There are any number of things that were expected to be raised by critics against the reelection of the senior California senator, Dianne Feinstein. There is her support for the death penalty or expansions of surveillance programs or her presumed knowledge of the torture program or her husband’s financial dealings. However, the thing that is galvanizing opposition is Feinstein’s statement this week that she would not back impeachment of President Donald Trump and her suggestion that citizens might have to be patient. That has caused an outcry that now threatens her consideration of running for a new term. In the age of rage, even saying that you would not support a clearly unjustified impeachment effort makes you not only someone outside of the resistance but a reactionary.
Senate President Pro Tem Kevin De León denounced Feinstein’s remarks for being too measured and restrained: “It wasn’t the proper tone or tenor, especially given the current state of politics at the national level. We don’t owe Trump patience. We owe Californians resistance.”
For a politician who has not faced serious opposition in two decades, the angry response is a telling measure of the mind and mood of voters in California. Impeachment has become the new qualifying threshold issue despite the dangers presented in what I have called the “no confidence impeachment model.”
There is a growing feeling of a Robespierran climate. Instead of “revolution,” we have “resistance” and former allies like Feinstein are being devoured by a new and more extreme generation. Jacques Mallet du Pan, a French journalist, once said “like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children.” The same, it appears, can be said about resistance.
California is going to have a vibrant election campaign and will work through it–no need for anyone to get really excited. The need to keep the President in check, though, is something that should be of concern as the Constitution did not call for a Unitary Executive and the systematic dismantling of Government for narrow objectives should be of concern to all as underscored by this in somewhat of a rebuttal to some of the positions taken by Professor Turley in his columns and some of the discourse here:
https://www.lawfareblog.com/collateral-damage-arpaio-pardon-and-separation-powers
To all in the US, wishing you all a great and restful w-end.
AntiFa is a societal boil that needed to be lanced with all the accompanying inflammation. It festered too long.
On your hindquarters? Bend over.
I thought you were that kinda guy.
This one isn’t as funny as Manafort’s interpretation of Ralph Cramden: “humina humina humina”
Or is it?
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. But, in a series of books published during the late nineteen-forties and early nineteen-fifties (which have recently been reissued by Transaction), he continued to develop his political philosophy. He gave the conservative movement its name and, as the historian George Nash, the author of “The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America,” says, he “helped make conservatism a respectable word.” Moreover, Viereck’s belief that the United States could be a moderating influence, confronting the forces that threaten freedom and democracy without succumbing to liberal optimism, became a central tenet of conservative thought and, with the arrival of neoconservatives in positions of power in Washington, beginning in the nineteen-eighties, of American foreign policy.
Yet Viereck never became a rallying figure. Conservatism remained largely an intellectual movement during its first several decades, from the late nineteen-forties to the late nineteen-seventies—a loose affiliation of scholars and writers who had little more in common than a hatred of liberalism and Communism, which they increasingly saw as indistinguishable. Even in this context, Viereck was an anomaly, insisting on a moral distinction between the moderate and the totalitarian left and, as conservatives began to attain political influence, denouncing what he perceived as the movement’s demagogic tendencies. Conservatives, he wrote in 1955, are “trying to overthrow an old ruling class and replace it from below by a new ruling class. . . . The new would-be rulers include unmellowed plebeian Western wealth”—here he singled out Texan oil money—“and their enormous gullible mass-base.”
In 1962, he published an attack on conservatives in The New Republic, titled “The New Conservatism: One of Its Founders Asks What Went Wrong,” in which he depicted a movement infiltrated by religious fundamentalists, paranoid patriotic groups, and big-business leaders, united in their loathing for the cosmopolitan élites on the nation’s coasts. “American history is based on the resemblance between moderate liberalism and moderate conservatism,” he wrote, and this tradition, which had saved the United States from Europe’s violent fate, conservatives now threatened to destroy. Viereck’s vision strikingly resembles the description of the contemporary Republican Party in last year’s best-selling book by Thomas Frank, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” He anticipated the radicalism of the George W. Bush Presidency before Bush had graduated from college. But by then Viereck was regarded by many conservatives as an apostate.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/10/24/the-first-conservative
None of you are conservatives. On the contrary, you are everything that is not conservative.
Viereck became a historian, specializing in modern Russia,
No, he was a literary scholar at Mount Holyoke College. There was never much there there.
Ignorance becomes you.
Says the man plagiarizing material for a comment box.
You are the undisputed expert on all things conservative. But I don’t think you know the legal definition of the term plagiarism.
