Canadian Cincinnatus

Mainstream media lies and the closing of the American conservative mind

Remember how American conservatives used to respond to media bias in the mid-nineties? I do. They would research the fishy story and then point out its inconsistencies by citing facts and logic. Flash forward to today. When confronted with an unpleasant news story, today’s conservative is just as likely to retort, “mainstream media lies!” This is intellectual laziness and it is troubling. And no, I don’t trust the mainstream media either. I have been studying mainstream media bias since the late 1980’s and have been actively seeking alternate sources of information ever since.

But here’s the thing: even though media bias is real, it doesn’t license you to dismiss every unwelcome fact out of hand. If you do that, you end up in a positive feedback loop of anger and paranoia. Another way of saying this is that if you can dismiss every unwelcome idea that comes your way, you can prove anything. Which is another way of saying you can prove nothing.

No intellectually healthy political movement countenances this kind of dishonest thinking. Until very recently, conservatism did not. Something similar happened to liberalism in the 1960’s, which began the decade optimistic and progressive. But as the decade wore on, an increasingly angry and paranoid outlook took over. Martin Luther King was replaced by Malcolm X. Patriotic New Dealers were supplanted by Bill Ayers and the Weathermen. Liberalism ended bitter and violent because it had lost control of its intellectual self.

The same thing almost happened to the conservatism in the 1990’s. Along with the sunny Rush Limbaugh and the optimistic Republican freshmen who were elected in the 1994 midterms, a nasty, paranoid, extremist element metastasized alongside it. This took the form of the militia movement, whose members carried AK-47’s and spouted wild anti-government conspiracy theories. But the kooks didn’t hijack conservatism - not this time. Partly this was because conservative leaders took their responsibility seriously and policed the movement.

Take for instance a very illuminating exchange between Rush Limbaugh and a listener I happened to overhear in the mid-90’s. A female caller was alarmed at the prospect that the UN was going to bar code new-born babies in American hospitals if NAFTA passed, so that they could be processed better in FEMA camps. Rush had none of it. Though she refused to listen to sense, the intro to his show for the next week began with the phrase, “EIB, the pro-NAFTA network.” Every time I heard that, I smiled. Of course, what really killed off the militia movement was the Oklahoma City bombing. After that atrocity, nobody wanted to be associated with those guys. They were politically radioactive. This helped Bill Clinton win reelection in 1996 but also inoculated the GOP against further fanaticism.

When the Tea Party movement sprung up in 2009, the crazy element was absent. I put this down to Mark Levin’s best-seller, Liberty and Tyranny. If there ever was a right book at the right time, this was it. While ordinary people can often sense when something is wrong, they are often poor at drawing conclusions. They are not political philosophers and so look to leaders for guidance. Thanks to Mark Levin, the Tea Party movement was animated by the principles of constitutional conservatism.

Unfortunately, conservatism lost its way since then. For this I largely blame Mitch McConnell and John Boehner. The wise thing for the then-de facto leaders of the Republican Party to have done was to embrace the Tea Party cause as their own and use it as a vehicle for legislative victory. Instead, they openly scorned the Tea Party voters who elected them while simultaneously misleading them on issues such as immigration. This created a power vacuum that has since been exploited by unscrupulous demagogues.

What’s worse, this time, the conservative media went along for the ride. There is a revealing anecdote about Rush Limbaugh that bookends the story from the mid-1990’s. When Donald Trump recently proposed a trillion-dollar stimulus bill, Rush gushed his approval. In economic terms, Trump’s proposal is equivalent to Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus package which Rush had (justifiably) derided. As a conservative leader, Rush should have stood up for limited government principles, but he didn’t.

Even worse has been the behaviour of Fox News, whose recent election coverage has been terrible. First, they went all-in for Jeb Bush. When Bush dropped out, they went all-in for Marco Rubio. After he dropped out, they went all-in for Trump. It appears as if Fox learned all the wrong lessons about mainstream media bias. The problem with MSM bias is the bias. What most people want from a news channel is honest reporting. What they don’t want is more propaganda, only this time from the other side. Fox has become what we all say we hate about the mainstream media, except that they do it in the other direction - but with much less skill than ABC News, who is able to hide their bias far more subtly.

If conservatism is to become a forward-thinking force in American politics again, it must jettison all of the bad intellectual habits it has accumulated. It must recover its intellectual honesty and subject its own arguments and beliefs to the same critical evaluation it applies to left-wing ideas. Conservative thought leaders also need to relearn that standing up for principles is more important than partisan cheerleading and emoting. If they do not, conservatism will keep descending into the fringe ghetto where it is currently heading, and the only conservatives left will be a small number of True Believers.

The rebirth of the Democrat Party and the coming implosion of the GOP

After the 2004 Presidential election, many believed the Democrat Party to be in permanent decline. Jonah Goldberg gleefully contemplated that the GOP will have to divide into its social conservative and libertarian factions just to provide the American people with at least two realistic options on election day. In the real world, the Democrats came roaring back two years later to retake the House with a gain of 31 seats, and to tie up the Senate with 5 additional Senators. In 2008, they took the presidency, with further massive gains in Congress. Oh well, so much for the GOP’s Goldberg era.

