Kevin D. Williamson, with a certain unholy glee, predicts that the Left will not love living with its own precedents.

For eight years, Democrats celebrated the aggrandizement of the already inflated presidency left to Barack Obama by George W. Bush. You remember the greatest hits: “If Congress won’t act, I will.” “I have a pen and a phone.” “Elections have consequences.” And, my personal favorite: “I won.”

Somebody else won this time around. The pretensions of the imperial presidency are going to haunt Democrats for the immediate future, but they’ll quickly rediscover their belief in limits on the executive. While they’re rediscovering old virtues, they might take a moment to lament Senator Harry Reid’s weakening of the filibuster, an ancient protection of minority interests in the less democratic house of our national legislature. They might also lament Senator Reid’s attempt to gut the First Amendment in order to permit the federal government — which in January will be under the management of Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and — incredibly enough — President Donald Trump — to regulate political speech, deciding who can speak, about what and when, and on what terms. Perhaps they’ll thank those wicked “conservative” justices on the Supreme Court for saving basic political-speech rights. If they are smart, they will rediscover federalism, too, and the peacemaking potential of a school of thought that says in a diverse nation of 320 million souls, there is no reason that life in rural Idaho must be lived in exactly the same way as it is in Brooklyn or Santa Monica.

Read the whole thing.

NBC Chicago:

A leaked email from Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign Chairman John Podesta referenced a 2015 BuzzFeed article in which Sen. Mark Kirk predicted nuclear war in the Middle East in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal.

Podesta’s email, which was released Friday by WikiLeaks along with a cache of documents from the Clinton campaign chair, was in response to a message from John Anzalone of Anzalone Liszt Grove Research that bore the subject line, “you call it.” In his email, Anzalone included a link to the BuzzFeed article and a quote from Kirk.

“This agreement condemns the next generation to cleaning up a nuclear war in the Persian Gulf,” Kirk told BuzzFeed at the time. “This is the greatest appeasement since Chamberlain gave Czechoslovakia to Hitler.”

“Yup,” Podesta said in response to the email.

Quite an admission.

Baracktrema obamai

Popular Science:

A new species of blood fluke was found infecting the lungs of turtles in Malaysia. This parasitic flatworm has been dubbed Baracktrema obamai, in honor of the President of the United States (who is the fifth cousin twice removed of one of the discovering scientists).

B. obamai is described in the August issue of the Journal of Parasitology as having a long, thread-like body. So far, it’s shown up in two freshwater turtles, the black marsh turtle (Siebenrockiella crassicollis) and southeast Asian box turtle (Cuora amboinensis).

——————————

Jay Solomon and Carol E. Lee reported on the Obama Administration’s hypocrisy in the Wall Street Journal.

The Obama administration secretly organized an airlift of $400 million worth of cash to Iran that coincided with the January release of four Americans detained in Tehran, according to U.S. and European officials and congressional staff briefed on the operation afterward.

Wooden pallets stacked with euros, Swiss francs and other currencies were flown into Iran on an unmarked cargo plane, according to these officials. The U.S. procured the money from the central banks of the Netherlands and Switzerland, they said.

The money represented the first installment of a $1.7 billion settlement the Obama administration reached with Iran to resolve a decades-old dispute over a failed arms deal signed just before the 1979 fall of Iran’s last monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The settlement, which resolved claims before an international tribunal in The Hague, also coincided with the formal implementation that same weekend of the landmark nuclear agreement reached between Tehran, the U.S. and other global powers the summer before.

“With the nuclear deal done, prisoners released, the time was right to resolve this dispute as well,” President Barack Obama said at the White House on Jan. 17—without disclosing the $400 million cash payment.

Senior U.S. officials denied any link between the payment and the prisoner exchange. They say the way the various strands came together simultaneously was coincidental, not the result of any quid pro quo.

“As we’ve made clear, the negotiations over the settlement of an outstanding claim…were completely separate from the discussions about returning our American citizens home,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said. “Not only were the two negotiations separate, they were conducted by different teams on each side, including, in the case of The Hague claims, by technical experts involved in these negotiations for many years.”