Bet you didn’t know Willian F. Buckley was really a socialist. Shh! Don’t let it get around: I’m thru slapping you around for now. Go eat some peanut butter
I like history: Peter Viereck then:
In the 1930’s, when the present author, still a student, was writing an article for the Atlantic Monthly urging “a Burkean new conservatism in America,” and to some extent even as late as his Conservatism Revisted of 1949, “conservatism” was an unpopular epithet. In retrospect it becomes almost attractively amusing (like contemplating a dated period piece) to recall how violently one was denounced in those days for suggesting that Burke, Calhoun, and Irving Babbitt were not “fascist beasts” and that our relatively conservative Constitution was not really a plot-in-advance by rich bogeymen like George Washington and the Federalist party. For example, the author’s Atlantic article, written in pre-war student days, was denunced more because the word used was so heretical (“conservative” than because of any effort by the Popular Frontist denouncers to read what was actually said. It was the first-written and wirst-written appeal ever published in America for what it called a “new” conservatism (“new” meaning: non-Republic, non-commercialist, non-conformist). This new conservatism it viewed as synthesizing in some future day the ethical New Deal social reforms with the more pessimistic, anti-mass insights of America’s Burkean founders. Such a synthesis, argued the article, would help make the valuable anti-fascist movement among literary intellectuals simultaneously anti-communist also, leaving behind the Popular Frontist illusions of the 1930’s.
As the liberal Robert Bendiner then put it: “Out of some 140,000,000 people in the United States, at least 139,500,000 are liberals, to hear them tell it … Rare is the citizen who can bring himself to say, ‘Sure I’m a conservative’ … Any American would sooner drop dead than proclaim himself a reactionary.” In July, 1950, a newspaper was listing the charges against a prisoner accused of creating a public disturbance; one witness charged: “He was using abusive and obscene language, calling people Conservatives and all that.”
When conservatism was still a dirty word, it seemed gallanty non-conformist to defend it against the big, smug liberal majority among one’s fellow writers and professors. In those days, therefore, the author deemed it more helpful to stress the virtues of conservative thought than its faults, and this is what he did in the 1949 edition of Conservatism Revisited. But, in the mood emerging from the 1950’s, blunt speaking about conservatism’s important defects no longer runs the danger of obscuring its still more important virtues. (p. 123-4)
Viereck was a literary scholar who had flat nothing to say worth reading on public affairs. Conservatism Revisted is an inane paean to Metternich. He was never associated with any starboard policy shops and was not a contributor to any of the nascent publications up and running ca. 1955. When he placed an article in 1956 saying that ‘conservatism’ was a complex of dispositions closest to Adlai Stevenson among Democrats and Clifford Case among Republicans, Wm. Buckley replied that he and they were not engaging in compatible enterprises. ‘Conservatism’ in the hands of Viereck was an affection without real content.
She’s 85 years old. She’s been in Congress for 27 years and (bar and interim of 2 years and change) has held elective office continuously for 40+ years. A woman her age has a life expectancy of 7 years. Why in God’s name does she wish to spend those years in Congress? She and her husband indubitably own several handsome properties to which they could retire (he’s 82) and given the age of her daughter, it’s a reasonable wager she has great-grandchildren to which to attend.
She’s always been an independent thinker in the Democratic Party (as was Albert Gore prior to 1988) and anyone who replaces her will likely be a cut or two below her in quality.
==
It’s indicative of the lunacy abroad within the Democratic Party that someone’s declared meat for saying you shouldn’t apply extraordinary remedies when you’re out of sorts about policy changes. That lunacy is derived from the assumption that political offices are theirs by right and anyone else holding them is there illegitimately.
Good analysis. And yes, the party of my blue collar parents has become insane and savage, led by their black shirted Antifa.
Re: wanting to spend all her remaining years in congress: I wonder if it’s something like an embezzler who never wants to take a vacation because if not there for the cover-up, the crime is revealed.
They have just rolled a Guillotine into the town square, Prof. Turley! What now!?
The insanity of the Left is even
Getting to Feinstein. 👈🏼
No one should be surprised these screwballs started calling for impeachment the day after the defeat of Her Royal Highness. Then resist, white privilege, white supremacy and any other buzz word they can put together to feed their rage.
Turley says, “Instead of “revolution,” we have “resistance”… But some of us can see that Trump IS the revolution. The Dems and the Establishment are the reactionaries.
Feinstein is correct. Trump will finish ‘at least’ his first term.
You should watch “inside Job”.
Thanks for the suggestion, I will.
The Goldman Bros won.
