The number one single today in 1955 was banned by ABC Radio stations because it was allegedly in bad taste:
The number one album today in 1961 wasn’t a music album — Bob Newhart’s “The Button Down Mind Strikes Back!”
The number one album today in 1965 was “Beatles ’65”:
My high school political science teacher posted this, from Ray Ortlund:
Now and then a commenter asks why I post music videos that are not devoted to God. Most inquiries are courteous. A few are not. In any case, here is my answer.
I believe in common grace. John Calvin taught me that it is God who lavishes giftedness on his human race. We may therefore enjoy it wherever we encounter it, with gratitude to God (Institutes 2.2.15).
That gives me three categories of music — since music is what we’re talking about here. First, music devoted to God. Hopefully, this is great music everyone will fall in love with. Second, music opposing God. Hopefully, this will be rotten music people cannot stand. Third, music neither devoted to God nor opposing God. If it happens to be good music, by God’s common grace, I for one will enjoy it. Good music does not have to be devoted to God for me to be okay with it — though, if it were devoted to God, I’d be thrilled.
One thing I love about the gospel is its promise of the new heaven and new earth. In eternity, God will not delete all the culture-creating we’ve done throughout human history; he will redeem it. The Bible says that, in the New Jerusalem above, “the kings of the earth will bring their glory into [the holy city]. … They will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations. But nothing unclean will ever enter it” (Revelation 21:24-27).
The glory and honor of human cultures — the music, the clothing, the literature, the dance, the languages, the customs, the humor, the traditions, and so forth — it will be cleansed and brought in forever. So Eric Clapton’s blues guitar, for example, is a preview of coming attractions. The blues will be brought into heaven. But there it will be even better, and fully devoted to God. It will finally be perfect.
I hope and pray Eric himself will be there too.
The aforementioned Clapton writes in his excellent autobiography that when “Clapton Is God” signs started appearing in Britain it made him feel very uncomfortable. For being on the short list of greatest rock guitarists of all time, Clapton doesn’t appear to have been overwhelmed by his own ego.
But don’t believe me, read Teilhard de Chardin:
I knew a little bit about his professional career but I knew nothing about his personal life. However, when I started researching for the readings for this week I came across a fascinating homily by Fr. Ron Rolheiser that is available from St. Louis University. The homily is a summary of Eric Clapton’s autobiography (Eric Clapton, The Autobiography, N.Y., Random House, 2007) and his journey from fame, self-destructive behavior using drugs, alcohol and casual sex to hide inner pain and then a surrender of the ego to have a relationship with God. I encourage you to read the entire homily here, but set forth below is an extended summary:
“Clapton tells his story with a wonderful intelligence and disarming self-effacement. This isn’t a cheap celebrity, ego-trumpeting book, but a story of art, youth, restlessness, search, falling, near-disaster, and life-saving conversion. And its real interest lies exactly in that latter element since, as Heather King puts it, sin isn’t interesting but conversion is.
Clapton fans won’t be disappointed either at how seriously he takes his art. Throughout his whole career, however fuzzy his head may have been about other things, he was always clear and single-minded about his art, the blues, willingly sacrificing popularity and money for the sake of his craft. For him, art is pure, something near to God, and is meant always to remain pure. His words: “For me, the most trustworthy vehicle for spirituality had always proven to be music. It cannot be manipulated, or politicized, and when it is, that becomes immediately obvious.”
Those are the words of a good artist, but his real struggle was never with art but with his obsessions, addictions, ego, and sobriety.
Success came to him early and the world of rock-and-roll bathed him in a culture of alcohol, drugs, and irresponsibility. He was soon an addict, with everything in his life other than his music spinning out of control. Eventually grace intervened and, during a second trip to an alcoholic clinic, he found grace and sobriety. Here are his own words:
Nevertheless, I stumbled through my month in treatment much as I had done the first time, just ticking off the days, hoping that something would change in me without me having to do much about it. Then one day, as my visit was drawing to an end, a panic hit me, and I realized that in fact nothing had changed in me, and that I was going back out into the world again completely unprotected. The noise in my head was deafening, and drinking was in my thoughts all the time. It shocked me to realize that here I was in a treatment center, a supposedly safe environment, and I was in serious danger. I was absolutely terrified, in complete despair.
At that moment, almost of their own accord, my legs gave way and I fell to my knees. In the privacy of my room, I begged for help. I had no idea who I thought I was talking to, I just knew that I had come to the end of my tether, I had nothing left to fight with. Then I remembered what I had heard about surrender, something I thought I could never do, my pride just wouldn’t allow it, but I knew that on my own I wasn’t going to make it, so I asked for help, and getting down on my knees, I surrendered.
