“…“Like a bearded nut in robes on the sidewalk proclaiming the end of the world is near, the media is just doing what makes it feel good, not reporting hard facts,” Michael Crichton once said. “We need to start seeing the media as a bearded nut on the sidewalk, shouting out false fears. It’s not sensible to listen to it.”
As the editor of an online newspaper, I am reluctant to agree with Crichton entirely. There are still news sources, liberal and conservative, even in Washington, that seek to report rather than explain or analyze or decipher the context and implications of facts. (But you can count them on one hand!) Sometimes these publications carry opinions, such as the one you are reading. Sometimes they have a little fun. And that is fine, so long as they are upfront about it, and are “half a step up from Daily Caller.”
But please, please, please be wary of the supposedly nonpartisan and objective experts who have looked at the DATA and determined which course history will take. In fact, be more than wary.Run in the opposite direction.“
Speaking of the counterintuitive, courtesy of the Hoover Institution, the great Victor Davis Hanson offers a contrarian view which proffers the possibility The Donald is a throwback:
“…The Roman aristocracy—most claiming some sort of descent from Julius Caesar and his grandnephew Octavian (Caesar Augustus)—had long written Claudius off as a hopeless dolt. Claudius limped, the result of a childhood disease or genetic impairment. His mother Antonia, ashamed of his habits and appearance, called the youthful Claudius “a monster of man.” He was likely almost deaf and purportedly stuttered.
That lifelong disparagement of his appearance and mannerisms probably saved Claudius’s life in the dynastic struggles during the last years of the Emperor Augustus and the subsequent reigns of the emperors Tiberius and Caligula. The stereotyped impression of Claudius was that of a simpleton not to be taken seriously—and so no one did. Claudius himself claimed that he feigned acting differently in part so that he would not be targeted by enemies before he assumed power, and to unnerve them afterwards.
Contemporary critics laughed at his apparent lack of eloquence and rhetorical mastery, leading some scholars to conjecture that he may have suffered from Tourette syndrome or a form of autism. The court biographer Suetonius wrote that Claudius “was now careful and shrewd, sometimes hasty and inconsiderate, occasionally silly and like a crazy man.”
Sound familiar?
Roman intellectuals hated Claudius, who hit back blow-for-blow at them for their slights and snark, and showed no mercy to plotters and conspiracists. After Claudius’s death, the court toady and philosopher Seneca—pal of Claudius’s successor, the sinister and murderous Nero—wrote a cruel satire on Claudius’s supposed crudity and buffoonery. Seneca’s Apocolyncotosis (The “Gourdification” of the Divine Claudius) mocks Claudius’s halting speech and off-putting mannerisms. He also poked fun at Claudius’s lowbrow friends, and his penchant for crass popular entertainment.
Later Roman historians, drawing on now lost contemporary accounts of Claudius, reflect the same prejudices. In the biography of Suetonius and throughout the Annals of the historian Tacitus, the accidental emperor Claudius comes off as little more than an impulsive bumbler, an accidental emperor who came to power on a fluke and whose lack of Julian elegance made him more a buffoon than the head of the global Roman Empire of some 60 million citizens.
Claudius’s 50 years of private life before becoming emperor were also the stuff of court gossip and ridicule. He would marry four times and was often flattered and manipulated by younger women.
Modern historians, however, have corrected that largely negative view and ancient bias…”
All of which means, though the jury’s still out on Trump, you can pretty much ignore every smear the MSM has leveled against him…at least for now.
Next up, in a related item suggesting ignorance is not only bliss but advisable, David French suggests, at least when it comes to Paris, we deliberately dismiss everything we’ve been hearing and reading from Progressives, because…
“Let’s make one thing clear from the outset: There is no such thing as a “moral superpower.” By that I don’t mean that a superpower can’t behave in moral ways, but rather that morality alone can’t make a nation powerful. Specifically, as the term is used today, adherence to leftist norms on climate, immigration, or social-welfare policy does not grant meaningful international authority. In international relations, power flows through military and economic strength combined with the choice to exert that strength to impose the national will.Leadership is a function of power, and leadership without power isn’t leadership at all.
Keep those realities in mind as you read and ponder hyperbolic analyses in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement.According to some, this was the moment when America abdicated its international leadership. This was the moment when our allies would start to turn their backs on their most powerful international partner.
Consider these comments, in a Washington Post news analysis of Trump’s decision:
“It’s going to seriously complicate any effort President Trump makes to build a counterterrorism coalition or mobilize the West on any set of policy issues,” said Bruce Jones, director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
Or this:
“Having pulled out of the Paris accord, after sowing doubt at NATO and killing the TPP, President Trump is on the way to ending the U.S.-led international order,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a firm that assesses political risks. “I think we’re heading toward a Hobbesian, each-on-his-own world.”
