The Trumpian ascendancy as answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance

For some while I've asked without satisfactory answer whether the Obama precedent of fiat, unilateral, rule-by-decree, because-I-say-so governance will die with the Obama presidency, or if maybe it will be applied to Democrat presidencies but not Republican ones, or if any president henceforth might follow the Obamian precedent and do just as he darn pleases, enforcing or not enforcing the law as he would prefer it to have been written, conveniently redefining "treaty" and "war" so as to circumvent Constitutional demands of Congressional assent, enacting society-wide and calamitous legislation by parliamentary trick and over the screams of the American people, and governing very largely through executive orders and administrative rule-makings.

Obama is objectively lawless; the catalogue of his lawlessness may be had from those researchers and authors and bloggers not driven by the cataloguing to despair for the Republic and despair of living. In times past academics and politicos and have invoked that old name of "imperial presidency" and abused it to damn any president and presidential policy they happen not to care for, but Obama's is an imperial presidency in the true and full sense, an approach to governance as seen in the emergency measures of the Civil War and world wars or in the New Deal excesses of Franklin Roosevelt, as for instance piling judges onto the Supreme Court 'til he'd made himself a friendly majority and effectively extinguished the judiciary as independent of his will.

Barack Obama is of course contemptuous of America, or else those haters of America in this country and globally wouldn't have recognized in him one of their own and descended into slavering Obama-adulation, so one is left to suppose that to advise Obama that this fiat or that would defy the Constitution or conventions of the United States, is to argue for it, to his way of thinking. Plus which Obama is nothing if not a creature of the post-1968 hard-Left, and the Left since its advent in the mad and bloody French Revolution has always and everywhere an impulse to totalitarianism: see for e.g. Animal Farm by Orwell whose words are paraphrased in the paragraph prior.

Elected Republicans have had no answer to Obamian because-I-say-so governance. To take the example of Obama's lawless executive order legalizing millions of illegal aliens, which unilateralism Obama himself had pronounced impossible and unconstitutional something over twenty times as president, the Republican idea was the classical and constitutional one, that Congress is invested by the Constitution with the "power of the purse" and may nullify an executive action by declining to fund it. That of course went noplace, made a good excuse for bad press for the Republicans in Congress by the Democrats who are the press, and left the conservative base of the Republican Party frustrated and worse.

And so we come to Donald Trump. Trump promises his presidency will be an end to that abuse and defrauding of the 14th Amendment which goes by the name of "anchor babies", to take but one example. When reflexively the elites and the go-along-to-get-along gang commence their amateur legal lectures on judicial precedent and all that rot, Trump spits back however sloppily that every American knows this practice of hurrying the Mexican girl over the border and into the emergency room for the free (i.e., paid for by someone other than the Mexican girl) delivery of her baby in United States jurisdiction, so as to anchor the mother and her family to the United States through this "American citizen" Mexican infant, is nothing resembling the intent of the framers of the 14th Amendment much less the Founders of the Republic; the Constitution and immigration law are abused and defrauded by these anchor babies, he's the man to put that right, and the elites can go cry into their milk and cookies.

To be a leftist in the 21st Century is to hate America and to make war daily in ways great and small on all things recognizably American, so it has been an alloyed joy to the Left to observe Obama do as they would have him do and at the same time to extend a contemptuous and insolent middle-finger to the Constitution which they regard as some relic of barbarism. But if the gentle reader will pardon the cliche, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

When Julius Caesar upturned centuries of Roman republicanism, the ancient constraints on political power repudiated and the democratic Plebeian Council and constitutional Senate rendered pretenses, Rome was the tyranny of one man ever after. Caesar was not the one to formalize Rome's transformation from republic to monarchy-by-another-name, but he had crossed the Rubicon, in more ways than one. The Obama precedent of because-I-say-so governance may not be so irrevocable as Caesar's, but were Obama to be succeeded by a president whose instincts and impulses are disposed in that direction, that successor would find all the precedent he could hope for in Obama's two terms. It's as the English historian William Warde Fowler wrote in the 19th Century of Caesar's autocracy, that "it struck the keynote by which a clever successor might tune the system to the sensitive ear of the Roman world."

Any Democrat president henceforth may be expected to demand no fewer prerogatives than Obama got away with, and by now we're fully a century past the first "Progressive" Democrat president, namely Wilson, who regarded the Constitution expressly as an obsolescent obstacle to "progress", so what constraint is left to tether and fetter any Democrat president? Republicans elevate the Constitution and the founding principles of the Republic practically to a theology, and God bless them for it, but mightn't the next Republican president find he couldn't afford to play by the rules while the other side played anything-goes? And anyway Donald Trump is not a classical Republican, and is accustomed to the miniature tyranny of boss in a business bearing his name.

