Rod Dreher discusses AG Barr’s speech to Notre Dame that I previously posted. It is a good analysis of the speech and important commentary on the role of religion in modern America.

Rod Dreher:

“…The AG begins by talking about the capacity for self-government, meaning not the form of administration of a liberal democracy, but the ability of individuals to master their own passions, and subject them to reason. Can we handle freedom? That, says Barr, is a question that preoccupied the Founders.

No society can exist without the capacity to restrain vice, he goes on to say. If you depend only on the government to do this, you get tyranny. (This, by the way, is what’s happening in China; many Chinese actually support the tyrannical Social Credit System, because communism destroyed civil society and social trust.) But, says Barr, licentiousness is another form of tyranny. People enslaved by their own appetites make community life impossible. (This, I would say, is what we are more endangered by in America today … and it will ultimately call forth tyranny, Chinese-style.)

Barr offers this quotation from Edmund Burke:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity; in proportion as their soundness and sobriety of understanding is above their vanity and presumption; in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves.”

Why is religion a public good? Because, says Barr, it “trains people to want what is good.” It helps to frame a society’s moral culture, and instills moral discipline. No secular creed has emerged that can do what religion does, he says. And by casting religion out, we are dismantling the foundation of our public morality.

“What we call ‘values’ today are nothing more than mere sentimentality, drawing on the vapor trails of Christianity,” says the AG.

Barr took the gloves off, saying that religion is not jumping to its death; it’s being pushed.

“This is not decay,” he said. “This is organized destruction.” He named secularists in academia, media, and elsewhere as figures who are not neutral at all, but have rather inculcated a kind of religiosity in their own project of destroying religion. They conduct their own inquisitions and excommunications for heresy.

Then Barr said something, almost in passing, that in truth deserves a lot more attention by religious and philosophical observers: that we have created a popular culture in which we the people are “too distracted” to take these questions seriously…”

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An interesting analysis of the Middle East and US strategy in the region. A long piece, some of which I disagree with, but worth a read and consideration.

George Friedman:

“…For several years, there has been a significant shift underway in U.S. strategy toward the Middle East, where Washington has consistently sought to avoid combat. The United States is now compelled to seek accommodation with Turkey, a regional power in its own right, based on terms that are geopolitically necessary for both. Their relationship has been turbulent, and while it may continue to be so for a while, it will decline. Their accommodation has nothing to do with mutual affection but rather with mutual necessity. The Turkish incursion into Syria and the U.S. response are part of this adjustment, one that has global origins and regional consequences.

Similarly, the U.S. decision to step aside as Turkey undertook an incursion in northeastern Syria has a geopolitical and strategic origin. The strategic origin is a clash between elements of the Defense Department and the president. The defense community has been shaped by a war that has been underway since 2001. During what is called the Long War, the U.S. has created an alliance structure of various national and subnational groups. Yet the region is still on uneven footing. The Iranians have extended a sphere of influence westward. Iraq is in chaos. The Yemeni civil war still rages, and the original Syrian war has ended, in a very Middle Eastern fashion, indecisively.

A generation of military and defense thinkers have matured fighting wars in the Middle East. The Long War has been their career. Several generations spent their careers expecting Soviet tanks to surge into the Fulda Gap. Cold Warriors believed a world without the Cold War was unthinkable. The same can be said for those shaped by Middle Eastern wars. For the Cold War generation, the NATO alliance was the foundation of their thinking. So too for the Sandbox generation, those whose careers were spent rotating into Iraq or Afghanistan or some other place, the alliances formed and the enemies fought seemed eternal. The idea that the world had moved on, and that Fulda and NATO were less important, was emotionally inconceivable. Any shift in focus and alliance structure was seen as a betrayal…”

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I watched Shannon Bream interview Amy Klobuchar after the Democrat debate last night. Klobuchar was a breath of fresh air. She is the only Democrat running who seems half normal. I disagreed with most of her opinions and policy positions as she explained them to the interviewer, but she still came across as a normal person. Too bad she is so low in the polls. It would be nice to see a national Democrat express normal views once in awhile.

Charles Lipson:

“…The most important thing to know about Democrats’ impeachment inquiry is this: It is not about removing President Trump now; it is about damaging him now so he can be defeated next year.

Impeachment normally seeks to remove the president (or a federal judge) from office. A successful House vote is only the first step. The Senate needs strong evidence to convict, and House leaders try to provide it with their investigation and public hearings. That’s what we learned in seventh-grade civics.