Bernie Bros lost. How’s that DNC election fraud lawsuit going?
All of these idiots calling for impeachment, let me ask you something.
What are you going to do the next time a Democrat happens to win the Presidency? Celebrate. Oh no. You know why? Because the RIGHT who you have vilified will NEVER accept that. Its over.
You think the protests are bad now, you aint seen nothing.
This country is on the verge of a Civil War and its the Lefts fault
So Congrats Democrats.You have about destroyed the country and quite frankly you can go to hell
Wrong answer. The rubes, hicks, racists, “good ole days” wishers, and gullible marks who chose this cretin are responsible for the harm to our country. Any resistance is done out of patriotism. Although the level of resistance is something new, we’ve never elected such an utterly unqualified buffoon before, either.
This is to “but Faux News told me he’s good” mouse
When Californians come to visit Amsterdam the men cannot find the Red Light District to have fun and the women get there early to raise money.
Diane is an old lady who needs to retire. She is about as old as Arpaio.
Trump won’t get impeached. The nation will soon be at war with Korea and the nukes will be launched by the man with his finger on the trigger. Bye, bye Miz American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.
The irony is that Senator Feinstein is a classic war mongering neocon who is personally enriched by military interventions.
Do these people even look at who they elect?
Can you not agree that Trump has morphed into a warmonger that is getting enriched by his presidency? In any case Feinstein is right. It is way too early for impeachment. Wait until the investigations have concluded.
I have no doubt as to Trump’s militaritic predilections.My comment was based on California being left leaning, yet they reelect a hawkish neocon disguised as a liberal.
Those two characteristics don’t jive based on what I personally think Democrats should stand for.
Her unbridled support for anything related to the use of force is problematic in my mind.
Agree…
SWM/frankly, It looks like the Generals are Trump’s daddy. Quite troubling.
“Can you not agree that Trump has morphed into a warmonger that is getting enriched by his presidency? In any case Feinstein is right. It is way too early for impeachment. Wait until the investigations have concluded.”
Yep, he is being boxed into your deep state scheme of things. When you people decide to call off impeachment, we’ll know the transformation has been declared “complete.”
Oh please….. Trump said he wanted to bomb the “shit” out of them in the campaign. He is attracted to military men and the Goldman Sachs brand name. The idea that he is a victim only goes so far.
The irony is that Senator Feinstein is a classic war mongering neocon
Another Unz comboxer here.
Comboxer? When I have ever, ever said anything that resmebles the idea that I or anyone else is oppressed because of an authoritarian conspiracy?
Plain and simple Diane Feinstein is a warmonger. You brought up her chronolical history why not look at her voting record and comments related to military interventions?
Please.
“Warmonger” is a nonsense term favored by soi-disant ‘palaeo-conservatives’. Any nation with a functioning military must make war from time to time. You can play let’s pretend, as Ron Paul does. Paul is notable for never having had much responsibility for anything going on outside his own office.
Also the idea that you are the last word as far as manners and content is quite Taliban like. But I’m sure your Catholsim demands it of you to be as morally pedantic as possible as you walk around this blog rapping others on their knuckles for their egregious transgressions with your correction ruler like The Penguin from The Blue Brohters..
Also the idea that you are the last word a
I’ve received this non-sequitur several times in the last 24 hours, all from the same screwball type. People who traffick in palaeo-babble (‘neo-con’, ‘warmonger’, “Israel-firster”, “HBD”) seem to fancy themselves especially perspicacious and lose their cookies when someone shoots darts at them.
If my reality is between my own two ears then at least that’s a good place to start rather than out of my ass.
Communists and fascists have a party line that ALL must toe. Feinstein was just reminded what party owns her.
NIck, you forgot to include spoiled, entitled, emotionally irrational, sore losers.
Roscoe, Thanks for picking me up, as they say in team sports.
Anyone who has paid the least bit of attention will understand that you don’t push to remove an idiot from the Presidency in the midst of a catastrophe. The shrub would not have been reelected if it weren’t for 9/11. The attack/catastrophe galvanized America and pushed other issues to the back. Harvey will necessitate Americans dropping their political squabbles and furthermore contrasting those who continue complaining about this catastrophe of a President with the now greater catastrophe, Houston and surrounds. This is an opportunity for Trump to establish himself as someone with an ounce of common sense, something he has yet to do. If he blows this, hopefully he will be gone soon.
Issac, speaking of idiots we haven’t heard from you in sometime.
And, that’s all you got.
Issac, everyone knows you, it’s more then enough.