Those American people rallying to Donald Trump have observed this Age of Obama and the futility of resisting Obamian lawlessness with Constitutional law, and they appreciate that America is in collapse, that much has been lost and much is in jeopardy, and that it will take some extraordinary reaction to put right what has gone wrong. The Republican Party is not wrong but it is cowed and certainly it's been ineffective. And so it may be that this Trumpian ascendancy in the Republican primary is in part a reaction to Obama and his lawlessness and to the collapse and ruin of America which is not Obama's error but his policy and purpose, and a reaction also to the futility of the by-the-rules Republican answer to Obamaism.

I grind no axe for Donald Trump or against him, and neither do I venture a forecast for the primary and general elections, but were Trump to win the primary and the presidency, would he not be the type to take Obama's because-I-say-so governance for his precedent, if not also to run with it? Maybe that's to misjudge the man, or maybe some force would constrain a President Trump from doing as President Obama has been at liberty to do. But were the next president to claim the powers of the last then what consistent and coherent argument could be raised against him?

The 9/11 catch-22; Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly; The trouble with sci-fi

The 9/11 catch-22

The catch-22 is that America today will not act to forestall a second 9/11 attack, absent a second 9/11 attack; it'd take a second 9/11 to move America to action on a scale which would spare us that second 9/11.

And to wait on Pearl Harbor is not only to concede the first strike and condemn its victims. The war which follows is liable to be that much bigger and bloodier for the wait, the enemy having been permitted to gather and grow and to run amok long after it might've been squelched so much more quickly and cleanly. But 'twas ever thus, and this is an argument rejected by all but a certain, Churchillian, and martial strain of rightist thought, until it's accepted universally, ex post facto.

The generation of the Hitler war was converted to Churchillianism, invoked "appeasement" as the dirtiest of words, and saved us again after that war by their proaction and peace-through-strength. But the generation of their very children unlearned their lesson. And what's worse is that so far from pushing and pulling the nation toward Churchillianism, the present national leadership are among the most defiant in their repudiation of it. It's not for nothing that among Barack Obama's early acts as president was the banishment of the bust of Winston Churchill, given the American president by the British prime minister in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Obama ordering it turned out of the White House and returned to its sender.

There's nothing now to be argued, nothing to be done; they won't learn in the abstract, won't learn from history, won't learn 'til it's too late for learning, and evidently that'll be the way 'til Doomsday.

Short-shrifting the Soviets, and rightly

I've detected a revisionism in latter-day histories of the Second World War, making out that we in the English-speaking world have been blinkered or anyway neglectful in not sufficiently honoring the Soviet contribution and sacrifice, those 20 million Soviet dead and all the rest. Well, those revisionists ought to credit their own kind for a little more: we've not been neglectful much less blinkered; we've had good cause to decline to sing hosannas for the Soviet war effort.

The Soviet Union effectively allied with Hitler in their Non-aggression Pact, joined in Hitler's conquest of Poland, and conspired with Hitler in annexing the Baltic states and parts of Finland and Romania, and when the Soviets did at long last take up arms against Naziism it was only after the Nazi empire had smashed into Russia and its empire and bid fair to extinguish Bolshevism. The Soviets allied with Hitler when a Nazi-Soviet pact was on offer and in the end "only killed Germans to keep from being killed by Germans", to invoke a very fine observation from Herman Wouk's Winds of War.

A goodly part of that 20 million Soviet dead is down to the incompetence, paranoia, and stupidity of Stalin, and to the madness of the Soviet system which would elevate a man to its god. Stalin had "purged" a good deal of his finest commanders before Hitler's Operation Barbarossa invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin was heedless even to the extraordinary personal warning from Winston Churchill of the certain German invasion, out of mad paranoia that Churchill's warning was a piece to some Western plot. Or take the moment in 1942 when half a million Soviet forces were on the point of German encirclement, and Stalin shrugged off the sound advice to order the retreat of those troops so they might live to fight another day, so that when the Germans completed the circle the day following, the U.S.S.R. was out half a million men-in-arms.

And the coup de grace to this notion that the Soviets deserve and demand greater honor for their war effort is of course that the Soviets didn't so much liberate eastern Europe from Naziism as substitute their totalitarianism for Hitler's, and enforced their Soviet empire 'til near enough to the end of the century.

The Soviets killed Germans, and bully for them, but their reasons were the basest and had it been up to them they'd have carried on as conspirators with Hitler; their losses were in some considerable part on them; and they weren't liberators but alternate oppressors. And that in brief is why the Soviet Union is short-shrifted in our honoring of the heroes of the Second World War, and may it ever be thus.

