Bernie

My take on Bernie Sanders, as of today:

• At this point, he is asking for support.
• If he gets it and then wins the White House, he will stop asking.
• Trump has endured a "resistance" for the duration of his presidency, even though he was (and remains) unlikely to do anything that will really transform the way our country is governed. Of any politician out there who needs a "resistance" arrayed against him, it's Bernie. Would that happen, would our well-appointed functionaries inside the Beltway resist him, or make his dreams come true? 

Get to it

Back in 2016, this feature's political stance was NeverTrump. Once the election was decided, it no longer made any sense to hold that stance. Never was negated. So it was, at least in my mind, time to judge Trump on his performance in office, rather than his uncorrected personality traits.

We now have a 3+ year sample size of Trump as president. He's had successes -- the economy is generally going well, but it's not perfect. He's done less war mongering than any of his predecessors going back to Grover Cleveland. He's worked with Mitch McConnell to largely remake the federal judiciary, including adding two new justices to the Supreme Court. And he's spent much of his time dealing with a political opposition that has come at him with relentless ferocity. He's been impeached, but to no effect. If anything, impeachment has made Trump marginally more popular, because the behavior of his tormentors has been on prominent display and hasn't been a good look for any of them.

Trump would like a second term in office. Although I approve in broad outline of Trump's performance in office, even now I could be persuaded to vote for someone else, mostly because I tire of the drama. Yet, none of the current candidates on offer are even close to acceptable substitutes. It's increasingly possible the Democrats will undergo a hostile takeover by Bernie Sanders and his Jacobin followers. The other Democrats are mediocrities -- Biden was found wanting 32 years ago, Warren is a fraud on various levels, Buttigieg is a marketing campaign disguised as a candidacy, and no one else has any traction, including our local Senator of Small Things. Meanwhile two plutocrats even more dire than the Bad Orange Man, Nanny Bloomberg and the environmental grifter Tom Steyer, flood the airwaves with focus group invective.

If you want to get rid of Trump, I understand -- I really do. But do you see a plausible alternative? If so, it's time to make your case. Get to it.

Ambassador Sondland, he presumes

I haven't spent much time on the impeachment hearings because it's the same thing every day:

1. Witness implicates Trump in something nefarious in opening statement
2. Republicans ask questions that reveal nothing nefarious actually happened
3. Newscasts show opening statement
4. Lather, rinse, repeat

But for the record, Gordon Sondland, actually spoke to Trump, unlike most of the other witnesses who didn't actually witness anything. And if you read the headlines, you see he says there was the dreaded quid pro quo. But if you read further, you find out, well. . . .

"Is that your testimony today, Ambassador Sondland, that you have evidence that Donald Trump tied the investigations to the aid? Because I don't think you're saying that." Rep. [Mike] Turner asked.

"I said repeatedly [...] I was presuming," Sondland noted.

After some more grilling, Congressman Turner asked again, "Is it correct, nobody else on this planet told you that Donald Trump was tying this aid to the investigations? Because if your answer is yes, then the chairman's wrong and the headline on CNN is wrong. No one this planet told you that President Trump was tying aid to investigations, yes or no?"

"Yes," Sondland replied.

"So, you've really have no testimony today that ties President Trump to a scheme to withhold aid from Ukraine in exchange for these investigations?" Turner asked.

"Other than my own presumption," Sondland said. 

"Which is nothing," Turner responded.

Presumption. Hey, being presumptuous isn't a bad thing, so long as it's in the service of whatever agenda the odious Adam Schiff is currently pursuing. And yet we're likely to have Trump impeached over this crap show, unless the focus group data says otherwise. We can stipulate until the cows come home that Trump is someone many people find distasteful. But that doesn't mean he's done anything wrong.

Fair questions

You may have heard that Rep. Justin Amash, R-Michigan, is now calling for Bad Orange Man's impeachment. If you have followed Amash's career, you are likely aware that he is best known for being a libertarian of the Ron Paul stripe.

So how do you square that philosophy with supporting the Big State behavior of Trump's tormentors? Not sure you can, really. A few other relevant questions from Liz Sheld:

One more thing, J-Am, where are your libertarian principles regarding illegal surveillance on American citizens? On Illegal FISA warrants, national security letters, human intelligence assets being placed around a political campaign by the unelected political bureaucracy? The jack-booted fedgov strong-arming people to plead to process crimes? U cool with that bro, because TRUMP?

I would bet Amash won't answer those questions. But he should, because a principled politician (I know, I know) would have greater concerns over the behavior of the government before and after Trump took office. Amash may be many things, but he's not a libertarian if he's cool with what happened to candidate Trump.

