Dear Jolters,
Well, that is one lame-o card. The implication at the get-go is this text will rhyme: Maybe somewhere “hope” and “joke” do, but not in The Bronx. No rhyme and no rhythm either. And whoever proofread this needs a smack: After the aforementioned “joke,” where’s that comma, eh? And what’s this test-making stuff? No, dude, you keep dreaming about the not-yet lip-meeting, because I doubt you’ll get even a handshake. More likely, a slap. On the upside: at least this card’s not creepy, like these.
Speaking of love and creepy, let’s end the beginning with Benny Hill’s infamous take on this missive’s subject line.
Editorials
1. On the memo crafted by California Republican representative Devin Nunes, we opined that the document should be “just the start.” From the editorial:
The campaign waged against the memo as a grave threat to America’s intelligence operations appears completely absurd in light of its contents. Part of the bureaucratic objection at the FBI to releasing the memo — and to giving the House Intelligence Committee the material it’s based on — was clearly that it contained information embarrassing to the FBI. . . .
The Nunes memo has broken the seal on information related to the start of the Russian investigation; the republic will survive, and in fact, benefit from an airing of the circumstances of this episode.
2. On the Senate’s budget deal, NR says ixnay. From the editorial:
And we are skeptical that the deal will include any meaningful budget offsets. Budget-cap agreements in the past have come with offsets that tend to manifest as accounting gimmicks rather than actual spending cuts. Even small changes in the future growth of entitlements would counteract the new spending in this bill, but there is no serious appetite for that within the GOP.
Republicans interested in passing major conservative reforms in 2018 — which could be the last chance for years, if Democrats succeed in taking the House later this year — should reject this deal and push for something better. Another year of unified Republican control of the elected branches of government in Washington is a terrible thing to waste.
Podcastapalooza
1. Scott and Jeff stick Eli Lake before a microphone and talk about Steely Dan (after whose hit my sweet and beautiful niece Aja is named). OK, you can listen to the new Political Beats right here.
2. Discussed by Mr. Nordlinger on the new episode of Jaywalking are Saoirse Ronan, Harvey Weinstein, Presidents Trump and Obama, and much more, and yes, there is music. You may listen here.
3. The Q & A episodes in which Jay features opera talents are my favorite. Fun always breaks out. On the new edition, tenor Lawrence Brownlee joins NR’s senior editor to talk all things music. Do listen here.
4. The ever-popular John J. Miller podcast, The Great Books, looks at one of the greatest: Virgil’s Aeneid. Professor Louis Markos of Houston Baptist University joins JJM to discuss the classic. Listen here.
5. Author Bryan Caplan tries to make The Case Against Education to JJM in the new episode of The Bookmonger. You ought to listen, done conveniently here.
6. It’s politics to the n-th power on The Jamie Weinstein Show. His guest this week is Politico and Axios founder Mike Allen. Catch it here.
7. David and Alexandra tackle religion in football, blitz through some important new #MeToo statistics, and ask Congress not to punt on its constitutional authority to declare war. It’s the post-Super Bowl edition of The Liberty Files. Tune your receivers to listen here.
8. On the new episode of The Editors, Charlie, Reihan, and Michael Brendan Dougherty discuss the Nunes memo, the pending budget deal, and the Rubio-Ivanka “paid family leave” plan. Lend an ear, here.
9. If you want to hear Kevin and Charlie discuss the Super Bowl, Philadelphia Eagles fans, and the ridiculous Republican budget, then you are in luck: All of that is being served up on the new episode of Mad Dogs and Englishmen. Check it out, here.
10. Last but not least, if only because John Podhoretz is involved, the new episode of The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg has been uplifted, courtesy of booster rockets, onto NRO. Our host and his guest yammer about movies, TV, New York, neoconservatism, and much more. There is also a surprise-guest cameo. Strap on your headphones and listen up here.
A Dozen NR Pieces that You Will Read or Weep Hot Tears When You Find Out What You’ve Missed
1. Jonah Goldberg gets Cloverfielded. That’s now a verb. A clumsy one, I’ll admit.
2. Jay Nordlinger heads south of the border (take it away, Frankie) and provides an exceptional travelogue. There’s so much to share from his wanderings through Mexico City that one column can’t contain it all. But you need to read both Part One and Part Two.
3. The Memo, One: After the Nunes Memo was released, Andy McCarthy drafted NR’s key response and analysis. From his initial piece:
A final point should be made about continuing attempts to shape our views of the memo and what it portends. It is fatuous to claim, as critics of Committee chairman Devin Nunes and the memo do, that it makes war on our investigative agencies while attempting to discredit the Mueller investigation.
