Picking up from my nightmare post below, proceeding into the daylight of what’s come to light so far, I would say that…

…even a glance at the most reassuringly-framed wire-service newspaper stories about Friday’s hearing on the IRS scandal must leave one seriously appalled. And if one turns to conservative media, perhaps exploring the most telling moments of the hearing the way this clip by Jeff Davis does, via Powerline, I think it goes beyond being appalled into being a bit shaken.

Questions asked by tax agents about the contents of prayers? About the contents of books purchased? A screening applied to conservative groups exclusively? This happened in America? At the hands of scores upon scores of federal workers and at the direction of Obama appointees, and (to some extent) at the request of Democratic Senators?

I am not ready to join Mark Levin, the Tyranny v. Liberty guy, who is saying that this scandal shows that we have “entered an age of post-constitutional soft tyranny,” and that Obama’s is a “post-constitutional government.” That’s just obviously proven wrong every time Obama or his agencies abide by Supreme Court decisions contrary to their wishes, or every time Obama whines about not getting his agenda passed because Republicans control the House. I have said here that the present pattern of Democratic Party leadership, modeled by Obama especially, displays a scandalous unwillingness to forthrightly support the Constitution, but I do not regard their basic obedience of it nor even their “so-to-speak support” of it as counting for nothing. Levin unfortunately has a penchant for squandering his constitutional knowledge amid Chicken Little dramatics, which is bad, since we might need voices like his to convincingly cry “Wolf,” when and if the beast of open presidential Constitution-defiance really comes.

Similarly, I do not think it’s terribly useful to argue at this point about whether the IRS scandal is worse than Nixon’s Watergate, and thus the worst scandal in our entire history, as this Bookworm Room blog proposes. The argument there is even if Obama was not involved, this is a massive aggression of the government upon ordinary citizens, whereas other scandals usually victimized other politicians. I don’t buy it, but the guy has a point.  I.e., in a somewhat different key, this is arguably as destructive of American citizens’ trust of their government as Watergate was.

Ken Masugi and our Kate (scroll below) do have it right that this is ultimately much more about the corruption of the IRS, a corruption arguably inherent to the “administrative state,” than it is about Obama. But that means that, even if clear evidence walling him off from the key decisions to screen conservative groups emerges, this scandal will continue to be HUGE.

I think
Hugh Hewitt gets the true horror of these hearings just right in a couple of posts:

Some employees within the IRS –and it sounds like a lot of employees– have simply been out of control, and in ways that will chill and disgust most Americans. It is as though the IRS hired exclusively from MoveOn, Kos, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.

…Care must be taken not to damage the reputation and careers of the fair and the honest within the agency, but the “tip of the iceberg” analogy is completely accurate.

And who was it who appointed these many bad apples? By and large, we know will find, by Democratic leaders, or administrators appointed by them. In terms of poor hiring and oversight decisions, it will all trace up to Obama. And yes, moderates so-called, and decency-respecting liberals so-claimed, it traces even more clearly back down to YOU.  Have you not noticed something not quite right with the Democratic leadership of late? Which increasingly sets the tone for our federal government in general? Hugh has:

I have spent 23 years representing clients before various federal agencies, and the vast majority of federal officials I have dealt with have been just like those I worked with during my time as a general counsel in two federal agencies, and as a staff lawyer the White House Counsel’s office and DOJ –superb public servants of the highest ethics and significant competence.

I continue that law practice before an alphabet soup of agencies, as do my partners, but things have changed, and they have changed at every level of the federal government. Indifference combined with arrogance and sometimes pure spite used to be very, very rare, but increasingly it seeps out of almost every agency, and the very good employees struggle to undo the work of the worst.

I’m pleading with you to face it, Democratic voter: this is your doing. It’s different this time. You bungled things, albeit in an understandable way, in 2008, but alas, last November you willfully abdicated your responsibility to discipline your party(and your media) when it had clearly gone off the rails. Clearly evinced tendencies toward corruption. You voted for people that you knew bended the truth too much and who demonized conservatives too much. So these IRS petty tyrants are your babies. The leaders you chose chose them, and the leadership patterns you tolerated, in the name of progressivism I guess, gave them the green light. Every time you laughed at a “T-bagger joke,” you were preparing the way.