Now showing across the internet

Full display

Readers of this feature will remember that I was, during the 2016 election, in the NeverTrump camp. I hated being there, because I did not want Hillary Clinton to be president, either, but I had serious misgivings about Trump's demeanor and assumed he was going to do irreparable damage to the conservative cause.

Once he was elected, I took a "wait-and-see" stance. I also stopped being a NeverTrumper, because what was the point? In the 2+ years of his presidency, he's really helped to clarify a few things, to wit:

• His opponents on the Left are unhinged
• His opponents on the Right range from unhinged to cynical, sometimes both (a good trick, by the way, but watch Bill Kristol some time if you doubt this assertion)
• Nothing that the mainstream media says about Trump can be taken at face value

A liberal college-era friend of mine made an astute comment about Trump. My friend, who has struggled with mental health issues, objects to the "Trump is mentally ill" tropes that seem to be back in the air, now that Mueller looks to be a disappointment. He said this:

Apparently, [George] Conway thinks diagnosing Trump will some how confirm or nail down some "secret" about him. Trump is already on full display. We don't need psychiatry.

And that's spot-on. Trump has been on full display his entire adult life. What you see is what you get. So, having viewed the display of Trump, and the circus that surrounds him, what do you make of the display? 

Doc Zero reminds us where we are

Via Ace, what should be obvious:

I don't understand how anyone who claims to be conservative needed to hear Democrats openly endorse infanticide in order to realize Dems are extremists on abortion and no one with respect for life can vote for them in good conscience.

This stuff about making the infant comfortable while you decide whether or not to kill her isn't a bolt from the blue. It's not a shocking aberration. It's the logical conclusion of Democrat abortion politics. It's not that much different than stuff Obama said about abortion.

It should have been obvious as all hell to any reasonably engaged conservative -- and most definitely to all professional pundits -- that Democrats are all-in on late-term and born-alive abortion. 

Once you accept the premise that someone else's life is expendable, any endpoint is arbitrary. Ralph Northam may get drummed out of the governor's chair in Virginia because he did some blackface 35 years ago, but the issue with him isn't his early adult deportment, but rather the disregard for others that he evinces with his statements on infanticide. There's more, though:

Passive conservatives long ago proved they don't understand GOP voters. This infanticide shock shows they don't understand Democrats either. They don't appreciate the value of what they throw away when they toss Dems electoral victory to score points in GOP power plays. 

Democrats are not your friends, kids. They hate you. Erik Paulsen thought he could keep his distance from people he found distasteful and that his political opponents would give him credit for goodwill. Instead, he got his butt handed to him.

You don't have to like Trump. Really, you don't. But understand this -- if you're a Republican politician or pundit, you'll get nothing for your virtue signaling. You will not be treated better in captivity. The Ralph Northams and Ilhan Omars of the world don't give a damn about your bien pensant posturing. They may or may not make you comfortable, but in the end they will decide and the decision will not be in your favor.

It's the only way to be sure

It's becoming increasingly clear that 2019 is shaping up to be all about getting Trump impeached. He will not be removed from office, though, just as Bill Clinton was not removed. So what's the point?

The always entertaining Kurt Schlichter has the solution:

This is all a lie and a scam. And Donald Trump can and should use his pardon power to highlight this fraud before he drives a stake into the heart of the elite’s soft coup play.

He should pardon everyone.

I mean everyone. 

Pardon Flynn, and Manafort, and Papadopliswhateverhisnameis. Pardon Stone and Corsi. Pardon Don, Jr., Jared, and Ivanka. Pardon Melania and Barron. Pardon Pence, and Pence’s pets. And then he should pardon himself.

For everything. Take it all off the table. Strip the elite of its ability to coerce perjury and ruin lives for the sin of dissenting.

Pardon everyone, for everything. 

It’s all a lie and a scam anyway, and there’s no sense pretending this is all some kind of legit truth-seeking exercise in support of lofty and noble principles. It’s a tawdry frame job by a failed elite desperate to hold on to the power that the people revoked in November 2016. We owe the ruling class no respect; there’s no reason to pretend this Mueller farce is anything but a transparent attempt to claw-back the authority the elite forfeited by being terrible.

We have more important things to do than play this game. Time to clear the chessboard.

Lessons learned, yet again

Another former #NeverTrumper sees the dawn:

Kavanaugh was a normal establishment Republican pick. Destroying him had nothing to do with opposing Trump’s particular flaws. This was about annihilating anyone who gets in the Democrats’ way, especially anyone who threatens their illegitimate Supreme Court policy wins. It was a declaration of war on every conservative, no matter how respected, reasonable, and mainstream.