When Democrats have run the Congress, they have not hesitated to decry the FBI’s use of Patriot Act and surveillance power. They then refer to it — quite correctly — as their constitutional obligation to conduct oversight and ensure that these agencies created by Congress carry out their taxpayer-funded missions appropriately. The point is to ferret out missteps, remedy them, and hold officials accountable; it is not to undermine the FBI, which is regarded as the nation’s premier law-enforcement agency for good reason.
4. The Memo, Two: Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee leaked a rebuttal to the Nunes Memo, drafted by NY uber-liberal Jerrold Nadler. Andy (always on duty!), in a careful and detailed analysis, called it “very weak,” “wholly unpersuasive,” and “in several particulars frivolous.”
5. The Memo, Three: And then Victor Davis Hanson weighed in. From his widely circulated Corner post:
By all means, let us see the transcript of the McCabe interview, the Democratic minority memo, the actual FISA court requests, the complete text trove of Page and Strzok, the prior administration’s requests to unmask surveilled American citizens, Clinton-campaign communications about the procurement of the dossier, and the transcripts of those surveilled.
We need to find out whether Russian collusion and interference into the 2016 election was far more devious and complex than believed and whether it involved seeding the research behind the Clinton campaign’s purchased oppositional dossier in order to undermine a U.S. election, leading to the greatest irony of all: a special counsel investigating what likely did not happen while ignoring what likely did — perhaps the greatest political scandal of the modern age.
At this point, the only cure for the wound is far more light.
6. The Memo, Four: The next day brought more analysis from VDH, much of it about how so many roads in this emerging scandal seem to point to one Barack Obama. A slice:
By all means, let us see the transcript of the McCabe interview, the Democratic minority memo, the actual FISA court requests, the complete text trove of Page and Strzok, the prior administration’s requests to unmask surveilled American citizens, Clinton-campaign communications about the procurement of the dossier, and the transcripts of those surveilled. We need to find out whether Russian collusion and interference into the 2016 election was far more devious and complex than believed and whether it involved seeding the research behind the Clinton campaign’s purchased oppositional dossier in order to undermine a U.S. election, leading to the greatest irony of all: a special counsel investigating what likely did not happen while ignoring what likely did — perhaps the greatest political scandal of the modern age. At this point, the only cure for the wound is far more light.
7. Rich Lowry says yes, throw a parade. Jonah likely won’t be watching.
8. Campus kangaroo courts, where due-process is often barred by administrators or AWOL from ignorance, are neatly in the cross-hairs of Naomi Schaefer Riley.
9. Doug Badger, Mike Needham, and Marie Fishpaw are fearing a Republican capitulation on Obamacare. Here’s how their piece winds up:
Conservatives have long disagreed among themselves on important details, which is why Republican leaders abandoned repeal efforts after last July’s disastrous Senate vote. Members who haven’t given up on repeal continue to argue over the bill’s details. In seeking the optimal politically feasible outcome, they should operate with a sense of urgency and a willingness to compromise.
If they don’t coalesce behind something soon, they will find themselves bystanders as their GOP colleagues link arms with Democrats to preserve and enlarge Obamacare, not to repeal and replace it.
10. Nice try Clint Eastwood, but for Kyle Smith, 15:17 to Paris stalls between stations.
11. If you think “Labor Peace” is a goal of public-employee unions, you might have hit your head. Maxford Nelson looks at the matter and the upcoming major SCOTUS case, Janus v. AFSCME Council 31. Here’s a section of his article:
Fundamentally, though, the question of whether forcing public employees to pay agency fees to a union promotes labor peace is empirical, not legal. Union bluster aside, if agency-fee requirements do not promote labor peace in practice, then the infringement of public employees’ rights perpetrated by agency fees is much harder to justify legally.
12. George Weigel (more from him below) blasts a Vatican bishop who extols Communist China for some cockamamie de facto “best implementing the social doctrines of the Church.” You mean like forced abortion and forced sterilization and the laogai, you dumb purple-capped cluck (the cluck being Argentinian bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo)? From George’s piece:
The “useful idiot” has been a player on the world stage since the days of Lenin (although one wonders whether, in this case, the idiocy is so extreme that the perpetrator’s utility to the regime begins to decline). Bishop Sánchez Sorondo’s absurd misrepresentations of the realities of 21st-century China put him in a rogues’ gallery that includes such notables as Walter Duranty, who deliberately failed to report the Ukrainian terror famine in 1932–33 to the readers of the New York Times, and Herbert Matthews, whose encomia to Fidel Castro similarly misled the readers of what was once a national paper of record.
