have gone the way of these other nations. Yet, it is one of the few successful multiracial societies in history. (Sorry Barry and Hillary; America IS exceptional!) America has survived slavery, civil war, the Japanese-American internment, and Jim Crow—and largely because it has upheld three principles for unifying, rather than dividing, individuals.

The first concerns the Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, which were unique documents for their time and proved transcendent across time and space. Both documents enshrined the ideal that all people were created equal and were human first, with inalienable rights from God that were protected by government. (Protected by government, not granted by government!) These founding principles would eventually trump innate tribal biases and prejudices to grant all citizens their basic rights.

Second, given America’s two-ocean buffer, the United States could control its own demographic destiny. Americans usually supported liberal immigration policies largely because of the country’s ability to monitor the numbers of new arrivals and the melting pot’s ability to assimilate, integrate, and intermarry immigrants, who would soon relegate their racial, religious, and ethnic affinities to secondary importance.

Finally, the United States is the most individualistic and capitalistic of the Western democracies. The nation was blessed with robust economic growth, rich natural resources, and plenty of space. It assumed that its limited government and ethos of entrepreneurialism would create enough widespread prosperity and upward mobility that affluence—or at least the shared quest for it—would create a common bond superseding superficial Old World ties based on appearance or creed.

In the late 1960s, however, these three principles took a hit. The federal government lost confidence in the notion that civil rights legislation, the melting pot, and a growing economy could unite Americans and move society in the direction of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision—“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.”

This shift from the ideal of the melting pot to the triumph of salad-bowl separatism occurred, in part, because the Democratic Party found electoral resonance in big government’s generous entitlements and social programs tailored to particular groups. (As is Tucker Carlson in a later item, VDH is too kind.  The “federal government” didn’t lose confidence in anything; LBJ and the Dimocrats deliberately, and with malice of forethought, saw an opening to reinstitute slavery through entitlements and the soft bigotry of low expectations.) By then, immigration into the United States had radically shifted and become less diverse. Rather than including states in Europe and the former British Commonwealth, most immigrants were poorer and almost exclusively hailed from the nations of Latin America, Asia, and Africa, resulting in poorer immigrants who, upon arrival, needed more government help. Another reason for the shift was the general protest culture of the Vietnam era, which led to radical changes in everything from environmental policy to sexual identity, and thus saw identity politics as another grievance against the status quo.

A half-century later, affirmative action and identity politics have created a huge diversity industry, in which millions in government, universities, and the private sector are entrusted with teaching the values of the other and administering de facto quotas in hiring and admissions. In 2016, Hillary Clinton ran a campaign on identity politics, banking on the notion that she could reassemble various slices of the American electorate, in the fashion that Barack Obama had in 2008 and 2012, to win a majority of voters. She succeeded, as did Obama, in winning the popular vote by appealing directly to the unique identities of gays, Muslims, feminists, blacks, Latinos, and an array of other groups, but misjudged the Electoral College and so learned that a numerical majority of disparate groups does not always translate into winning key swing states.

At one point Clinton defined her notion of identity politics by describing Trump’s supporters: “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America.”

What is the future of diversity politics after the 2016 election? Uncertain at best—and for a variety of reasons…”

What’s truly disappointing is the number of Senate “Republicans” who seem bound and determined to aid and abet the Progressive power structure in preserving their contemporary reincarnation of the antebellum plantation.

Since we’re on the subject of Progressives’ purposefully misplaced priorities, courtesy of NRO, Heather Wilhelm reports on the latest Liberal fad:

The Media’s ‘Me Party’

In confronting Trump, the press is undermined by excessive self-regard.

““It took ten days for the glue that holds this country together to crumble,” New York Daily News columnist Linda Stasi wrote on January 31, responding to Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders. Two weeks later, amazingly, the country remains apparently un-crumbled, but the media’s Trump-related frenzy continues apace.