There is no refuge from this sort of totalizing, destructive politics. The Republican rejection of Merrick Garland was political hardball; the sliming of Kavanaugh was categorically different and much worse. The Democrats crossed the line from policy disagreement to personal destruction, and in doing so they nuked any middle ground between themselves and conservative Trump skeptics. And they put every conservative on notice: You could be next.

And the home truth:

Capitulation to the outrage mob is contemptible, but it has become the norm, with lives ruined professionally and personally. The worst aspects of the online mob, the campus tribunal, and the gutter press have been embraced by the leaders of the Democratic Party, and they think any and everyone on the right is fair game. Those determined to believe the worst about the accused also believe the worst about those standing up for the rights of the accused, and want to destroy them as well. Dissent will not be tolerated—those who dare speak out against the witch-hunt will be burned as witches themselves.

I wish this was not so. I would rather be arguing about the Enlightenment than jumping on the Trump train. As a writer and scholar I want to persuade, not to destroy. I do not want American politics to be like this.

But as a voter who recognizes the unfortunate realities of our politics, I believe supporting Trump has become the responsible choice. Things may change, but right now Trump’s policies are better than I expected, he is not the authoritarian some feared, and he does not want to destroy me and mine. It isn’t much, but since Trump stands between me and those who would ruin me, he will have to do.

You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you would wish it to be. You may not want to fight, but there's a war on.

Lessons learned

In a lengthy (but deeply useful) summation of the Kavanaugh aftermath, Victor Davis Hanson deftly explains what I got wrong in 2016:

The preppy Kavanaugh — by class, education, comportment, and prior employment — was about as pure a Bushite as one could imagine. His opinions were doctrinaire conservative and traditionalist, in the sense of interpreting rather than making laws.

To destroy a judge like Kavanaugh reflected that the New Left’s hatred of Trump had always been incidental to its essential loathing of conservatives in general. For a remnant group of Never Trumpers to oppose Kavanaugh, then, reflected the elevation of their own personal hatred for Trump over the critical elevation of a principled jurist to the Supreme Court. Supposedly, Kavanaugh was soiled by a Trump handprint, and therefore it was better to have a more liberal court than see Trump get any credit for taking the court in a direction only previously dreamed of by conservatives.

Never Trumpers had always assured their former conservative colleagues that Trump would either fail or prove liberal. But he has done neither. And as far as his demonstrable crudity and uncouthness, the hearings showed that the Democrats were far crueler and crass in deed than Trump was in word. So perhaps half of the small minority of Republican Never Trumpers, in horror at the Antifa tactics of the Democrats, retreated to the old adage of “hang together or hang separately.” Those who doubled down by joining leftists in opposing the Kavanaugh nomination revealed that they have crossed their Rubicon and now are either orphaned or unabashedly part of the new progressive Democratic party — at least until their useful obsequiousness no longer serves current progressive agendas.

Emphasis mine. The lie I told myself back in 2016, when this feature had a NeverTrump badge, was that Trump was simply pulling a scam and that his lack of scruples would lead to ruin. But nearly two years on, it's become clear that Trump, for all his crudity and uncouthness, has been the man for the moment. He's always going to say things that will make me cringe, but despite it all his heart is in the right place and his instincts are a lot more sound than those of his starboard side critics, myself included.

And right on cue, Hillary Clinton reemerged yesterday and drove the point home:

Civility can only return if Hillary and her cabal gets power back. People are always docile if there's a boot on their throat. And let's not pretend civility, in the Left's construct, is anything other than a boot on the throat.

Can you think of anyone on the Left who has behaved honorably in recent weeks? Is there anyone on that side of the aisle who wouldn't crush people who get in their way, if only afforded the opportunity?

My great concern is that conservatives of all stripes will enjoy the Kavanaugh victory and then stop fighting the Left. It's the default position of many conservatives, who are involved in politics only because they are required to be. The Left never sleeps and never relents. There is an election in less than a month. The Left must be defeated again.

Pant-Lodestar

(Apologies in advance for the profanity, but sometimes a blue term is le mot juste.) I'm not going to give the New York Times a link for their chickenshit op-ed yesterday. You can get to it by clicking on this Ann Althouse link if you choose, but the Old Gray Lady's perfidy ought not get any clicks or rewards. Althouse sums the argument well enough, anyway:

Unsung heroes? This person is singing about his own heroism. We just don't know his/her name, because he/she has got to stay hidden to continue sabotaging the work of the President the deplorables elected.

