or, at least not lying any more than any politician routinely does. Let me define what I mean by “a lie”. A lie is a knowing telling of an untruth with an intention to deceive. Now I can comment on Gerard Baker’s Wall Street Journal remarks:

Now it’s important to say here that the past few years haven’t exactly been a golden age for presidential credibility. Mr. Biden’s predecessor set the bar for authoritative misdirection extremely high.

But you’ll recall that President Trump’s whoppers were, in the somber reporting of the time, cast as an existential threat to the very fabric of American democracy. News articles would report something he’d said as either an outright lie or with the censorious clarification that his words were “false” or “without evidence.” (I earned infamy a few years back as editor of the news pages of this newspaper for insisting that reporting something confidently as a “lie” required a level of knowledge about a person’s mind that we probably didn’t have.)

I don’t see news organizations reporting that President Biden has “falsely” stated that there had been no complaints from U.S. allies, or that he has said “without evidence” that Covid was on the wane. Republicans lie. Democrats merely misspeak.

accompanied by a recital of Biden’s “lies”. Note that his criticism is more of media hypocrisy than it is of Biden mendacity. My take is that President Biden has probably been in politics long enough that he can no longer tell what the truth is. That’s an occupational hazard. My take on the media is that most outlets don’t care whether it’s true or false as long as it’s well-intentioned. They can tell whether it’s well-intentioned by the political agenda being advanced.

Salvatore J. Cordileone and José H. Gomez, the Roman Catholic archibishops of San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, have an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, defending Junipero Serra against the slanders being levied against him by California’s legislature:

California lawmakers have passed legislation to replace a statue of St. Junípero Serra at the Capitol in Sacramento with a new monument honoring the state’s native peoples. The Serra statue has been in storage since it was torn down by protesters in July 2020. A humble 18th-century Franciscan priest, Serra would surely approve of a new monument honoring the indigenous Californians he spent his life serving. Unfortunately, the legislature has gone further, slandering his name and pushing a false narrative about the mission period in California.

Enslavement of both adults and children, mutilation, genocide, and assault on women were all part of the mission period initiated and overseen by Father Serra,” declares Assembly Bill 338, which passed both chambers by wide margins and now awaits Gov. Gavin Newsom’s signature. None of that is true. While there is much to criticize from this period, no serious historian has ever made such outrageous claims about Serra or the mission system, the network of 21 communities that Franciscans established along the California coast to evangelize native people. The lawmakers behind the bill drew their ideas from a single tendentious book written by journalist Elias Castillo.

As leaders of the state’s two largest Catholic communities, we serve thousands of native Californians who trace their faith to ancestors who helped build the missions. We understand the bitter history of native exploitation. But history can be complicated and facts matter.

They go on to elucidate those facts. Junipero Serra didn’t abuse indigenous Californians—many of his actions were attempts to defend those people from the abuses of the Spanish and right the wrongs they had experienced. You should be able to read the entire op-ed from my link if you hurr—I believe these “free links” expire pretty quickly.

One more point. The champions of indigenous people including indigenous Californians should read some contemporaneous accounts of the lives of those people and stop romanticizing them.

I don’t know what to say about New York University’s Stern Center for Business and Human Rights’s report on the role of social media in stoking already substantial political polarization in the U. S. Here’s a snippet:

Some critics of the social media industry contend that widespread use of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has contributed to increased political polarization in the United States. But Facebook, the largest social media platform, has disputed this contention, saying that it is unsupported by social science research. Determining whether social media plays a role in worsening partisan animosity is important because political polarization has pernicious consequences. We conclude that social media platforms are not the main cause of rising partisan hatred, but use of these platforms intensifies divisiveness and thus contributes to its corrosive effects.

The complete report is here (PDF).

I think their recommendations suffer from wishful thinking seasoned with a generous dollop of unlikely assumptions. I agree with them that social media are exacerbating polarization. They do it in any number of ways, e.g. providing “safe spaces” for extreme views in which the views aren’t that extreme giving those who hold them the illusion of widespread popularity, they actually reward extreme positione—that is, indeed, what “influencers” do, and so on. I just don’t think the companies can be restrained by the means they suggest. I think the better strategy is to render their business model untenable.