What is more, this is one more sign that you are backing your fellow Americans into a corner. Your media outlets slander the tea-partiers with unfounded racism accusations, and you say nothing in protest? The IRS persecutes them with audits? The IRS higher-ups, doubtless with Obama’s and the some media-higher-ups knowledge, deliberately delay admission (and cessation!) of this until after the election, which means that there is a fairly plausible argument that they stole it? I don’t know what your fellow citizens will do. I feel in my own heart a desire for something dramatic, but I fear how this desire will play out in others.

One thing, to whatever extent the implementation of Obamacare depends upon an IRS role, you can now predict that this will be resisted by almost all Republicans to the hilt.

Another thing, to whatever extent Republicans were too reflexively anti-government before this, we can predict they will only become more so, and we cannot reliably predict they will lose elections for doing so anytime soon.  Because this scandal is far from over–rather, it looks as if we are going to hear about one horror story after another.

And God only knows what calls we are going to hear for a tax strike next year.

So, the Republic quakes a bit today.

What say you? Am I too alarmist? Or, not enough?

A tremor was felt rumbling through the land…

…fitful dreams interrupted, of mobs and protests, shrill cries, a yellow flag is waved in great swoops, festooned with the sign of the black pistol, there are other flags, secret meetings, solemn pledges, stockpiled cans and legal briefs, debates about deadbolt technology, “this is a fragment of the true gavel,” the police shouting at those other police, clutched documents, shoves, he is pushed back and forth trampling upon the pages, the fine glassware is smeared, icily quiet signing ceremonies with awkward protocol confusions, resignations, silences, “it’s like she’s cut us off,” rumors, threats, “the semester is cancelled,” “the payments are suspended,” strikes, evictions, shaking of heads, “but they won’t speak to him anymore,” crosses, ugly crosses, and crosses crossed out, sweet nostalgic reminiscence about the days of facebook, radio, and singing together…

We awake, the shaking stops, and yet, as in that scene with Jack Lemmon and the coffee cup from The China Syndrome, somewhere there is a man who feels the very slightest and yet oh-so-telling after-tremor.  Something is not right.

Yes, “A spectre haunts America.” At least it does this American. Not, I think, the spectre of tyranny… …no, that’s the one for Europe… …for us, the nightmare’s name is:  civil dissolution.

But no, c’mon, it’s 99% forgotten in 9 seconds, it’s all normal, normal, and always must will be, coffee-schedule-and-career, my everyday fellow Americans, good-morning my dear, they can only take it so far, don’t you know, so pass the baseball page please, and then a glance at that IRS scandal story…

Glenn Kessler’s The Fact Checker column at The Washington Post awards our President four pinocchios for his statement yesterday that, “The day after it happened, I acknowledged that this was an act of terrorism.”  This misrepresented his deliberate refusal to call the Benghazi attack a terrorist attack for several weeks after it, a refusal in which he simultaneously tried to provide himself cover by condemning “acts of terror” in general.

The piece provides a good in-depth study, of one specific instance of Obama’s lying, which as any one lie tends to, spins out into a specific set of lies. We see that at each step, our president employed deception quite carefully, precisely, and for low and ultimately foolish reasons.

I would say this is the regular pattern–that what Kessler reveals here is not at all unusual, but part of the reason for why, as I said once, even while praising his literary proclivities:

Obama has become one of our very worst presidents, particularly in his unprecedented degree of mendacity-employment and his sickening shamelessness about it …

That is, when Representative Joe Wilson cried out “You Lie!” during his Obama’s health-care speech before Congress back in 2009, he had, intentionally or not, done more than protested a specific falsehood, but had captured a basic fact about the man.

Obama lies. That is a key part of who he is, reflected even in his autobiographical self-construction.  Obama is a progressive. That is another key part. The two do not necessarily go together.

Sorry to say it, but some employment of mendacity by the office of the presidency, some blurring of the line between rhetoric and deception, is probably inevitable. It is a likelihood nearing a certainty that every president has lied in office, and not only concerning national security secrecy.  And that’s before we even get to campaigns!  Close students of history know this.

The problem with Obama is that it has been taken to another degree entirely. Proving that here is impossible–one would have to systematically compare Obama’s campaigns and presidency on this question, day by day, with those of previous presidents.  (Eventually, some historian will do this.) So I understand that many readers will not be with me here. Bush II was far worse, they will say. Or Clinton. Fair enough: such readers have their broad judgment calls, and I have mine.