Self-regard is always a growth stock inside the Beltway, so that's the least surprising part of this nonsense. I'm guessing this will be at least the 174,274th time this point has been made, but so it goes: if the Metternich who wrote this piece really feels this way, he/she/it ought to resign and make a public, on the record, statement detailing specific examples of the president's incompetence. I'd also bet dollars to donuts that this individual is one of the anonymous sources for Bob Woodward's new book. We call this "cross-promotion" in the industry.

Much has been made about the use of the word "lodestar" in the piece. It's a word Mike Pence is fond of using. I sincerely doubt Pence wrote the piece, though. Pence is a good soldier. I'm guessing the actual writer isn't as senior as the Times would have you believe. I'm also guessing the actual writer will be discovered, fired, and will have no trouble making up for lost income because there's a lot of money to be made in Trump-bashing. Man, it's tiresome, though. And I continue to believe that Trump is about to turn the tables on these clowns.

Home Truth

Victor Davis Hanson, on why Never Trump is a mug's game, especially for its most visible practitioners:

Republicans who for two years have made the argument that Trump’s personal downsides have outweighed his otherwise conservative agenda, or that his unorthodox ideas on trade and immigration nullify his judicial appointments and tax and deregulation record, will not suddenly be called in to nurse a Republican Phoenix to arise out of the Trump ashes.

At least 85 to 90 percent of the Republican party disagrees with Never Trump absolutism. Fair or not, the so-called Never Trumpers would be as likely to be blamed for their nonstop ankle-biting of a deposed Trump as they are to be cited as prescient in warning of the ultimate wages of his sins.

It is also likely that MSNBC, CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times would view Never Trumpers in the fashion that MSNBC once saw Pat Buchanan after the end of the Bush presidency, the successful Iraq surge, and the ascendency of Barack Obama: a once-expedient conservative resource to fuel Bush opposition, but no longer needed or wanted after his utility was over, and so to be gradually eased out once a suitable illiberal pretext could be found.

While it is desirable for liberal organs to have a “conservative” writing 24/7 about the evils of Trump, it is not of much value, once the evils of Trump are ostensibly gone. In other words, in a post-Trump world, many of the Never Trump Republicans would likely be faced with either becoming permanent converts to the liberal cause or being orphaned from their once-welcoming liberal friends and current coveted progressive billets.

The name on the byline might say Kristol, or French, or Will, or Sykes, but the real name is Charmin.

One brief thing to call to your attention this morning

One thing about the infamous Steele Dossier has always puzzled me, which is the early support of the effort to get dirt on Republican candidates, especially Trump, by the Washington Free Beacon, which is largely a conservative website. It's also puzzled me why The Weekly Standard, which has long fancied itself a bulwark of conservatism, Beltway-style, has always been so supportive of taking Trump down, even now, nearly two years since the election.

We may have an answer, thanks to this report from Julie Kelly, writing for the website American Greatness, discussing the recent support from Bill Kristol's publication for the odious Peter Strzok:

So, what’s with the fanboying between the Standard—an allegedly serious publication dedicated to advancing conservative principles—and a corrupt government bureaucrat who embodies everything the conservative movement fought against for decades?

I found an article in the Standard archives this week that might explain why. On July 24, 2016, just days before Strzok helped launch a counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, Kristol gave Strzok and the Obama Justice Department a big assist from the anti-Trump Right by posting a flawed and questionably-sourced article. “Putin’s Party” is compelling evidence that Kristol and the Standard were far from mere sideline observers as the Trump-Russia collusion scam took shape in the summer of 2016.

At the very least, the timing of the article suggests there was careful coordination between the central players—including the Hillary Clinton campaign—and Bill Kristol to derail Trump’s candidacy just weeks before the election. But the article’s content also serves to raise alarming questions about the claims by many Republicans that “conservatives” had no knowledge of or involvement with the Christopher Steele dossier.

Oh, it's another conspiracy theory! But read on:

A few hours after the Standard piece went online, Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook reinforced Kristol’s message in an interview on CNN. Desperate to change the subject from DNC chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s pending resignation, Mook also claimed the Russians were behind the DNC’s computer hack because Putin wanted Trump to win. There were other similarities to Kristol’s article. “Trump and his allies made changes to the Republican platform to make it more pro-Russian,” Mook told Jake Tapper. “And we saw him talking about how NATO shouldn’t intervene to defend our Eastern European allies if they are attacked by Russia. So, I think, when you put all this together, it’s a disturbing picture.”

