Tag Archives: responsibilities

Do Big Things Quietly

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Which is not the same as doing them secretively.  Just don’t bruit about any wonderfulness about you for doing them.  Let the little things you do do your talking for you.

Morally, do the little things quietly (but not secretively), also; let your efforts speak for themselves.  I’m writing here, though, about practical politics, and two examples illustrate the matter: Obamacare and efforts at managing climate change.

Recall that Obamacare was an effort to redo a sixth of our economy in Government’s name, for our own good: a big thing.  It also was highly controversial, the Democrats made a big deal out of how wonderful they were for doing this.  And it was, and is, universally hated.  Except for the Republicans’ efforts here.  Undoing Obamacare is as big a deal as doing it, and the Republicans are making a big deal out of how wonderful they are for working to undo it.  And their efforts are not at all popular, either.

Notice: both parties spent/are spending as much, if not more, energy on their virtue signaling as they did/are on the actual effort.  The outcomes were disasters for the Democrats in Congress, the White House, and in state and local governments.

Look, too, at climate change.  Dawn Wilson, a purchaser and customer relations manager (currently between jobs) in Roseville, MI, had some thoughts.

Of Clinton having a campaign office here—only to skip visiting the struggling working-class manufacturing town and send in Hollywood surrogates Ted Danson and his wife Mary Steenburgen, who scolded voters about climate change—she is sardonic:

Your message and your optics are everything when you are trying to persuade people to buy something from you or vote for you. Does this look like somewhere that needs to be schooled on climate change?

Never mind that what mattered to the folks in Rosemont, and everywhere else in the US throughout the failed Obama recovery, was the immediacy of their economic well-being, whether they would be able to keep their job—Wilson was fired after 17 years in her job—or having lost their job, whether they would be able to get another.  After all, at the time of the election campaigns throughout last year, the average time out of work, for those who hadn’t given up altogether, still was measured in severals of months, not the few weeks that’s typical of a normal recovery.

Yet the Democrats made lots of noise about their importance to preventing future climate problem of questionable likelihood and of no immediacy in the minds of voters, and made little noise at all—and so no effort at all, at least perceptually, about solving that today problem of voters.

As the Washington Examiner put it,

For the Clinton campaign to send Hollywood liberals here in the closing days of the race to preach about climate change was tone deaf on a Guinness record-level.

Like a shoe maker says: just do it.

Handling Classified

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FBI Director James Comey had this about Huma Abedin and her role in the ex-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D) classified email scandal:

Somehow, her [Clinton’s] emails were being forwarded to Anthony Weiner, including classified information.  His then-spouse, Huma Abedin, appears to have had a regular practice of forwarding emails to him for him to print out for her, so she could deliver them to the secretary of state.

Comey justified his lack of action with this:

We didn’t have any indication that she had a sense of what she was doing was in violation of the law[.]

There is, however, no requirement for mens rea under the relevant law; if nothing else Abedin’s actions fit the law’s gross negligence felony charactistic.

With such a bold, declarative statement about what Abedin was doing, then, I have to wonder why there’s been no indictment and subsequent prosecution.

Probably for the same reason he declined to bring a case against Clinton after having said her actions were excessively careless: it’s not politically expedient.

Military Academies as Professional Sports Farm Teams

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Or not.  Secretary of Defense James Mattis has reversed an Obama administration late 2016 move that

allowed academy students with exceptional sports talent to bypass active-duty and serve out their time in the military reserves to play in professional leagues.

Dana White, Pentagon spokesman, on the matter:

Our military academies exist to develop future officers who enhance the readiness and the lethality of our military services.  Graduates enjoy the extraordinary benefit of a military academy education at taxpayer expense.

Unfortunately, the new policy still lets these Academy-trained officers to apply for a waiver after just two years on active duty.  An Academy grad, like ROTC grads, normally have rather longer commitments.  An Air Force Academy graduate, for instance, must on entering the Academy

accept an appointment and serve as a commissioned officer in the Air Force for at least eight years after graduation, five of which must be active duty and the remainder can be served as inactive reserve. You will become eligible to request a separation from the Air Force after five years of service.

Mattis’ move is a good start, but Academy graduates should serve their full commitment, not just two years of it.

Having honored their commitment, only then should they be able to move on. Special treatment is uncalled for.

You’d have thought that to be obvious.