At ProPublica Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella remark on the revelation that the Saudi government was more involved in the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 than has heretofore been revealed publicly:

The Saudi government has always denied any role in the attacks, noting that al-Qaida and its former leader, Osama bin Laden, were sworn enemies of the royal family. But the 2016 report shows that FBI agents found evidence that several Saudi religious officials working in the United States had connections not only to people who assisted the hijackers but also to other Qaida operatives and suspected extremists. At the time, there were many Saudis in the country who had diplomatic credentials but were mainly involved in religious activity. The FBI later investigated many of them for extremism.

and

“This validates what we have been saying,” said James Kreindler, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs. “The FBI agents working this case detailed a Saudi government support network that was working in 1999, 2000 and 2001 to provide the hijackers with everything they needed to mount the attacks — apartments, money, English lessons, flight school.”

Not only should this be publicized but there should be repercussions, both for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and for the federal officials who concealed it. For the KSA I have two words: civil suits. The figure that should be sought should be in the tens of trillions of dollars, it should be sought not only by the U. S. government but by the families of those killed on 9/11 and those who have died in the various fronts in the War on Terror.

What about the officials? In particular I’d like to know what national interest was served by concealing the KSA’s involvement. U. S. national interest, I mean.

It is as I have been saying for some time: the Saudis are not our friends. They cannot be our friends.

There is quite a difference of opinion on the vaccine mandate which President Biden announced yesterday. At The New Republic, for example, Tim Noah is enthusiastic:

President Biden is imposing the most comprehensive Covid vaccine mandates thus far, requiring federal employees and most private sector workers to get vaccinated.

The new mandates to combat the delta variant, which is starting to slacken economic growth and perhaps even the ferociously tight labor market, arrive after months of dithering within the Biden administration over how aggressively to police workplaces about Covid-19.

[…]

I’ve been very hard on Biden’s reluctance to impose health protections against Covid-19 in the workplace. He waited way too long. But he seems now to be making good on his promises. With new Covid cases approaching January’s levels, Thursday’s moves are better late than never.

and the editors of the New York Times are supportive:

Faced with this avoidable catastrophe, President Biden is right to order tighter vaccine rules, which he did for roughly two-thirds of the nation’s work force on Thursday. “We’ve been patient,” Mr. Biden told vaccine holdouts. “But our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”

The president moved to require all executive branch employees, federal contractors and millions of health care workers to be vaccinated. Workers at private businesses with 100 or more employees will have to either get vaccinated or take a weekly Covid test. Any business covered by the order must offer its employees paid time off to get their shots or recover from any side effects.

As incursions on bodily autonomy go, this is pretty mild stuff. No one, the Times columnist David Brooks wrote in May, is being asked to storm the beaches of Iwo Jima.

but a group of Republican governors are challenging the diktat in court:

A number of republican governors, who have long fought mask mandates and other safety regulations intended to stop the spread of the deadly virus, immediately argued that this rule change infringed on their personal freedom and was unconstitutional. The change was an attack on private businesses and states rights, they claimed.

“Biden’s vaccine mandate is an assault on private businesses,” tweeted Texas Governor Greg Abbott. “I issued an Executive Order protecting Texans’ right to choose whether they get the COVID vaccine & added it to the special session agenda. Texas is already working to halt this power grab.” Last week Abbott enacted legislation that would prevent the majority of women in Texas from choosing whether or not to receive an abortion, even in cases of rape and incest.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also questioned Biden’s ability to issue the mandates. “I don’t believe he has the authority to just dictate again from the presidency that every worker in America that works for a large company or a small company has to get a vaccine,” he said on a radio program hosted by former President Donald Trump advisor Steve Bannon. “That is outside the role of the president to dictate.”

Governor Kristi Noem of South Dakota wrote on Twitter that she would see Biden “in court,” and Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina said in a statement that “Biden and the radical Democrats (have) thumbed their noses at the Constitution.” Governor Mark Gordon of Wyoming also said he was preparing his state’s attorney general to take action.

while in an op-ed in the New York Times Robbie Soaves, editor of the libertarian site, Reason.com warns:

The president’s plan is certainly well intentioned. The vaccines are the only tried-and-true strategy for defeating Covid; government officials should both encourage vaccination and make it easier to get vaccinated. Health officials must continue selling people on the vaccines by emphasizing the considerable upside: Vaccination decreases transmission of the virus and turns hospitalization and death into very unlikely outcomes. It provides such robust protection that 99 percent of coronavirus fatalities in the United States now occur in the unvaccinated population. Vaccination works, and it’s the right option for a vast majority of Americans.

But forcing vaccines on a minority contingent of unwilling people is a huge error that risks shredding the social fabric of a country already being pulled apart by political tribalism.

