Friends, this week's Newsmaker Show is implicitly thankful, insofar as Brian and I spend a lot of time analyzing the declining fortunes of the Democrats' impeachment inquisition. It looks like the polling momentum has turned against impeachment and removal, and the Dems are starting to sweat. Some are even talking about censure as an alternative to impeachment. If they were smart, they wouldn't have boxed themselves in on impeachment, or raised its specter in the first place...but as we all know Democrats are capable of limitless self-mortification.
Brian and I also talk about the enforceability of Congressional subpoenas, why Democrats may fear a trial in the Senate, who President Obama may prefer as the Democratic candidate in 2020, the latest bouts of intolerance on college campuses, and the ongoing "climate strike." And in This Week in History we cover the Chinese intervention in the Korean War, the First Crusade in the 11th century, and the legacy of the Alger Hiss trial and American Russophobia.
Don't miss a single second!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-ecZQw5ATs&feature=youtu.be
"Make Thanksgiving Great Again"--love it-thanks for the laugh.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, the "whistleblower" is being protected, if I were him, I would be afraid of being called by the senate. By the way, he is not a whistleblower, he is a political hack. A true whistleblower would of have followed the chain of command, and he did not. As for censure, something tells me that will be the case. Needless to say, Pelosi has been backed into a corner with no easy way out. She allowed this to get out of hand and now she has to deal with the fall out. But you know, I feel the hate for this man has just gotten so bad, that she nor the democrats can see any further/the bigger picture.
Intolerance on many campuses are real and what is more real are the power trips that some professors have. It is a scary thought when a student is bullied and quieted and has no recourse. Intimidation is a real issue, I see this everyday, and intimidation has no age limit. Older professors and younger professors vs. older non traditional student(s) and even the traditional student, truly it is sad. I don't think it is just an Ivy League issue as this is even happening at the community college level and the state college/univ. level.
How are the Crusades covered? I had three great semesters of Medieval History, this semester was Women's Medieval History 440. Great subjects. As much as I love this subject and excelled in it, I still find myself excelling far better in American History, which is not very old as we all know. America's history is so interesting and we owe a lot to the Magna Carta Libertatum.
I hope you have a great Thanksgiving, Dr. Waddy.
Linda: First I want to thank you for your expressed special perspective on the military in an earlier post and how it applied to one of the witnesses against President Trump. Being a vet I agree with you on the vitality of the chain of command. And I'm confident that your feeling for the military is as mine: veneration and gratitude.
ReplyDeleteIf I remember, you were preparing a thesis on important women of the Middle Ages; if so, I would be very interested to hear, at your convenience, who you covered. I experienced the transcendent thrill of standing in front of Magna Charta itself (well, one of the originals) at the British Library last January. It was sublime.
Jack, seriously, you saw the Magna Carta? AWESOME!! It's on my ever growing Bucket List. As for the thesis, I choose the topic of Mysticism and the historical significance of Joan of Arc. All I ever knew of Joan/Jeanne was she was burnt at the stake. Interesting enough, my research far passed what was needed to write a paper on this. The more I dug, the more it turned sinister, shame on the church.
DeleteP.S. For my American Revolution class--I started off writing about the 5th Amendment and ended up discussing James Madison and how his personal viewpoints affected the writing of the Constitution and Bill of Rights tying into the Amendments. It amazes me how much has survived all these years.
DeleteDr. Waddy: Speaking of campus intolerance, how about the Red Guard onslaught on well known extreme rightist firebrand Arthur Laffer and those who insolently dared to herald his appearance at SUNY Binghamton. Its by definition a NY tax payer supported entity and somehow not all NY tax payers would think well of the implicit approval granted the thugs by the pusillanimous "University"administration and by our emphatically far leftist dictator, Cuomo. My, was he at his histrionic "best" in condemning Syracuse U. for its politically incorrect handling of incidents which excite Andrew's prejudices but he is eloquently silent on Binghamton. I know! It's because Syracuse remains an insolently and temporarily private entity in Andrew's People's Republic. He has not the administrative control he had over SUNY New Paltz, through what the NY Post describes as his "Gubernatorial cat's paw" SUNY Board when New Paltz disingenuously renamed some campus dorms in the name of "inclusiveness" while displaying signal dismissiveness, through its silence, for the concerns of politically incorrect groups on campus for their"discomfort" ( that term of such expressed definitive and manifest concern to the college President)at being attacked (sometimes physically) by politically correct groups on campus. One may well question whether this may be a widespread injustice on SUNY campuses, since such telling examples have arisen recently.