Within a few days I realized that something had happened for me. An atheist would probably say it was just a change of attitude, and to a certain extent that’s true, but there was much more to it than that. I had found a place to turn to, a place I’d always known was there but never really wanted, or needed, to believe in. From that day until this, I have never failed to pray in the morning, on my knees, asking for help, and at night to express my gratitude for my life and, most of all, for my sobriety. I choose to kneel because I feel I need to humble myself when I pray and with my ego, this is the most I can do.
If you are asking me why I do all of this, I will tell you … because it works, as simple as that. In all this time that I have been sober, I have never once seriously thought of taking a drink or a drug. …. In some way, in some form, my God was always there, but now I have learned to talk to him.
It is interesting to note how popular artists have managed over the years to insert religious messages into their music in varying degrees of subtlety. The most common current example is U2, but there are others. Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash are two artists who managed to chart on pop, country and religious music charts.
The Beatles had the number one album, “Rubber Soul” …
… and the number one single today in 1966:
Caleb Howe deconstructs Barack Obama’s gun control plan and finds …
Every day I see people ask what the “gun show loophole” is, why we don’t have “universal” background checks, and many other questions. Those questions are amplified in light of the President’s executive action. So we are going to break it down for you here at RedState. This way you know exactly what is happening and why.
To that end, I’ve borrowed a format often used by the left to put information into bite-sized bits that are easy to remember and share. You will not only understand, but be able to explain. Let’s begin, shall we?
1. The Gun Show Loophole
Obama: “Anybody in the business of selling firearms must get a license and conduct background checks or be subject to criminal prosecutions.”
Truth: There is no gun show loophole. What people mean is that you have to sell a certain amount of guns before you cross over from private citizen to a dealer requiring a license. A private sale is when a person who owns a gun sells that gun to another person. Some private sales take place at gun shows. But people who are dealers that go to gun shows and sell lots of guns have to be licensed. The sales are legal, and there is a background check on the buyer. This is already the law. There’s no loophole.2. The Online Loophole
Obama: “A violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the internet with no background check, no questions asked.”
Truth: There is no online loophole. Exactly as with the gun show, what happens is that a person might privately sell something. Let’s say you own a gun. You have a friend on Facebook who wants to buy a gun. You sell your friend the gun. Because you are not a retailer, you do not have to be licensed as a dealer, and are not required to conduct a background check. That’s it. Otherwise, online sales are already covered. Retailers that sell guns and have an online presence where you can buy them are licensed and therefore, the sales are legal and there is a background check on the buyer. And you simply can’t sell a gun over the internet and ship it over state liunes without restriction or background check even if it is a private sale. That’s right. Even private online sales cannot transfer the weapon without a check. There’s no loophole.3. Universal Background Checks
Obama: “We know that background checks make a difference.”
Truth: There are already background checks. So this statement is a straw man. What the controllers are pitching is who is required to conduct them and under what circumstances. This idea is sold in the press as simple common sense. The idea is that every time a person becomes the owner of a gun, they are vetted by the government. This would even mean temporary transfers of ownership, like say you give your gun to your mother while you are on deployment. Some states, like recently-in-the-news Oregon, have passed laws that are versions of this. That is, a criminal and mental health background check for all gun sales. (In Oregon’s case, even the new law still allows transfers of ownership among family members without a check.) But the requirement for a background check on all private sales of guns is one of the objectives of the gun control lobby and their media allies. So now you know what they mean by this. They mean that you can’t sell your rifle to your Facebook hunting buddy unless a criminal and mental health background check is conducted.4. Obama’s Executive Action
Despite the wishes of the gun-grabbers, Obama’s executive action does not address points one through three above. Instead, it simply “requires” that the ATF should enforce the existing laws about licensing people who sell weapons. To that end they are giving more money to the ATF for people who conduct the background checks that already are conducted and are already required by law. There will also be more federal oversight and enforcement on reporting of lost or stolen guns. As a result of Obama’s action, it ispossible that more people will be defined as sellers based on volume as a result of there being more ATF agents, but in reality private sales won’t be changed in any meaningful way, and gun shows and online sales will continue as they do, with only a very few exceptions.5. Precedent
Although the practical effect of the President’s action is relatively minor, it is a message nevertheless. The President is establishing his authority to simply take action curtailing the constitutionally guaranteed right of Americans to own guns, without the legislature, based on his own decisions about what that action should consist of. As a precedent for gun-grabbing, it may not be strong, but it is absolutely applicable. If you value your freedom to purchase and possess guns, this action is an affront.
