Fascism and Socialism: Still Not Opposites The Eurasian movement of Putin and his allies draws from both Nazism and Stalinism.

Editor’s Note: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.

Dear Reader (Including the trenchcoat-wearing FCC minister with breath like he’s been sucking a urinal cake looking over my shoulder, tapping hisBIC pen on his glass eye, and sighing every time I write something he doesn’t like)

I’ve got to bang out this “news”letter pretty quickly. I’m sitting in a too-small fake wicker chair at the coffee shop at the Broadmoor (one of my favorite hotels, btw). The time difference here puts me two hours behind at six in the morning. Plus, I don’t want the housekeeping staff to find the body in my room. If I didn’t need coffee so badly I would have taken care of that already. But one must prioritize. I think the high altitude here is making my brain itch.

FASCISM, AGAIN

Timothy Snyder has written the best piece I’ve seen on what’s going on in Kiev. It’s worth reading just as a primer. But it’s also interesting in other ways. I had not read a lot about the “Eurasian Union,” a proposed counterweight to the European Union, in much the same way the Legion of Doom is a counterweight to the Justice League. Putin and a band of avowed “National Bolshevik” intellectuals are in effect trying to put the band back together. Snyder writers:

The Eurasian Union is the enemy of the European Union, not just in strategy but in ideology. The European Union is based on a historical lesson: that the wars of the twentieth century were based on false and dangerous ideas, National Socialism and Stalinism, which must be rejected and indeed overcome in a system guaranteeing free markets, free movement of people, and the welfare state. Eurasianism, by contrast, is presented by its advocates as the opposite of liberal democracy.

The Eurasian ideology draws an entirely different lesson from the twentieth century. Founded around 2001 by the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Dugin, it proposes the realization of National Bolshevism. Rather than rejecting totalitarian ideologies, Eurasianism calls upon politicians of the twenty-first century to draw what is useful from both fascism and Stalinism. Dugin’s major work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, follows closely the ideas of Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi political theorist. Eurasianism is not only the ideological source of the Eurasian Union, it is also the creed of a number of people in the Putin administration, and the moving force of a rather active far-right Russian youth movement. For years Dugin has openly supported the division and colonization of Ukraine.

Via: NRO

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Williamson: The Government Isn’t Santa

There were three wise men, bearing gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Much has been written about the mystical connotations of those gifts, but it is rarely, if ever, asked: Where did they get them?

Presumably, Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar were not engaged in gold mining, frankincense farming, or myrrh cultivation. They had other things to do, other stars to follow. For Christians, and for men of goodwill categorically, this is an important question: Feed my sheep, saith the Lord — okay: Feed ’em what? Some of the Apostles were said to have the gift of healing through the laying on of hands; those without such gifts still have an obligation to heal the sick (if the ACLU will allow it), which means building hospitals and clinics, equipping doctors and nurses, etc. With what?

If ye had but faith in the measure of a mustard seed . . . and if the mustard-seed approach does not work, and the mountains we command to be uprooted remain stubbornly in place, then we are back to the old-fashioned problems of human existence: scarcity and production. That is what is so maddening about Pope Francis’s recent apostolic exhortation — which is, as much as my fellow Catholics try to explain it away, a problematic document in many ways. The pope’s argument, fundamentally, is that we can have capitalism on the condition that we feed the poor. This is exactly backward: We can feed the poor if we have capitalism. To give away wealth presumes the existence of that wealth, whether it is an annual tithe or Jesus’ more radical stance of giving away all that one owns. Giving away all that you own does not do the poor an iota of good if you don’t have anything. You can’t spread the wealth without wealth.

Via: NRO

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Impeachment Lessons: The Nineties taught us it’s not guilt that matters; it’s political will.

Well whaddya know: The topic of impeachment reared its head at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday.

Jonathan Strong’s report here at NRO noted the wincing consternation of GOP-leadership aides at utterances of the “i-word” during the testimony of prominent legal experts. For the Republican establishment, it seems, history begins and ends in the 1990s: No matter howtimes have perilously changed, any talk of shutdowns or impeachment is bad, bad, bad. Yes, the Obama “uber-presidency,” as left-of-center law professor Jonathan Turley called it, has enveloped the nation in what he conceded is “the most serious constitutional crisis . . . of my lifetime,” but GOP strategists would just as soon have us chattering about immigration “reform” and bravely balancing the federal budget by, oh, around 2040.