The Democratic victory in November 2008 led to another round of triumphalism, and predictions for the demise of one of America’s great political parties – this time the Republican Party. Once again, the hegemony was short lived. The Tea Party came out of nowhere in 2009 to crush the Democrats in the 2010 midterms.

You can see what I am getting at. Given the recent past, it’s hard to believe that the new era of Republican domination will last any longer. In fact, I will go one step further. Normally I don’t make predictions, but I believe that one distinct possibility is that the 2018 midterms will be a replay of the 2010, except with the parties reversed.

Why do I think this is possible? For starters, losing gives the loser a number of advantages and the winner a number of disadvantages. Think of it as a negative feedback loop designed to stabilize the system. Their recent losses have given the Dems two big gifts. First, all the Clinton baggage is now gone. They no longer have to defend the e-mails, Benghazi, the Clinton Global initiative, etc. Second, they now have a clear enemy to focus on.

Contrary to popular belief, people to not come together by talking out their differences. That only leads to more acrimony. In the real world, what inspires people to work together towards a common goal is a common enemy. This election gave them that: Donald Trump. Every Democrat agrees that Trump is the enemy.

One big disadvantage for the winner is that he has to govern. And governing is hard. It’s not about promises any more. It’s about picking the least worst option and justifying to the voters all the negative consequences that flow from the decisions you have made. All the electoral reverses I cited were precipitated by mistakes made by the governing party. For 2006 and 2008, it was the Iraq War, the reappearance of chronic deficits, and the 2008 crash. For 2010, it was Obamacare, the Stimulus Package, and trillion dollar deficits.

In 2016, it was a race war that Obama started in 2011 to mobilize minorities against Mitt Romney. Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, Missouri, and Black Lives Matter were all designed to make blacks fear whites (and by extension, the white party – the GOP). They wood Latinos with wide-open, illegal immigration. As a result, to the white working class, it seemed that the Obama coalition thought of them as a bacillus to be eliminated. Unfortunately for Obama, the white working class reciprocated the hostility. It is instructive that while Donald Trump received fewer votes than Mitt Romney or John McCain, he did get a boost from rural rustbelt whites who flocked to Trump. They were telling Obama that there are now two sides to this race war. The most insightful pundit of this election, John Schindler, in this must-read column, calls it “America’s emerging nationalism crisis.”

So why do I think the GOP might get routed in the near future? First of all, the Republicans are in an very weak position for a winning party. This is mainly because of the extraordinary unfitness of Donald Trump. Speaking as somebody who thought Barack Obama was the most unfit man to ever be President, I think Donald Trump now holds that title. While he has all the inexperience of Obama, Trump has a series of grave weaknesses all his own. While Barack Obama is emotionally stable; Donald Trump is impulsive, vengeful, prone to angry outburts, and driven by petty grievances. Obama is literate; Trump has never read a book in his adult life. Obama is a family man; Trump cannot govern his lusts.

Even worse, in a shocking scandal completely ignored by the media, Donald Trump is in cahoots with a hostile foreign power that regards the United States as its “greatest strategic adversary”. For details, see my previous writings or those of the aforementioned John Schindler. This situation is unprecedented in American history. The closest analog is the 1948 Progressive candidate, Henry Wallace, who was also a witting agent of the Kremlin. I don’t think most Americans realize how dangerous the situation in Eastern Europe is, or how close we are – right now – to a conventional war in Europe.

For too many Americans, the only wars they know are the counterinsurgency campaigns of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. As a result, they don’t understand that the butcher’s bill for a conventional war can be far, far higher. Against this background, the US – the country that has ensured peace in Europe for the past 70 years – elects a man personally tied to the region’s aggressor. If war comes to Europe, Trump – and the GOP - will own that catastrophe. All of it. And Americans will learn how expensive isolationism can be.

In addition, this election has laid bare a number of the GOP’s structural weaknesses. The first is the alternative media. If you asked me six months ago, I would have said that talk radio, Fox News, conservative Internet sites are conservatism’s greatest strengths. No more. This wretched election cycle has exposed about 80% of them to be “infotainment hacks”, to use Jay Cost’s memorable phrase. While some in the conservative media are insightful and honest news disseminators, too many are ignorant fools propagating nonsense to goose ratings.

Even worse, the Republican Party’s ideology is now broken. From Abraham Lincoln down to 2016, the Republican Party was the party of Anglo-Saxon conservatism, that is of Edmund Burke, free enterprise, classical liberalism, constitutionalism, the rule of law, and a respect for tradition. Now that Trump is its de facto head, the GOP is being governed by a central European, nationalistic, socialistic ideology. This doesn’t mean that every Republican, or even most Republicans, think this way, but it does mean that the GOP will be pulled in this direction by a leader who thinks like a South American caudillo. Will the GOP revert back to its roots when Trump is gone? Hard to say. I hope so. More to the point, this ideological schism makes it hard for the party to pick itself up after the next electoral loss.

Unfortunately, the GOP has nobody to blame but itself. Coming off of 8 years of Obama misrule, winning in 2016 was almost preordained. The Republican Party didn’t need to take the problematic direction it did. But it did, and it will pay the price.