The trouble with sci-fi

I wouldn't presume to write science-fiction -- I'm not science-minded much less educated formally or otherwise in that side of things, my fiction devolves necessarily into humor, etc. -- but I do presume to make an observation or four on the universe of science-fiction of the past half-century-and-more.

What confronts me when I dwell at all on space is the size and scale of it. And yet battle scenes in Star Wars or Star Trek or Battlestar Galactica or what-have-you very often are practically glorified WWI dogfights transplanted to space. My idea is that the scale of space war would be something closer to a galactic End of Days. Maybe unengineering a solar system, to bring its heavenly bodies crashing together and smashing to atoms and burning to vapor any life therein. That sort of thing.

　
And silence: they do say space is silent, and yet even the more serious science-fiction very often inserts great, thunderous bangs and booms for sound effects to accompany their explosions in space. Maybe the directors imagine that the cinematic effect of an explosion would be lost absent its SFX, but I say depicting an explosion absent the sound would if anything be more arresting for being so alien and counterintuitive. I'd run music, maybe balletic music, for a soundtrack to any explosions in space. Mightn't hurt if the video was slowed, too.

　
And no pressing of buttons. No red buttons, no flashing buttons, no booping buttons, no buttons plus keyholes, no buttons at all. Surely if these advanced beings of science-fiction can't yet think a thing into being then they'd wave a hand or some such and the machines would take that for their cues. If a fellow means for his dog to back away then he need only look at the dog and wave his hand as if to say "Back away," and the dog understands well enough. So in science-fiction it ought to be that if a fellow, say, wants his lights out, he looks in the direction of some lighting interface and gestures "Off," and it's done. Science-fiction is crammed with buttons, and they're altogether hidebound and hackneyed.

　
Also in my science-fiction that'll never be, the tech is preposterously advanced but the society is self-consciously conservative: it'd have been scared straight by the civilizational collapse that is not only the product of leftism but its purpose. Conservatism isn't ideology or tradition, since 1968, so much as self-preservation. It's one of the more historically illiterate conceits of the Left that history moves from right to left. The '80s, the '50s, Victorianism, Puritanism, etc., all were historical shifts rightward, or "rightward" as we'd conceive it. History develops in both directions and has done since well before those directions were recognizably Left and Right, so in science-fiction as in nonfiction the future might easily run rightward.

The barbarous Continent; The suicide-pact Left; Mission accomplished and the tide of war; Aryanism for Chinamen

The barbarous Continent

The notion of Continental Europe as the home and heart of "enlightenment" is a conceit of the Left and a fantasy; it's in the English-speaking world where is found stability and decency and rule of law and inalienable rights, to a fault. In Continental Europe as I write this there is a good old-fashioned shooting war over borders, there was genocide as recently as the 1990s, and societies as far westward as Germany and as recently as the '80s were totalitarian, not to mention that Iberian fascism survived into the '70s, and to say nothing of the culling and extinguishing of European Jewry within the lifetimes of my parents, with the cooperation and collaboration of civilians in Germany and across occupied Europe, and with pan-European auxiliaries filling out the Nazi armies, and with three-fifths of France capitulating to Hitler voluntarily. Europe is not one generation removed from genocide, and is even now yawning at the dawn of a new age of violent territorial struggle, so if for instance the Muslims of France and Europe imagine themselves to be secure or their supply of supplemental Muslim immigrants to be assured, they have no grounds for it in the histories of their hosts.

The suicide-pact Left

Leftism in this 21st Century amounts to a sort-of civilizational suicide pact, to wit: the impulse to kill the goose that laid the golden egg, to starve and beat and damn the producers; the demands for wave on swamping wave of immigration, of only those most alien outsiders, or better yet the most hostile; the incapacity for taking our side in a war, damning as wickedness any measure for the national defense much less the national interest, with the attendant apologizing for the enemy; the apologizing also for convicts, casting as victims the victimizers and demanding their turning out of the prisons and onto the streets; the affirmative celebration of abortion and euthanasia and homosexuality; the denial not of religion so much as of Christianity, and persecution of its true believers; and the damning of any impulse to nationalism or patriotism, and equally an unthinking glorying in all things exotic, for the reason of their exoticism. One could go on, but QED. The Left anymore are Frankfurt Schoolers to a man, wittingly and otherwise, their cause is contempt and disdain, and their purpose to tear it down, blow it up, and watch it burn.

Mission accomplished and the tide of war

There was a time when it was great sport for the Left and the Democrat Party to observe that President Bush had stood before a banner reading "Mission Accomplished", that banner having to do with the Iraq War and the occasion being the toppling by American and allied forces of the Saddam Hussein regime in spring '03. Those Democrats and leftists were of course making hay, but they were unjust inasmuch as the "mission" in question had well and truly been "accomplished": Bush had ordered the deposition of the Hussein regime, and a matter of weeks thereafter that order had been executed to completion.

