Author: johncla

I didn’t vote for him, but was a supporter from day one. I agreed with most of his policies, and especially enjoyed all the schadenfreude and bulging eyeballs on the left. I never liked his personal behaviors; but who does?

Now, I’m done. The retreat from Syria, and the resignation/firing of the Secretary of Defense lead me to decide President Donald Trump is a threat to national security.

Yes, the withdrawal from Syria fulfills a campaign promise, but the way it was done must discourage our military. How will they react the next time this President or future leaders ask them to put their lives on the line? The President’s decision on Syria was contrary to the advice of his own military advisers. That decision, and the firing of the Secretary of Defense lend comfort to our enemies (Iran and Russia), and are discomfiting to our allies (Israel, NATO, South Korea).

The President serves at the pleasure of Congress, as written in Article 2, Section 4 of the Constitution:

The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.

The Constitution provides a legal process, but the decision is political. Here is one definition of ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’:
“The charge of high crimes and misdemeanors covers allegations of misconduct by officials, such as perjury of oath, abuse of authority, bribery, intimidation, misuse of assets, failure to supervise, dereliction of duty, unbecoming conduct.”

It’s clear where history will stand on this: the President on a daily basis shows us the quality of his judgment and character. This is a huge opportunity for any Senator or Congressman, especially any Republican, to set themselves apart from the herd. Call for impeachment. Congress should make it clear that when a President makes decisions like this, contrary to professional advice and without careful consultation with our allies, they will lose support of Congress and their job. National security is too important.

The bottom line
Sadly, I told you so. I’ve written before about the tendency to start military involvements that we don’t finish, and our failure to support allies. Harry Truman was a non-entity before being pushed into the Oval Office. Hopefully, Mike Pence will turn out to be just as good.

For months we’ve heard how important the Paris Agreement is. Environmentalists and their friends use language like “key to planetary survival”. The Paris Agreement is all about saving us from global warming. Let’s grant that there is a scientific consensus that global warming is real, but there is no consensus on the impact of the Paris Agreement.

The core goal of the Paris Agreement is to keep “a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”. Before the deal was agreed at Paris researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Global Change Science released a statement saying this: “even if negotiators reach a deal … it probably won’t be enough to limit global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.”

The problem appears to be what climate negotiators call “leakage”, defined here as: “a reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases within the State that is offset by an increase in emissions of greenhouse gases outside the State”. In this case, as stated in the MIT report: “For Africa, the Rest of East Asia and Rest of Eurasia the leakage is sufficient to overwhelm the emissions-reducing effects of the expected policies and measures”. It seems that the Paris negotiators sent us down a rat hole, leaving us with a non-functional plan.

The left loves global warming because of the synergy with its favorite tools for world domination: regulation and taxation. The details of the Paris Agreement are contained in a series of INDCs: Intended Nationally Determined Contributions. Each INDC contains a country’s commitment for action in the Paris Agreement. For example, see the European Union’s INDC, a list of proposed taxes and regulations.

The French government is now facing riots against taxes on fossil fuels, which are exactly what climate negotiators say are needed to fight global warming. Maybe the taxes are intended to discourage use of fossil fuels, or maybe the taxes are intended to fund prevention of global warming. Constituents are unhappy.

THE BOTTOM LINE
There’s a new term that sums up the Paris Accords: ‘virtue signaling’, defined this way by my Bing search engine: “the action or practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments intended to demonstrate one’s good character or the moral correctness of one’s position on a particular issue”.
There are problems with the Paris Accord: unrealistic, politically unviable. If global warming opponents are interested in solutions rather than just the opportunities offered by exploiting the issue, I suggest they try again with a program that actually gets us somewhere, and provide a realistic assessment of the costs.

I’m not the first to notice that the Democratic Party includes some bad losers. See this article published by USA Today: The Sore Loser Party. Even Vladimir Putin has noticed: “this is an affront to their own dignity. It is important to know how to lose gracefully”.
But, there’s more going on here than just being sore losers.

Call it a syndrome. I first ran into it at a state library association meeting in the early 1980s, probably in Butte, California. At the time I was trying out a career in public libraries and walked into a meeting of several hundred people just as a vote was occurring. The vote was on some issue where there was a very clear left/right divide, and the ‘wrong’ side won the vote.
So what happened? We voted again. As if to say “Alright, you clearly misunderstood. Try again.” No thought given to accepting the vote as legitimate and just moving on. There was a clear idea that there was a “correct” result. Unwillingness to accept results as legitimate seems to be common with Democrats.

• Florida 2000 Remember the overnight vote count, and the two successive recounts, and the subsequent Supreme Court decision? All lost by the Democrats, yet the whining continues today.
• Clinton/Trump 2016 Many Democrats, including Hillary Clinton herself, refuse to admit the election was legitimate. Yes, investigations continue.
• Georgia 2018 After a recount was complete, the unsuccessful Democrat candidate for governor acknowledged the election was legal but denied its legitimacy. “Will I say this election was not tainted, was not a disinvestment and a disenfranchisement of thousands of voters? I will not say that.”

There is a recent spike in use of intimidation tactics by progressive Democrats.

• Usatoday.com reported spokesperson Sara Sanders and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen being “heckled” and “hounded” from restaurants in DC.
• Steve Bannon, former campaign advisor, was confronted in a Richmond, VA bookstore in an incident that resulted in a 911 call. A statement by the bookstore said that a woman called Bannon “a piece of trash” and “repeatedly shouted obscenities.”
• Senator Jeff Flake was cornered in an elevator by protestors. The NY Post called it a setup: ” The women wouldn’t let Flake leave until had they yelled at him, face to face, for several minutes…A CNN camera broadcast the event live.”

This was all applauded by Rep. Maxine Waters, who encouraged progressives to keep it up: “Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

As the Kavanaugh confirmation process unfolded, progressives within the Democratic Party began to attack the legitimacy of important American institutions.

• The US Senate is un- democratic.
• The Supreme Court is illegitimate.
• The electoral college is unfair.

Notice that all of these accusations are post hoc. There was nothing wrong with the Supreme Court when the Senate confirmed Elena Kagan or Soni Sotomayor. There was nothing wrong with the electoral college when JFK beat Nixon in a tight race in 1960. The Senate was a wonderful example of Democracy when the Affordable Care Act was passed.

Of course it’s sore-loser syndrome, but it’s also contempt and elitism. Progressive Democrats (I’m sure it’s not ALL Democrats) are so sure their ideas are right that they feel entitled to throw the rule book away. Their sense of the superiority of progressive ideas is part of it, but there’s also a personal component: remember these two statements, from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama:

• “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic—you name it.”
• “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them…”

THE BOTTOM LINE
Yes, Democrats are whiny and poor losers, but many progressive Democrats also seem to think they’re above any need to respect fellow citizens, or democratic institutions.
So what should we do?

• Respect each other, including opponents.
• If you don’t like the electoral college or the Supreme Court, remember that democratic and lawful mechanisms are available to change them.
• Look around, the US isn’t so bad. Churchill said this: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”