But U.S. officials also acknowledge that Iranian negotiators on the prisoner exchange said they wanted the cash to show they had gained something tangible.

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican from Arkansas and a fierce foe of the Iran nuclear deal, accused President Barack Obama of paying “a $1.7 billion ransom to the ayatollahs for U.S. hostages.”

“This break with longstanding U.S. policy put a price on the head of Americans, and has led Iran to continue its illegal seizures” of Americans, he said.

Since the cash shipment, the intelligence arm of the Revolutionary Guard has arrested two more Iranian-Americans. Tehran has also detained dual-nationals from France, Canada and the U.K. in recent months.

Read the whole thing.

Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel who killed 89 and injured hundreds on Bastille Day in Nice.

Mark Krikorian:

The local paper reports that the terrorist was “of Tunisian origin,” which surprises no one, of course. But since he was killed by police, President Obama may never know his real motive.

Nerō Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, 15 December 37 AD – 9 June 68 AD. Younger, but has a definite bit of resemblance to Trump in the shape of the head, doesn’t he?

Angelo Codevilla, Last February, analysed precisely the country’s situation and warned presciently about just where we are heading.

Obama has been our first emperor. A Donald Trump presidency, far from reversing the ruling class’s unaccountable hold over American life, would seal it. Because Trump would act as our second emperor, he would render well-nigh impossible our return to republicanism.

Today, nearly all the rules under which we live are made, executed, and adjudicated by agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and countless boards and commissions. Congress no longer passes real laws. Instead, it passes broad grants of authority, the substance of the president’s bureaucracy decides in cooperation with interest groups.
Trump’s career and fortune have been as beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others.

Nancy Pelosi’s remark that we would know Obamacare’s contents only after it passed was true, and applicable to nearly all modern legislation. The courts allow this, pretending that bureaucrats sitting with their chosen friends merely fill in details. Some details! Americans have learned that, as they say in DC, if you are not sitting at one of these tables of power, “you’re on the menu.”

Trump’s claim to be an enemy of rule-by-inside-deal is counterintuitive. His career and fortune have been as participant and beneficiary in the process by which government grants privileges to some and inflicts burdens on others. Crony capitalism is the air he breathes, the only sea in which he swims, his second nature. His recipe for “fixing” America, he tells us, is to appoint “the best people”—he names some of his fellow crony capitalists—to exercise even more unaccountable power and to do so with “unbelievable speed.” He assures us that, this time, it will be to “make America great again.” Peanuts’ Lucy might reply: “This time, for sure!”
Deal-Making Expands Government

In recent years, Obama and the Democratic Party (with the Republican leadership’s constant collusion) have prevented Congress from voting to appropriate funds for individual programs and agencies. They have lumped all government functions into “continuing resolutions” or “omnibus bills.” This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, shielding elected officials from popular scrutiny, relieving them of the responsibility for supporting or opposing what the government does. This has enabled Obama to make whatever deals have pleased him and his Republican cronies.

This has moved the government’s decision-making into back rooms, relieving elected officials of responsibility.

Trump touts his own capacity to make good deals. But good for whom? And who is to say what is good? Who or what causes would benefit from continuing government by secret deals? Who or what would lose? Trump’s stated objective is to wield whatever power might be necessary to accomplish whatever objectives upon which he—in consultation with whomever—might choose from time to time. But the difference between Trump and Obama amounts only to whatever difference may exist between each emperor’s set of cronies. …

Like Obama, Trump is not about persuading anybody. Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them. Throughout history, this style of politics has been the indispensable ingredient for wrecking republics, the “final cause” that transforms free citizens into the subjects of emperors.
Both are about firing up their supporters to impose their will on their opponents while insulting them.

This style of politics has grown, along with a ruling class that rejects the notion that no person may rule another without that person’s consent. As I have shown at length elsewhere, America is now ruled by a uniformly educated class of persons that occupies the commanding heights of bureaucracy, of the judiciary, education, the media, and of large corporations, and that wields political power through the Democratic Party. Its control of access to prestige, power, privilege, and wealth exerts a gravitational pull that has made the Republican Party’s elites into its satellites.