The most underreported story today: Russia’s systematic meddling in the Presidential election

In Europe, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin supports every fringe party and movement, both far-left and far-right, as long as they destabilize the status quo. For this reason, many anti-EU parties are funded by the Kremlin. For instance, in Greece, both the ruling Coalition of the Extreme Left, and the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn Party are bankrolled by Russia. Until recently, this sort of interference was unknown in North America.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Putin has succeeded on getting his tentacles inside every major political party in the US. First, there is Jill Stein of the Green Party. Last year, she attended the Russia Today 10^th anniversary dinner. Afterwards, she sent this creepy message from Red Square:

“It’s been so wonderful to see people come together from across all borders and from the across the political spectrum, really, come together around basic human values, around human rights, around the need for international law, including the need to reign in U.S. exceptionalism and totally reform and revise our foreign policy so that it is based on international law, human rights, and diplomacy”

This from a country that recently invaded two other countries, that has conducted a scorched earth war in Chechnya, has threatened Denmark with a nuclear attack, that has practiced a nuclear attack on both Sweden and Poland, and whose current leader ascended to power by orchestrating a terror campaign against his own people that killed 293 souls.

Then there is Gary Johnson, the leader of the Libertarian Party. On Russia Today, he defended the Russian takeover of the Crimea, stating that the Ukraine (a sovereign country) is to Russia what Puerto Rico (a territory taken from another country) is to the US. I guess Johnson is unaware of the Budapest Accord, which guaranteed the borders of Ukraine in exchange for Ukraine handing over its nuclear weapons to Russia. Both the US and Russia are signatories of this agreement – and therefore guarantors of Ukraine’s borders.

The real problems however are only encountered when you move up to the A-list of Presidential candidates. With Hillary Clinton, the concern is that Russia has the e-mails she had on her private server. The blackmail potential is huge. Against this, it must be noted that Hillary Clinton’s stated foreign policy has not to date favoured Putin.

More worrisome is the hack on the DNC server, which seems to have been done by Russia. Is Vladimir Putin is trying to tilt the election in Donald Trump’s direction by creating turmoil in the DNC? (Debbie Wasserman-Schultz had to resign over the contents revealed.) If Hillary Clinton’s principal opponent were a normal candidate, he would have immediately condemned this inexcusable foreign meddling. Instead, Trump made a stupid joke about it, regaling in his opponent’s misfortune.

Speaking of the Trump campaign, it has so far been the epicenter of Kremlin influence. Mike Morell, the former head of the CIA, said this:

“President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia was a career intelligence officer, trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them. That is exactly what he did early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities by complimenting him. He responded just as Mr. Putin had calculated.

Mr. Putin is a great leader, Mr. Trump says, ignoring that he has killed and jailed journalists and political opponents, has invaded two of his neighbors and is driving his economy to ruin. Mr. Trump has also taken policy positions consistent with Russian, not American, interests — endorsing Russian espionage against the United States, supporting Russia’s annexation of Crimea and giving a green light to a possible Russian invasion of the Baltic States.

In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation. [Emphasis added]”

An unwitting agent. An assessment like this - by a former CIA head of a presidential candidate - is unprecedented in American history. Trump supporters dismiss Morell, claiming that he is in the tank for Clinton. Of course, they do not consider the possibility that causality may flow in the other direction, that Morell only favours Clinton because he is horrified by Trump. This is what John Schindler says about Morell:

“His depiction of Trump as “an unwitting agent” of Vladimir Putin is shared by many American intelligence personnel, including most of the ones I know. And I know a lot of them from my own time in the Intelligence Community. Among seasoned Russia-watchers and those acquainted with counterintelligence, I don’t know any spies who would substantially disagree with Morell’s comments on the Republican nominee.

In a recent column analyzing Trump’s bizarre comments on Crimea and Ukraine, I explained that his falsehoods uttered on national television meant that the GOP’s candidate “Either is clueless about Crimea and Ukraine, being totally unfamiliar with the basic issues, and decided to pontificate on the subject regardless while on national television. Or he is consciously parroting Kremlin propaganda.”

Morell has chosen my second option for Trump, characterizing him as Putin’s man. The term “unwitting agent” is spy-speak for what Lenin (supposedly) famously termed a Useful Idiot, that is, someone who is duped into spouting propaganda that he may not fully understand. This is a harsh assessment but more charitable than the accusation that Trump’s is a witting agent of the Kremlin.[again emphasis added]”

Who is John Schindler? He is a former NSA man and a former professor of the Naval War College who has written extensively about Hillary’s e-mail scandal, carrying the torch on this issue since the beginning. He believes Clinton has committed numerous felonies. And he wrote the above lines in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law. Roll that in your Trump cigar and smoke it.

There are also worrisome reports about Donald Trump’s finances. According to Edward Lucas – probably the best observer of Eastern European affairs writing today:

“His carefree ways with other people’s money — including numerous near-bankruptcies in past decades — mean that American banks shun him. 

Yet his debts have grown over the past year, from £270 million to £485 million; which suggests he may have borrowed heavily. 

His cash assets, meanwhile, have shrivelled. So where is the money coming from.

The short answer is Russia.