The Freedom Caucus of No

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Daniel Henninger had some thoughts in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal on this group’s first 100 days; read the whole thing.  I’m interested in one aspect of the No-ers’ first 100 days that Henninger was too polite to say out loud.  Henninger pointed out

Back in 2016, Speaker Paul Ryan and the House leadership held public hearings, conducted negotiations inside the House conference, and published texts of the proposed legislation to repeal and reform ObamaCare. The American Health Care Act that emerged from this process had both a political and policy purpose.

Its political purpose was to create a bill that could survive the House, survive the Senate, survive a conference and make it to Mr Trump’s desk to fulfill one of his and the party’s biggest political promises.

The policy purpose was to lay a foundation on which Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and his SWAT team of reformers, such as Indiana Medicaid specialist Seema Verma, could help Congress clean up the rest of ObamaCare over the next two years—moving away from the 2010 law’s 2,000 pages of legal babel and toward a market-based system.

But no (to coin a phrase).

The Freedom Caucus rose to say none of these pieces of the president’s legislative agenda could move forward until it got what it wanted: elimination of ObamaCare’s 10 essential health benefits.

The No-ers didn’t hold out for this sort of thing during those prior negotiations.  No, they waited until the American Health Care Act was before the public, hoping to extort concessions from President Trump and/or from their supposed fellow Republicans in the House.

The No-ers, with their behavior, have betrayed their own constituents by sticking them with continued Obamacare, a steaming swamp these persons have been pretending to want to get rid of.

If the Freedom Caucus of No welched on their 2016 agreement regarding health care, how can they be trusted with anything today?

FGM

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This piece will be, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali put it,

disturbing but it is crucial that we speak openly about what is taking place rather than shroud it in euphemism so as not to cause offence.

This piece is about female genital mutilation, the deliberate butchery of a woman’s—even a five-year-old little girl’s—genitalia for the woman’s, the child’s, own good.  And for the egos of the men of Islam who approve and perpetrate this atrocity.

This is, in Hirsi Ali’s plain language, what female mutilation truly is, in order from the “mildest” version to the outright butchery form:

  1. The ‘nick’: The girl is held down, her legs pushed apart and a needle is used to prick her clitoris. The incision is similar to a finger prick test for diabetes, blood comes out and the girl is considered ‘cleansed’. Often there is a ritual with a little party to celebrate the procedure.
  2. ‘Female circumcision’: The second method in terms of severity is often compared to male circumcision. The hood of the clitoris is cut off, in some cases the tip of the clitoris is cut off, known as clitoridectomy. In this form, an otherwise normally functioning body part is sliced off and thrown out. Disfiguring a little girl’s genitals in this way cannot rationally be considered anything but mutilation.
  3. Intermediate infibulation: In the third form of FGM, as much of the clitoris as possible is dug out and removed. The inner labia are cut off and the outer labia are sewn together leaving two small holes for urination and menstruation. In places where this is done without ‘medical intervention’ girls have been known to bleed to death. After infibulation is done it is imperceptible what has taken place when the girl stands up with her legs together, but in the obstetrician’s position it is clearly visible that parts of her genitals have been removed and sewn up.
  4. Total infibulation: In the fourth type of FGM the clitoris and inner labia are cut off and the outer labia are cut or scraped off too, then sewn up. When the girl stands, even with her legs closed, her genitals clearly look different.
  5. Vaginal fusing: In the fifth type of FGM, which is rarely discussed, all of the fourth type is done and then the inner walls of the vagina are scratched to cause bleeding and the sewing is again done. The girl’s feet are tied together in an effort to fuse the two sides of the vagina with scar tissue to close it up. Children can die undergoing this.

This is what The New York Times insists is acceptable and that we in the West must be more sensitive to the “cultural” practices of others, including this one.  This isn’t, after all, mutilation; it’s “genital cutting.”  You may have to scroll down a bit in the second link, to get to Celia Dugger’s, NYT‘s Health and Science Editor, excuse for insisting on “genital cutting” as a less culturally loaded term than female genital mutilation.  Blunt facts are never to be allowed to intrude into sensitivities, after all.

No.

These important cultural practices, as The New York Times and Journal of Medical Ethics put it, are a clear demonstration that some cultures are inferior to others.

More importantly, this is a practice that must be stopped, that must not be allowed in the United States, and whose perpetrators must be prosecuted and given maximum sentences.  With confinement with the prison’s general population.

Also: support Hirsi Ali’s AHA Foundation.