The next day, Carter Page received his first text from a reporter and former Wall Street Journal colleague of Simpson’s, asking him about his ties to Russia and mentioning dossier-sourced specifics. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest fielded his first (planted) question during the daily press briefing by an AP reporter, who oddly asked whether the DNC hack was an attempt to influence the election in favor of Donald Trump.

Coincidence? Not a chance.

Kristol would take to Twitter dozens of times before the election to promote the Trump-Russia collusion fantasy, even referring to the GOP as “the Putin Party.” Kristol’s handpicked candidate to challenge Trump, Evan McMullin, also pushed the Trump-Russia narrative. (On the other hand, despite Fusion and Glenn Simpson being covered in the conservative media for more than a year, Kristol has zero tweets about the firm.)

It might be easy to dismiss all of this as mere happenstance, the rantings of a fierce Trump foe determined to do whatever he could to stop Trump from winning. But there is an important sidebar to consider: The Washington Free Beacon admitted last year that they retained Fusion from late 2015 until April 2016 to gather opposition research on Republican primary candidates. The website is run by Kristol’s son-in-law, Matthew Continetti. The Beacon posted numerous negative stories about the Trump campaign in 2016, including hit pieces on Carter Page in March and July.

Rudy Giuliani has been huffing and puffing rather a lot lately about how it's all about to come crashing down and demanding the Mueller write his report now. It's worth remembering that Trump has access to every document Mueller has used up to this point. He also has access to all the information that was used against him. He's been waiting, waiting, occasionally firing a jab at Jeff Sessions, but mostly letting things play out. The game will be on shortly, I think.

More at the link. Worth your time.

Divide

When Donald Trump began his campaign in 2015, I was disgusted with him. During 2016, I publicly identified myself as a NeverTrumper. For however long Trump is president, I'll never be very comfortable with him. But he is the president. And many of the people who oppose him are far worse than Trump is. 

John Kass, writing for the Chicago Tribune, makes the salient point:

So, what is bothersome isn’t that reporters and many pundits don’t understand Trump. I really don’t know who does understand him. He wasn’t my choice for president.

But what concerns me are his voters, our countrymen and women. That’s half of our nation. And what bothers me is that I really don’t think many in journalism want to understand them.

Shame them? Yes. Understand them? No.

Pharisees come in many packages. Back to Kass:

But Trump’s voters know what put him in the White House. It wasn’t merely that Hillary Clinton was a lousy candidate. It was that Trump voters detested the crowd that backed her, loathed them; and those voters in turn were viewed as something to be stepped on, to be ridiculed for heresy.

By not wanting to understand them, I worry that journalism blinds itself to something very real, critical and, in the long term, dangerous in our nation: A simmering resentment against the establishment in much of red state America.

And it’s not going away even if Trump goes away.

I've spent the better part of the past 18 months trying to grapple with these issues, especially in this feature. Kass is correct -- from what I see, the concerns of many Trump voters are somehow illegitimate, at least to those who make their living telling us how the world is. And that leads to a bad place. Victor Davis Hanson senses it, too:

Ideologies and apologies accumulated to justify the new divide. In a reversal of cause and effect, losers, crazies, clingers, American “East Germans,” and deplorables themselves were blamed for driving industries out of their neighborhoods (as if the characters out of Duck Dynasty or Ax Men turned off potential employers). Or, more charitably to the elites, the muscular classes were too racist, xenophobic, or dense to get with the globalist agenda, and deserved the ostracism and isolation they suffered from the new “world is flat” community. London and New York shared far more cultural affinities than did New York and Salt Lake City.

Meanwhile, the naturally progressive, more enlightened, and certainly cooler and hipper transcended their parents’ parochialism and therefore plugged in properly to the global project. And they felt that they were rightly compensated for both their talent and their ideological commitment to building a better post-American, globalized world.

One cultural artifact was that as our techies and financiers became rich, as did those who engaged in electric paper across time and space (lawyers, academics, insurers, investors, bankers, bureaucratic managers), the value of muscularity and the trades was deprecated. That was a strange development. After all, prestige cars, kitchen upgrades, gentrified home remodels, and niche food were never more in demand by the new elite. But who exactly laid the tile, put the engine inside the cars, grew the arugula, or put slate on the new hip roof?

In many cases, people who voted for Trump provided the services Hanson describes. My job requires me to market products and services that people who lay tile require. I can't ignore their concerns and stay in business. And those who earn their living in media shouldn't, either. But too often they do. Back to Kass:

Think back on that laughter, on that giggling when she talked of “deplorables.” What followed were the snickers of the clique who get the joke at the expense of those who don’t.

