September 8, 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Brett Kavanaugh, Ben
Shapiro, Our Monuments, and the Never Trumpers
Friends,
I
did not spend that much time watching the Senate hearings on Supreme Court
nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It seemed to me, barring some late night bombshell or
revelation, that the judge would be confirmed, with all Republicans and perhaps
a handful of Democrats voting in favor, while the mass of Democrats would be violently
opposed.
Like,
I suppose, most of you, I did catch the programmed outbursts of dozens of
planned (the night before) protests by Senate Democrats, and then, the staged “I
am Spartacus” moment acted out by New Jersey Senator Corey Booker (D), who is
desperately seeking publicity to fuel his probable 2020 presidential campaign. His
complaint about non-released emails and his solemn announcement that he was—drum
roll please—momentously breaking storied Senate rules, fell on deaf ears when
it was discovered that the night before his outburst it had been decided to go
ahead and release the emails in question.
Ah,
but then, why spoil a publicity stunt by an aspiring munchkin, after all he
must prove himself to those raging lunatics in his increasingly Left-leaning
political party. The fact that his staged stunt fell flat will be ignored by
the cultural Marxist social justice warriors, who, despite its theater of the
absurd nature, will nevertheless “eat it up” and see it as an example of
courageous opposition not so much to the Kavanaugh or the Senate rules, as to the hated and despised President
Trump. After all, they say, “Kavanaugh is his
man,” and therefore, he cannot be good.
But
the Kavanaugh hearing was just one story dominating headlines this past week.
The other major story concerned a “senior member” of the Trump administration authoring
and publishing, anonymously in the far Left New
York Times, an attack on the president personally and boasting that he—and a
“few mainline and reasonable Republicans within the administration,” that is,
what I call “semi-Never Trumpers”—had managed to deflect and, in a sense,
undermine portions of the president’s Make American Great Again agenda.
The
author takes pride that he and a few others have been able to worm their way
into the administration, pledging their loyalty to the president and his
program, while at the very same time doing their damnedest to derail his
policies, or, as they call it, “to protect the country against this man who
would upset everything.” Trump for them, you see, is irrational, a
bull-in-a-china shop who is overturning the tried and tested ways of doing
things in Washington and, who, they say, “acts on his instincts and on impulse.”
And for them the not so hidden message
is that they are “saving the country from him.”
Of
course, this is exactly what the sixty-one million plus voters who opted for
Donald Trump wanted when they cast their ballots for him in November 2016: they—we—wanted
a bull-in-a-china shop who would radically shake up things and overturn the
status quo, most especially within the ossified and whorish Republican Party. For
it is a party that acts too often like a “kept woman” always pining away and
waiting for her latest assignment from her “john,” those leading personages,
political and cultural, on the Farther Left who are always moving as the
Italians say, “a la siniestra,” to the left, and who control the dialogue and
discussion, and decide what can and what cannot be said.
And
like those “women of the night” establishment conservatives in the GOP—“conservatism
inc.”—when summoned to jump and embrace the latest leftist nonsense, they respond
only, even if times a bit begrudgingly, “how high”?
Back
in late 2016/early 2017 there were those of us who raised the alarm about those suddenly-converted
Never Trumpers, those Neoconservatives, who had all of a sudden “found religion”
and who came hat-in-hand to visit with the new president in Trump Tower,
offering to “love, honor and obey ‘til death do us part.” There was the former
Waffle House waitress Nikki Haley, who had cursed Donald Trump to high heaven a
year earlier, all kissy-kissy—Lindsey Graham’s peace offering to the President
Trump and Graham’s eyes-and-ears spy within the administration. Haley got named
to the UN ambassadorship where ever since she has beat the war drums at every
possible opportunity—against Russia, against Syria, against whomever her
bloodthirsty Neocon handlers direct (she is, let us suggest, incapable of
actually formulating her own developed ideas, but does the job of the “war hawks”
on the outside of the administration).
Almost
singularly the stalwart Elliott Abrams, another Never Trump firebrand, actually
got shot down by the president as Rex Tillerson’s candidate for Deputy
Secretary of State, but only through strenuous activity on the part of certain
friends I know and those who fully comprehended the danger to the Trump agenda
with Abrams within the administration.