Tom Friedman, the globetrotting, mustachioed New York Times columnist, led the pack with a Valentine’s Day doozy, comparing Trump’s election to the bombing at Pearl Harbor and the September 11 attacks. “We have never taken seriously from the very beginning Russia hacked our election,” he told MSNBC. “That was a 9/11-scale event. They attacked the core of our democracy. That was a Pearl Harbor–scale event.”

Well, yikes. The specific event Friedman compared to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, it should be noted, was not Russia’s literally hacking into voting machines, although MSNBC viewers could be forgiven for thinking so. It was, in his own words, Russia’s “deliberately breaking into Democratic National Committee computers and then drip-by-drip funneling embarrassing e-mails through WikiLeaks to undermine Clinton’s campaign.” In other words, it was the exposure of largely accurate information that made Hillary Clinton look bad, widely covered — and condemned — by the press.

Is Russia’s enthusiastic foray into hacking a serious and alarming problem? Certainly. Should we all be concerned about Russia’s meddling in American politics, and its possible links to the Trump administration? Absolutely. Is there a good chance that the media will blow its remaining shreds of credibility by hyperventilating and exaggerating and bringing every single presidential kerfluffle to DEFCON 1? It sure looks like it.

Friedman’s February 14 column is a case in point. In the paragraph following his passionate call to arms regarding the serious issue of Russian hacking, Friedman goes on to blast Trump, with equal venom, for – wait for it – criticizing the cast of Hamilton and Meryl Streep. No, I am not making this up.

This is simply not serious. It’s also a perfect example of the media’s inability to separate important news from run-of-the-mill Trump. Alas, perspective is in short supply these days, and Friedman seems to view himself as a hero, not a professional muddier of the waters. Unluckily for us all, he’s not the only one busy patting his own back.

Despite achieving the dubious distinction of polling lower than Donald Trump — the latest presidential approval ratings range between 39 (Pew) and 55 (Rasmussen) percent, while Gallup’s brutal new confidence poll has a mere 32 percent of Americans saying they have a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media “to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly — many esteemed journalists are seemingly six drinks in at their own self-congratulatory Me Party…”

As the legendary Dean Vernon Wormer so eloquently observed…

Though it sure as hell seemed to work for Teddy Kennedy!

In a related item detailing deliberate Leftist deception…with more than a little help from an inexplicably compliant Conservative…as Humberto Fontova observes at Townhall.com…

Tucker Carlson Grills Former Mexican Official Who Plots to Sabotage U.S. Court System With Thousands of Deportation Cases

Curious The Left and its MSM minions don’t have an issue with Señor Castañeda interfering in America’s domestic politics!

“Yes I want to use the U.S. judicial system—the immigration courts in particular– to jam, to backlog it so perhaps President Trump will change his mind and stop this ridiculous policy– this unpleasant and hostile policy– of deporting people…” (Jorge Castañeda to Tucker Carlson, Fox News, 2/14/17.)

The “ridiculous policy” consists of President Trump’s executive orders to deport lawbreaking foreigners, mostly Mexicans. In other words, this “unpleasant and hostile policy” consists of Trump’s fulfillment of his campaign promises and his pledge to uphold the U.S. Constitution when he was sworn in on Jan. 20.

The Mexican government itself has pledged $50 million in legal defense funds towards this jamming of U.S. courts as planned and promoted by Jorge Castañeda, who was introduced by Tucker Carlson as “Mexico’s former Foreign Minister, also a NYU professor and Board member of Human Rights Watch.” Democrats and the mainstream media would have us gag and shudder at such fulfillments of the U.S. Constitution—because they offend the sensibilities of a former Mexican Communist Party member and spy for Cuba’s terror-sponsoring Stalinist regime.

“Whoops! What was that?” some readers ask. Yes, amigos, I’m afraid that — either due to politeness or ignorance –Tucker Carlson scrimped on his guest Jorge Castañeda’s curriculum vitae. (We’ll flesh it out in a second.)

