How Dare They?

The Supreme Court overruled a district court three judge panel and allowed Alabama to proceed with a prior Congressional district map that’s skewed 6-1 toward Republican House representatives instead of that lower court’s mandated newly created map that skewed 5-2 for Republicans. This ruling came in the aftermath of the Court’s prior Callais ruling that held that racial gerrymandering was no longer allowed.

Progressive-Democrats are in their usual uproar.

Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented.

“Before the Court are two paths. Down one lies an orderly election. … Down the other lies a chaotic election, held under a never-before-used congressional map that intentionally discriminates against Black Alabamians.”
The President Barack Obama-appointed justice also wrote that the high-court’s conservative majority “chooses the second path and disregards both democratic values and the rule of law.”

And

In a public statement, [Progressive-Democrat Congresswoman Terri Sewell (AL)] called it a decision allowing Alabama to use its “racist congressional map” for the midterms, expressing frustration over the reversal of prior efforts to create additional majority-minority districts.

My irony meter is pegged, and my hypocrisy warning light is flashing. There’s nothing more racist than demanding some Americans be segregated into a separate voting district, explicitly as Sotomayor, et al., and Sewell are demanding for the protection of those singled-out Americans. How hypocritical that the politician is objecting to the possibility of losing a Congressional seat that belongs to her.

How dare those impudent Justices insist on acting on what our Constitution and the Voting Rights Act actually say instead of what those Progressive-Democrats and their subordinate activist Justices want them to say?

Duplicity and Mistaken Imperative

There was a ceasefire agreed between Iran and the US and Israel in the recent US-Israeli conflict against Iran aimed at preventing the latter from acquiring nuclear weapons. Then, amid skirmishing during this ceasefire, which remains in official effect, Iran showed its duplicity by welching on the terms of the ceasefire by insisting, de novo, that Israel’s conflict with Iran’s terrorist satrap Hezbollah, operating in Lebanon, was actually a part of that ceasefire agreement.

That conflict is a separate matter between Israel and Hezbollah, and never has been a part of the ceasefire. Iran’s insistence that it is is Iran’s confession that Hezbollah is an instrument of Iran’s terrorist government, and that lately insistence is a demonstration (as if another one is needed) of the Iran government’s duplicity and intrinsic untrustworthiness.

President Donald Trump (R) has long made clear his abhorrence of war, with its broad destruction and civilian casualty rate. The conflicts Trump has fought despite that abhorrence are emblematic of that, with their brevity, sharpness, and precision, which have vastly limited civilian casualties, including during the current conflict with Iran. In this latter case, sharpness and precision have limited destruction to Iran’s nuclear weapons development-associated facilities and military facilities and personnel. Civilian damage, damage to civilian infrastructure has been remarkably constrained.

Therein lies Trump’s mistaken imperative. In his desire to bring a diplomatic end to the conflict with Iran, he is overemphasizing his abhorrence for death and destruction by acceding to Iran’s insistence that Israel’s separate conflict with Hezbollah be included in any ceasefire agreement: Israel must end its conflict with Hezbollah. Trump pushed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into agreeing that separate ceasefire.

This is a broad mistake, and it will lead only to a prolongation of both conflicts with concomitant increased death and destruction. The better answer would have been (and still could be) to require Iran and Hezbollah work a separate peace with Israel and to resume full out attacks on Iran, this time with a view to destroying its ability to fight at all, with the conflict continuing in full force until Iran’s government men and women agree to forswear in a provable way its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, including an official statement acknowledging that the Strait is international waters and that Iran has no ambition to control it.