But Nancy Pelosi is not in middle school. She is teaching post-graduate courses, and she knows a Republican Senate is very unlikely to convict Donald Trump without a lot more evidence than has been brought to light along with a groundswell of public support. So, the House speaker has a more realistic goal, and it’s a purely political one. Her aim is to prevent Trump’s reelection. To do it, she has exerted tight, unilateral control over the process and handed day-to-day investigation to her California protégé, Adam Schiff, who heads the committee on intelligence. His secret hearings are in sharp contrast to the open ones held for Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton by the House Judiciary Committee.

Schiff’s closed-door sessions, his refusal to allow Republicans to call witnesses, and his prohibition of White House participation are all clear indications of Pelosi’s strategy. She and Schiff are using the investigation as publicly funded opposition research, complete with subpoena power, much like the probe that resulted in the second volume of Robert Mueller’s report…”

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The situation in and near Syria is complex. Far from being a close NATO ally, Turkey is increasingly becoming a radical islamic state enemy. Short of a significant increase of US military assets in the border area between Syria and Turkey and  including men on the ground, The US was in no position to stop a mechanized advance from Turkey’s standing army. Our nitwit media and gabby talking heads do not discuss this because it may provide insight as to why Trump took the action he did. I probably would have preferred a more aggressive action from the President, short of a shooting war, but I don’t have the information he does and I am willing to defer to his judgement. I don’t think a US military buildup in the area is in our interest.

Nicholas Sakelaris & Daniel Uria:

“…Oct. 14 (UPI) — U.S. President Donald Trump imposed new sanctions against Turkish officials for their role in the country’s military operation in Syria.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the United States took action against two ministries and three senior Turkish government officials.

“The United States is holding the Turkish Government accountable for escalating violence by Turkish forces, endangering innocent civilians and destabilizing the region,” he said…”

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Daniel John Sobieski:

“…While Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, two groups of Democratic senators have been colluding with Ukrainian interests to advance their own agenda and political careers.

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” – a group of Democratic senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same time the Democrats are pushing the Trump-Ukraine yarn. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff.

That’s handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine’s energy sector, directly in line with Burisma’s interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, “We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets.”

This was at a time when Democrats were waging a war on fossil fuels, opposing fracking, and trying to shut down U.S. energy production. American natural gas was bad for the environment, but Ukrainian natural gas was good for the campaign coffers when it involves Hunter Biden’s business interests and John Kerry’s former chief of staff…”

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Calif. Gov. signs law requiring colleges to offer ‘free’ abortions.

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…Any current critics calling for the use of American trip-wire soldiers to protect Kurds from the Turkish military — in the current stated mission to defeat ISIS and keep it defeated — should at least make the case that de facto fighting against Turkey means that it is therefore no longer a friend and should no longer be a NATO ally, and thus, in extremis, can be opposed militarily, and also that we can do without its geographic access and bases in the Middle East without harming ourselves or our interests. And note they should also assume that Turkey, out of spite, will release millions of refugees into Europe, and it will react to friction with Americans troops in Syria in who knows what fashion to their U.S. counterparts now stationed with nuclear weapons at Incirlik Air Base inside Turkey. Do we really wish to risk a shooting war with a NATO ally while 5,000 American airmen are inside its country equipped with 50 nuclear weapons?

Or barring that, they should at least argue that the current NATO roster is now becoming a farce, and Turkey’s membership in it a cruel joke — and we can therefore ignore all that when we like and as we please…”

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Sam Donaldson:  Trump Core Supporters “Ignorant,” “Don’t Care About The Facts Or Know About The Facts”

 

Worth clicking over for the whole thing. I stopped watching professional sports years ago for similar reasons.

Washington Examiner Editorial:

“…The embarrassing spectacle of the NBA’s millionaire players and billionaire owners doing the bidding of China’s communist rulers, and even attacking the United States in the process, has forced Americans to ask questions about our national culture.

Many have asked if the case for free trade was a fable, and that instead of us exporting American liberties, we are importing Chinese oppression. Others have pointed to the hypocrisy of “woke” NBA celebrities, such as Steve Kerr and Gregg Popovich, “brave” when defending elite morality in America but abject cowards when faced with actual cases of oppression that potentially conflict with their financial interests or contractual obligations.

But there’s a subtler point that it’s easy to miss: The censorious arguments from Beijing’s defenders sound like they could come from the mouths of campus leftists or appear on the pages of America’s liberals magazines…”

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Click for video

More videos at the Project Veritas webpage

https://youtu.be/W9BxZ_onlpA

Victor Davis Hanson:

“…There is no logical Democratic explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democratic Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project.