Obviously the reconstruction and democratization turned out to be long and costly and bloody, but the rest of that story is that after the "light footprint" policy was demonstrated in '06 finally to have failed, Bush remade it utterly, ordering the surge policy in January '07, that policy going into effect fully in middle June of that year and turning the war decisively as of early August. I.e., the failed Bush policy was recognized as a failure by Bush himself, whereupon he set to putting it right, and half a year after his order and a month and a half after its execution, he had effectively won the war. Or rather, Bush had won the war for some years before Obama junked the victory, cavalierly and indulgently, nullifying the sacrifice, forfeiting to ISIS and Iran what that sacrifice had won, and condemning the Iraqi people again to war and brutality and tyranny, all for nothing greater than the ideology and partisanship and vanity of Barack Obama.

The "Mission Accomplished" banner on that aircraft carrier in spring '03 was conceived by the Left and the Democrat Party as some world-historic folly on Bush's part, never mind that the "mission" in question was about as "accomplished" as any ever is, or that the unaccomplished, secondary mission also was effectively accomplished in summer '07. But for presidential pronouncements on war, there can be no folly to excel Obama's "The tide of war is receding".

Obama was precisely and catastrophically wrong in the assessment and in the thinking behind it, which guided his foreign and defense policies and determined that his "tide of war" would crash over the greater Middle East, harder and farther than we warmongering types dreamt possible. To take for a case-study just one of those enemies who want us all dead and burning in hell, ISIS presently occupies a great swath of Iraq and Syria, and operates in Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Jordan, and Lebanon. And ISIS was undreamt of until this Age of Obama. The monumental irony is that the "tide of war" had turned, before Obama and despite him, and it was Obama who brought it crashing back.

Aryanism for Chinamen

The 2012 Chinese film with the nondescript and cliched title of The Assassins purports to tell some history circa 200 BC, and looks to be official, not to say any major motion picture could be released in China if it ran afoul of the Politburo in Beijing. It's a cliche of the Asian history picture, with the mass choreography and the comicbook combat and the fantastical "Forbidden City" sets and costumery. But then, the Chinese never were accused of restlessly reinventing and reimagining, and they're nothing if not slaves to uniformity and conformity. What rates notice is that the movie makes out from the outset that China was the summit of the world even as of 200 BC, and sacrifices historical authenticity for grandeur, so that anyone might be forgiven for concluding its purpose is not to tell history as it was, so much as to promulgate a mythology of Chinese greatness and superiority.

The Assassins mostly duplicates that fantastical-martial-arts-and-fantastical-Forbidden-City formula that no-one outside the hermetic seal of Chinese Communism could mistake for a representation of reality, not even those Westerners in thrall to Orientalism or the ones of our number who appreciate the genre for the preposterous fantasy that it is. It's the domestic audience that's cause for fretting: this is Aryanism for Chinamen, the sort of national mythology invoked to enact the wickedest atrocities in the world. Only a truly and deeply Christian nation can bear mythology like that, direct it to noble ends, and China like Germany is elementally pagan.

And while I'm at it, my summary review of the 2012 Anglo-Canadian-German miniseries World Without End, derived from the novel by Ken Follett: Crap dialogue, politics and preoccupations of a 21st C elite presented as 14th C history, contemporary conventions and cliches only incidentally set in the Middle Ages, unworthy and unwatchable. Magnificent title, though.

Where the enemy is not

We were where the enemy was not.

In Vietnam we contained ourselves for the most part to the South, against an enemy which operated there but based in North Vietnam and transited through Cambodia.

In Afghanistan we kept mostly to that country with its hundreds of routes over the nominal border to Pakistan, against an enemy that came and went between Afghanistan and Pakistan which was sometimes and in some ways an ally of ours but too often played host and enabler to the other side.

And presently in this Third Iraq War we constrict our halting, little-as-we-can-get-away-with semi-war in large part to Iraq, against an enemy that forms effectively a state covering a swath of Syria as much as Iraq and approximate in its territory to Jordan.

Analogies to the Second World War are frequently facile but occasionally useful, and had our civilian leadership in that war directed that we fight Germany in France or Holland but not in Germany, then Hitler might've been contained, at least until his war machine devised some means of breaking the containment, but there could've been no defeating and dismantling the Third Reich and neutering its menace.

This diminutive post will go mostly unread and wholly unheeded, and I can't think why it should be otherwise: I can't claim to be a scholar of military history and certainly I'm no holder of public office. But I do presume to have just a little sense, and it strikes me that so long as a considerable element of the enemy is in safety, with a base for supplying and regrouping and recruiting, and for undertaking fresh offensives, then there can be no prospect of victory.