The "divided country" comes in for a comeuppance
The conventional wisdom has it that ours is a "divided country", and conventional wisdom is only mostly bollocks, so it may be that this is one of those twice-a-day when the stopped clock gets it right, but it's past time the conventional wisdom came in for a comeuppance.
I sometimes wonder whether those people who cry "divided country" are less than proficient in the language, and sometimes whether they were born yesterday: I've heard "divided country" invoked to account for what is plainly "polarization", not division among the people but disparity between the parties, and I've heard "divided country" as though it were some singular feature of our age, that we were skipping along in contented comity until The Advent of The Orange. It was a handful of votes in one state that decided the presidency in 2000, then in '12 the presidency was decided by something like 400,000 votes spread over four states -- I could go on, but that "divided country" business would seem to obtain with some frequency in just these two decades, two presidential elections of four before Trump's.
Then there are the great questions of the age. Securing the border was the principal cause of the Trump campaign, and manifestly that's a question of national consensus: the Democrats won the House in '18 promising "border security", in maybe the boldest fraud and most perfect inversion of the truth I've seen in 14 election cycles. Some part of Trump's presidency has been given over to confronting China, another of those great questions of the age untouched before Trump, and on China the Hate Trump Party take care to pose for the people as standing with Trump, so I can only conclude that Trump's taking the lead pipe to China's kneecaps also is a point of agreement. Trump's disruptive, revisionist policy on trade has passed its Congressional tests with near-unanimity so again I can only conclude that trade is still another question of national consensus. And there is the rebuilding of the forces and of the roads and bridges, Trump's issues and consensus issues.
And as ever, "It's the economy, Stupid," and on that point don't take my word for it: Jim Cramer who's no great friend to Trump concluded late last year that Trump's economy is "the best of our lives." Only lately Gallup found that "personal satisfaction" was never higher, an impossible 90%. So presumably the Trumpian economic program which has wrought what may be the greatest and broadest and deepest prosperity in any society at any age, is another of those questions of national consensus, and not a small one. Anyone might point to questions that split more evenly, but there's more consensus where that came from.
It strikes me that the claim of a "divided country" coincides very neatly with the election of Donald Trump, and that it would make a convenient means for those people who claim it, of denying Trump's triumph and their defeat. If the country is "divided" then there's no winner and no loser, we haven't won and they haven't lost. Maybe they're right, maybe we're split up the middle, but we'll know soon enough, on Election Night in nine months, whether they've not lost and we've not won.
Impeachment impeached
If I were King of America, I'd decree two changes at least to the impeachment of a president. First, no 24 hours unbroken of arguments in the Senate trial, but the morning for the prosecution and the afternoon for the defense, then the defense gets the morning and the prosecution takes the afternoon, and so on. Under the rules as approved by the Senate in 1999 and affirmed in 2020, the defense sits silent for the better part of a week while a mountain of half-truths and untruths out of the other side go unanswered, and without provision for interjecting with objections, then when finally the defense gets its at-bat, there's no provision for the prosecution to answer any points of fact and arguments out of the defense which had been unknown or unanticipated.
But more than that, I'd amend the Constitution to make a partisan impeachment a practical impossibility: removal demands a vote of at least two-thirds in the Senate, so apply that same threshold to the House, raise the bar for impeachment to two-thirds and there'll be no more of this pointless, baseless partisan impeachment paralyzing the national government. Impeachment and removal are reserved for the most extraordinary national emergency and national consensus, and the two-thirds threshold for the Senate reflects that, but then that standard is exploded by the low bar in the House, a simple majority of fifty-plus-one partisan pygmies.
Unless the partisanship and paralysis that was the impeachment of President Trump is punished by the people in November, and brutally, the House Democrats like the teenager whose keys to the family car are snatched away by the grown-ups, we've no right to be surprised if impeachment takes its place as just another tool in the box for hysterical partisans in the House of Representatives, and at all events the threshold is set so low as to invite abuse.