ReplyDeleteI overheard a conversation about this between students and a professor...and honestly, I still don't know much about it. My viewpoint comes strictly from a personal point of view, and what I find funny is these liberals want to cry foul and in truth, they are the ones who squash free speech.
DeleteDr. Waddy: Though I think it probable you have read it, I would commend Tuchman's Stillwell and the American Experience in China, in considering the U.S. attitude to the possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea in 1950. The book describes the then contemporary Chinese military corruption and incompetence ine WWII. But this stands in stark contrast to the Chinese Communists' resolute fight against the Japanese. Our military leadership in 1950,including the great MacArthur, may have misjudged the 1950 Chinese military. And they probably simply did not understand China's resolve to reject the foreigner, given force by the Communists (I regret to say).
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: Alger Hiss; My, my, how easy it was for him, in the comfortable DC bubble, to work for the fashionable Soviet monster. How free he was of the physical consequences visited upon so many due to Stalin's whims. Even those who supported the fiend were often submitted to the most primitive of fleshly and psychological torments but Alger was beyond the reach of Stalin.
ReplyDeleteThe real hero of all of this is Richard Nixon, who saw right through Hiss, an aristocrat who disdained self made men such as Nixon.
Dr. Waddy: I was in Singapore, a very Chinese community, when Bruce Lee's death was announced: he was manifestly important there. I think in places like Singapore and Hong Kong, where western influence is widely tolerated (I'm sure of that, from my experience)Chinese perceptions and wishes are nevertheless, very significant.
ReplyDeleteHappy (Belated) Thanksgiving, Jack and Linda!
ReplyDeleteI agree that the whistleblower is almost certainly politically-motivated. His identity is less important than the plot he presumably cooked up with Schiff's staff and other deep state swamp monsters before submitting his report. The Dems seem DESPERATE to shield him from cross-examination. I can see why! In the end, they might opt for censure just to cover their own you-know-whats.
Linda, I'm very sorry to hear that you see intimidation happening on a wide basis in academia. Every class is different, I suppose, and every professor and student is too. I wonder: how often is it the STUDENTS doing the intimidating? They're very capable of it!
Hmm. Since I've been to the British Library, I suppose I must have seen the Magna Carta too. It didn't make a big impression, I'm sad to say.
Linda, can you explain what you mean by "sinister" vis-a-vis Joan of Arc? What did the Church do exactly?
Jack, I wasn't aware of the incident at Binghamtom. I've heard a little about Syracuse. Everyone is bent out of shape because a white supremacist manifesto was distributed, correct? I suppose they might react in much the same way to a Trump campaign flier...
Did we underestimate the Chinese in 1950? And how!!! I honestly don't know much about the Korean War. I shall have to dig deeper.
Was Alger Hiss beyond Stalin's reach? I wouldn't be so sure. He was a loyal soldier, or so it seems, so Stalin would have had little reason to target him, but I suspect that Red spies who misbehaved were dealt with very harshly! Think the "Trotsky treatment".
Jack, when were you last in Singapore? I wonder how much it's changed. Are there still Western bases there?
Dr. Waddy and Linda: First - God Save Our Christian Holidays and thank you for your affirmation of the same. I mean this not as a lamentation but as a consequent clarion call to CELEBRATION and VICTORY over the disdainful and presumptuous left in its execrable attack on our most venerated values. Let us enjoy to the very maximum our glorious Western traditions in this manifestly glowing season!
