The Wrath of Khan

I watched not one second of the coverage of either convention this month.  But even I knew about the father of a Muslim soldier killed in Iraq addressing the Democratic National Convention.  It was a poignant story, but it no doubt would have quickly been forgotten if not for the Donald.

The whole point of Khizr Khan's appearance in Philadelphia was to criticize Trump's proposal to ban Muslim immigration into the United States by presenting an example of a Muslim patriot giving his life for his country.   Khan made his challenge personal by addressing Trump directly.  What sacrifices has Trump made for his country?  Has he ever read the Constitution?  Somebody had to know that was like waving a red cape at a bull.

Naturally a reporter chose to prompt Trump for a response to Khan' challenge and he obliged.  Trump said he's made sacrifices by putting up buildings and creating jobs.  He then pointed out that Khan's wife, the mother of the fallen soldier, stood silently next to Khan while he delivered his address.  Trump suggested that she wasn't allowed to speak because she is a Muslim woman.

This episode illustrates several of Trump's serious character defects.  First, nothing can ever not be about him.  It would have been so easy to say simply that he appreciates and honors the sacrifice of this American soldier and move on.  But he, at his core, is incapable of that kind of restraint.

He asserts that he made sacrifices by developing real estate.  He didn't make sacrifices; he made money (usually).  His decades-old claim that avoiding VD in the seventies was his personal Vietnam war could have been left in the past had he not demonstrated that this narcissistic attitude is very much a part of him still.  His assumption about Mrs. Khan's silence may have an element of truth.  She apparently comes from a culture where women are discouraged or outright forbidden from speaking out.  But that's entirely irrelevant to her son's sacrifice.

It was obvious the Democrats were going long on grieving mothers in Philadelphia, particularly mothers of sons killed by police.  I'm sure they would have preferred to have Mrs. Khan address the convention directly.  Maybe she was culturally inhibited or just shy.  So they had her stand on stage as a silent endorsement of her husband's speech while presenting another grieving mother for the assemble delegates to fetishize.

I don't credit Democrats with an ounce of intellectual honesty or genuine concern but sometimes you let these things lie so as not to extend their cultural lifespan.  Donald can't do that.

Secondly, it's quite obvious Trump hasn't read the Constitution.  It's obvious from many of his public pronouncements.  He hasn't read it for the same reason Bobby Jindal said he hadn't read the Bible - he isn't in it.  If he had, he could have addressed his Muslim immigration ban with a modicum of intelligence the way Andrew McCarthy did in National Review Online.

Trump lacks all self-discipline.  This is why he announced his intention to fund super PACs to defeat two candidates he's already defeated.  This vindictive self-obsession should be disqualifying in a presidential candidate.  That his legions of Trumpswabs can't see this does not bode well for the republic.  A country can survive ignorant leaders far more readily than it can survive ignorant voters.

Feeling Pretty Unappreciated Right Now

So I was riding the bus this afternoon and somewhere behind me two people decided to start a race riot.  Not really.  But there argument was loud, heated and racially tinged to the point that the driver had to pull the bus over to the side of the road and request police intervention.  The two antagonists calmed down before the police arrived but what struck me most was that this contretemps was between a black man and a Puerto Rican woman.

You get that?  Not a single white person involved.  I had no idea you could start a race riot without white people.  If you can, then what exactly are we here for?  I'm going to go have an existential crisis now.  See you later.

Marking the Further Decline of the American Republic

Three excellent columns hit the internet this morning.

Over at National Review Online Andrew McCarthy has a piece titled "Terror in France and the Annals of Willful Blindness."  In it he restates criticisms of the Obama administration's approach to Islamic terrorism that have been raised many times before - chiefly its reflexive rush to cleanse every blatantly obvious act of Islamic terror of any connection to Islam.  He identifies the source of this compulsion as, not just an urge to placate the supposedly moderate Muslims around the world, but an inability, a blind spot, that prevents progressives from understanding what motivates people like Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel to attack innocent people.  The idea that people could be motivated by religious obligation is incomprehensible to them.  As McCarthy says, "Contrary to White House blather, people do not commit mass-murder attacks because of economic privation or over trifling slights. They commit it because they are seized by commands that they take to be divine injunctions rooted in scripture, their devotion to which will determine whether paradise or eternal damnation awaits."

Read the whole column.  It's worth it.  Particularly because he also takes on a rhetorical tic common to politicians and pundits of the left and right in the aftermath of each new terror attack:

I had to fight of the urge to throw my television out the window Thursday evening. Images of bodies strewn across the promenade along the Côte d’Azur were interrupted by one vapid pol after another, brought on set to condemn the “cowardly” jihadist. Cowardly? Do you think you could drive a truck through a mass of humanity and then shoot it out with trained security personnel, knowing all the while that you were going to die? Our enemies are barbaric savages, but cowards? To do what our enemies do requires nerve, fervor — a cause they believe is worthy of the raging passion Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al Banna called “the art of death.”

I remember reacting negatively to this tendency as far back as September 11 when it was Bush administration officials falling over themselves to condemn the attacks as cowardly.  I wasn't sure they understood what that word means.  Willingly sacrificing one's life to a cause, no matter how repugnant, is not cowardly.  To pretend it is just makes it harder to understand the enemy.

Also on NRO today is a column by Kevin Williamson titled simply "I Told You So."  In it he explores why the oft-predicted "libertarian moment" never manifested itself.  The error is in the belief that most people are fundamentally in favor of freedom, that all those people living under despotic regimes around the world are ripe markets for liberal republics if only the oppressive dictatorships that govern their countries were removed.

But the fact is that people's desire for freedom, to the extent that it exists, is more often than not subjective.  That is, people want the freedom to live in accordance with their values and their desires but they are not willing to extend that freedom to others who hold different values.  As Williamson says, "Most people do not want their values to be tolerated — they want their values to prevail."

This mistaken notion about people's commitment to liberty has consequences.  A critical assumption underlying George W. Bush's middle-east strategy was that the populations of Muslim nations would embrace freedom if it were offered to them.  The record on this is spotty at best.

Closer to home this intolerance manifests itself in the persecution of Christian florists, bakers, photographers, etc. who erroneously thought that "live and let live" was a workable solution to differences of opinion over same-sex marriage.

Finally, over at Townhall, Stephen Chapman writes about "Mike Pence's Towering Hypocrisy."  Chapman recalls a speech the Republican vice-presidential nominee gave to the Federalist Society in 2010.  In that lecture, Pence held forth on the character traits essential in a president of a constitutional republic such as ours.  Among these traits are humility, self-discipline and "an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic but life itself."  Having laid down that marker, it's hard to fathom how he could have signed on as Donald Trump's second banana.  If nothing else, it's example #34,856,923 of why you should never take anything a politician says at face value.

A Day of Mourning

That's what the Fourth of July has come to be for me.  We call it Independence Day but the Declaration of Independence did more than effect a political separation from Great Britain.  It defined the purpose of government:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.  That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the Governed.

The purpose of government is to secure the people's God-given inalienable rights.  These are rights that don't come from government, they come before it. These are not phony rights like  health care or a "living wage," which are rights that can only come at the expense of someone else.  The natural inalienable rights are the rights to live at peace with your fellow human beings.

The evidence is all  too clear that American citizens by and large no longer hold to this view.  The only inference we can draw from innumerable "idiot-on-the-street" interviews as well as from election results is that today's Americans think the role of government is to provide them with free stuff at their neighbor's expense and to control that neighbor's behavior for his own good.

Look at the people we elect to office from the presidency on down and tell me we haven't abandoned the ideals that made this country great.  Like Esau, we have sold our birthright for a bowl of stew.