No. This is flat-out wrong. The worst impact on international relations may be a series of petty or petulant retaliatory decisions that do precisely nothing to permanently either adjust the world balance of power or render America a bystander in world affairs. The likely impact is little more than a series of tweets and public temper tantrums — IU…”
Consider, if you will, Tucker Carlson’s dissection of the “arguments” of a Paris advocate wholly incapable of answering the simplest of questions about the subject he so vociferously espouses:
Note how Green deliberately and disingenuously raises the level of supposed scientific consensus from 97% to 98%!
Here’s the juice, as recorded by James Delingpole at Breitbart.com:
By “global warming” these papers don’t, of course, mean the mild warming of around 0.8 degrees Celsius that the planet has experienced since the middle of the 19th century as the world crawled out of the Little Ice Age. Pretty much everyone, alarmists and skeptics alike, is agreed on that.
Rather, they mean “global warming” in the sense that is most commonly used today by grant-troughing scientists, and huxter politicians, and scaremongering green activists, and brainwashed mainstream media (MSM) environmental correspondents. “Global warming” as in the scary, historically unprecedented, primarily man-made phenomenon which we must address urgently before the icecaps melt and the Pacific islands disappear beneath the waves and all the baby polar bears drown.
What all these papers argue in their different ways is that the alarmist version of global warming — aka Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) — is a fake artefact.
That is, all these different experts from around the world — China, Russia, Canada, the U.S., Italy, etc. — have been looking closely at different aspects of the global warming puzzle in various regions and on different timescales and come to the conclusion in irreproachable, peer-reviewed scientific ways that there is no evidence to support the global warming scare story.
Late 20th century and early 21st century global warming, they show, is neither dramatic, nor unusual, nor scary…”
Unlike the thought of spending our last years on a desert island alone with Hillary Clinton, Maxine Waters and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. With all due respect to van Gogh…
…such calamitous conditions would force us to sever more than just our ear!
Since we’re on the subject of the close avoidance of calamitous conditions, writing at the WSJ, Dan Henninger celebrates the recent SCOTUS decision in favor of…
The Supreme Court’s breathtaking defense of the bedrock principle of freedom to speak.
“…It is not possible to overstate the importance of the Supreme Court’s unanimous decision this week to confer free-speech protection on the Slants, an Asian-American rock band. That is because it is also hard to overstate the progressive left’s determination to establish, in practice if not in law, limits on America’s free-speech traditions.
Ruling against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s determination that the name Slants had violated its “disparagement clause,” Justice Samuel Alito’s decision for the court was written with the rare clarity of a declarative sentence in the active voice: “This provision violates the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment. It offends a bedrock First Amendment principle: Speech may not be banned on the ground that it expresses ideas that offend.”
Anyone half-awake to American life in recent years (Which, by definition, omits Liberals!) knows there is a large effort under way to banish that bedrock principle of protection for words that offend. Free-speech traditions are under pressure on campuses, in high schools, in the media, in the streets and in sports.
That the court’s liberal justices— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan —joined the majority suggests these four see what is going on, that letting the ability to speak one’s mind slip away under this silencing weight will damage all Americans.
…Unlike the NFL’s Mr. Goodell, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred is leaning on Indians owner Paul Dolan to drop the logo. Last month, “Saturday Night Live”—which notably bills itself as “from New York”—described Chief Wahoo as “racist.” Naturally, an ESPN commentator in April did a number on Chief Wahoo. Editorial pages in Ohio routinely call for a ban, which, needless to say, gives us some idea of where the truth lies.
Last year, the Washington Post actually did apollof Native Americans’ feelings about the Redskins logo. The percentage who were offended was …9%.The rest checked off “doesn’t bother me.”A Cleveland friend who’s been going to Arizona for years says she has met plenty of Navajos who loveChief Wahoo.
…People like MLB’s Rob Manfred think they are making a reasonable accommodation. But you can’t.The exterminating left will pocket any concession and roll forward toward the next target. Agree to delete Chief Wahoo or burn one uncomprehending artist’s sculpture as cultural misappropriation, and centuries of Western art will be heading to the furnaces or basements, with complicit museum directors holding the door open.
An exaggeration? These days? I recall a Buffalo Springfield lyric: Step out of line and they’ll take you away.
This happens because people in positions of authoritybuckle.(See Evergreen College president George Bridges in our Video of the Day above!)Which is why the Supreme Court’s unanimous defense of the Slants and freedom of speech is breathtaking.“
Oh,…and George Bridges, like Mike Mullen and every politically-correct appeaser before them…
Which brings us to The Lighter Side:
Finally, though we’re days late rather than dollars short, courtesy of Gettysburg College Professor Robert Garnett writing at the WSJ, we honor the memory of those who helped forge the future of America 75 years ago this past 4th of June:
Unlike Mike Mullen and other self-serving sycophants who’ve sacrificed the national defense on the altar of political correctness, Nimitz was a leader in the FINEST traditions of the U.S. Navy, as exemplified by John Paul Jones:
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