ReplyDeleteLinda: If you have not already read it, I would commend to you Shaw's Saint Joan. He was not a great historian I suppose but he may have studied some of them. His play contains, at the mouth one of its church official characters, a very well argued defense of the suppression of heresy. Typical Shaw it was!
As a Christian believer, I think it most possible she was informed by divine voices and her triumphs are of confirmed historical record. The play's last act presents a plausible scene of her spirit's return to earth. Her closing lament is eloquent and believable. Looking forward to reading your view of her.
Dr. Waddy: Stalin was able to extend his sociopathic intent as far as one of his erstwhile fundamental enemies, Trotsky, in Mexico City,yes. But first to consider is Stalin's intense anxiety in response to ANY opposition.He did order the execution of many of his closest comrades.
ReplyDeleteIn the 1930's trials he savaged men at the very leadership who had endured, along with him, all the travails of the Revolution and the almost incredibly savage Civil War. He was a thorough sociopath and probably suffered no sleepless nights thereby.
Would he have ordered the murder of the #3in the U.S. State Dep't. Maybe not.(?)
What did Hiss know or care of this? The Marxist dream has ensnared many of intellectual accomplishment AND detachment!
Dr. Waddy: As far as I knew in the four months I was in Singapore in late 1973, the Brits no longer had a base there but I did witness a raucous night of drinking by Brit sailors and Australians, in one of the more, shall we say, more debased areas of Singapore. I had been in areas no less degraded by U.S. sailors, among them me, in Hong Kong in 1972. The Brits did still have a base there.
ReplyDeleteJack -- yes, let's revel in our Christian traditions, while we still can! We won't dwell on what a hash our culture has made of Christmas. At least it still bears Christ's name.
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point about Stalin: he was more apt to kill you if you were higher on the food chain than if you were a nobody (although plenty of nobodies bit the dust too). That's one of the extraordinary facts about Stalinism -- it persisted despite its incredibly poor treatment of its own people, INCLUDING its own elite. And how poor a reflection is it on Hitler that Stalin's victims still preferred Stalin to the only available alternative? I wonder how much Russians and communists globally were taken in by the Soviet smokescreen of show trials and charges of fascist "sabotage"? It's a pretty flimsy smokescreen, but the human reason is awfully elastic, no?
Jack, any thoughts of returning to Singapore or Hong Kong? Can you imagine how different, and how much more prosperous, they must be now? Why not let Cunard show you the sights...
Dr. Waddy: I think any all out attack on Christianity,once it becomes blatant enough to be obvious to everyone, might well experience what the Polish Marxists did as soon as the totalitarian boot was lifted the slightest bit: complete discreditation. They will go too far with this garbage in the wrong place and they will reap the whirlwind. I fully expect them to go for the jugular of the Catholic Church and be thoroughly rebuffed by that resilient institution.
ReplyDeleteMany victims of the Soviets, perhaps hundred of thousands, especially Ukrainians, did fight for the Nazis. Solzhenitsyn thought this to have condemned Stalin . But yes, wily Georgian Stalin did appeal to the intense love so many Russians have for their country, once the Nazi onslaught commenced. Then, postwar, he dictated that any Soviet soldier"convicted" of rape be sent to the Gulag and then applied it instead to very many of those who survived the Nazi subhuman treatment of Soviet pows because he thought them intolerably influenced by corrupt foreign doctrines. He was a thing crept straight out of hell's darkest reaches.
If I had the means to go back to Hong Kong or Singapore I'd go to Moscow, Rome or Kyoto first. I'm a Russophile and Rome . . . well, that's a sublime place I hear.
Jack, it all depends on what you mean by an "all out attack on Christianity". The Left needn't contemplate anything so extreme, when they've assured themselves that religion will die a death of a thousand cuts anyway (it may), and millions of Christians have become stooges of leftism besides.
ReplyDeleteTrue, many Soviets did fight for the Nazis. Well, I take that back. Based on what I've read, the Nazis permitted virtually none of their Hiwis to fight. They performed useful tasks, but the Germans made poor use of the manpower available to them in the occupied areas. They weren't willing to make meaningful concessions to the Slavs until it was too late.