But this seems an appropriate week to remind folks of my “It’s Different this Time” cry from the heart, a post-election essay in which I looked my fellow citizens in the eye and basically said, “How can we trust you, feel civic commonality with you, if you so casually vote for a man like this a second time?” Oh, I was accused of melt-down, incoherence, racism, narcissism, un-Christian ire, you name it, for that post. Daniel Larison scolded me, in typical TAC fashion, for not understanding the ongoing consequences for the Unfathomable Awfulness of Bush.

But I think at present we can see why I was within reason to say there, and not so much to the younger Obama voters but really to the experienced ones, that:

You had four long years to take the measure of this man. …for all who have been willing to honestly look, his character has been revealed to be one of arrogance, incompetence, divisiveness, and serial mendacity. …And, you still voted for him… …even in a situation where the Democratic Party did not stand to lose many decisive policy points…

I cannot remember if I ever posted anything to this effect, but one of things I wanted to say to moderates in the run-up to the election was that a man of Obama’s character, particularly when his worst tendencies got so little serious scrutiny from an irresponsible legacy (MSM) media, was probably bound to get entangled in scandals and constitutional-no-no’s that would provoke nation-dividing consideration of impeachment proceedings.  A moderate Democrat could honorably vote for Romney as a way to avoid this.

But here we are.  I sure hope clear evidence walling Obama off from this IRS persecution-of-conservatives campaign is there, and (of course) is true. But if not…

I also appreciate Richard Reinsch’s introduction to Ralph Hancock’s excellent book The Responsibility of Reason, which Peter links below, but it seemed a little odd to me to use Rawls’s concept of “public reason” as the key example of the sort of reason-reliance that Ralph wants us to see the insufficiency of.  A better way into Ralph’s thought on this is to note that he was the translator of a neglected classic of contemporary French political philosophy, Philippe Bénéton’s Equality by Default: An Essay on Modernity as Confinement (2004, ISI; 1997 publication in France).

Bénéton presented two key pillars of contemporary modernity: the modern democratic creed and the modern conception of science. The latter of these he characterized as “scientism.” What follows are a few pieces of a review I wrote of the book (for PPS):

…“scientism” holds that science is the only true form of reason, so that “whatever lies outside the scientific method lies outside reason.” Research that is scientific must have the qualities of “exteriority, neutrality, technicity, and generality”; intellectual activities and investigations that cannot meet these criteria…cannot provide us with real knowledge.

…Bénéton shows that scientism, even though it is not relativistic itself, functions as an “accomplice” to the dogmatic relativism fostered by the modern conception of equality. When a relativistic man hears someone say that an action of his is wrong, he responds by saying: To me it is good, and I determine what is true for me. Whereas the scientistic expert refuses to endorse his second statement, he backs him up on the key point by insisting that no one can know anything about values.

Another societal consequence of scientism is its impact on language. Words and phrases like “self-expression,” “group,” “deviance,” and “structure” migrate…into our common usage, becoming a mental filter through which we perceive the world. We become progressively unable to think thoughts that accurately perceive the interior, the contingent, the cultural, the unquantifiable, and—in a word—the substantial.

A central claim of the book is that as “substantive reason withdraws,” it is replaced by “practical reason cut off from being, a reason reduced to a procedural or instrumental function.” An “irrational rationalization of the world” is taking place, in which two forms of rationalization, the procedural and the instrumental, tendentiously order everything.

Procedural rationalization consists of the procedures that autonomous individuals must agree on if they are to “live together in disagreement”; it preserves their autonomy while allowing pressing collective decisions to be made. [This is where Rawls's concept of “public reason” would come in.] But, practically speaking, it requires an expanding judicial regime to manage conflicts between the increasing number of rights, and it tends to “legally neutralize” natural and substantial differences, such as those between the sexes and, most alarmingly, those between adults and children. …contractual relations tend to replace customary ones. Outside of one’s immediate family, responsibilities for others that were once taken for granted are abandoned, unless they are narrowly defined as part of a job and legally insulated from onerous rights claims. Institutions become soulless, ruled not by persons but by procedures, and collective life becomes more and more careerist and commercialized.

Instrumental rationalization works from the assumption that rationality is purely instrumental—without substantive knowledge, all we can really know is that certain techniques obtain certain ends, although we have no way of judging the ends. This brings us under the sway of what is economically valued as a “good.” …Armed with the excuse that another researcher, firm, or nation will pursue whatever leads they do not, specialists wash their hands of responsibility. Knowledge of technique, quite deliberately agnostic about the ends, winds up running the world.

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Incidentally, I prefer that manner of attacking market-worship, which gives you all the “good stuff from Marx” as Peter did a few posts back, without suggesting that Marxism deserves less contempt than it does, and without using the problematic (because really socialist-invented) word “capitalism.”