BONUS: James L. Buckley — yes, that Jim Buckley, the sainted former senator and federal judge — writes that curbing the constant growth of the administrative state is essential to protecting our fundamental liberties. From his piece:
All of these legislative and constituent pressures are converting Congress from an institution that could once think problems through to responsible conclusions into one that substitutes political reflex for reflection. And to compound the injury, a harried Congress now finds it so hard to focus on the messy details of new legislation that it increasingly abdicates its constitutional responsibilities by delegating essentially legislative authority to executive agencies, thereby spawning an unaccountable administrative state; an administrative state that issues letters instructing schools on who may use which bathroom without bothering with the pesky procedures that require the scrutiny of regulations before they can take effect; an administrative state in which a president who is unable to persuade Congress to do his bidding now reaches for pen and phone to do his will.
BONUS BONUS: Jonah weighs in on the Vatican’s genuflecting before the PRC’s Big Brother. Or is it Big Monsignor? Read his column here.
Nine Important and Valuable Articles Written by Friends and Others
1. In First Things, George Weigel finds devastating cause and effect for the West: “Men Without Conviction, Churches Without People.” From his piece:
“Secularization” is not something that just happened to western Europe, like the Black Death. The radical secularization that has transformed Christianity’s heartland into the most religiously arid half-continent on the planet has at least as much to do with the craven surrender of ministers of the gospel to theological and political fads, and their consequent loss of faith, as it does with the impact of urbanization, mass education, and the industrial revolution on Europeans’ understanding of themselves.
If the gospel is not preached with conviction — the convictions that humanity is in need of salvation and that Jesus is the Savior who liberates us into the fullness of our humanity and gives us eternal life — then the gospel will not be believed.
2. This is not from a journalistic “friend” — it’s from The Guardian. Still we share it here we share it here so you can get a taste of the Left’s growing effort to attack Jordan Peterson as a “dangerous” man. From this rant by Dorian Lynskey:
Not everybody is persuaded that Peterson is a thinker of substance, however. Last November, fellow University of Toronto professor Ira Wells called him “the professor of piffle” — a YouTube star rather than a credible intellectual. Tabatha Southey, a columnist for the Canadian magazine Macleans, designated him “the stupid man’s smart person”.
“Peterson’s secret sauce is to provide an academic veneer to a lot of old-school rightwing cant, including the notion that most academia is corrupt and evil, and banal self-help patter,” says Southey. “He’s very much a cult thing, in every regard. I think he’s a goof, which does not mean he’s not dangerous.”
3. This sounds like quadruple-dipping: At Reason, Scott Shackford details how many Los Angeles public workers are getting huge taxpayer bucks from a financial stew of salary, “earned” while collecting a pension, and often fortified by disability/workman’s comp. As his article’s troubling headline says, “It’s Not Enough to Get Paid for Not Working.”
4. While Hollywood goes dark and gorey, the Hallmark Channel goes gooey and brings in millions of eyeballs seeking and getting family-values fare. At City Journal, Steve Malanga tells this media success story.
5. Are conservatives ideologues non grata in Silicon Valley? A just-released survey by Lincoln Network says yes.
6. Georgetown is a Catholic college. So it should come as no surprise that a campus group that advocates for Catholic doctrine on marriage is getting tormented by the school’s bureaucrats. The College Fix has the story.
7. Is the Canadian Broadcast Service serving Canada, or Islamists? Tom Quiggin, writing for Gatestone Institute, thinks it might be the latter. From his piece:
Canada’s state broadcaster, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) consistently supports the Islamist cause, including direct cooperation with terrorist front groups. This support extends to editing domestic Canadian stories to ensure that even ISIS is not criticized in the domestic context. Given that the CBC is owned by the Government of Canada and funded by taxpayers with a billion dollar a year subsidy, the question arises as to whom they serve.
8. More on Francis’ outsourcing the papacy (bishop appointments and plenty more) to Red China’s atheist bossmen: Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Simon asks: Who made Xi Jinping Pope? From his piece:
The pope’s dealings with similar regimes, notably Cuba and Venezuela, do not inspire confidence. Perhaps he dreams of becoming the first pope to celebrate Mass in Tiananmen Square. That would make for a powerful image. But the hard-liners in Beijing are not naive. They are very conscious of the church’s role in communism’s fall, especially in Poland.
9. First they came for the leprechauns: Also at the Wall Street Journal, my very good pal Bill McGurn takes on the college-mascot nazis.
BONUS: Rush Limbaugh joined NR Institute in Palm Beach on Tuesday to celebrate the legacy of Bill Buckley. He wowed the crowd with a terrific conversation (with Andy McCarthy) about free speech and plenty more. Rush talked about it on his show.
