On our fiscal house, our political rhetoric, the Arizona GOP, the game of golf, outstanding families, and more
The recent debate about student-loan forgiveness is multilayered. One question is, How should the federal government spend money, and on whom? How should tax dollars be distributed, and redistributed?
For many years, I have fantasized about a presidential candidate who would say something like the following:
“Here is my pledge to you: I will adhere to the Constitution. I will crush or subdue our enemies, foreign or domestic. And I will do my utmost to keep your sorry behinds free.”
How many votes would such a candidate get? Eleven?
Listening to the student-loan debate, I have had another fantasy — related. My presidential candidate would say this:
“Let me tell you what I’m going to do for people — in the area of economics, in particular. I am not interested in redistributing money from some constituencies to other constituencies — no matter how deserving the latter constituencies are. I will not play Santa Claus. I’m not going to have a naughty list and a good list.”
My guy (or gal) would continue,
“I want to get our fiscal house in order. I want to attack the federal budget deficit and the national debt. I want to reform the tax code along sensible lines. I want to get our whole structure healthy, so we avoid ‘the road of Greece,’ as Mitt Romney said in the 2012 campaign. Insolvency is a brutal thing. It would make our present problems seem like soft kisses.”
Finally,
“What I have outlined — getting our fiscal house in order — is the best thing a president — the best thing our government — can do for people. For our nation as a whole. It will brighten the prospects of all.”
So, how many votes would such a candidate get? Mine certainly. That would spare him a goose egg!
• Last week, Mike Pompeo said, “If I come to believe I ought to become president, that I have something to offer the American people, I will run no matter who all decides to get in and who else decides not to get in the race.”
Heh. If I come to believe I ought to become president. As a rule, these guys come to believe it when they’re about ten.
Hell, I came to believe I ought to be president a long time ago. Weird thing is, no one else agrees with me. (Maybe a few. A precious few.)
• On the business of student loans — on the business of a lot of things: I liked very much something that Patrick Chovanec said on Twitter. A statement of true maturity:
Rarely is a policy idea completely wrong or completely right. There may be positive elements to a policy that is overall wrongheaded, or very negative aspects to a policy that has a lot of arguments in favor of it. It’s important to be aware of both.
• Here is Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, on Anthony Fauci: “Someone needs to grab that little elf and chuck him across the Potomac.” This line elicited huge cheers. I’m sure rhetoric of that kind will go over big in the 2024 presidential primaries. It’s what the folks want.
They want it in politics. They want it in their media, too. It’s what gets the clicks, the “likes,” the dough — all that.
I often quote the late Roger Scruton on the late Kenneth Minogue. These were two sterling conservatives (whom I was privileged to know). In an appreciation of Ken, Roger wrote,
In many ways he was a model of the conservative activist. He was not in the business of destroying things or angering people. He was in the business of defending old-fashioned civility against ideological rage, and he believed this was the real meaning of the freedom that the English-speaking peoples have created and enjoyed.
Scruton further said, “For Ken Minogue, decency was not just a way of doing things, but also the point of doing them.”
It all seems a thousand years ago, in a galaxy far away . . .
• John McCain died on August 25, 2018. On August 25 last week, the Libertarian Party of New Hampshire tweeted a photo of one of his daughters weeping at his casket. The Libertarians wrote, “Happy Holidays.”
Ghouls. Jackals. And they are numerous in our land, unfortunately.
• “In Arizona, Blake Masters backtracks on abortion and scrubs his campaign website.” That is the headline over this article. Apparently, the voters are feeling choicey. Masters is the Republican nominee for Senate — one of the Thiel-funded candidates. His website once read, “I am 100% pro-life.” It once said that he supported “a federal personhood law (ideally a Constitutional amendment) that recognizes that unborn babies are human beings that may not be killed.” But these things have been “scrubbed.”
I think of an old line: “These are my principles. And if you don’t like them, I’ve got others.”
• To see Masters’s website, go here. On the homepage, at the upper right, there is this blue thing — sort of a spiky circle, a circle with Lisa Simpson hair — that says, “Trump Endorsed.” It is literally a seal of approval. Very GOP.
• Stay with Arizona and its Republican Party. Rusty Bowers was the speaker of the house. President Trump and Rudy Giuliani put the arm on him to reverse the results of the presidential election. To cheat. He refused. He was defeated in a GOP primary earlier this month.
Before the primary, he said, “I’m well aware that I’m highly distrusted. My district is a very Trump district, and who knows how this is all going to work out? And if it doesn’t work out, great — I’d do it all again the same way.”