What they don't remember and I can't forget
A vote in my high school history class in Canada a couple years after the Gulf War of 1991 went something like 28-2 against George H. W. Bush's declining to "roll onto Baghdad" and "finish the job"; America was held by the class to have been mistaken in not carrying the Kuwait war over the border into Iraq to tear down the monstrous and menacing Saddam Hussein regime and institute a decent national government in its place -- and those two dissents were the exceptions that proved the rule, namely me and a friend of mine seated next to me and watching my vote. Until '98 it was America's not going to war in Iraq that was Canada's indictment of America. And in America for a decade before the Iraq War of 2003 the consensus had it that we had been mistaken in not "rolling onto Baghdad". I lived it and I can't forget it.
The air strikes and air wars against Iraq carried on through the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, including a matter of days before Clinton's inauguration in January of '93, and in December of '98 when Clinton ordered a three-day air war on Iraq a matter of hours before the scheduled vote on his impeachment. And in later years it was practically daily that Hussein's forces fired on allied aircraft patrolling the No-Fly Zone which Hussein had conceded by treaty, with practically daily return fire.
As a young conservative and a contrarian I only ever resisted the consensus that Iraq ought to have been invaded and its regime toppled, for the reasons that it looked to be a bigger and messier business than it was worth, and that there had been cause for hope within Iraq of a coup or revolution. Until in 1998 the accumulation of Hussein's defiance of the United Nations weapons inspections and the routine air strikes and air wars to keep him in his box, with the recognition that Hussein had consolidated his power, tipped the balance of cost and benefit, for me and for the Congress and president. It was 1998 that a Republican Congress and Democrat president committed the United States as national policy to regime change in Iraq, seconded emphatically by Britain's Labour Prime Minister Blair.
And whatever became of those weapons of mass destruction by the time American forces swept over Iraq in '03, it was no fantasy and no lie that Hussein was armed with WMDs because he had put them to use -- ten times. Then there are the resolutions of the UN Security Council which Hussein had defied, or the great majority demanding the Iraq War before the war, including Joe Biden and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which was America's declaration of war on the Hussein regime, passed by a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
And that's off the top of my head, two decades hence. Our effort in Iraq, first tearing down one of the more monstrous and menacing regimes since 1945 and then instituting in its place a living democracy, was not some conspiracy on the people and the world by some cabal of "neocons", but the enactment of the consensus of a decade.
The conventional wisdom has it that ours is a "divided country", and conventional wisdom is only mostly bollocks, so it may be that this is one of those twice-a-day when the stopped clock gets it right, but it's past time the conventional wisdom came in for a comeuppance.
I sometimes wonder whether those people who cry "divided country" are less than proficient in the language, and sometimes whether they were born yesterday: I've heard "divided country" invoked to account for what is plainly "polarization", not division among the people but disparity between the parties, and I've heard "divided country" as though it were some singular feature of our age, that we were skipping along in contented comity until The Advent of The Orange. It was a handful of votes in one state that decided the presidency in 2000, then in '12 the presidency was decided by something like 400,000 votes spread over four states -- I could go on, but that "divided country" business would seem to obtain with some frequency in just these two decades, two presidential elections of four before Trump's.
Then there are the great questions of the age. Securing the border was the principal cause of the Trump campaign, and manifestly that's a question of national consensus: the Democrats won the House in '18 promising "border security", in maybe the boldest fraud and most perfect inversion of the truth I've seen in 14 election cycles. Some part of Trump's presidency has been given over to confronting China, another of those great questions of the age untouched before Trump, and on China the Hate Trump Party take care to pose for the people as standing with Trump, so I can only conclude that Trump's taking the lead pipe to China's kneecaps also is a point of agreement. Trump's disruptive, revisionist policy on trade has passed its Congressional tests with near-unanimity so again I can only conclude that trade is still another question of national consensus. And there is the rebuilding of the forces and of the roads and bridges, Trump's issues and consensus issues.
And as ever, "It's the economy, Stupid," and on that point don't take my word for it: Jim Cramer who's no great friend to Trump concluded late last year that Trump's economy is "the best of our lives." Only lately Gallup found that "personal satisfaction" was never higher, an impossible 90%. So presumably the Trumpian economic program which has wrought what may be the greatest and broadest and deepest prosperity in any society at any age, is another of those questions of national consensus, and not a small one. Anyone might point to questions that split more evenly, but there's more consensus where that came from.