We might note the obvious influence of Leo Strauss’s Natural Right and History upon Bénéton’s framing of modernity, but he works out the implications of historicist relativism and Weberian social science in ways that are more attuned to both the contemporary academy and to our day-to-day lives. Moreover, the overall feel of the book is more of a French Catholic one—Charles Péguy’s spirit inhabits it throughout. In any case, it remains to my mind one of the more lucid articulations of the contemporary situation. Of modernity.

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How to escape such confinement-by-truncated-reason?  Well, one of the key thinkers to look to would be our Ralph Hancock.  It goes without saying that the best introduction to Ralphism remains his own book, especially its accessible enough introductory chapter. And I should quickly mention that its chapter on Strauss is a must.

And boys of all ages mourn.

The dread creaking-bronze colossus Talos, from my favorite Harryhausen-driven movie, Jason and the Argonauts, and his many other unforgettable creations will of course live on in the image file. In addition to being one of those charming American inventor types, from the times when our science-worship often sang in a distinctively boy-ish key, special effects pioneer Harryhausen was also a class act–you can begin to learn about his accomplishments here–(more parts to this if you look). His long friendship with Ray Bradbury, who passed away just last summer, should be particularly noted.

The 36 million in a sense murdered by Mao and the Chinese communist leadership. Here’s my original post which attempted to visualize the number using our Vietnam War memorial as a prop, a post most important for its links to the must-see documentary China: The Mao Years. That post was on the occasion of the English publication of the important book: Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine by Yang Jisheng.

This week, I notice there is  a fine new article on the book by professor Arthur Waldron in The New Criterion. (H/T Powerline)

36 million. It’s a number to remember.

Via Instapundit and Ed Driscoll, attention is paid to a post “Why Cary Grant Is Mandatory for the Manosphere” by an econ blogger who calls himself “Captain Capitalism” (groan), a post basically about how imitating Cary Grant will help you win the women. The only really interesting thing the Captain says is that Grant shows you how you have to work at charm (something both David Hume and Jane Austen would agree with), and that a key part of it is the precise employment of a wide vocabulary.  Driscoll adds little to this other than to quote an old but insightful observation by Frederica Mathewes-Green:

I’m a fan of old movies, the black-and-whites from the 1930s and 1940s, in part because of what they reveal about how American culture has changed. The adults in these films carry themselves differently. They don’t walk and speak the way we do. It’s often hard to figure out how old the characters are supposed to be—as though they were portraying a phase of the human life-cycle that we don’t have any more.

Well, I’m a fan of many of those movies, too, and of Cary Grant’s work in them, by and large. I don’t consider Grant a very admirable person, however, nor do I think that old Hollywood movies are reliable guides to manners and love-life, even if they may provide good places to start for those young folk immersed in the banal casualness of now. For such, watching the American Movie Classics channel can deliver a pleasant shock of stark contrast.

So like Driscoll and Mathewes-Green, I think the overall contrast between the adult feel of the stars of yesterday, and that of the 25-is-the-new-15 feel of the “stars” of today is telling and symbolic.

But I would pose against that archetypal gap, a hidden archetypal connection, namely the fact that Cary Grant Did Acid. That’s the title of post of mine that was part of my larger rock-connected project of sketching the contours of the Intermediate Modernity. Intermediate Modernity, 1920-1965, was what the Full Modernity of 1965-present replaced and famously revolted against in the 60s. As I say therein:

…for those who want to long for the good old AMC-portrayed America before liberals messed everything up, when men were men, women women, and everyone dressed so proper, it does not really compute that Grant became an acid-apostle.

But he did—you can follow a link there to confirm it, one which incidentally acquaints you with his…er…rather active love life, the very thing the manlier-than-thou Captain admires him for, even if it must trouble Christians like Frederica-Green and I, and really any thoughtful person who looks into it closely. In any case, my claim is that in the 1960s:

LSD…represented the total freedom now sought not just in one’s sex life but in all spheres of life, i.e., the freedom to re-form the psyche…

I also riff there on Plato’s Democratic Man, and the fact that Steve Jobs did acid, too, comparing the world-encompassing indeterminate freedom promised by our I-Devices to that promised by LSD, but let me leave you with this warning against AMC/American-Songbook/supper-club/Greatest-Generation nostalgia, and its proponents:

Nor do they want to admit that the free-love of the hippies was to a certain extent an attempt to democratize the Cary Grant [i.e., "movie-star"] experience of fooling around quite a bit. Until one admits the instability of intermediate modernity, and that our major cultural sicknesses go back at least as far as its 1920s arrival, one cannot be a genuine conservative…

That is, the manly and classy Cary Grant of the screen can be usefully posed against today’s wimpy and charmless stars, but the Cary Grant of real life was, in truth, their father.