Rome IS sublime. I can confirm it. I believe it's the world's greatest city for a history buff. I would dearly love to see Moscow too. Maybe in Trump's second term we'll bury the hatchet with Putin?
Dr. Waddy: To follow up belatedly on your suggestion of what I might find if I revisited Hong Kong or Singapore: I've seen the pictures and they are to me as much as science fiction would have proposed in the early '70's. I'm so happy for them; they are so hard working and prosperity is such a well earned blessing for them.
ReplyDeleteAmen to that, Jack! You and I share an appreciation for "civilization" (currently unfashionable in academe), and it's refreshing to see that the people of the Third World are in complete agreement with us. Those who have lived without the blessings of modernity know how valuable those blessings are. As you say, the progress in East Asia was also achieved "the old fashioned way": with hard work, intensive study, and by conscious imitation of others who had gotten things "right". Prosperity in America, I fear, is less clearly "earned," and for that reason it may not last.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: I would suggest though, that present day American prosperity is the product of those who worked so very hard in the '30's (with all of the prosperity producing union activity of that day)( when they could work that is), together with all the sacrifices of WWII and even in the promising post war world. My WWII vet father saw most of his friends die within a few years of retirement in the '60's and '70's. He had, luckily, 18 years of freedom.
ReplyDeleteI have personally witnessed the transcendently hard work of which so many East Asians are capable and accomplished but I would suggest American prosperity, though it has been unforgiveably dismissed by my ingrate generation (well, some of them), was earned, though at somewhat less cost than that of East Asia.
That said; could American prosperity be lost? I think yes, at the hands of the boomer inspired far left.
Oh, I'll concede all of that, Jack, but what it means is that our prosperity isn't founded on the current American work ethic, but is simply a legacy of the character and grit of our forebears. And the bad news is that inheritances are usually squandered. It's just a question of time. Now, I realize I'm being a bit hard on my fellow Americans. Many do work extremely hard. I just fear that it's a minority, whereas it used to be the vast majority. Maybe that's the future of civilization, though: an enormous population of layabouts and degenerates will be sustained by a tiny cadre of intelligent, hard-working model citizens. Hmmm.
ReplyDeleteDr. Waddy: You being an accredited historian I am confident you understand the hard work of our forebears. It is unrealistic to expect of those, most of us that is, of less education, comprehension of what it was like. But, in my opinion, the detachment of my so influential boomers was born of naivete , the purposeful deceit of university Marxists (I saw that first hand,)the boomers' unprecedented attendance at university and college and the unanticipated effect we had on society due to our (shall we say) enthusiastic post war conception and eh, subsequent multitude.
ReplyDeleteThat small intelligent ( and canny) model citizenry you plausibly propose might well be led by President Trump and those who believe in him. As for an indolent majority; you may be right. How do we combat them?
The answer may lie in an extended effort through our educational system to discredit the naysayers. Is it possible? We must attempt it. How? Through resolute action on the part of the real America to recognize that what has ensnared NY state could well come to them!Its assured by their very own declarations!And it is at your gates! I know this because I taught in most rural reaches of my (NY)state and encountered the left very directly.
Real America and its defenses, beware! They have you in their sights and all of your population.
Jack, the best solution would be to restore the original character of the American people. Fat chance of that, with the current elite at the helm.
ReplyDeleteOtherwise, our democracy will be troubled by one of the systemic flaws of democracy itself: the best and brightest have one vote each, while the lazy and ignorant, who are usually more numerous, also have one vote each. Mathematically, it's easy in democracy, therefore, for the chaff to dictate terms to the wheat, so to speak.
In the end, a democracy always relies first and foremost on the character and wisdom of the people. The bad news is that that character and wisdom has never been more in doubt. The good news is that it is still, by all appearances, far superior to what the Marxist cultural elite is peddling. There's reason to hope AND reason to despair.
Dr. Waddy: That is a very plausible evaluation of the present situation.
ReplyDelete