I have referred here to Donald Trump’s blaming Ronald Reagan’s 1987 tax reform for the first of Trump’s four business bankruptcies, and how very un-Republican that is.
That comment came in a Playboy magazine interview. Trump’s first big Playboy Interview was in 1990, when he made this interesting statement:
Sometimes you sound like a Presidential candidate stirring up the voters.
I don’t want the Presidency. I’m going to help a lot of people with my foundation-and for me, the grass isn’t always greener.
But if the grass ever did look greener, which political party do you think you’d be more comfortable with?
Well, if I ever ran for office, I’d do better as a Democrat than as a Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more Republican-and that’s not because I’d be more liberal, because I’m conservative. But the working guy would elect me. He likes me. When I walk down the street, those cabbies start yelling out their windows. …
Wait. If you believe that the public shares these views, and that you could do the job, whynot consider running for President?
I’d do the job as well as or better than anyone else. It’s my hope that George Bush can do a great job.
You categorically don’t want to be President?
I don’t want to be President. I’m one hundred percent sure. I’d change my mind only if I saw this country continue to go down the tubes.
Later in the 1990s, Trump again got the Playboy Interview treatment, written by Mark Bowden, who has resurfaced nearly two decades later to say …
He was like one of those characters in an 18th-century comedy meant to embody a particular flavor of human folly. Trump struck me as adolescent, hilariously ostentatious, arbitrary, unkind, profane, dishonest, loudly opinionated, and consistently wrong. He remains the most vain man I have ever met. And he was trying to make a good impression. Who could have predicted that those very traits, now on prominent daily display, would turn him into the leading G.O.P. candidate for president of the United States?
His latest outrageous edict on banning all Muslims from entering the country comes as no surprise to me based on the man I met nearly 20 years ago. He has no coherent political philosophy, so comparisons with Fascist leaders miss the mark. He just reacts. Trump lives in a fantasy of perfection, with himself as its animating force.
Before I met him back in 1996, I felt bad for him. He’d had a rough 10 years. He had just turned 50 and wasn’t happy about it. He looked soft, from his growing jowls to the way his belt bit deeply into the spreading roll of his belly. As a businessman he had crashed and burned, rescued only by creditors who had to bail him out lest they be dragged down with him. His enterprises were being run by court-appointed managers, who had put him back on his financial feet mostly by investing heavily in Atlantic City, which was then on the rise.
He had insulated himself from failure with bluster. In public he was still The Donald—still rich, still working hard at being a symbol of excess. I was working on a profile of him for Playboy, which was his kind of magazine. He considered himself the magazine’s beau ideal, and was inordinately proud of having been featured on the magazine’s cover some years before. His then wife, Marla Maples, told him, sardonically, that he ought to buy the magazine: “You bought the Miss Universe Pageant; it’s right up your alley.” He must have figured it was a safe bet to agree to cooperate for my story. But well before I left him, we both knew he probably wouldn’t like the final product.
I was prepared to like him as I boarded his black 727 at La Guardia for the flight to Mar-a-Lago, his Florida home—prepared to discover that his over-the-top public persona was a clever pose. That underneath was an ironic wit, an ordinary but clever guy. But no. With Trump, what you see is what you get. His behavior was cringe-worthy. He showed off the gilded interior of his plane—calling me over to inspect a Renoir on its walls, beckoning me to lean in closely to see . . . what? The luminosity of the brush strokes? The masterly use of color? No. The signature. “Worth $10 million,” he told me. Time after time the stories he told me didn’t check out, from Michael Jackson’s romantic weekend at Mar-a-Lago with his then wife Lisa Marie Presley (they stayed at opposite ends of the estate) to the rug in one bedroom he said was designed by Walt Disney when he was 18 (it wasn’t) to the strength of his marriage to Maples (they would split months later).
It was hard to watch the way he treated those around him, issuing peremptory orders—“Polish this, Tony. Today.” He met with the lady who selected his drapery for the Florida estate—“The best! The best! She’s a genius!”—who had selected a sampling of fabrics for him to choose from, all different shades of gold. He left the choice to her, saying only, “I want it really rich. Rich, rich, elegant, incredible.” Then, “Don’t disappoint me.” It was a pattern. Trump did not make decisions. He surrounded himself with “geniuses” and delegated. So long as you did not “disappoint” him—and it was never clear how to avoid doing so—you were gold.