We had a large number of women with us of various ages, which angered the young men who like to engage in confrontation. They addressed themselves to the women, saying: “What brought you here today? The Brotherhood has bad intentions and we don’t want to be preoccupied with you.”

This is from an account of a clash that occurred a month ago between the Muslim Brotherhood and a group of anti-Brotherhood protesters. It was written by the participant Nawara Negm, an Egyptian journalist and activist, and is translated from al-Tahrir courtesy of The Arabist blog.

It’s another piece of evidence–and note, one freely published in Egypt–that the situation remains a very confused one on the streets of Cairo.  A very “fluid” situation, yes, but strangely drawn out, and not one that leads us to expect a decisive victory for either side.

Negm’s account swings wildly between her semi-seriously thinking about the possibility of the MB killing her during this confrontation, and her making the MB seem ridiculous and ineffectual. And the facts compel her to oscillate in this way. Those chivalrous Egyptian “street fighting men” trounce the Brothers, so much so that one of their Christian members had to dramatically put his body between them and the entrance to the mosque the cowardly Brothers fled into!

In any case, if you read her essay, a much more uncertain picture of the Egyptian situation emerges. It is far too early to say the Brotherhood has really got things moving in the direction it wants. It is also appears far too late to hope for much influence from the once-ballyhooed “moderate” elements of the Brotherhood, in view of the ever-clearer thuggish nature of its vast majority, as displayed in the threats issued in the lead-up to a clash like this one.

That’s what you get when you combine John McWhorter’s fine mini-lecture on texting-talk as an “emergent complexity” of human linguistic evolution, or more helpfully, as “fingered speech,” with Matt Labash’s deliciously long TWS essay on why twitter, and the performative non-deliberative sort of declamation/addiction it represents, will destroy civilization, and produce Twidiocracy.

I, who remain a foreigner to both phenomena, highly recommend both pieces. Perhaps those of you further along in the process of human evolution can explain why they might both be right.

(H/T Booker Rising for the McWhorter)

Provocative editorial in the American Spectator by Peter Hitchens. Like Ivan Kenneally (see below for his fine piece) although without the modernity-analysis, Hitchens locates the source of the rising anarchy not mainly with the late 80s-to-present advocacy for SSM, but with the way the Sexual Revolution began reworking marriage from the 60s on. He does so particularly with respect to changes in family law, changes he says real conservatives ought to be demanding at least partial reversal of:

Since 1969, when it became easier to dissolve a British marriage than to escape a car-leasing agreement, the annual number of heterosexual weddings has been on a mainly downward path, diminishing from more than 400,000 every year to fewer than 250,000. This has happened despite a rapidly rising population…

It is more than 30 years since Baroness Hale…noted that “family law no longer makes any attempt to buttress the stability of marriage or any other union. It has adopted principles for the protection of children and dependent spouses which could be made equally applicable to the unmarried.”

Hitchens has an argument about the changes making men less willing to commit, which I suspect is overdrawn. I’m sure some readers will find other things strained, or even objectionable, about Hitchens’ piece. But we all must admit that the facts reported in it are eye-opening.

On the relevance of SSM, if it is merely numerically weighed:

In 2004 they did so in all but name by creating a legal status known as “Civil Partnership,” available only to same-sex couples but otherwise identical to civil marriage. The main result has been to show that this issue is important only to a very small number of people, and to prove—if it needed demonstrating—that Professor Kinsey’s wild claims about the extent of homosexuality were just that: wild. Currently, about 6,000 homosexual civil partnerships are formed each year in a country of more than 6o million people. …Such households remain very rare, distant from most people’s lives and affecting one-fifth of 1 percent of the population.

One-fifth of one-percent. Well. How about some more numbers?

…the number of cohabiting unmarried heterosexual couples has increased from 1.5 million in 1996 to 2.9 million in 2012. The sad tally of dependent children living in these marriage-free households has also doubled—from 0.9 million to 1.8 million—during the same period.

Or how about some words?

The words “husband” and “wife” have more or less been written out of official documents, usually replaced by “partner,” …

RTWT.