That laughter stuck. And Trump voters took the memory of it to the polls on Election Day. Clinton won the popular vote, but Trump voters overwhelmingly gave him the Electoral College victory.

Now, Democrats are lathered up with the trial of this B-movie villain, this Manafort, whose alleged crimes took place long before he worked a few months for Trump.

Let’s say their Manafort fantasies come true, and he cuts a deal, and he serves Trump to special prosecutor Robert Mueller and the orange presidential head is placed upon a platter.

Then what?

What do you do with the millions who voted for Trump? Mock them into submission? Have them grovel and beg forgiveness before they’re re-educated?

You don’t have to understand Trump. But it’s dangerous not to understand the 63 million who voted for him. They’re not going into exile. They’re here.

And the lesson I've learned? They are me.

Conflation

I made this argument in the comments on yesterday's post, but Byron York makes it more elegantly here:

There have always been two parts to the Trump-Russia probe: the what-Russia-did part, which is the investigation into Russia's actions during the campaign, and the get-Trump part, which is the effort to use the investigation to remove him from office.

Trump's problem is that he has always refused, or been unable, to separate the two. One is about national security and international relations, while the other is about Donald Trump.

And he has his reasons. Back to York:

The president clearly believes if he gives an inch on the what-Russia-did part — if he concedes that Russia made an effort to disrupt the election — his adversaries, who want to discredit his election, undermine him, and force him from office, will take a mile on the get-Trump part. That's consistent with how Trump approaches other problems; he doesn't admit anything, because he knows his adversaries will never be satisfied and just demand more.

But Trump's approach doesn't work for the Trump-Russia probe. There's no reason he could not accept the verdicts of the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee, the Intelligence Community, and, yes, Mueller, that Russia tried to interfere in the election. There would be no political loss, and, in fact, great political gain, for Trump to endorse that finding.

Benefits would be fleeting, I suspect. But there's more:

At the same time, there is nothing wrong with Trump fighting back hard against the get-Trump part of the investigation. Voters know that Democrats, Resistance, and NeverTrump activists have accused Trump of collusion for two years and never proven their case. Mueller has charged lots of people with crimes, but none has involved collusion. That could still change — no one should claim to know what is coming next from Mueller — but Trump, as a matter of his own defense, is justified in repeating the "no collusion" and "witch hunt" mantras.

Trump may never go to war with Putin; I doubt that would happen. But he's been at war with the Deep State from the moment he declared his candidacy. Trump is going to have a complicated legacy; he's been a complicated figure throughout his public life, which stretches back nearly 40 years now. Future historians will marvel at how Trump turned his opposition into a mirror image version of InfoWars.

Yepper

I don't use Twitter much, but I admire people who use it intelligently (h/t AoS):

It's easy if you try

Top left is the Jason Howerton's tweet of Chris Cillizza of CNN, who doesn't like it that Donald Trump won't put up with his network's whiny Sam Donaldson wannabe, Jim Acosta. All those halo shots of Mr. Trump's predecessor tell the tale quite nicely.

And while we're at it on the explanation front, here's Kurt Schlichter with another hunk o' red meat:

One of the secrets of Trump’s success is having really, really stupid enemies, enemies who are so tone-deaf and out-of-touch that they simply cannot adopt commonsense positions that resonate among normal Americans. The establishment instead insists on telling Americans that up is down, black is white, and girls can have penises. Nope. No wonder the Normals have gotten militant, and no wonder a leader like Donald Trump came along with the vision to exploit the opening the establishment left for an outsider to rise and prevail by embracing the obvious.

And seriously, wouldn't all the halo shots of the former Leader of the Free World be another example of telling people up is down?

A good, succinct explanation

Writing for American Greatness, Henry Olsen has a few gentle clues for the Bill Kristols of the world:

I am not a Trump fan by any stretch of the imagination, yet it strikes me as fairly obvious why many Americans would like the president or think he is doing a good job. Some Americans have been so disaffected by economic changes of the last decade that they see Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of American jobs for American workers as a breath of fresh air. Others find his staunch support of American security as reassuring. Trump’s proposed Muslim ban enrages many of his opponents, but the polling data suggests that this more than any other proposal is what made him president.

Others might be less enthusiastic about Trump but have good reason to think he’s doing a good job. Religiously traditional people see themselves under siege from an elite culture that holds them in contempt and have chosen to embrace the devil that backs them over the devil who does not.

