Bookworm Beat 6/14/17 — Never give a Leftist an opening

The past week has reinforced one of the most important rules in life and politics: Never give a Leftist an opening. Block him at every turn or you lose.

Never give a Leftist an opening about Israel. As I mentioned earlier, I had the pleasure of attending the 14th Annual Ariel Avrech memorial lecture, at which Daniel Greenfield spoke. One of the points he made was that we Jews and Israel supporters should not enter into arguments justifying or proving our right to exist. Some things, after all, go without saying. Nobody asks Norwegians or Germans to justify their right to their ancestral lands and Jews should not have to do so either.

I’ll add to what Greenfield said by noting that there’s also a very practical reason for avoiding arguments, which is that engaging in an argument also allows the opposition to continue arguing. In this regard, I was reminded of something my sister-in-law, the clinical behaviorist taught me: Don’t argue with a teenager! Instead, reflect what they said but constantly return to your rule, a rule that needs no defending or explaining. Otherwise, you will get sucked into the teenager’s world, one in which your teen has all the time in the world and all the energy to incessantly push his or her cause. Two simple dialogues will suffice:

The wrong way to talk to a teen

TEEN: Can I go to the mall with my friends on Monday night?
YOU: No. It’s a school night.
TEEN: But all my friends are going.
YOU: We’ve talked before about the fact that, just because your friends go, it doesn’t mean you can go.
TEEN: Yeah, but everyone is going. I’ll be the weird dork if I don’t get to go.
YOU: You’re never a weird dork. Look at how many friends you have. People like me.
TEEN: They only like me because I do things with them. If you won’t let me go to the mall….
YOU: Look, we’ve talked about how you need your sleep on school nights.
TEEN: That’s silly. You know that even when I’m home I always go to bed late and I’m fine.

And on it goes, with you constantly responding to the shifting sand of your teen’s argument, and your teen taking every one of your responses as a new opening and a new opportunity. After all, you’ve got a life, while the teen has a monomaniacal need to go to the mall Monday night. Who’s got more stamina for the argument?

The right way to talk to a teen

TEEN: Can I go to the mall with my friends on Monday night?
YOU: No. The house rule is no malls on a week night.
TEEN: But all my friends are going.
YOU: Nevertheless, the house rule is no malls on a week night.
TEEN: That’s not fair!
YOU: I’m sorry you don’t think it’s fair, but it’s the house rule. No malls on a week night.
TEEN: Everyone will think I’m weird if I don’t go.
YOU: [Empathetic listening statement optional here.] Still, you know the rule: No mall on a week night.

Israeli’s, Zionists, and anyone else who supports Israel should take a page out of the smart teen parent’s handbook. Israel is a nation that exists. End of story. Live with it.

Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.) knows how to deny Leftists an opening on gun control. Rep. Mo Brooks gave just a stunning answer today when a reporter questioned him about gun rights following the Progressive Bernie supporter’s effort to decimate Congressional Republicans:

That’s about as good a defense of the Second Amendment as any I’ve ever heard.

I’ve come to the conclusion, though, that I could be willing to support a single type of gun control: No Medina Muslims (that is, those Muslims who support the violent, jihadist face of Islam) and no Democrats or Progressives may have a gun. Once you get rid of that class of American, you’ve significantly winnowed down the number of mass shootings.

You could winnow down a lot more shootings, of course, if you allowed those law-abiding citizens trapped in crime-ridden urban neighborhoods — such as Democrat- and gun-controlled Chicago or Detroit — to own weapons with which to defend themselves against the criminals who aren’t legally entitled to possess guns but, somehow, always manage to get hold of them.

Lastly, if we improved mental health services, we could do a great deal. Even in wealthy, compassion-oozing Marin, our mental health services are abysmal. A few years ago, someone I know started hearing voices in his head. He repeatedly sought help from his medical provider and from the county, but was put on waiting lists. While he was waiting, the voices told him to throw his wife off a bridge. Fortunately, he failed.

It was only have this drastic criminal act that he man got the help he’d begged for earlier. His wife, incidentally, stood by him, because she understood that he never would have attacked her had he been in his right mind.

Can Trump escape the special prosecutor box into which Democrats have locked him? Speaking of not giving Leftists an opening, what in the world were Trump and his advisers thinking when they allowed the Democrats to push Trump into appointing a special prosecutor and, moreover, one who is a Comey buddy and a Democrat hack? Republicans keep losing battles because they think they are responsible for holding the moral (and invariably self-defeating) high ground. Democrats, smarter than Republicans, keep manipulating Republicans into ascending those rarefied heights, where their moral egos are intact, but their political fate is disastrous.

Had he done things right, Trump on his first day in office would have fired Comey and launched an investigation into (a) Hillary’s server and (b) Comey’s botched investigation of same. But he didn’t do that, and now he’s caught in the trap Comey set for him. I can only hope that Trump really does have tapes or something else and that it is, in fact, Comey and the Democrats who are heading for a trap.

If Trump really is stuck to the tar baby here, what we’ll witness is months and even years of Mueller turning over every rock he can find until something wiggles out, at which time the Democrats will pounce on the entire Trump edifice. Under those circumstances, Trump’s only hope, really, is such a rip-roaring economy that his aura assures Republican maintain control over the House in 2018. Failing that, Jonah Goldberg is correct that the Democrats, if they hold the House, will immediately impeach Trump. The fact that Trump won’t have done anything wrong will be irrelevant, given that the Left lives in a post-factual age.

And that’s all I’ve got for today. Although I’m traveling tomorrow, I will definitely blog tomorrow and for the duration of my trip.