As the leading American newspaper, the Washington Post, reported: ‘Since the 1980s, Trump and his family members have made numerous trips to Moscow in search of business opportunities, and they have relied on Russian investors to buy their properties around the world.’

Trump’s son, Donald Jr, boasted to a property industry conference in 2008: ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.’”

Then there are the numerous Kremlin-connected operatives in Donald Trump’s campaign, with the now-gone Paul Manafort being only the ugliest and most notable member. According to Schindler, Manafort was so closely connected to the Kremlin that he was probably run by a GRU (Russian military intelligence) operative when he was in the Ukraine working for Putin’s puppet there. He may have even helped orchestrate violent protests against US Marines in the Crimea in 2006. There is a word for somebody like that.

Then there is Carter Page, the Trump advisor with direct financial ties to Gazprom, the state-owned gas company that Vladimir Putin uses regularly as a foreign policy tool to enforce his will on other countries and to enrich his friends.

Third, there is Mike Flynn, Donald Trump’s foreign policy guru, a retired Lieutenant General, and former head of the Defence Intelligence Agency. According to Schindler:

“It seems that Flynn remains furious at Obama for firing him, and that anger may be the driving force behind his cozy relationship with the Kremlin. General Flynn has frequently appeared on RT (formerly Russia Today), the Russian government’s news channel aimed at the outside world. RT is unadulterated Kremlin propaganda—not a normal news network—as evidenced by its showcasing avowed neo-Nazis and having its own Illuminati correspondent.

Since Flynn is a Cold War veteran and a career spy, he knows exactly what RT is—he has no excuses. Yet this has not deterred him from appearing there regularly. To top it off, last December he attended RT’s 10th anniversary gala in Moscow, including a photo op with President Vladimir Putin.

It’s safe to say Putin would have a word for any top retired Russian intelligence general who regularly appeared on official U.S. television and did a photo op with President Obama. It’s not a nice word, and that general would be well advised to avoid drinking tea.

To make matters worse, neither General Flynn nor RT were willing to comment if he is a paid contributor to the network. If a possible vice president is an actual paid employee of Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin, that seems like something the American people should know.”

Again, to Trump supporters: this assessment also appeared in a newspaper owned by Donald Trump’s son-in-law.

You know, people ask me why I so strongly oppose Donald Trump even though I am a deeply committed conservative. This is why.

Conservatives have made a big deal of Hillary Clinton’s well-documented venality. And if she were facing off against any candidate but Donald Trump I would say the corruption charges against her would be disqualifying. But in the bigger picture, the Democrat Party has been corrupt for 150 years. There was Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall machine. There was the Daly machine in Chicago and there was fightin’ Tommy D’Alesandro of Baltimore. While Hillary Clinton may be high on the corruption scale, what she has done is no different than what Tom Pendergast did in Missouri 100 years ago. Another 4 years of Democrat corruption won’t kill the Republic.

But what would be unprecedented - an event unparalleled in American history - would be a President beholden to a hostile country, one with nuclear weapons aimed at the United States and who regards the US as its “greatest strategic adversary” (Putin’s words not mine). The only other example I can think of is Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party candidate in 1948. But he came a distant fourth in 1948.

The world situation is more unstable today than it has been since the end of the Cold War, largely because the American President for the last eight years has been so weak. If his replacement were somebody actively rooting for the other side, I do not think the center will hold.

This is why I don’t want Donald Trump in the White House. Every other consideration is secondary.

What Paul Ryan’s primary win says about the Trump media

A month ago I read in Breitbart that Paul Ryan’s approval rating had dropped to 43% in his primary fight against challenger Paul Nehlen – whose popularity had improved to 32%, according to the poll cited in the article. I thought, wow! Paul Ryan is about to go the way of Eric Cantor. This was followed up with articles announcing that Ryan is “running scared” ahead of his primary.

To my great surprise, I also came across articles in the non-Trump media (basically everything but Breitbart and Drudge) stating that Paul Ryan is cruising to an easy victory, and that his challenger Paul Nehlen is a nut who nobody takes seriously. They also referenced polls, but these polls had Ryan’s support among likely primary voters pegged at upward of 80%, with Nehlen polling in the single-digits or low teens. I thought, wow! Talk about dueling narratives.

My second thought was that the nice thing about this storyline clash is that we don’t have to guess which is right. We will know soon enough. Since the stories are so divergent, one will have to turn out to be completely false. My third thought was that this is an interesting test of the Trump media’s reliability. Are they telling a story that everybody else is ignoring and lying about, or are they are just pushing agitprop?

On Tuesday, Paul Ryan beat Paul Nehlen 85% to 15%. All the mainstream polls had predicted this result. The only outlier was the poll that Breitbart touted. It was so singularly divergent from all the other polls - as well as the final result - that its methodology and purpose can be legitimately called into question.

With regard to Paul Ryan’s victory, when you win 85% of the vote, your support is as universal as it is ever going to get in a free election. All politicians naturally accumulate enemies, people who hate you for purely personal reasons or because they are under the sway of some eccentric ideology. That Paul Nehlen only received 15% means his level of support was little more than white noise.