What was clear was how fast and far one could fall from favor. The trip from “genius” to “idiot” was a flash. The former pilots who flew his plane were geniuses, until they made one too many bumpy landings and became “fucking idiots.” The gold carpeting selected in his absence for the locker rooms in the spa at Mar-a-Lago? “What kind of fucking idiot . . . ?” I watched as Trump strutted around the beautifully groomed clay tennis courts on his estate, managed by noted tennis pro Anthony Boulle. The courts had been prepped meticulously for a full day of scheduled matches. Trump took exception to the design of the spaces between courts. In particular, he didn’t like a small metal box—a pump and cooler for the water fountain alongside—which he thought looked ugly. He first questioned its placement, then crudely disparaged it, then kicked the box, which didn’t budge, and then stooped—red-faced and fuming—to tear it loose from its moorings, rupturing a water line and sending a geyser to soak the courts. Boulle looked horrified, a weekend of tennis abruptly drowned. Catching a glimpse of me watching, Trump grimaced.
“I guess that’ll have to be in your story,” he said.
“Pretty much,” I told him.
This apparently worried him, because on the flight home a day later he had a proposition.
“I’m looking for somebody to write my next book,” he told me.
I told him that I would not be interested.
“Why not?” he asked. “All my books become best-sellers.”
The import was clear. There was money in it for me. Trump remains the only person I have ever written about who tried to bribe me.
As I’ve watched his improbable political rise, it is clear that he hasn’t changed. The very things that made him so unappealing apparently now translate into wide popular support. Apart from the comical ego, the errors, and the self-serving bluster, what you get from Trump are commonplace ideas pronounced as received wisdom. Begin registering all Muslims in America? Round up the families of suspected terrorists? Ban all Muslims from entering the country? Carpet-bomb ISIS-held territories in Iraq (killing the 98-plus percent of civilians who are, in effect, being held hostage there by the terror group and turning a war against a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims into a global religious crusade)? Using nuclear weapons? The ideas that pop into his head are the same ones that occur to any teenager angry about terror attacks. They appeal to anyone who can’t be bothered to think them through—can’t be bothered to ask not just the moral questions but the all-important practical one: Will doing this makes things better or worse? When you believe in your own genius, you don’t question your own flashes of inspiration.
I got a call from his office some days after my profile of him appeared in the May 1997 issue of Playboy. I had already heard how he’d blown his stack to Christie Hefner. I was traveling at the tim>, working on my book Black Hawk Down. The call came to me in a motel room in Colorado, from his trusty assistant, the late Norma Foerderer.
“Mr. Trump would like to talk to you,” she said.
I waited, sitting on the edge of the bed, bracing myself.
Foerderer came back on the line. She said:
“He’s too livid to speak.”
Be that as it may, Trump’s supporters should be more concerned about what RedState reports:
In July, Donald Trump made a statementabout the 2008 financial crisis that left many conservatives perplexed:
“I identify with some things as a Democrat…I was never a Bush fan. [When] the economy crashed so horribly under George Bush, because of mistakes they made having to do with banking and lots of other things, I don’t think the Democrats would have done that.”
Now to be sure, there is plenty of blame to be spread around. Both parties in Congress, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and even the American public all contributed to the crisis.
But if Trump thinks that the Democrats were not to blame, well, I will refer him to Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.
Trump’s statement prompted me to research what he thought about the economy-and proposals to fix it-during the end of Bush’s term and the beginning of Obama’s term (of which he had high hopes):
We have a young, vibrant, smart president who, I think, is going to do a really good job.
And, honestly, he has to do a really good job or this country maybe will never be the same. We had eight years of a horrendous president, a terrible president. You cannot get worse than Bush. And I really believe that Obama will be a great president, and I hope he is.
Anyway, I found out that Donald Trump supported the bank bailouts.
“Now, I did not know about a $700 billion bailout, in all fairness. And I think probably, it is something — it’s sad, but, probably, it’s something that has to get done, because your financial system is most likely going to come to a halt if it does not. So, it is a pretty sad day for this country.”
And the auto bailouts:
“I think the government should stand behind them 100 percent. You cannot lose the auto companies. They’re great. They make wonderful products.”
He really liked the stimulus package:
“I thought he did a terrific job,” Trump told Fox News’s Greta Van Susteren. “This is a strong guy knows what he wants, and this is what we need.”
“First of all, I thought he did a great job tonight,” said Trump. “I thought he was strong and smart, and it looks like we have somebody that knows what he is doing finally in office, and he did inherit a tremendous problem. He really stepped into a mess, Greta.”