It strikes me that the claim of a "divided country" coincides very neatly with the election of Donald Trump, and that it would make a convenient means for those people who claim it, of denying Trump's triumph and their defeat. If the country is "divided" then there's no winner and no loser, we haven't won and they haven't lost. Maybe they're right, maybe we're split up the middle, but we'll know soon enough, on Election Night in nine months, whether they've not lost and we've not won.
Impeachment impeached
If I were King of America, I'd decree two changes at least to the impeachment of a president. First, no 24 hours unbroken of arguments in the Senate trial, but the morning for the prosecution and the afternoon for the defense, then the defense gets the morning and the prosecution takes the afternoon, and so on. Under the rules as approved by the Senate in 1999 and affirmed in 2020, the defense sits silent for the better part of a week while a mountain of half-truths and untruths out of the other side go unanswered, and without provision for interjecting with objections, then when finally the defense gets its at-bat, there's no provision for the prosecution to answer any points of fact and arguments out of the defense which had been unknown or unanticipated.
But more than that, I'd amend the Constitution to make a partisan impeachment a practical impossibility: removal demands a vote of at least two-thirds in the Senate, so apply that same threshold to the House, raise the bar for impeachment to two-thirds and there'll be no more of this pointless, baseless partisan impeachment paralyzing the national government. Impeachment and removal are reserved for the most extraordinary national emergency and national consensus, and the two-thirds threshold for the Senate reflects that, but then that standard is exploded by the low bar in the House, a simple majority of fifty-plus-one partisan pygmies.
Unless the partisanship and paralysis that was the impeachment of President Trump is punished by the people in November, and brutally, the House Democrats like the teenager whose keys to the family car are snatched away by the grown-ups, we've no right to be surprised if impeachment takes its place as just another tool in the box for hysterical partisans in the House of Representatives, and at all events the threshold is set so low as to invite abuse.
What they don't remember and I can't forget
A vote in my high school history class in Canada a couple years after the Gulf War of 1991 went something like 28-2 against George H. W. Bush's declining to "roll onto Baghdad" and "finish the job"; America was held by the class to have been mistaken in not carrying the Kuwait war over the border into Iraq to tear down the monstrous and menacing Saddam Hussein regime and institute a decent national government in its place -- and those two dissents were the exceptions that proved the rule, namely me and a friend of mine seated next to me and watching my vote. Until '98 it was America's not going to war in Iraq that was Canada's indictment of America. And in America for a decade before the Iraq War of 2003 the consensus had it that we had been mistaken in not "rolling onto Baghdad". I lived it and I can't forget it.
The air strikes and air wars against Iraq carried on through the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations, including a matter of days before Clinton's inauguration in January of '93, and in December of '98 when Clinton ordered a three-day air war on Iraq a matter of hours before the scheduled vote on his impeachment. And in later years it was practically daily that Hussein's forces fired on allied aircraft patrolling the No-Fly Zone which Hussein had conceded by treaty, with practically daily return fire.
As a young conservative and a contrarian I only ever resisted the consensus that Iraq ought to have been invaded and its regime toppled, for the reasons that it looked to be a bigger and messier business than it was worth, and that there had been cause for hope within Iraq of a coup or revolution. Until in 1998 the accumulation of Hussein's defiance of the United Nations weapons inspections and the routine air strikes and air wars to keep him in his box, with the recognition that Hussein had consolidated his power, tipped the balance of cost and benefit, for me and for the Congress and president. It was 1998 that a Republican Congress and Democrat president committed the United States as national policy to regime change in Iraq, seconded emphatically by Britain's Labour Prime Minister Blair.
And whatever became of those weapons of mass destruction by the time American forces swept over Iraq in '03, it was no fantasy and no lie that Hussein was armed with WMDs because he had put them to use -- ten times. Then there are the resolutions of the UN Security Council which Hussein had defied, or the great majority demanding the Iraq War before the war, including Joe Biden and Al Gore and Hillary Clinton, and the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force which was America's declaration of war on the Hussein regime, passed by a Republican House and Democrat Senate.
And that's off the top of my head, two decades hence. Our effort in Iraq, first tearing down one of the more monstrous and menacing regimes since 1945 and then instituting in its place a living democracy, was not some conspiracy on the people and the world by some cabal of "neocons", but the enactment of the consensus of a decade.