So, speaking of idiots, I guess I touched a nerve. That’s what brought you out from under the rock. Hey as long as we’re slinging……
Issac-Turn about is fair play, even for Canadians.
Isaac, thanks for your insightful comments.
It’s too bad that Professor Turley’s interesting blog attracts so many commenters who only want to attack other commenters and see their own shallow comments in “print” again and again and again on every post.
Bacon
I rarely vent or sling sh*t at the bloggers that fire their mindless salvos my way, Canada’s way, the way(s) of progressives, anyway. But sometimes…. My side is neither right or left but common sense and anything that will evolve our society. It is not difficult to understand what is worth championing and what should be let go. All one has to do is to look around at the many successful and unsuccessful efforts made by nations both further advanced as societies. The present trend in the US is one of isolationism. History teaches us that this is not a good thing. When a person or country steps out into the world and falls short, the lesson should be to learn, not hide away.
He’ll blow it for many reasons, including rolling back regulations that might prevent the severe damage when this happens again, which it will because of global warming, which your orange President is denying. Texas is proud of its lack of regulations, so in Crosby, there’s a chemical factory that has been on fire and has exploded already, but will probably explode again and have more fires. The volatile chemicals must be kept cold, so when the primary, secondary and tertiary power sources went out, nothing could be done to stop fires and explosions. People and businesses within a 1.5 mile radius must evacuate. Gee, wouldn’t it make sense to require it to move more inland, away from the probable landfall area of future hurricanes, or maybe issue regulations banning volatile chemical operations that depend on power sources to prevent fire and explosions so close to the Gulf? Wouldn’t this make sense in the interests of public safety and saving taxpayer money? Won’t happen in Texas, and under Chump, won’t happen either.
“maybe issue regulations banning volatile chemical operations that depend on power sources to prevent fire and explosions so close to the Gulf?” Ban the production methods for making organic peroxide feeder stocks? And replace them with what? Move them to where? Did you even read of Arkema’s handling of the impending plant explosions/fire? Your comments remind me of Democratic Luddites like Cenk Uygur–his and Ana’s blatherings do not help your cause. They only make people who argue for more regulations look like uninformed hatemongers who lack compassion for those less fortunate.
It hasn’t occurred to Natacha that laymen making categorical statements on topics which require a background in chemical engineering make idiots of themselves.
Good grief! These liberals are balancing on a razor thin edge of lunacy. California needs to get a grip or, better yet, fall into the ocean. The rest of the country won’t miss them too much.
They would miss the tech jobs, the produce, the movies and some very lovely vacation spots.:)
I’ve got my passport. I would be happy to visit The People’s Republic of California.
We just visited the socialist country of Canada.
As far as Canada goes, letting you in simply illustrates how tolerant a country, Canada is. Canada can handle the worst of any country; nothing to be afraid of.
Issac, is that coin they have up there named after you. Let’s see what’s it called again, Oh yes the Loonie.
You are ill informed about all things Canadian.
They wouldn’t let you in, or perhaps are looking forward to it. ‘Send in some more meat.’
The produce is a function of subsidized irrigation water and illegal alien labor. The tech sector cans their late-middle-aged technicians and hires H-1Bs.
In any case ,the produce and the tech jobs would be severely missed. The California tech companies are creating many of the new jobs in Austin, Denver, Phoenix and many other cities.
They wouldn’t be missed at all. Either they have produce for export or they do not. A change in political status is not going to change their export mix. That aside, they’re not the only place on Earth which produces fruits and vegetables (though they may be the odd place whose water resources can be cut off by a neighboring state). As for the tech sector, the food Mark Zuckerberg eats doesn’t fill my stomach. Same deal for the H-1Bs he’s importing.
You probably eat out of a can filled with Monsanto made chemicals.
You probably thought that was clever.
“They would miss the tech jobs, the produce, the movies…”
Evidently not this year’s visual and auditory babble. Cripes.
She evidently thinks Hollywood movies would thenceforth be distributed only in La La Land.
The Gingrich revolution impeached Bill Clinton.
He’d committed discrete crimes. Aside from those identified, there were those not elucidated because Susan McDougal was willing to cool her heels in jail rather than appear in front of a grand jury.
They will eat their own.
Maybe people in California should get out of California more often.
Agree,,,that is the best answer.
NO! Too many of them have already invaded Oregon and Washington (which are already lost causes), Idaho, Nevada, and my beloved home state of Arizona, and are trying to ruin them too. Push them all back into Kalifornia and keep pushing to about five miles into the Pacific.