Van Susteren then asked Trump if a simple payroll tax holiday might be a better way to stimulate the flagging economy. Trump, however, held firm in his support for Obama’s plan, which he praised for the wide breadth of approaches it took to combatting the crisis.
“Well, I think taxes are very good. I think it goes quickly. It is easily done, and etc., etc.,” Trump told Van Susteren, “but building infrastructure, building great projects, putting people to work in that sense is also very good, so I think you have a combination of both plus he is doing a rebate system and I think that is good also.”
Despite concerns with the cost, he liked Obama’s healthcare plan:
VAN SUSTEREN: What is your thought about the health care reform that is being at least proposed, at this point?
TRUMP: Well, I think it’s noble, except I just don’t know how a country that’s in such debt — we are really a debtor nation right now, and I just don’t know how a country in this kind of trouble can afford it. It’s very — I love the idea, but can this country afford it? Will it destroy the country? Will it destroy other people that have been paying into health care for years? I mean, will that destroy other people? It’s a very, very tough situation. I love it from many standpoints, but can this country afford it? And maybe this isn’t the right time.
(By the way, Trump IS and HAS been a fan of Obama’s ideal healthcare system: single payer)
How about Obama’s longstanding obsession with progressive taxation? Trump agrees:
“The one problem I have with the flat tax is that rich people are paying the same as people that are making very little money,” he said. “And I think there should be a graduation of some kind. Because as you make a certain amount of money, I think you should have to graduate upward.”
How about “protecting ” Social Security and Medicare from financially responsible and necessary reform? Trump won’t touch them either:
“Every Republican wants to do a big number on Social Security, they want to do it on Medicare, they want to do it on Medicaid. And we can’t do that. And it’s not fair to the people that have been paying in for years and now all of the sudden they want to be cut.”
Throw in his misunderstanding of the economic effects of immigration and free trade, and the current GOP front-runner is one confused man when it comes to the economy.
Of course Trump understands the real estate and entertainment businesses. But his skill in those areas clearly has not translated to a broader understanding of free market principles.
If Republican voters care about those principles, more than say, bluster, it will only be a matter of time before Trump fades. Otherwise, and it is a very real possibility, the GOP just may nominate another candidate who represents more of the same economic failures of the past.
The number one single in Britain …
… and over here on my parents’ wedding day in 1961:
The number one single today in 1977:
The Wall Street Journal:
As the FBI seeks to end the citizen takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it’s worth reflecting on what is behind the rising civil disobedience in the American West. The armed occupation of federal buildings is inexcusable, but so are federal land-management abuses and prosecutorial overreach.
Activists on Saturday broke into an unoccupied building on the 187,000-acre federal refuge in eastern Oregon to protest the imprisonment of two Oregon ranchers. The group’s spokesman is Ammon Bundy, son of Cliven Bundy, a Nevadan who in 2014 came to national attention over his standoff with the Bureau of Land Management. The younger Bundy is a political grandstander, and many in Oregon oppose his illegal siege.
The drama is bringing attention to legitimate grievances, especially the appalling federal treatment of the Hammond family. The Hammonds’ problems trace to 1908, whenTheodore Roosevelt set aside 89,000 acres around Malheur Lake as a bird refuge. The government has since been on a voracious land-and-water grab, coercing the area’s once-thriving ranchers to sell.
The feds have revoked dozens of grazing permits and raised the price of the few it issues. It has mismanaged the area’s water, allowing ranchlands to flood. It has harassed landowners with regulatory actions that raise the cost of ranching, then has bought out private landowners to more than double the refuge’s size.
The Hammonds are one of the last private owners in the Harney Basin, and they have endured federal harassment over their water rights, the revocation of their grazing permits, restricted access to their property, and prosecutorial abuse.
In 2001 the family told authorities it planned to set a managed fire on its land to fight invasive species. The fire accidently spread over 139 acres of public land before the Hammonds extinguished it. In 2006 the family tried to save its winter feed from a lightning fire by setting “back fires” on its property (a common practice), which burnt an acre of public land.
Years later, in 2011, the feds charged Dwight Hammond and his son Steven with nine counts under the elastic Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A federal jury found them guilty only of setting the two fires they had admitted to starting, and federal Judge Michael Hogan sentenced the father to three months and the son to a year in prison. He said the federal minimum of five years would not meet “any idea I have of justice, proportionality” and would “shock the conscience.” The feds appealed the sentence and another judge ordered both Hammonds to serve the full five years. They also owe $400,000 in supposed fire-related costs.