And
we all might remember that the president interviewed perennial nemesis Mitt
Romney as a possible choice for…his Secretary of State! Of course, that fell
through, thank the gods on Mount Olympus for small favors.
But
those early signs indicated several situations that would, unless understood,
continue to bedevil the Trump administration:
First,
Donald Trump was a self-made businessman whose word was his bond: what you see
is what you get. If a man, even someone who had been in opposition previously,
now pledges loyalty and fealty, “the Donald” is apt to take him at his word.
Second,
as a long-time businessman not that involved with or aware of the Lady Macbeth-style,
stiletto-wielding, backstabbing environment known as our nation’s capital,
Donald Trump did not fathom the political and factional intricacies and
intrigues that dominate the cesspool along the Potomac. “Neocon vs. Old Right,”
“Interventionist vs. Non-Interventionist.” Center for the National Interest vs.
American Enterprise Institute. What was all that to him…as long as the
candidate for a position (1) pledged loyalty and (2) appeared experienced and
capable of doing the job?
Third,
many in the Never Trump opposition after Trump’s nomination and unexpected
election success had one of those “come to Jesus” moments: they could remain
outside the administration, continuing as its bitter critics and foreswearing
cooperation—and some have done that: Bill Kristol, Max Boot, George Will, and others, even to the point of suggesting that they will vote
Democratic in the future, anything to rid them of the hated Donald.
Or,
they could take their own “Road to Canossa”—in the style of 11th
century Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV’s pilgrimage to Pope Gregory VII, after
battling him, to make their amends and recognize his authority. The only
problem is that many of those newly-minted Trumpistas have continued to
profess, at least in their heart of hearts, their previous views and their
determination to, as it were, bring the policies of the Trump administration “into
line” with those views. And like the anonymous op-ed writer in the Times, they see it as their “moral” duty
to correct the “errors” (according to them) that the president might make.
Already
these Neoconservative munchkins within the White House plot another incursion
into Syria, supposedly at the behest of hundreds of thousands of innocent
civilians in Idlib province in the northeastern region of that country. It is
the last area of the country controlled by ISIS and allied Islamic terrorist
groups, and its pacification is the goal of President Bashar al-Assad and his
Russian allies. Yet, despite the presence of an estimated 10,000 ISIS types, we
beheld this week Neocon satrap Nikki Haley at the UN, almost foaming at the
mouth, threatening the Syrian government and Russia with “dire consequences” if
they proceed to reduce and defeat the Islamist rebels!
This
was not the foreign policy that candidate Donald Trump advocated, yet it is
what his appointed minions—those cooing and double-faced prior Trump-haters now
in his administration--are pushing: a possibly major enlargement of the war in Syria,
a war that the Syrian government has all but won, but which blood-thirsty Russophobes
like Lindsey Graham hunger for, like rats after fetid cheese.
There
is, of course, an even larger semi-Never Trump contingent outside the administration.
There are such personalities as “little Ben” Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg, those much
vaunted commentators on Fox who see it as their solemn duty to continually
attack anyone to the right of them, in order to please the dominant opinion deciders
on the Farther Left.
I’ve
written about Shapiro, in particular, in the past: he’s the youngish semi-Never
Trumper who appears most eager to climb the greasy pole of success, whatever
it takes. And his praxis has been to vigorously attack anyone more traditional
than he as a way to demonstrate his “anti-racist and anti-bigoted” credentials
to his Farther Left friends and just how good a bloke he really is.
A superb
example of this comes in recent attacks on Corey Stewart as the Republican
candidate for US Senate in Virginia (June 6, 2018, accessed at: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/texts-daily-wire-tries-to-coerce-jerry-falwell-jr-to-drop-corey-stewart-endorsement/) You see Stewart accepted support from those who support
Confederate statues and monuments—a definite no-no in Shapiro’s
politically-correct book and an assured sign of “racism.” Shapiro is a “conservative”
that Leftists truly like. Indeed, leftie Seth Stevenson in Slate magazine (January 24, 2018, “The Many Faces of ben Shapiro,”
accessed at: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/01/is-ben-shapiro-a-conservative-liberals-can-count-on.html) literally loves the guy, loves his discordance with
President Trump, his pro-same sex stand
on gay marriage and his amenable positions on other social issues:
“…Is
the enemy of my enemy my friend? Shapiro is among a dwindling cadre of
Trump-averse conservatives at a time when the mainstream GOP and its media
apparatus are following (and sometimes leading) our cretinous president
straight into the muck. Shapiro is ascendant, with a growing media empire and a
large audience who adores him. Should there arise a constitutional crisis in
which this president attempts to roll his tanks (metaphorical or otherwise)
over the ramparts of American democracy, I will be relying on influential
right-wing figures like Ben Shapiro to help America hold the line. The question
I keep asking myself is: Will he?”