You know, Andrew Breitbart is a hero of mine. He was a bully who liked to bully bullies. He loved to fight for the little guy. The last thing he would ever do would be to shackle himself to some politician – even a politician he more or less agreed with. I cry when I think about what a Goldman Sachs alumni has done with his organization.

Trump’s “Second Amendment people” comment proves he doesn’t understand gun owners

I’m a gun guy. I have been for a long time. I am a collector and I have been a provincial level pistol competitor for almost 30 years. Last month I competed in the US National Pistol Championships in Camp Perry.

I have a lot of friends who are gun owners and many who aren’t. One of the annoying things that non-gun owners do around gun owners is to crack jokes about ‘taking somebody out’ or ‘shooting the place up’, etc. The important thing to note is that in making jokes like this they are not being mean. They are trying to be friendly and this is how they genuinely think gun owners talk amongst themselves. They believe this because their main source of information about gun culture comes from Hollywood and the media. When their joke is received with rolling eyes and blank stares, they are perplexed.

In contrast, gun owners never speak to each other this way. Why? Well one reason is that we have the tools and the skills to carry out the implied threat that would be joked about. We are afraid somebody will take us seriously. With great means comes great responsibility. Or as Robert Heinlein put it, “an armed society is a polite society.”

For instance, I would never, ever make an assassination joke because I sometimes travel across the border with handguns to attend shooting competitions (with all the correct ATF paperwork filled out, of course). The last thing I want is for US Customs to pull me over at the border because I have been flagged by the Secret Service as a possible threat. Non-gun owners make the kind of jokes they do because they do not understand this reality.

In making his “Second Amendment people” joke about Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump comes across to me like one of those non-gun owners. Clearly, the part of his speech where he delivered that line was an attempt to curry favour with American gun owners. In his ham-fisted attempt at humour, he ticked us off because we know we are not like that. He was playing to a caricature created by liberal disinformation to discredit us – one that we are continuously trying to distance ourselves from.

Andrew Klavan’s theory about Donald Trump is that he is living up to the liberal media’s caricature of a conservative because the liberal caricature of conservatives is all that he knows. He is opportunist who saw an opening in the GOP and he must put on the best act he can.

Trump’s assassination comments, while also distasteful and inappropriate, is a data point that Klavan is onto something.

Trump’s charges of a ‘rigged’ election are subversive

Donald Trump’s latest disqualifying comment concerned the actual voting process on the upcoming Presidential Election. Coming off a horrible week, when the wheels of his campaign were flying off, Donald Trump had this to say about the upcoming election:

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged.”

That a Presidential candidate from a major political party uttered a statement like this is simply reprehensible. The electoral process, and by extension, the legitimacy of the government itself is based on trust – the trust of the people in the electoral system. A specious charge of a ‘rigged’ election by a major candidate is irresponsible because it needlessly erodes the people’s trust – trust that must exist for the system to be able to operate at all.

Take the Presidential election of 1960, between Richard Nixon and JFK. Until Bush vs. Gore, it was the closest election in American history – and it is likely the only contest where cheating may have affected the result. But when told that the Kennedy wins in Illinois (8,800 vote margin) and Texas (46,000 votes) may have been tainted by the major Dailey’s Chicago machine and LBJ’s Texas machine, Nixon declined to complain. His reason? Throwing the result of a presidential election into turmoil with allegations of fraud would destabilize the country.

But say, you ask, don’t political candidates contest election results all the time? Of course they do. But here’s the difference. They do it after the contest is over. And they almost never make generalized claims devoid by specific allegations. What every competent candidate does is to ensure that his scrutineers and observers are in place at as many polling places as possible. These people are instructed to record the discrepancies they see and to challenge any irregularities they witness. And if an election is close, the campaign takes the compiled list of irregularities to a judge and asks for a recount. The judge then orders a recount, or an investigation, or finds the complaint spurious. That is how it is supposed to work. The system of scurtineers and judicial oversight is one of the checks and balances within the system to help keep things fair.

I will give you an anecdote from a friend with a long history of political involvement. In an alderman race in Toronto - this would be going back 40 years or so – the alderman-candidate he supported lost by one vote. Yes, you heard me – one vote. So, the losing campaign asked a judge for a recount. The judge in turn asked what irregularities they had observed that would justify his granting a recount. They said they had none (they neglected to instruct their scrutineers to record any they may have witnessed) but they felt that a recount was warranted because of the closeness of the result. The judge declined the request, explaining that a mere dissatisfaction with the result is not enough to justify judicial intervention. To justify a recount, at least one specific complaint about wrongdoing in the process was needed. My friend told that story to every batch of new scrutineers he trained. His larger message was that complaints about voting irregularities are irrelevant if they are unsupported by evidence.

This is not the first time Donald Trump has made specious charges about a rigged election. The first time was after he got shellacked in the Wyoming and Colorado primaries where won no delegates. He lost because those states have a complicated caucus process that requires a strong ground game, one that Ted Cruz had and that Trump completely lacked. Instead of acknowledging his error and congratulating the winner like a good sport, he screamed that the system was ‘rigged’, and that it was undemocratic because he received no delegates. Surely, there must have been Trump supporters in those states, he charged (conveniently ignoring the fact that he won every delegate in the Florida primary in spite of the fact that the other candidates collectively won more than 50% of the vote).