Many in rural Oregon view this as a government vendetta. Rusty Inglis, who worked for the Forest Service for 34 years and now runs a local Oregon farm bureau, recently told a trade magazine that it’s “obvious” that “the BLM and the wildlife refuge want that ranch.” The Oregon Farm Bureau called the sentences “gross government overreach.” The ideology of “national” land has become the club to punish private landowners who are the best source of economic stability and conservation.
The Bundy occupation of federal land can’t be tolerated, but the growing Western opposition to government harassment of private landowners ought to be a source of political concern. Ted Cruz and others are right to caution the occupiers against their sit-in, but the federal bureaucracy also needs to be reined in.
This is not the first time the BLM has grotesquely exceeded its legitimiate authority. The first time I read about the BLM was in the late 1970s in, of all places, a motorcycle magazine that wrote about the BLM’s shutting off motorcross motorcycle riders’ access to federal lands without any authority to do so. The magazine cited a radio commentator who pointed this out. The commentator’s name was Ronald Reagan.
This is also not the first time government employees who work in the environmental arm of government have reached near-totalitarian levels of bureaucratic overreach. Ask any business owner who has to deal with the Environmental Protection Agency. This state’s Department of Natural Resources has been known for decades as “Damn Near Russia.” And too many Wisconsinites continue to believe it’s a good idea for state government to use taxpayer dollars to gobble up state land under the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Fund so that the unapproved cannot use land their taxes paid to buy. (That is: hunters, fishermen, ATV owners, snowmobile owners, etc.)
Jim Geraghty has some inconvenient truths for supporters of Donald Trump, though it applies to all Republicans:
The American Right is divided between those who think our country has serious problems and those who think it is teetering on the edge of collapse. Donald Trump’s rise has been fueled by the latter group, which sees itself as Cassandra, accurately surveying and desperately trying to revive a “crippled America,” as Trump titled his book.
The edge-of-extinction crowd hasn’t just failed to persuade the rest of the Right; they’ve failed to persuade the mass of voters. Americans tell pollsters the country is headed in the wrong direction, but they’re not apocalyptic about it. To everyone else, the Doomsayers come across as paranoid, race-obsessed hysterics.
Conservative columnist Diana West, arguing that it’s time for “American Patriots” to rally around Trump, offers a concise summary of the apocalyptic vision that has taken hold among quite a few self-identified conservatives:
If, say, a President Cruz were to ensure that Planned Parenthood was defunded, Obamacare ended, government trimmed, and amnesty once again staved off for another election cycle — we would all rejoice. However, the Constitution, the Republic, would be no more secure. On the contrary, they would still teeter on the edge of extinction, lost in a demographic, political, and cultural transformation that our fathers, founding and otherwise, would find inconceivable — and particularly if they ever found out that the crisis took hold when We the People lost our nerve even to talk about immigration and Islam.
There’s a lot to unpack here. West’s first point on the path to extinction is a “demographic transformation.” The United States is 77 percent white, 13 percent African American, about 17 percent Latino, and 5 percent Asian. Those numbers will change in a generation; staid demographers and rhetorical firebrands alike refer to it as the “browning of America.” West and others assert that a majority-minority United States will be a lesser country — less free, less prosperous, less safe. At heart, they believe that what gives America its unique strengths is a population that is predominantly European in heritage.
But if you think a strong national defense, strong family values, free-market economics, and respect for the rule of law only benefit white America, and can only be preserved by them, you’re out of your mind. Try telling the 233,000 African-American members of the military that they’re incapable of keeping Americans safe. Tell the 42 percent of Asian-Americans who profess faith in Christ that their lives don’t preserve and promote Judeo-Christian values. Tell the 55,000 Hispanic police officers that they’re culturally incapable of upholding the rule of law. Tell the immigrants starting 520 new businesses per month that they can’t strengthen American capitalism. According to apocalyptic conservatism, Clarence Thomas, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Thomas Sowell are part of the problem, not the solution.
The Doomsday Conservatives contend we’re living in a genuine dark age of oppression of speech, at a time when Alex Jones is on 160 stations, Glenn Beck has his own television network, and Mark Levin’s books repeatedly top the New York Times bestseller lists. West concludes that the crisis she sees took hold when the American People “lost our nerve to even talk about immigration or Islam.” Look around you. Do you see a country that is afraid to discuss immigration or Islam?
It’s a bit like when Leftists insist “it’s time for a real national dialogue on race” or “it’s time for a serious national conversation on guns,” when in reality these dialogues have been ongoing for decades, in the halls of Congress and on cable-news shows and at dinner tables across the country. Trump-aligned anti-immigration zealots insist the conversation is nonexistent or suppressed so as to avoid the truth: They aren’t winning the argument.