But as we discussed in this August column — back when the first anniversary of the Benghazi massacre loomed, back when many Americans still believed that if they liked their health-insurance plans, they could keep their health-insurance plans — it is not crazy to talk about impeaching President Obama. And if you’re going to have a congressional hearing about systematic presidential lawlessness, it is only natural that the word “impeachment” gets bandied about. Not only is impeachment the intended constitutional remedy for systematic presidential lawlessness; it is, practically speaking, the only remedy.

Via: NRO

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Sheila Jackson Lee: Insurance Companies Should Not Have Sent Out Cancellation Letters, They Should Have Sent Letters Telling Them Their Insurance Was Getting Better…

"Is she still living in a Fantasy World?"

Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, a Texas Democrat, told National Review Online today that instead of sending out cancellation letters, insurance companies should have told their customers that their coverage was about to get better.

She said she wrote an amendment before the president’s announcement that would require insurance companies to “tell the truth.”

“The cancellation notice was not the truth,” she says. “It should have been: ’We intend to or expect to modify your insurance.’”

She adds that cancellation is what happens “when you don’t pay your premium, or something has happened in the bad old days,” but that’s not what’s happening here.

“A cancellation notice was the inappropriate document to send without notice,” she continues. “All they had to do is that, ‘This is a notice to say that we’re going to improve your insurance, not, in essence, eliminate your insurance.’”

Via: NRO

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Anti-Gun Activist Shannon Watts: Open Carry Texas ‘Like the Taliban,’ Might Shoot and Rape Moms

At the end of my conversation with Shannon Watts, of gun-control group Moms Demand Action, Watts said something rather astonishing. The reason that the moms in Dallas were so intimidated by the counter-protest outside, she told me, was that Open Carry Texas is “like the Taliban” and could feasibly have planned to open fire. “You don’t honestly believe they were going to shoot you?” I asked.

“I have no idea why you would actually assume that,” Watts replied. “You never know with these mass shootings. I don’t know who these people are. I don’t know if these people have had background checks. Or if they have had any training.” Watts also suggested that Open Carry Texas was full of people who mightrape the women involved in Moms Demand Action. I suggested that this was a “little extreme,” but she said that OCT’s website featured some choice comments and that she had inferred it from that.

I don’t know too much about OCT, I grant you. But I do know that one is probably unlikely to plan to shoot up and then rape a restaurant full of mothers after one has alerted the press to one’s presence and brought along one’s wives and children for good measure.

Via: NRO

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Graham Joins Vitter in Fight over Hill’s Carve-Out

It’s a contest over which senator is the most unpopular with his colleagues. Surprisingly, it’s probably not Ted Cruz. The most likely winner is David Vitter of Louisiana, who is mounting a campaign to end government subsidies for congressional health coverage. Polls show that 92 percent of voters dislike the idea of a special Obamacare privilege for anyone on Capitol Hill.

Yesterday, Vitter won an influential new recruit: GOP senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Graham told NRO’s Bob Costa that he will “object” to any pending fiscal deal unless the Senate at the same time votes on Vitter’s proposal.

“We’re down to stopping bad things, and the only bad thing at this point that we can really push on is the [Office of Personnel Management] rule,” he told Costa, referring to the rule that allows subsidies for Congress and its staff. “At this point, I’m not sure if we’re going to get it, so I’m going to object on any deal until I get that up-or-down vote. That’s only fair, and I believe the American people will be with me.”

Graham knows Vitter’s amendment may be the best leverage the Republicans have in any budget-deal negotiations. Democrats have personally and passionately appealed to Graham not to throw up a poison pill such as the Vitter amendment. But Graham says the Senate Democrats and President Obama “have moved the goal posts on a reasonable deal.”

Throwing the Vitter proposal into the mix is hugely unpopular with Capitol Hill veterans of both parties. Harry Reid, the majority leader, has slammed Vitter as “an anarchist” and “mean-spirited.”

Vitter responds that the original 2010 Obamacare law barred members of Congress and their personal staffs from continuing to get employer subsidies — worth $5,000 for individual policies and $11,000 or more for family coverage — because they would be buying coverage from the health-care exchanges, where employer subsidies are banned.

Via: NRO

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