That he himself believed these charges to be without merit can be seen from the fact that the Trump campaign did not legally contest the result of either state primary, nor did it make any specific complaint at any time. It was clear that Trump’s only purpose in his empty allegations was to tarnish his opponent’s entirely fair victories.

Though I had supported Ted Cruz until that point, I was not yet turned overtly hostile to Donald Trump. But after that disgraceful incident, the scales fell from my eyes. Donald Trump wasn’t merely less preferable than Ted Cruz. I was beginning to see that he is morally unfit to be President.

A widespread belief among the framers of the US Constitution was that a republic can be maintained only by a moral people. Among the many things this means, it means that the people contesting an elections have a moral duty to not be sore losers. Tracking and reporting specific irregularities and wrongdoings is fine. So is fighting for justice for yourself. In fact, doing so is your patriotic duty. (For this reason I think Nixon was wrong in not challenging the results of Texas and Illinois.)

But to call the fairness of an election into question simply because you don’t like the results – or because you had a bad week on the stump - is the height of bad sportsmanship. It is also fundamentally dishonest, irresponsible, and unpatriotic.

Donald Trump, the America Last candidate

Donald Trump is frequently accused of being an America First-er. America First is another name for isolationism, an old strain among America’s right. The guiding foreign policy principle of isolationism is that the United States should avoid all entanglements with other nations.

Donald Trump gets the America First reputation from his consistent disparagement of NATO. The Daily Wire has a good summary of Donald Trump’s comments about NATO that he recently made to the New York Times:

“First, The New York Times asked Trump if he would defend NATO allies if they were attacked by Russia. He answered that he would “decide to come to their aid only after reviewing if those nations ‘have fulfilled their obligations to us…If they fulfill their obligations to us, the answer is yes.’”

This destroys NATO.

The whole purpose of NATO is deterrence: if you attack one of us, you attack all of us. Even if Trump were to consider whether to defend Estonia, Latvia or Lithuania – or, for that matter, Poland or Czech Republic – on a case-by-case basis, you don’t say that out loud, unless you’re either stupid or unworried about signaling to Russia that they can invade sovereign nations with impunity. Ed Morrissey of HotAir, who is not prone to exaggeration, wrote, ‘This kind of talk from prospective Commanders-in-Chief is no mere academic or political exercise; it’s actively dangerous.’”

Unfortunately, Trump’s love affair with unsavoury Russian governments is not some recent passion. This is what he had to say about glasnost in the Soviet Union:

“I was very unimpressed... Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That's my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.”

I guess he agrees with Vladimir Putin that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the worst catastrophe of the Twentieth Century.

And Russia is not the only enemy of America that Donald Trump has expressed positive views about. After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, Trump said this:

“When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak... as being spit on by the rest of the world.”

Earth to Carnival Barker: There was no riot in Tiananmen Square. There was a massacre, planned, initiated, and executed by the Communist government of China. Those students were peacefully protesting for western liberal values. Their symbol, the Goddess of Democracy, was modeled on the Statue of Liberty. To stop those protests (and save their miserable necks), the Chinese Communist government crushed the students with tanks and chopped them up with machineguns.

That all of this was well known at the time makes Trump’s comments all the more inexcusable. After seeing the photograph of the lone protester standing in front of a line of tanks, Donald Trump must have been the only person in the West whose reaction was one of sympathy to the people who sent the tanks. That is, Trump and a few Stalinist cranks handing out leaflets on the street-corner.

Oh yeah, he has also praised Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un. Of the latter, he had this to say:

“You've got to give him credit. How many young guys (he was like 26 or 25 when his father died) take over these tough generals, and all of a sudden... he goes in, he takes over, he's the boss.

It's incredible. He wiped out the uncle, he wiped out this one, that one. This guy doesn't play games.”

You really, really get the feeling that Donald Trump likes vicious strongmen. Personally, nothing can be more disqualifying of the Presidency than such an attitude.

But here is the real question: given Donald Trump’s well-documented trail of comments disparaging America’s allies, has he ever said anything positive about a foreign government that wasn’t hostile to the United States? Especially a formal ally?

Given that the governing principle of the America First movement is neutrality towards all foreign governments - showing no favour or disfavour to anybody, doesn’t Donald Trump’s consistent support of America’s enemies make Donald Trump an America Last-er?

For there is nothing neutral about Trump’s foreign policy preferences. He loves America’s enemies.

Forget Clinton vs. Trump, here are the 10 Senate seats you should be worrying about

Many American conservatives will be facing a dilemma in November: they can’t vote for Hillary Clinton and they don’t want to vote for Donald Trump. My advice to them is to remember that the more a decision resembles a dilemma, the less important the choice is.

To give a counter-example, last October Canada held its last Federal Election. I could vote for the Stephen Harper-led Conservatives and the Liberals led by Justin Trudeau. I did not face a dilemma. Because I was faced with a real choice, I knew exactly who to vote for.