The country is evenly split on whether to allow Syrian refugees to resettle in the United States. But only 27 percent of registered voters support banning Muslims from entering the country; 66 percent oppose the idea. A slim majority supports the status quo on “birthright citizenship” — giving American citizenship to anyone born on American soil, regardless of their parents’ legal status. Support for a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants consistently sits between 50 and 60 percent.
Those who feel that stopping illegal immigration should be the nation’s top priority rarely have any idea of how few of their countrymen agree with them. Gallup recently asked voters what they see as the most important problem facing the country today. Just 5 percent said “immigration/illegal aliens.” 16 percent said “terrorism” and 9 percent said the “economy in general.”
Yet to West, the problem that’s so low on most people’s lists is even worse than anyone is willing to admit:
We don’t even have a border. We have “border surges,” and “unaccompanied alien minors.” We have “sanctuary cities,” and a continuous government raid on our own pocketbooks to pay for what amounts to our own invasion. That’s not even counting the attendant pathologies, burdens, and immeasurable cultural dislocation that comes about when “no one speaks English anymore.”
It is no doubt frustrating that an Immigration and Customs Enforcement service capable of removing 409,000 illegal immigrants just a few years ago only removed 235,419 in the last fiscal year. But U.S. immigration enforcement has not ceased, as West and her ilk might suggest.
In 2005, 9,891 border-patrol agents worked on the Southwest border with Mexico; by 2014, there were 18,127 agents. Under Operation Secure Texas, the state government will devote $800 million in new resources to securing the border, which is already patrolled by Texas National Guard troops. We have a border, and a lot is being done to secure it. But the Doomsday Conservatives can’t take “yes” for an answer. They’re too emotionally and psychologically invested in the idea of perpetual crisis to acknowledge that real progress has been made on immigration.
Despite its gloom, their narrative preserves their self-image: A nation of sheep tunes out the severity of its problems, obliviously careening toward the precipice while an impassioned, brave band of outsiders recognizes the menace arriving from abroad. While even seemingly conservative lawmakers such as Ted Cruz are mesmerized by, as West puts it, a “rosier vision of Islam and immigration screening,” the faithful unite around a billionaire who’s willing to speak the truths that political correctness has so thoroughly silenced. Anyone who doesn’t see it the way they do is a loser, a low-energy clown, or something more sinister.
The best part of this narrative is that if Trump fails to win the nomination or the presidency, the outsiders have a ready-made explanation: the party and/or the country chose to be ostriches, heads buried in the sand as the country fell apart. It just couldn’t be that Trump and his supporters tainted legitimate concerns about border security and assimilation of immigrants with a whiff of lunatic white-nationalism.
Go back to those numbers:
5%: Americans who believe “immigration/illegal aliens” is the biggest issue facing the U.S.
27%: Americans who believe Muslims should be banned from entering the U.S.
50–60%: Americans who believe illegal immigrants should get a path to citizenship.
60%: Americans who oppose banning Muslims from entering the U.S.
If you’re taking one or both of those first two positions … well, Donald Trump calls people on the wrong end losers. The First Amendment gives us the right to be wrong and unpopular, but taking positions most people do not agree with doesn’t get you elected.
To put it mildly, James Taranto is not impressed with what Barack the Weeper announced yesterday:
“This is it, really?” Jennifer Baker, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association’s lobbying arm (no pun intended) asks the New York Times rhetorically. “This is what they’ve been hyping for how long now? This is the proposal they’ve spent seven years putting together? They’re not really doing anything.”
She refers, of course, to what the White House calls President Obama’s “commonsense steps … to keep guns out of the wrong hands.” As we write, the White House homepage carries the prominent headline “Watch President Obama Take Action to Reduce Gun Violence.” That’s accompanied by an 84-minute video that is literally all talk and no action.
We take it back. It’s not all talk. The first 35 minutes are a “beginning shortly” screen, followed by a minute-plus of an empty lectern and a six-minute introduction.
As for the “action,” as per a White House fact sheet, it consists mostly of an effort to “keep guns out of the wrong hands through background checks”:
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) is making clear that it doesn’t matter where you conduct your business—from a store, at gun shows, or over the Internet: If you’re in the business of selling firearms, you must get a license and conduct background checks.
The key phrase here is “in the business of selling.” Not everyone who sells firearms is “in the business.” The law exempts hobbyists and collectors who sell firearms from the requirement that they run background checks on buyers. Only Congress can change the law, and Obama’s gun control agenda couldn’t get past even the Democratic Senate in 2013. So the administration is adopting a broader definition of “in the business of selling firearms” in the hope of expanding background checks (or deterring sellers).