Still others, many of whom are traditional business or free market conservatives, remain wary of him personally but increasingly like his policies. Indeed, there are a number of polls that show Republicans who voted for Gary Johnson to be of this view. They might prefer someone without Trump’s flaws, but faced with the evidence of a man who hasn’t screwed up and who has implemented much of their agenda they seem willing to reconsider their prior anti-Trump views. But few if any of the punditocracy has followed suit, and fewer still can even see that many Americans don’t view Trump as beyond the pale.

The last three words of this excerpt are the key ones -- beyond the pale. It's a term that goes back centuries, but in the current context it means unacceptable. And as I've come to experience the current administration, I've had to look at what unacceptable means. For the Never Trumpers, it's still more about style and temperament than it is about actual performance in office. Trump's behavior will always be grating -- the braggadocio, the continuing struggles with subject/verb agreement, like that. All the boorishness will never be easy to take.

And yet, and yet. . . Trump's critics persist in making much of their critique about his deportment rather than his performance of his duties. Barack Obama's persona was certainly more elegant and classy than Trump's, but it was a veneer. He remains what he decided he wanted to be when he entered politics -- a Chicago politician. Obama may not have worn a pinkie ring, but he was quick to kneecap anyone who got in his way. He just was more discreet about it. Trump doesn't care about any of those niceties -- if he wants something, he'll either do it if he can take care of it himself, or he'll rage and whine and wheedle and threaten. But he'll often get what he wants. And to the extent his exertions square with good public policy, he'll be more successful than his predecessor and deservedly so. It all goes back to the distinction Eric Hoffer makes between Men of Words and Men of Action. We have a Man of Action in the White House. And that's going to make the Men of Words grind their gears.

Calling in an air strike on your own position

I'm seeing plenty of this image on social media today:

That monster Trump, putting kids in cages in. . . 2014?

The problem? This was 2014.

Late Spring

"How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked. 

"Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly." 

 -- Ernest Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises"

Suddenly, we are learning things. Andrew McCarthy:

See, it has always been suspicious that the anonymous current and former government officials who leak classified information to their media friends have been unable to coordinate their spin on the start of “Crossfire Hurricane” — the name the FBI eventually gave its Trump-Russia investigation.

When it began matters a lot. Back to McCarthy:

With the revelation last week that the Obama administration had insinuated a spy into the Trump campaign, it appeared that we were back to the original, Page-centric origination story. But now there was a twist: The informant, longtime CIA source Stefan Halper, was run at Page by the FBI, in Britain. Because this happened just days after Page’s Moscow trip, the implication was that it was the Moscow trip itself, not the dossier claims about it, that provided momentum toward opening the investigation. Then, just a couple of weeks later, WikiLeaks began publicizing the DNC emails; this, we’re to understand, shook loose the Australian information about Papadopoulos. When that information made its way to the FBI — how, we’re not told — the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation was formally opened on July 31. Within days, Agent Peter Strzok was in London interviewing Downer, and soon the FBI tasked Halper to take a run at Papadopoulos.

I’m not buying it.

I'm not either. More:

Last week, as controversy stirred over the possibility that the Obama administration had used a spy against the Trump campaign, the eagle eye of the Wall Street Journal’s Kimberly Strassel caught a couple of key passages from the House Intelligence Committee’s recent report on Russian interference in the election — largely overlooked passages on page 54.

It turns out that, in “late spring” 2016, the FBI’s then-director James Comey briefed the principals of the National Security Council on “the Page information.” As the Washington Examiner’s Byron York observes in a perceptive column today, NSC principals are an administration’s highest-ranking national-security officials. In Obama’s National Security Council, the president was the chairman, and among the regular attendees were the vice-president (Joe Biden), the national-security adviser (Susan Rice), and the director of national intelligence (James Clapper). The heads of such departments and agencies as the Justice Department (Attorney General Loretta Lynch) and the CIA (Director John Brennan) could also be invited to attend NSC meetings if matters of concern to them were to be discussed.

We do not know which NSC principals attended the Comey briefing about Carter Page. But how curious that the House Intelligence Committee interviewed so many Obama-administration officials who were on, or who were knowledgeable about, the NSC, and yet none of them provided a date for this meeting more precise than “late spring” 2016.