At any rate, promptly upon notice of this violation of Mexican sovereignty by immigrant wannabes, Jorge Castañeda – a man apparently scandalized by U.S. judicial procedures, especially as regards to illegal immigrants – ordered Castro’s Stalinist police to enter the embassy and drag the desperate Cubans out.

Now let’s expand a bit on Jorge Castaneda’s “credentials”…”

Seems like only yesterday The Left fully supported the “right of return”:

Which brings us to today’s Environmental Moment, also courtesy of NRO, as Julie Kelly reveals how…

A Climate Scientist Is Smeared for Blowing the Whistle on ‘Corrected’ Data

The scandal is growing, as Congress investigates and NOAA brings in outside experts to review a key study.

“Less than 72 hours after a federal whistleblower exposed shocking misconduct at a key U.S. climate agency, the CEO of the nation’s top scientific group was already dismissing the matter as no biggie. On February 7, Rush Holt, head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), told a congressional committee that allegations made by a high-level climate scientist were simply an “internal dispute between two factions” and insisted that the matter was “not the making of a big scandal.” (This was moments after Holt lectured the committee that science is “a set of principles dedicated to discovery,” and that it requires “humility in the face of evidence.” Who knew?)

Three days earlier, on February 4, John Bates, a former official with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — he was in charge of that agency’s climate-data archive — posted a lengthy account detailing how a 2015 report on global warming was mishandled. In the blog Climate Etc., Bates wrote a specific and carefully sourced 4,100-word exposé that accuses Tom Karl, his ex-colleague at NOAA, of influencing the results and release of a crucial paper that purports to refute the pause in global warming. Karl’s study was published in Science in June 2015, just a few months before world leaders would meet in Paris to agree on a costly climate change pact; the international media and climate activists cheered Karl’s report as the final word disproving the global-warming pause.

But Bates, an acclaimed expert in atmospheric sciences who left NOAA last year, says there’s a lot more to the story. He reveals that “in every aspect of the preparation and release of the datasets, . . . we find Tom Karl’s thumb on the scale pushing for, and often insisting on, decisions that maximize warming.” Karl’s report was “an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus and rush to time the publication of the paper to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy.” Agency protocol to properly archive data was not followed, and the computer that processed the data had suffered a “complete failure,” according to Bates. In a lengthy interview published in the Daily Mail the next day, Bates said:

They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did — so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.

Instead of taking these claims with the level of scrutiny and seriousness they deserve, most in the scientific establishment quickly moved to damage-control mode. In more testimony to the House Science Committee last week, Holt pulled one sentence from an article published in an environmental journal that morning, quoting Bates as saying, “The issue here is not an issue of tampering with the data but rather really of timing a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was.” (I guess that alone isn’t enough to raise any red flags in climate science.)

Holt went on to tell the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, which has been investigating the Karl study since 2015, that “all [Bates] is doing is calling out a former colleague for not following agency standards.” This man of science intentionally overlooked the damning charges in Bates’s own post to search out a tiny nugget in a biased article.

I asked the AAAS (which publishes Science, where the Karl study first appeared) why the head of their organization selected that one quote and failed to address the other issues Bates had raised: not vetting experimental data, failing to meet agency standards, and rushing to publish the report. Science editor in chief Jeremy Berg told me that Holt’s statement to Congress “was consistent with impressions from other private communications that had been conveyed to Holt” (emphasis added). Apparently, discovery and humility in the face of evidence are valid only when they result in politically desirable outcomes; impressions and feelings carry more weight otherwise…”

Why should the climate-scammers be different from any other Progressive special interest group?!?

Meanwhile, on The Lighter Side…

Finally, in the Sports Section, two related videos involving Chicago Cubs star third baseman Kris Bryant.  First…

 But what goes around comes around!

It’s refreshing to see such a stand-out be so stand-up.

Magoo