Lying With Pictures

In any shopping mall, on any day, you can see a grizzling kid yearning for the chocolate-covered candy bar that his/her cruel mother is withholding from the distraught child. You can take a photo of this distressing scene but will not expect to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize, or whatever touches the heart of the nation. The latest such photo won immense applause: it was aimed at dignifying the supposed right of illegal migrants never to be separated from the supposed parent. Can there be any single illegals left? And has the liberal media even begun to consider the implications of the latest atrocity?

The photo of the blubbering child, a yard away from mom, is not an accidental by-product of events. It is the aim and object of the entire exercise, from first to last, which is to get photographed and thus to influence current politics, above all by demonizing President Trump.

The Administration will clearly have to get smarter in its tactics and laws. But nothing can shift the giant fact: the greatest challenge of our times is the invasion of the first world by the third world. It has already destroyed the somnolent governing classes of many European States, including Britain. In America, this challenge is now awakening a sleeping giant.

Where Did the Party Go?

The long eclipse of the Liberal sun is well begun, and the dark shadow of the moon comes between it and earth. It may amuse the sun-worshippers to deride the moon-followers as “lunatics,” a more refined term than “deplorables,” but the signs are unmistakable. The re-ordering of the Supreme Court means that the era of liberal interventionism is over. What remains is the Democrat Party.??

Within living memory, the Democrats were the party of Harry S. Truman, Dean Rusk, and Adlai Stevenson. Serious people took them seriously. It is now a party in thrall to the fallacy of minorities, whose apparent rationale is: tot up all the minorities, which grow all the time, thick as autumnal leaves in Vallombrosa, and you have a majority. You can speed along this six-lane boulevard to the future, assured of victory.??

But the tyranny of the minorities has yet to prove its electoral worth for the Democrats. The Party remains. It puts me in mind of Charles G. Leland’s The Breitman Ballads, whose melancholy opening verse has this:??

Hans Breitmann gife a barty—

Vhere ish dot barty now? . . .?

All goned afay mit de lager beer—?

Afay in de ewigkeit!