After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the emoluments clause, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux-coup, the Comey memos farce, the “resistance” efforts outlined by the New York Times anonymous op-ed writer, the campaign finance violations accusations, Stormy, tax returns, whistleblowers, leakers, the Mueller 22 months charade, and now impeachment 2.0, what exactly is the point of impeaching Trump just 13 months before the election?…

…The impeachment “Inquiry” can do as much damage as a formal vote without the downside of endangering Democrats in purple congressional districts, at least for a while. The aim is to create slow-motion, sustained hysteria, throw out leaks, whistleblowers’ accusations, transcripts, emails, hearsay, and what not, and see what sticks—without House members going on record until there is enough chaos created to ensure positive polls.

The blueprint is the psychodrama of the Kavanaugh circus that tanked Kavanaugh’s popularity and weakened Trump. The Intelligence Committee, as is Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D.-Calif.) forte, can leak selectively, never release full transcripts, call in anonymous witnesses, and now and then use redactions and immunities.

The Democrats can wheel Schiff out daily to his media platform to grimace, and in pained expressions suggest that the flabbergasting things he just heard, read, and saw behind closed doors are bombshells, turning points, nails-in-the-coffin, walls-are-closing-in disasters for Trump that he unfortunately cannot divulge in full detail, given the classified nature of his proceedings. If Schiff gets the required poll numbers, the House can vote to proceed…

…Sane observers see impeachment as a travesty without either moral or legal grounds to justify removing an elected president 13 months before the 2020 election. But sanity means nothing these days, given the hatred of Trump, the volatility of the electorate, and the furious bias of the media.

After all, we are planning to impeach a president on the basis of a “whistleblower” who will not come forward, who is a Democratic partisan, who worked for a current Democratic presidential candidate, who contrary to the whistleblower statutes went first to the Democratic Chairman of what is now the impeachment inquiry committee, Adam Schiff, also chair of the Intelligence Committee, and whose formal complaint was prepped by Democrat-affiliated lawyers. The whistleblower claims second-hand knowledge from leaking White House Staffers who heard a confidential Trump conversation—a conversation whose transcript was immediately released and was at odds in key places with the whistleblower’s second- and third-hand versions…”

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Looks like the anonymous informant may be Eric Ciaramella

Kerry Picket:

“…House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff recruited two former National Security Council aides who worked alongside the CIA whistleblower at the NSC during the Obama and Trump administrations, the Washington Examiner has learned.

Abigail Grace, who worked at the NSC until 2018, was hired in February, while Sean Misko, an NSC aide until 2017, joined Schiff’s committee staff in August, the same month the whistleblower submitted his complaint.

The whistleblower was an NSC official who worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and who has expertise in Ukraine, the Washington Examiner has reported.

A career CIA analyst with Ukraine expertise, the whistleblower aired his concerns about a phone conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to a House Intelligence Committee aide on Schiff’s staff. He had previously informed the CIA’s legal counsel’s office.

Schiff initially denied he knew anything about the complaint before it was filed, stating on Sep. 17: “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. We would like to.”

But it later emerged that a member of his staff had spoken to the whistleblower before his complaint was submitted on Aug. 12. The Washington Post concluded that Schiff “clearly made a statement that was false.”…”

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Worth clicking over for a good analysis

Clarice Feldman:

“…Believing Adam Schiff’s lies and calling for an “impeachment inquiry” has to be one of the worst blunders of Speaker Pelosi’s career. The whistleblower tale has crumbled and the backup witnesses the Democrats are relying on only confirm the Deep State bureaucrats and Democrats believe that they, not the elected president, have a lock on executive powers. In fact, the ploy boomeranged and the spotlight is now on the Democrats’ White Hope, Joe Biden.  Despite the media downplaying Biden’s actions, there is more to come of his and his party’s corruption…”

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Kimberley Strassel:

“…Since Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the mainstream media has shed its once-noble mission — the pursuit of the truth — and instead adopted a new purpose: to take down the president…

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise. Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democratic effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: Democracy dies in bias…”

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I think many people confuse and conflate President Trump’s personality with his business acumen. This is a great mistake. A mistake the President uses to his advantage. I am proud of President Trump for achieving this great breakthrough.

This was something that needed to be done. Something that many Presidents had put off as too difficult. Something that many pundits in the media considered impossible.

I congratulate the President. This achievement highlights the President’s strength, which is his experience, maturity, and business knowledge. I believe the President uses his wild personality as a bargaining chip. He is very effective as a negotiator.

On the Eve of the CNN Insider blowing the whistle on his own network…

I look forward to the exposé