McCain kills effort to repeal Obamacare

Once again, McCain lets his vanity get the better of him. Still unable to get over his own humiliating defeat at the hands of Obama and unable to understand how he lost and Trump won, he has to show that, yes, he is still a player, a "maverick," and stick it to the 49 Republican senators and 217 Congressmen who voted in favor of repealing Obamacare and all those Republican voters who voted for them. McCain can rest assured that he will now be apotheosized into the liberal pantheon as someone who finally "grew."

The entire Republican Party is now held hostage by Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and, now, John McCain, RINO's all. At least Collins and Murkowski have been somewhat consistent. But, how does John McCain justify selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008 and then not voting to repeal Obamacare in 2017. All over the map, driven entirely by his vanity.

When liberals lose elections, they always retreat behind "norms."

In a recent blog post about the NYT's Linda Greenhouse, I wrote:

Ms Greenhouse can't engage the substance of Justice Gorsuch's arguments, so, instead, like the well-entrenched New York saloniste she is, she seeks to assassinate his character with her best cocktail party sniffs and condescensions. According to Greenhouse, Gorsuch violates the "habits, norms, unwritten rules" of the Supreme Court. When liberals lose elections, they always retreat behind "norms."

No sooner had I written this, than now Emily Bazelon writes an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled How Do We Contend With Trump’s Defiance of ‘Norms?’

Until that moment, it went without saying that a presidential candidate would not use his platform to vilify an ordinary young woman — a wildly disproportionate unleashing of power against a person with little of her own. But assumptions like these are more traditions than formal rules — boundaries made of sand. They’re norms, imprecise and ambient. They lay out what ought to be, according to unwritten social expectations, and not what must be, according to law. Norms are entirely up to us — they exist only as long as there’s a consensus, even unspoken, to preserve them. Such consensus is probably as important as law to the functioning of a democracy. But it’s also fragile. We say that laws are ‘‘broken’’ — a definitive act of rupture. Norms merely erode, slowly, amid argument and equivocation about the significance of a breach, until they’ve been destroyed.

According to the liberal mindset, it is, of course, liberals who are the arbiters of what the norms are. "Trump's wildly disproportionate unleashing of power against a person with little of her own" is, apparently, according to these arbitri morum, a violation of norms. But, the fact that left-wing shock troops on our college campuses today engage in violence to suppress the discussion of opinions they disagree with apparently is not.

Also, where were the liberal complaints about the defiance of norms when President Obama, quite legally, but certainly in defiance of "unwritten rules" governing the behavior of presidents, resorted to "pen and phone" and began governing by executive order? This was not just a matter of poor taste, but an attempt to circumvent an uncooperative Congress. In times past, a president who found himself in office while the opposite party controlled Congress abided by the time-honored norm of compromising with Congressional leaders of the opposite party to see what common ground they might have. Instead, on issues like climate change, the EPA, immigration, and Iran Obama simply barged ahead with his own agenda. Where were the liberal howls about the violation of norms then?

Update: For more liberal whining about Trump and norms, see here.

Update 2: And now, 8/4/2017, we have this column in The New Yorker by the reliably liberal Adam Gopnik. Apparently, the liberal elites have realized how weak their whining about norms comes off. So Adam 'splains that it is not so much the fact that "norms" are being violated that has liberals pissed off, but the fact that the "principles and premises of social contracts" are being trampled, with, of course, Adam and the rest of the liberal mob still getting to define what those principles and premises are. High dudgeon, indeed!

Evergreen, Claremont McKenna, Middlebury, Berkeley drunk with freedom

What's happening at Evergreen State and Claremont McKenna College and Middlebury College and UC Berkeley.

διδάσκαλός τε ἐν τῷ τοιούτῳ φοιτητὰς φοβεῖται καὶ θωπεύει, φοιτηταί τε διδασκάλων ὀλιγωροῦσιν, οὕτω δὲ καὶ παιδαγωγῶν: καὶ ὅλως οἱ μὲν νέοι πρεσβυτέροις ἀπεικάζονται καὶ διαμιλλῶνται καὶ ἐν λόγοις καὶ ἐν ἔργοις, οἱδὲ γέροντες συγκαθιέντες τοῖς νέοις εὐτραπελίας τε καὶ χαριεντισμοῦ ἐμπίμπλανται, μιμούμενοι τοὺς νέους, ἵνα δὴ μὴ δοκῶσιν ἀηδεῖς εἶναι μηδὲ δεσποτικοί.

And, in such a situation [when individuals in democracies become intoxicated with too much freedom], the teacher fears the students and coddles them and the students contemn their teachers and likewise anyone else placed in charge of them. And altogether the young assume the roles of their elders and battle them with both words and deeds, and their elders, kowtowing to the young, accommodate and graciously oblige them to the fullest degree, mimicking the young, in order that they themselves may not seem disagreeable and despotic.

Plato, Republic, 563B

Liberals seek comfort in Roberts and Kennedy?

In her latest column Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court writer extraordinaire for the New York Times, writes:

And while liberals have every reason to gnash their teeth over the justice who holds the seat that should have been Merrick Garland’s, they can perhaps take some comfort in the unexpected daylight that has opened between him and two of the court’s other conservatives, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy. My concern when Justice Gorsuch joined the court was how like Chief Justice Roberts he seemed in demeanor and professional trajectory. I could see him as a natural ally who would bolster the chief justice’s most conservative instincts. It now seems just as likely that Neil Gorsuch’s main effect on John Roberts will be to get on his nerves.

You know liberals are in deep trouble when they seek comfort in John Roberts, the man whom Senators Ted Kennedy, Richard Durbin, Charles Schumer, Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein all voted against when he came before them in the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings. Apparently, Ms Greenhouse hopes that Justice Roberts will "grow while in office."

It's going to be so much fun reading Linda Greenhouse's columns over the next several years

According to Linda Greenhouse, Supreme Court writer extraordinaire for the New York Times, new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch is "snarky" and like "the new kid in class with his hand always up." This is the kind of writing that passes for intelligent commentary these days in what is supposed to be our nation's greatest newspaper. Ms Greenhouse can't engage the substance of Justice Gorsuch's arguments, so, instead, like the well-entrenched New York saloniste she is, she seeks to assassinate his character with her best cocktail party sniffs and condescensions.

According to Greenhouse, Gorsuch violates the "habits, norms, unwritten rules" of the Supreme Court. When liberals lose elections, they always retreat behind "norms." Gorsuch "ooz[es] disrespect toward those who might, just might, know what they are talking about." How dare the uppity young conservative whippersnapper! Doesn't he realize he is in the presence of the Notorious RBG?

You can be sure that, if the newest member of the Court had been appointed by Barack or Hillary and s/he had authored numerous opinions in her/his first term, Greenhouse would be hailing the arrival of a fresh, new, progressive voice that had replaced the troglodytic originalist Scalia and heralded a new era of enlightened jurisprudence for the Court. That Greenhouse seems so blithely unconcerned with her so obvious bias is simply another sign of how far left the elites of the country have moved. To quote a particularly apt phrase I recently read being used of liberals, Ms Greenhouse is like a fish who does not know she is wet.

The learned textualist who has replaced Justice Scalia knows he is doing his job correctly if he provokes Ms Greenhouse to brandish her sting. Now that the Left has been not borked, but garlanded, it's going to be so much fun reading Greenhouse's embittered columns over the next several years.