Bigotry and Virtue Signaling

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Making land acknowledgments purporting to recognize the inequity of modern political, social, and economic successes have been in vogue among the Left and Progressive-Democratic Party political jurisdictions for some years. The recently done land acknowledgment from Los Angeles County provides a clear and canonical example, its repeated bodice-ripping mea culpas are especially illustrative: We respectfully acknowledge… and We acknowledge… and We recognize….

What’s instructive, though, is the utter lack of proposed solutions in these so-called acknowledgments. “We’re so sorry about all this; sucks to be you, good luck.”

That’s not just hypocrisy by these Leftists and Progressive-Democratic Party members; these…statements…demonstrate the same racist bigotry, if far more invidiously, as the Left’s and Party’s insultingly bigoted premise that black Americans are intrinsically inferior and desperately need the plethora of special treatments from Government, from “affirmative” action programs to race-based (now sotto voce) selections into universities and employment, in order to be able to operate, much less compete, in the same world as the rest of us.

Virtue signaling. Too bad, so sad. Carry on.

A Small Quibble…

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…within a larger problem. In the WSJ‘s Tuesday house editorial regarding President Donald Trump’s (R) quest for a grand bargain creating a global triumvirate (the editors’ term, but it’s apt), the editors had this characterization of Trump’s “Yalta 2” goal:

The Yalta analogy isn’t entirely apt since Stalin and Churchill were US allies in 1945.

That’s only half right, and that’s my small quibble. Stalin was by no means a US ally in 1945 or at any other time. The US and the USSR were on the same side in that war; the USSR was a co-belligerent of convenience, only for the duration.

The larger problem is that Trump wants to divvy up the world with our two most dangerous enemies, one of which badly regrets as a global catastrophe the collapse of the USSR late last century and is currently pushing at gunpoint his western border further into Europe while expanding his “gray zone”—a very dark shade of gray—conflict with the rest of Europe even as he kidnaps journalists that write things he doesn’t like, and the other of which has publicly and repeatedly stated its overriding goal of replacing us as a serious player around the world (which is tantamount to saying take functional control of our foreign policy and of our economy) and has a long-standing law requiring each business domiciled within it to conduct any espionage its intelligence community requires of it.

This is a meeting that should never take place. As the editors put it,

A new triumvirate that divided the world into spheres of influence would blow up America’s global credibility as a reliable ally.

Worse than that, it would badly weaken the US itself, making us vulnerable to defeat politically, even kinetically, in any conflict with either of these two nuclear powers, one of which is extremely powerful cybernetically, already holds the trump cards in rare earths, and currently has a first strike capability.

A Slick Idea in the Oil Trade

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Miad Maleki, of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies has one.

The US has imposed sanctions on some 160 shadow fleet oil tankers, 70% of which are relatively young as tankers go: less than 20 years old.

[T]he administration was reportedly considering easing sanctions on shadow-fleet vessels and allowing them to carry oil not subject to sanctions in an effort to bring down record high freight rates. Those discussions, a US official told Reuters, include the possibility of lifting sanctions on tankers “on an individual basis” so they can change hands.

Maleki’s idea is a tightening of this:

Washington should create incentives for US-aligned operators to buy ships out of Iran’s black market and put them to legitimate use in the Strait of Hormuz.

That legitimate use would be shuttling crude from within the Arabian Gulf through the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman, there to be transferred to waiting tankers for shipping forward to the oil’s final destinations.

Even just lifting the tanker sanctions on a case by case basis to facilitate each tanker’s sale to a legitimate buyer would be a very good move, but doing so to facilitate an American buyer’s purchase would make a good move much better, easing as it should, the shortage of American tankers.

And this, a bit of well-deserved schadenfreude:

Washington should open a gate and let the [Iranian] regime watch its fleet work for someone else.

Vote

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Voting season is upon us. It’s important that all of you—each of us—go vote regardless of which candidates or party you favor.

It’s not only our individual civic duty. Keep in mind that not voting at all leaves a vote for the other side unanswered.

Factions

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Recall that our Founders abhorred factions in our national politics, even considering it, in those first few elections, to be inappropriate for a candidate for office to personally campaign, the candidate relying instead on supporters to talk them up before the elections occurred. The Founders’ idea was that the subjects coming before Congress should be debated and then voted up or down by those initial 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators and signed into law by the President, or vetoed (and subsequently overridden by Congress, or not), on their individual view of the bill’s merits.

Of course, that goal quickly went into the trash heap, and immediately we got the straightforwardly named Pro- and Anti-Administration Parties, followed quickly by the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party, and on through to the Progressive-Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America Party of today.

Today we have factionalism laid bare and operating especially nakedly. Grace Mauser, Co-Chair of the New York City chapter of the DSA:

If someone needs your votes to make something happen, they should give you something in return[.]

The incoming DSA Caucus of the Progressive-Democratic Party is not alone in this naked trading of support for support. The Chaos Caucus of the Republican Party paralyzed the House and prevented the Republican Party from getting much of anything done beyond one tax-cutting bill, most infamously failing to pass the SAVE Act, which would have made our elections more secure if only by limiting the franchise explicitly and nation-wide to American citizens.

There’s not even any pretense of acting on the merits of a proposal anymore. A bill passes or fails (and the President signs or vetoes) based on the pecuniary or political value of what’s offered in trade for a politician’s—or today, a claque small caucus’—support. All along, too, we’ve objected as a people to the buying and selling of votes in our elections, yet our politicians actively buy and sell their own votes in the halls of our Congress–and we accept that as the nature of political sausage.

Given that factionalism has been and is here to stay, the longer-term danger of today’s factionalism is that the Progressive-Democratic Party and its DSA Caucus in the House will avoid paralysis and get much of the latter’s socialist goals passed and sent up to a Senate controlled by a Progressive-Democratic Party with its own DSA Caucus of Senators. After all, during Nancy Pelosi’s reign as Party Leader, we had Party acting on everything in the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party. That’s how we got Obamacare inflicted on us that last time we had the Progressive-Democratic Party unilaterally reigning.

We’ll see whether Party and its Caucus can maintain that discipline.