Rusty Bowers put country over party. Constitution, or the rule of law, over tribe, or faction. It is on people such as Bowers that our system depends.
For the Guardian, Ed Pilkington has interviewed Bowers. Here is one statement that Bowers made: “The Constitution is hanging by a thread. The funny thing is, I always thought it would be the other guys. And it’s my side. That just rips at my heart — that we would be the people who would surrender the Constitution in order to win an election. That just blows my mind.”
Bowers speaks for a lot of people.
An excerpt from the article:
From the beginning, conservatism and the Republican party were interchangeable for Bowers. “Belief in God, that you should be held accountable for how you treat other people, those were very conservative thoughts and the bedrock of my politics.”
One more excerpt:
. . . for now, he accepts that things are likely to get much worse before they get better. I ask him, at this moment, is the Republican party in Arizona lost?
“Yeah,” he said. “They’ve invented a new way. It’s a party that doesn’t have any thought. It’s all emotional, it’s all revenge. It’s all anger. That’s all it is.”
He held the thumb and digit finger of his right hand so close together that they were almost touching. “The veneer of civilization is this thin,” he said. “It still exists — I haven’t been hanged yet. But holy moly, this is just crazy. The place has lost its mind.”
The veneer of civilization is this thin. That is a very old, very conservative, belief, or recognition of reality.
• “Golf balls ‘are the product of colonial exploitation,’” reads a headline in the Telegraph. “The game was ‘imposed’ around the world by the British Empire, says University of St Andrews.” That is the subheading. The article is here.
Golf was “imposed” by the Brits? I can only thank them for the imposition, from the bottom of my heart.
• Stick with golf, and this story: “JoAnne Carner, 83, shoots her age one last time before saying farewell at U.S. Senior Women’s Open.” God bless you, Big Mama. Has been a joy to watch you.
• A little language? This obit contains some slang, circa 1940. The heading: “George Bartenieff, Fixture of Downtown Theater, Dies at 89.” Let me quote:
George Michael Bartenieff was born on Jan. 23, 1933, in Berlin to Michael and Irmgard (Prim) Bartenieff, who were dancers. His father was Jewish, and as the situation darkened in Nazi Germany the parents went to the United States to try to establish a life, leaving George and a brother, Igor, in the care of an aunt.
Some more:
His parents had settled in Pittsfield, Mass., using their dance expertise to start a physiotherapy business, and in 1939 they brought the boys over to join them. It was a time when German immigrants in the United States faced suspicion, something that The Berkshire Eagle, the local newspaper, sought to dispel with a 1940 article about the young newcomers.
This is what the Eagle said:
Neither child spoke a word of English when their parents met them at the pier in New York. But in six months they’ve learned not only to speak English, but good, honest ‘United States.’ George is in the fourth grade at Mercer School; Igor, in the sixth. Either one can say ‘You bet’ and ‘OK’ quicker than you could yourself.
Gosh, I love that. Warms the heart. (Very, very American, too.)
• Feel like a heartwarming story, from this very day? Our own day? This is a report about a lady and a firefighter in Monroe, Wash. The lady, known as “Grandma Elsie,” is in her nineties. A firefighter, Brandon Huber, learned that she needed some help — her house had fallen into disrepair. So, with his four sons, he did something about it. Those guys, with their ten hands, did something about it.
My gosh, what a great and classic thing.
• Bill Browder, you know. He is the financier-turned-human-rights-activist who spearheads the movement for Magnitsky acts. I wrote about him and his remarkable family in 2018: here.
Bill’s grandfather, Earl Browder, was the head of the U.S. Communist Party. As Bill says, “My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America, and I became the biggest capitalist in Russia.”
Bill’s father, Felix Browder, was one of the greatest mathematicians of his time. He was the chairman of the department at Chicago. Felix’s brother Andrew was the chairman of the math department at Brown. Their brother William was the chairman of the math department at Princeton.
You get the idea.
On Friday, Joshua Browder, my friend Bill Browder’s son — who is a STEM whiz himself — circulated a tweet, filled with fraternal pride:
So proud of my sister, Sophia Browder. Out of the 622,000 students who took their GCSE exams, she is ranked NUMBER ONE in the entire UK.
She worked so hard to make it happen. Congrats Sophia!
Dang. Those Browder whizzes keep a-coming.
Meanwhile, I can pretty much count my fingers and toes, on a sharp day. Happy Monday, y’all, and I’ll catch you soon.
If you would like to receive Impromptus by e-mail — links to new columns — write to jnordlinger@nationalreview.com.