This class’s fatal feature is its belief that ordinary Americans are a lesser intellectual and social breed. Its increasing self-absorption, its growing contempt for whoever won’t bow to it, its dependence for votes on sectors of society whose grievances it stokes, have led it to break the most basic rule of republican life: deeming its opposition illegitimate. The ruling class insists on driving down the throats of its opponents the agendas of each its constituencies and on injuring persons who stand in the way. This has spawned a Newtonian reaction, a hunger, among what may be called the “country class” for returning the favor with interest.

Ordinary Americans have endured being insulted by the ruling class’s favorite epitaphs—racist, sexist, etc., and, above all, stupid; they have had careers and reputations compromised by speaking the wrong word in front of the wrong person; endured dictates from the highest courts in the land that no means yes (King), that public means private (Kelo), that everyone is entitled to make up one’s meaning of life (Casey), but that whoever thinks marriage is exclusively between men and women is a bigot (Obergefell).

Trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

No wonder, then, that millions of Americans lose respect for a ruling class that disrespects them, that they identify with whomever promises some kind of turnabout against that class, and that they care less and less for the integrity of institutions that fail to protect them.

Trump’s voters expect precisely such turnabout. Within good measure, not only would this right any number of wrongs and restore some balance in our public life, it is also indispensable for impressing upon the ruling class and its constituents that they too have a stake in observing the limits and niceties that are explicit and implicit in our Constitution.

But not only do opposing sets of wrongs not make anything right. As I have argued (Sophocles did it a lot better), trying to stop the cycle of political payback with another round of it, while not utterly impossible, is well-nigh beyond human capacity.

Neither Obama nor Trump seem to know or care that cycles of reciprocal resentment, of insults and injuries paid back with ever more interest and ever less concern for consequences, are the natural fuel of revolutions—easy to start and soon impossible to stop.

Read the whole thing.

James Lewis, at American Thinker, speculates that Obama’s own childhood traumatic experience is responsible for his Bathroom Edict.

At age ten, the child Barry Soetoro was sent by his biological mother from Jakarta, Indonesia to Hawaii, where his grandparents apparently handed him over to the care of a person of known and questionable character, his “mentor,” Frank Marshall Davis. There is no known legal basis for this double transfer of parental responsibility. The mother and her husband remained in Indonesia so that legally, the child was abandoned by his legal parents. This is child neglect.

As far as is known, Frank Marshall Davis never legally adopted the ten-year-old child. Any family welfare worker would have raised serious questions about the legality and safety of Frank Marshall Davis becoming the sole adoptive parent. Davis was a hard-core Communist at the time, a party member. The Soviet Union, then under Nikita Khruschev and soon Leonid Brezhnev, posed a nuclear threat to the Western world. The Cold War was at its height. Davis was an obsessively enraged anti-white, anti-American individual, as shown in his newsletters and personal accounts. Davis wrote at least one pornographic pseudo-autobiography under the name Ben Green. He was an obsessive race-hater.

On the face of it, Barry’s mother, his grandparents, and Mr. Davis were guilty at least of child neglect. Psychologically, children who are passed around like this are often traumatically affected. Abandonment at a vulnerable age is said to inflict an emotional “wound” that may turn into narcissistic overcompensation. To make up for crushing feelings of personal rejection, a child may take refuge in grandiose and self-glorifying fantasies. Children who feel abandoned may seek sexualized relationships with adults to ensure that they will never be abandoned again.

Davis shows strong features of oppositional-defiant disorder, a compulsive need to break the boundaries of socially accepted behavior. For example, he allegedly took naked photos of Obama’s mother, dedicated his life to the Communist Party at a time when it was viewed as a threat to national survival, wrote passages involving pedophilia, and expressed his rage in racial terms. Davis mixed his obsessive racial anger with sexual provocation and revolutionary politics. He was not a fantasy revolutionary. He really hated those he considered enemies.