If this is true, we're now into "what did the president know and when did he know it" territory. It's worth remembering that Andrew McCarthy isn't a carnival barker like Sean Hannity and he is writing from National Review, which has been the primary Never Trump calliope in right-wing media. So what happened? McCarthy looks at the timeline and makes an educated guess:

There are many different ways the Obama administration could have reacted to the news that Page and Manafort had joined the Trump campaign. It could have given the campaign a defensive briefing. It could have continued interviewing Page, with whom the FBI had longstanding lines of communication. It could have interviewed Manafort. It could have conducted a formal interview with George Papadopoulos rather than approaching him with a spy who asked him loaded questions about Russia’s possession of Democratic-party emails.

Instead of doing some or all of those things, the Obama administration chose to look at the Trump campaign as a likely co-conspirator of Russia — either because Obama officials inflated the flimsy evidence, or because they thought it could be an effective political attack on the opposition party’s likely candidate.

From the “late spring” on, every report of Trump-Russia ties, no matter how unlikely and uncorroborated, was presumed to be proof of a traitorous arrangement. And every detail that could be spun into Trump-campaign awareness of Russian hacking, no matter how tenuous, was viewed in the worst possible light.

We are now approaching the "late spring" of 2018, two years on. Sunlight has been gradual at best, but we're learning things suddenly now. And Andrew McCarthy isn't the only one looking for answers:

Congressional Republicans have been calling for the appointment of a second special counsel to investigate alleged misconduct at the FBI and Justice Department for months now, and finally, a group of them will be introducing a resolution on Tuesday asking for just that.

Up to now, the Obama leftovers in the Justice Department, i.e., most everyone, have been trying to stonewall or kick things down the road. The latest gambit has been turn these new matters over to the Inspector General investigating other related shenanigans, but there's a jurisdictional issue there:

Washington D.C. attorney Victoria Toensing on Monday called Rosenstein's offer to expand the investigation "embarrassing and "a scam."

"He’s going to have the IG look into it? The IG? Now how is the IG going to talk to Sally Yates, who has left the Department?" she asked.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte wrote a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions two months ago, joining other congressmen in calling for the appointment of a second special counsel for that very reason.

“When I counted up 24 witnesses that he would not be able to access were he to investigate it, yeah only one conclusion, that’s special counsel,” Gowdy told Fox News anchor Bill Hemmer on Special Report back in March. Horowitz has no access to "anyone who no longer works for the Department of Justice, FBI, State Department," Gowdy explained.

Included on the list of witnesses would be former FBI director James Comey, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, James Rybicki (Comey’s former chief-of-staff), and Clinton fixers Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Another name that could be added to the list is alleged FBI informant Stefan Halper.

Just a guess -- Donald Trump is going to see the wisdom of this request and make it happen.

Dawn breaks, maybe a bit

The invaluable Jon Gabriel, from his perch at Ricochet, concerning the NeverTrumpers still out and about:

There’s an old maxim in marketing: people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. Likewise, no reader will take advice from a pundit who despises them.

Right. And even David Brooks is starting to figure it out:

Part of the problem is that anti-Trumpism has a tendency to be insufferably condescending. For example, my colleague Thomas B. Edsall beautifully summarized the recent academic analyses of what personality traits supposedly determine Trump support.

Trump opponents, the academics say, are open-minded and value independence and novelty. Trump supporters, they continue, are closed-minded, change-averse and desperate for security.

This analysis strikes me as psychologically wrong (every human being requires both a secure base and an open field — we can’t be divided into opposing camps), journalistically wrong (Trump supporters voted for the man precisely because they wanted transformational change) and an epic attempt to offend 40 percent of our fellow citizens by reducing them to psychological inferiors.

Yep. That approach is going to be persuasive. There's more:

The main reason Trump won the presidency is that tens of millions of Americans rightly feel that their local economies are under attack, their communities are dissolving and their religious liberties are under threat. Trump understood the problems of large parts of America better than anyone else. He has been able to strengthen his grip on power over the past year because he has governed as he campaigned.

Until somebody comes up with a better defense strategy, Trump and Trumpism will dominate. Voters are willing to put up with a lot of nonsense for a president they think is basically on their side.

My own NeverTrump stance was predicated on the belief that Trump didn't really care and that it was a put-on. As it turns out, I was wrong about that. The evidence mounts that his concerns are real and genuine. His solutions may not work, but that's a public policy debate, not a personal debate. And for the Left, it's always personal. And almost always ad hominem. I keep seeing college friends who are openly cheering for the old white men who supported Trump (no one else could have, natch) to die so they can have their imagined paradise. I know a lot of old white men who have spent their lives making sacrifices for their families and paying plenty of taxes to support the bien pensant class that would spit on them if given the opportunity. Trump may not succeed; the forces arrayed against him are powerful and persistent. But he wouldn't be in the position he is if the people who claim to be better were actually better.