The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

@DavidAFrench: Up Your Game

Posted on | February 19, 2017 | 1 Comment

by Smitty

French has a fair cop over at NRO, (emphasis mine):

And just like that, in lockstep, the tough-guy Right pivots. The herd moos aggressively and goes to war. It’s just as big a joke as a Democratic party that once pitched its own fits about hackers and leakers and now casts leaking in the most heroic possible terms.
None of this is honorable. It’s low and partisan. I don’t care how many war allusions you use, how insulting you are on Twitter, or how many times you accuse your opponents of “pearl-clutching” and “bed-wetting.” Unless your argument is honest, principled, and consistently applicable to both sides, you’re just being tribal.

My next-door neighbor is a straightforward #NeverTrump admirer of Her Majesty. I was making the point to him the other day: “It’s not good when the one you don’t like is in the office with too much power; it’s not good when the one you don’t like is in the office with too much power: maybe someday we’ll realize that the fundamental problem is that the office has too much power.”
You can’t beat tribal behavior, Mr. French. Maybe a better question is how you set about minimizing the effects of tribal behavior. Talk to me, in practical terms, about how we’re to drive this system toward dispersing power. Should we:

  • Make the House more representative?
  • Nuke the 17th Amendment, so that States matter more?
  • Replace gerrymandering with a modern mapping algorithm, to weaken parties?
  • Apply pliers and a blow torch to the IRS, and craft a 21st-century taxation system?
  • Term-limit pretty much everything, and blow up the petty aristocracy of the Beltway?

I’m not an “expert”. But I’m moving toward the opinion that, if you’re not recommending improvements for consideration, it’s almost as though you’re accepting the status quo.

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Comments

One Response to “@DavidAFrench: Up Your Game”

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