As an adult, Barack Obama shows many of the same psychological features. Other father figures in Obama’s life are also enraged, racially charged, and emotionally obsessive. Jeremiah Wright is an obvious example, but he is not the only one.

The important point is that the young Barry Soetoro lived with father figures who were consumed with racial hatred. When he briefly encountered his biological father in person and read his socialist writings, he was ready to idealize the image of Obama Sr. In fact, Obama Sr. joined the post-revolutionary regime of Jyomo Kenyatta, was soon expelled, apparently became alcoholic, and died under suspicious circumstances after two nearly identical car accidents.

All this should be irrelevant, but it is not – certainly not when the president of the United States issues decrees to our school systems that directly affect the psychological development of children.

The author doesn’t spell it out, but I expect he is referring slightly obliquely to the “Bathhouse Barry,” Obama-is-Gay theory, and blaming Obama’s covert sexual identity and partisan loyalty to LBGT causes on childhood molestation by the communist poet Frank Marshall Davis.

Paul Rahe explores the remarkable similarities, and notes the differences between, Trump and Obama.

Shortly before the Indiana primary, The Wall Street Journal’s “Notable and Quotable” published a brief squib lifted from the Mayo Clinic’s online entry regarding narcissistic personality disorder:

If you have narcissistic personality disorder, you may come across as conceited, boastful or pretentious. You often monopolize conversations. You may belittle or look down on people you perceive as inferior. You may feel a sense of entitlement—and when you don’t receive special treatment, you may become impatient or angry. You may insist on having “the best” of everything—for instance, the best car, athletic club or medical care.

At the same time, you have trouble handling anything that may be perceived as criticism. You may have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, vulnerability and humiliation. To feel better, you may react with rage or contempt and try to belittle the other person to make yourself appear superior. Or you may feel depressed and moody because you fall short of perfection. . . .

[The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5] . . . criteria for narcissistic personality disorder include these features:

Having an exaggerated sense of self-importance

Expecting to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it

Exaggerating your achievements and talents

Being preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate . . .

Behaving in an arrogant or haughty manner

If there was no commentary, it was because there was, in fact, no need – for it was self-evident whom the editors of that daily had in mind. It is nonetheless worth noting that, had they published the same squib at any time between April, 2009 and January, 2015, everyone would have recognized that the target was Barack Obama. Never in the history of the American Republic has there been a President as devoted to self-referential pronouncements and to self-praise. Nor have we ever had a President before who supposed that his knowledge and ability was superior in every particular to that of the experts whom he had hired to advise him. The self-confidence of Barack Obama knows no bounds.

There is, to be sure, this difference between our current President and the aspirant targeted by The Wall Street Journal. The latter is deficient in self-discipline. Incontinence ought to be his middle name. He is incapable of marital fidelity, and he has long advertised the fact. He is a model of indiscretion, and he responds to criticism with uncontrollable rage. …

Like Barack Obama, he is an accomplished actor, and he has one remarkable gift. He can spin a tale of his own greatness, and he can make the credulous believe it. Furthermore, like Barack Obama, he has devoted his life to aggrandizement. He is not a promise-keeper; he is a promise-breaker. He seduces others, uses them, and dumps them. Look at the women in his life; look also at his record as a businessman. In business, when he fails, his partners are always left holding the bag. When he speaks of “the art of the deal,” he has in mind “the art of the steal.” It is not clear that he has ever cared – really cared — for another human being: apart, perhaps, for his children whom he considers extensions of himself. It is all about winning, all about humiliating opponents, all about showing off, all about commanding the stage.

I can see why those who recoil in horror at the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming President (as I do) are inclined to suppose that The Donald would be better. He might be. He just might be. But if he is elected, it will be The Donald Show, just as we have lived through The Barack Show. The chief difference will be that Trump will be erratic – driven this way and that by his anger at perceived slights. The man has no principles whatsoever, and he has no self-control. Barack Obama has systematically exploited us in support of the narrative he is intent on constructing. There will be no system to what Donald Trump does. Under his direction, our government will be as chaotic as his romantic life, and we will once again be extras in a drama staged by and on behalf of someone else.

Read the whole thing.