More about the Buckley Legacy Project
National Review Institute is marking the tenth anniversary of Bill Buckley’s death (he passed away February 27, 2008) with a series of forums around the country to celebrate his legacy. The Rush-fortified kick-off forum in Palm Beach will be followed by half-day mini-conferences in Dallas (March 6), Houston (March 7), San Francisco (March 27), Newport Beach (March 28), and Chicago (April 12). Among those who will be on hand to talk about Bill, the First Amendment, the state of conservatism, and much more are Rich Lowry, Andy McCarthy, Ed Feulner, Brent Bozell, John Yoo, Neal Freeman, Jay Nordlinger, Kevin Williamson, Ramesh Ponnuru, Rick Brookhiser, Charles Kesler, David French, John O’Sullivan, Al Felzenberg, and others. We hope you will join us at one of these excellent forums. To get complete information, visit here.
Crisis of Responsibility
We’re excited for our pal David Bahnsen (the dude has written a ton for NRO) — his new book, Crisis of Responsibility: Our Cultural Addiction to Blame and How You Can Cure It, is formally published on Tuesday, February 13th. Its key argument is this: The key to American prosperity in this new era of populism is for moral people to make responsibility matter again by renewing personal virtue and form lasting, mediating institutions that will trump the elitist bogeymen and scapegoats for generations to come.
One premise of David’s book is that the fault for this and that American contretemps, fiasco, or contention doesn’t lie solely with institutions (Wall Street, bankers, elites — round up the usual suspects!); he contends that indeed, in this era of populism, individuals and Main Street are not blameless in America’s major struggles, some of which — like the 2008 housing crisis — have exposed a deeply troubling cultural meltdown of disappearing personal responsibility and mounting scapegoat-junkeying. He also contends that facing this reality is the way Americans can begin to cure this profound societal handicap.
Chatter is growing about the book. This terrific interview with the famous Dr. Drew is a great way to learn about the book and to wade into the analysis of crisis. You can check out a chapter, gratis here.
Eye Candy
1. Ramesh will be on Face the Nation this Sunday. You know the drill.
2. Our good friend Al Felzenberg was at the Nixon Library last week discussing his acclaimed biography of our founder, A Man and His Presidents: The Political Odyssey of William F. Buckley Jr. You should watch the video of Al’s talk.
3. It’s a little dark on the eyes, but it’s the ears that matter here — listen to Judge Jim Buckley, at the inauguration of the Buckley Yale Program‘s public service award named in his honor, discuss federalism and the need to limit government. Here’s the video. This man is a treasure.
4. What do Democrats stand for? A GOP ad asks.
Happy Valentine’s Day
Here are a few tunes to mark love’s official day (even when it happens on Ash Wednesday).
1. Satchmo asks for A Kiss to Build a Dream On.
2. Bobby Darin remembers how Once Upon a Time, a girl with moonlight in her eyes put her hand in his, and said he loved her so. . .Tony Bennett remembers too.
3. Perry Como melts singing If I Loved You.
4. Elvis admits that he Can’t Help Falling in Love with You.
5. The Shirelles want to make sure we know that this is Dedicated to the One I Love.
6. The Ink Spots may have the matches but they Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.
7. And if St. Valentine’s arrow missed you, consider Nat’s advice to Smile, though your heart is aching.
Baseballery
He was the first designated hitter in baseball history: the Yankee’s Ron Bloomberg. It came on Opening Day, April 5, 1973, in Boston — The Boomer walked in his first plate appearance, driving in a run (the bases were loaded). Alas, the Red Sox won a crushing 15-5 victory. (Hiss!) The DH was an American League exclusive until 1976, when the National League’s first-ever designated hitter, Cincinnati’s very solid Dan Driessen, came up to bat in the bottom of the first in Game One of the World Series. We’ll speak little of it, as my Bronx Bombers were toasted in four games. (I was at Game 3, a freezing night in The Bronx, and witnessed the Yanks’ only homer of the series, a solo shot hit by the backup shortstop, Jim Mason, who hit a measly .180 on the season, but who went long in his career’s only World Series at bat.)
WW2 Movie Recommendation
Available on the world wide web: One of Our Aircraft Is Missing.
A Dios
Mardi Gras comes Tuesday. Fasting and abstinence for some of us ash-smeared papists commence the next day (so does pitching and catching for most teams). Fair warning: Next weekend’s Jolt may be grouchy. Whether it is or it ain’t, until then, be well, pray for the forgotten dead, and tell the kids you love them. Good night, and joy be with you.
Best,
Jack Fowler
P.S.: The official map of Loveland.
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