A few weeks back I made the argument that American conservatives should not waste any more time and effort on the Presidential election. I argued that conservatives should understand and accept the fact that – for them - the Presidential race has already been lost. It was lost in Indiana when John Kasich and Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race. Instead they should concentrate their attention, time and money on important, meaningful races that have yet to be decided and where they can make a real difference for the better. Recently, Claire Berlinski made the same point.

To me, the most important goal for conservatives, given the current reality – that the next President will be hostile to conservatism - is to ensure that Congress remains in Republican hands. Given that Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court Justice will be chosen by the next President, maintaining the Senate must have the higher priority.

As luck would have it, the Republican Party will be playing defence this election cycle (thanks to their wild success of the 2010 mid-term elections). This means there are a lot of Republican Senate Seats to defend. According to the Hill, the top ten Senate seats most likely to flip are:

Mark Kirk (Republican): Illinois

Ron Johnson (Republican): Wisconsin

Marco Rubio’s seat (Republican): Florida

Kelly Ayotte (Republican): New Hampshire

Pat Toomey (Republican): Pennsylvania

Bob Portman (Republican): Ohio

Harry Reid’s seat (Democrat): Nevada

Richard Burr (Republican): North Carolina

John McCain (Republican): Arizona

Roy Blunt (Republican): Missouri

It can be seen that nine out of the ten seats are currently held by Republicans. In order to maintain control of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as many of these nine Republican seats must be held as possible.

It might be argued that many of these imperilled GOP Senators are RINO’s. This is true, but it is also true that the party balance in the Senate determines who controls the committees, and who controls the committees determines largely which bills get voted on and what get shuffled aside. Who would you rather have controlling the Judiciary Committee, the team of Mike Lee, Jeff Sessions, and Ted Cruz, or the team of Patrick Leahy, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, and Al Franken? This, ladies and gentlemen, is the question that should be at the focus of your attention now that the Presidential election has been settled.

Speaking of RINO’s, John McCain has a primary challenger in the form of State Senator Kelli Ward. The primary will be held on August 30. According to a poll taken in mid-May, they are tied at 41% each. If you want to participate in something more useful that a useless, no-hope, third-party challenge to Trump and Hillary, here is a place to park your time, money, and attention. It is a troubling sign of the misplaced priorities among conservatives that I had dig quite a bit in order to find out anything at all about this race. On the other hand, because so few people are paying attention to it, your personal effort will have all the more impact.

Don’t tilt at windmills, don’t cry in your beer, and stop paying attention to elections that have already been decided against you. There are plenty of important decisions yet to be made where your participation can make a real difference.

Oh yeah, the primary to pick the Republican Senate candidate in Nevada (for the Senate seat left vacant by the retiring Harry Reid) will be held on June 14. Do you even know about it? Do you know who is running? Don’t ask me. I don’t know. The conservative media has ignored the race – concerning the only possible GOP pickup in the Senate this year.

Advice from a Canadian conservative to an American Republican

I turned eighteen in 1979, the year Pierre Trudeau suffered his first electoral defeat at the hands of Progressive Conservatives (PC) led by Joe Clark (aka “Joe Who”). Unfortunately, all throughout the 80’s the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada was so bad that it wasn’t until the 1993 Federal Election - when Preston Manning and the Reform Party arrived on the scene - that I actually voted for somebody for the first time in my life.

Throughout that bleak period, I never voted PC – not once. Conservative friends would ask me, do you want the Liberals back in power? My response was who cares? The PC’s and the Liberals are just a choice between Tweedlededee and Tweedlededum. The 1980’s may have been a flowering of conservativism throughout the world - the US had Ronald Reagan, Great Britain had Margaret Thatcher - but in Canada we got a clunker in the form of Brian Mulroney. A venal, petty, unprincipled, and vindictive Red Tory, I could never vote for a man so hell-bent on hard-coding left-wing principles into Canada’s Constitution.

My guiding principle during those frustrating years is that politicians need to earn my vote. I have no obligation whatsoever to support anybody, regardless of their party affiliation. Politicians ultimately derive their power from the people not the other way around.

As a result, in the 1984 election, I voted for the Party for the Commonwealth of Canada. Decades later I discovered they were a front for Lyndon LaRouche. They only received 87 votes in my riding (one of them being mine), but it didn’t matter. They weren’t a serious party and my message - that I hated every mainstream option - was delivered. In 1988, I didn’t vote at all. After Brian Mulroney’s disastrous second term – where, in addition to his attempts at constitutional meddling, he enacted draconian gun-control laws (Bill C-17) - I felt vindicated. I hadn’t soiled myself by voting for him.

So if you are a Republican who thinks Donald Trump doesn’t have Presidential Timber, and you hate Hillary as well, then my advice is to not vote for either. You owe them nothing. It is up to them to convince you that they are worthy of your support. Don’t let anybody tell you it works the other way around.

But here’s the good news. As a Republican, you have a lot to be proud of. In spite of this year’s disastrous presidential season, the GOP is at a historical level of strength. The Republicans control 31 state legislatures outright, split 4 legislatures with the Democrats, hold 31 governors’ mansions, and have an overwhelming majority in the House of Representatives. As well, the majority of Senators are Republicans. And while the Congressional Republican leadership has been disappointing (to put it mildly), the new Speaker of the House is much better than the man he replaced. Paul Ryan may be disappointing in some ways, but he stands head and shoulders above the execrable John Boehner, a man of no virtues or talents.