And then there is National Review Senior Editor Kevin Williamson attacking
Southerners (and others) who in any way stand up for their heritage. Many of
us, alas, can remember many years ago when NR
defended with intelligence and verve the South and when its writers wrote
articles that identified with American traditions and the inherited legacy of
Western Christendom, writers who demonstrated a willingness to defend those
traditions.
But here is
Williamson writing recently in the National
Review (August 17, 2018, “Let It Be,” accessed at: https://www.nationalreview.com/2017/08/confederate-statues-republicans-democrats-should-let-them-be/):
“I am never quite sure whether I am really a Southerner. Texas was
in the Confederacy, but West Texas is a lot more Albuquerque than it is like
Birmingham. I have never felt any sympathy for the Lost Cause. If I were
building monuments to figures from that era, I’d choose Frederick Douglass,
Thaddeus Stevens, or, if I’m in a mood, John Brown.
“Southerners — and some conservative
sentimentalists — tell themselves two convenient lies about the Civil War. One
is that the Confederate cause was an honorable one, the other is that the war
wasn’t really about slavery. Neither of those stands up to very much scrutiny,
and the former is mostly false in no small part because the latter is almost
entirely false.
“There were honorable men fighting on
the Southern side, to be sure, and their fight was an honorable one to the
extent that risking life and limb on behalf of one’s home and people is
generally honorable. General Lee is widely considered to have been an honorable
military man, and so was Field Marshal Rommel. But General Lee’s cause was
destroying the United States of America to facilitate slavery. The historical
record, including practically every Confederate document explaining Southern
separation, makes that clear enough. That the abolitionists were imperfect in their
commitment to the liberation of the slaves and that there were Southern men of
conscience who detested slavery and yet fought on behalf of its preserver does
not change any of that. The War Between the States wasn’t about cotton tariffs.
“Many of the monuments and statues now being abominated
and disassembled were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War
but some years after, often in reaction to such modest advances in the
political and social condition of African Americans as the early 20th century
produced. Some were nothing short of consecrated shrines to white supremacy
erected to Southern political powers in league with such miscreants as the Ku
Klux Klan. To the extent that today’s reaction against these monuments is in
essence Democrats cleaning up their own mess, there is some justice to it.”
I
wanted to quote Williamson at length because I think his admission and
declaration is a clear indication not just of his mindset about monuments
honoring Confederate veterans, nor even of his brand of “conservatism,” but
more, one of the deeper ideological characteristics of Neoconservatives—and,
yes, many of whom have now declared like the Protestant King Henry of Navarra, that
“Paris is worth a mass,” and conveniently and deceptively, have changed their
spots from diehard Never Trumpers to gushing and oily “supporters” of the
president…and, as inveterate globalists, are quite willing to get this nation into a shooting war in
Syria, if possible, and to overturn or derail the president’s campaign
promises, on which he was elected, if they can do so.
And
they have their agents—agents of the Deep State—within his administration. It has
been the biggest disappointment for those of us who were his stalwart
supporters from the beginning. But we did understand that a larger-than-life
figure like Trump, unblemished largely by the putrid muck of DC, also would be
largely bereft of those sensitized political antennae that one really needs to
have when going against the elites. We would have to depend on his instincts
overcoming those cloying sycophants who had gotten to him and promised eternal
fealty (with their fingers crossed behind their backs).
Now,
as always, that has been our hope—that Donald Trump’s sound instincts, his
intuitions as he expressed them on the campaign trail, would somehow triumph
over the advisors that he, himself, brought in…yes, brought in honestly as he
believed their professions of faith and their resumes.
And
that is where I—and probably you —remain, and hope. For it may be the only current political hope
we really have.
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