What is the new definition? That’s unclear, and deliberately so. From that Times report:
Under [the president’s] plan, the White House said, officials from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will begin contacting gun sellers to let them know of new standards to “clarify” who would be considered a regulated dealer—taking into account factors such as whether someone has a business card, uses a website or sells guns in their original packaging.
But there will be no set number for defining how many guns sold would make someone a “dealer”—a standard that some groups had pushed as essential to giving the changes more teeth. White House officials said someone could sell as few as one or two guns yet still be considered a dealer whose sales are subject to background checks.
From the White House’s standpoint, the lack of a clear standard would appear to be a feature rather than a flaw. It means that nobody is safe: Anyone who sells so much as one gun will have reason to fear prosecution. Some will no doubt be deterred, while others will obtain licenses and do the background checks—though as the Violence Policy Center noted in a 2007 report, licensed dealers are exempt from other regulations that apply to private sales. Of those who continue to sell without licenses, a few will be prosecuted. Some, even if acquitted, will have their lives ruined over a malum prohibitum offense.
Meanwhile, malum in se firearms offenses will go on unabated, which is to say the effort is unlikely to save any lives. There will remain numerous channels, both legal and illegal, by which would-be killers can obtain guns.
That VPC report points out that what liberals refer to (imprecisely at best) as the “gun show loophole” was an unintended consequence of earlier gun-control efforts:
From 1968 to 1993, almost anyone who was not prohibited from owning firearms and had a location from which they [sic] intended to conduct business—including their own home or office—could obtain an FFL. For $30 an applicant could receive the three-year license, allowing the license holder to ship, transport, and receive firearms in interstate commerce and engage in retail sales. . . .
In 1986, Congress passed the National Rifle Association-backed Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which further eased regulation of licensees and placed restrictions on ATF’s ability to weed out illegitimate gun dealers. . . .
As a result of the lax requirements for becoming a firearms dealer, the number of Type 1 FFLs ballooned from 146,429 in 1975 to 245,000 in 1992. The vast majority of these license holders were what is known as “kitchen-table” dealers—individuals who conduct business out of their homes and offices and do not operate actual gun or sporting goods stores. And while many “kitchen-table” dealers obtained the license merely to enjoy lower prices and evade the perceived “red tape” associated with gun purchase laws, others recognized it as a dramatic loophole in federal law that could easily be exploited to facilitate high-volume criminal gun trafficking.
In response to the widespread abuse of FFLs and at the urging of the Violence Policy Center, the Clinton administration began strictly enforcing the requirement that license holders be “engaged in the business” of selling firearms as required by the statute.
That’s right, the Clinton administration used the “in the business of selling firearms” requirement as a reason to deny licenses—exactly the opposite of Obama’s approach now.
In addition, Clinton-era legislative changes increased the license fee and imposed new regulatory burdens on licensees. The result was predictable: “The number of Type 1 FFLs in the United States has dropped 79 percent—from 245,628 in 1994 to 50,630 in 2007.”
It’s a safe bet that the Obama measures will have unintended consequences as well. One provision, as Politico notes, weakens medical privacy: It “ enables health care providers to report the names of mentally ill patients to an FBI firearms background check system.” That doesn’t seem unreasonable on its face, but it may deter some patients from seeking treatment.
National Review’s Charles Cooke notes another near-certain consequence:
Ceteris paribus, the United States will play host to at least another 20 million guns by the end of December 2016—many of them so-called “assault weapons.” In addition, the country will welcome another million or so concealed carriers, and another half-million or so NRA members. Every time the president talks about gun control, these numbers increase, and, in consequence, the president’s opponents are strengthened.
One caveat: There’s an element of guesswork in any enumeration of gun sales. As the Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, “the best approximation we can get of the number of firearms sold each year comes from the FBI’s data on gun background checks.”
But that’s convenient for an administration that claims to be expanding background checks. Obama and his men will be able to spin increased demand for guns as a success: “Look at all the checks we’re conducting!”
So a policy loop is created: Gun control is stiffened, which doesn’t actually result in reducing gun violence; thus there are more calls for gun control. Maybe Obama can see an ObamaCare doctor for his tear duct problem before his next gun control speech.
First: The song of the day:
The number one album today in 1968 was the Beatles’ “Magical Mystery Tour”:
The number one single today in 1973 included a person rumored to be the subject of the song on backing vocals:
The number one British single today in 1979 was this group’s only number one:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 