So if I were you, I would tune out the presidential election. Regardless of who wins, the conservative cause has already lost that race. Rather, I would concentrate all my attention, energy, and money on local, state, and congressional races where you can make a real difference. These elections matter and there is a lot at stake.

Now that we know that the new President is guaranteed be bad (even if we don’t know his or her name yet), it is more important than ever to maintain control of Congress. This is especially true of the Senate, where, thanks to the success of the 2010 midterms, the Republicans have a lot of seats to defend. If I were a conservative activist looking for something to do, I would find a senate candidate to support. If there is none in your state, is there a close senate race in a nearby state? Perhaps there is a RINO who needs to be primaried.

To put things into perspective, I did not have this option as a Canadian conservative in the 1980’s. Thanks to iron party discipline, I could only choose between a Liberal trained seal or a Mulroney PC trained seal in my riding. And because provincial and municipal elections are held separately, there was very little reason to even go down to the polling station on Election Day. But because the American system of government is more decentralized, there is a lot you can do even if you hate all the options at the top of the ticket.

Please note that none of the things I advise involve lost causes or tilting at windmills. There are real, consequential elections out there that you can affect in a practical way.

So cheer up – and get to work.

Donald Trump and the strongmen

Yesterday, in his daily podcast, commentator Andrew Klavan listed five examples of things Trump has done that disqualify him for President. All five reasons are valid, but it was the fifth reason that struck a chord for me: that Trump often “has kind words for dictators.”

Mark Steyn has often said that he is the most pro-American. If that is true, then count me as the second most pro-American non-American. One principal reason I am is that - more than any other country - the United States has opposed tyranny and dictatorship. Obviously considerations of realpolitik require alliances of convenience with unsavoury regimes, but until recently, this was done reluctantly and only for pressing foreign policy reasons, and even then, not always. What was always the case was that no Democrat and Republican President ever romanticized a foreign strongman or considered him to be anything other than a lowlife and a thug. At least until Barack Obama, who has shown open favour to Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Donald Trump seems to want to continue this abhorrent policy.

Trump’s affection for Russian strongman Vladimir Putin is well known. Putin would be the former KGB goon who became the corrupt mafia leader of Russia; who rose to power via a terror campaign against the Russian people conducted by the FSB (the successors of the KGB); who openly murders his political opponents, such as anti-Putin journalist Anna Politkovskaja (who was machine-gunned on Putin’s birthday) and opposition leader Boris Nemtsov (who was butchered in broad daylight in Red Square); and who runs Chechnya through a vicious Islamist warlord, Ramzan Kadyrov.

If that weren’t enough, and to prove that he bromance with Putin isn’t some recent flight of fancy, in a 1990 Playboy interview he seems to agree with what the Chinese Communist government did in Tiananmen Square:

“What were your other impressions of the Soviet Union?

I was very unimpressed. Their system is a disaster. What you will see there soon is a revolution; the signs are all there with the demonstrations and picketing. Russia is out of control and the leadership knows it. That’s my problem with Gorbachev. Not a firm enough hand.

You mean firm hand as in China?

When the students poured into Tiananmen Square, the Chinese government almost blew it. Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength. That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak … as being spit on by the rest of the world–

Why is Gorbachev not firm enough?

I predict he will be overthrown, because he has shown extraordinary weakness. Suddenly, for the first time ever, there are coal-miner strikes and brush fires everywhere- which will all ultimately lead to a violent revolution. Yet Gorbachev is getting credit for being a wonderful leader and we should continue giving him credit, because he’s destroying the Soviet Union. But his giving an inch is going to end up costing him and all his friends what they most cherish-their jobs.”

So the Chicoms “almost blew it” because they ‘almost’ didn’t massacre the peaceful pro-liberty protesters? He also seems to blame Gorbachev for ending the Soviet Union. When asked about these comments during the election, he referred to the Tiananmen Massacre as a “riot”. Hey Donald, just a minor point of terminology: when peaceful protesters are machine-gunned in half and then run down with tanks, that’s not a “riot”, its a massacre.

Oh yeah, he also had kind word for Muammar Khaddaffi and Saddam Hussein.

I think it is obvious that such sentiments are completely contrary to the wording and spirit of the US Constitution, and would be abhorrent to America’s founding fathers if they were alive to hear them. The low regard for strongmen is one of America’s sterling qualities. It has propelled the United States to the first rank among the world’s nations. If you think America would have had as much success with a strongman in charge, think again. Why is it that all (and I mean all) the poor, decrepit nations of the world are governed by iron-fisted tyrants?

The worship of the strong man is also contrary to the principles of conservatism. Anglo-Saxon conservatism has two strands: libertarianism, and the conservatism of Edmund Burke. It is obvious that the worship of strongmen goes against every principle of libertarianism. To see what Edmund Burke thought about the worship of power, read this.

In other words, I regard Donald Trump’s infatuation with thuggish foreign strongmen as not only unconservative but contrary to the founding principles of the United States, principles that have made the US the world’s greatest nation.

Donald Trump should not be President.