The president should not — and most likely does not — have the power to unilaterally compel millions of private-sector workers to get vaccinated or risk losing their jobs: Mr. Biden is presiding over a vast expansion of federal authority, one that Democrats will certainly come to regret the next time a Republican takes power. Moreover, the mechanism of enforcement — a presidential decree smuggled into law by the Department of Labor and its Occupational Safety and Health Administration — is fundamentally undemocratic. Congress is supposed to make new laws, not an unaccountable bureaucratic agency.

For my part while I have no problem with vaccine mandates in the abstract, think that at this point there is ample evidence for at least the short term safety and effectiveness of the vaccines, and believe that more state and local governments should be mandating vaccinations, I’m a ways and means kind of guy and doubt that the federal government has this power. Before you point out the venerable court cases asserting that government does, indeed, have that power, find one that ruled that the federal government has that power. If it does have the power, it can only be wielded by act of Congress, and the president does not have the authority to make such mandates on his own and the Congress does not have the authority to delegate that power to the president or an executive branch agency. I also suspect this is another of the myriad well-intentioned decrees which there is no actual intention of enforcing which I think weakens the rule of law in general.

It does raise an interesting question, however. At this point I know of no state which has an unconditional COVID-19 vaccine mandates or even a universal mandate conditioned on the absence of religious objections. Illinois doesn’t have one. Why not? I think it’s because the governors fear political repercussions.

There is one thing that President Biden has not done, is certainly within the federal government’s authority, and in which I think that President Trump was remiss in the early days of the pandemic: curbing and controlling travel between the states. My explanation for this, is that fear of political blowback overrules all other considerations.

I don’t have anything insightful to say so I’ll keep it short. I think we should avoid projecting how we felt or feel on others and not judge them for how they feel or felt. I didn’t feel fear on that day; I observed more anger than fear but I didn’t feel either—I felt sorrow.

I’m seeing an enormous amount of claptrap being written about the events of that day and since. Perhaps I’ll post about that tomorrow. If you read anything good, please share it with us.

Update

Esquire, “Who Was the Falling Man from 9/11?”, Tom Junod
John Kass News, “What Do We Talk About When We Talk About 9/11?”, John Kass

In his 9/11 20^th anniversary column in the Washington Post David Ignatius tries to contrast two different things:

Radical pessimism is a mistake on this 9/11 anniversary. These two decades witnessed many American blunders but also lessons learned. Our military commanders discovered how to project power at relatively low cost, in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. Despite the Taliban’s triumph, Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane — in Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and a half-dozen other places.

and

What’s indisputably true is that a cycle in U.S. history has ended. I don’t just mean the post-9/11 effort to remake the Middle East by force. A larger process has been at work over the past century, as the United States gradually replaced the European colonial powers and took up their burden. This post-post-colonial era is dead, thankfully. The American people won’t stand for it anymore, and neither will the rest of the world.

There is so much wrong with the first it’s hard to know where to start. I can think of any number of lessons we should have learned but I can’t think of one that we have actually learned. “Relatively lost cost” are weasel words. Relative to what? There’s no fixed standard so it’s non-disprovable. Since 2001 we’ve spent more than $6 trillion making war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Perhaps that is relatively low cost to Mr. Ignatius but it sounds like a lot of money to me particularly since I’m skeptical that any of that spending has made us the least bit more secure than we were on September 10, 2001. Today is the anniversary we should be celebrating. And what is his evidence that “Islamist radicalism has been gradually on the wane”? I think it’s just biding its time and, indeed, will always be there under the surface.

And is the “post-post-colonial era” really dead? I think that the neoconservatives and liberal interventionists who reliably call for military interventions and, indeed, like Mr. Ignatius, believe we should be at war forever in Afghanistan are completely unrepentant. They, too, are just biding their time. As evidence I would point out that the Biden Administration is full of them: Samantha Power and Susan Rice immediately leap to mind.

In a piece at the Atlantic author Garrett M. Graff makes the argument that following the attacks on September 11 the U. S. did almost everything wrong. Here’s the kernel of his piece:

As we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11 on Saturday, I cannot escape this sad conclusion: The United States—as both a government and a nation—got nearly everything about our response wrong, on the big issues and the little ones. The GWOT yielded two crucial triumphs: The core al-Qaeda group never again attacked the American homeland, and bin Laden, its leader, was hunted down and killed in a stunningly successful secret mission a decade after the attacks. But the U.S. defined its goals far more expansively, and by almost any other measure, the War on Terror has weakened the nation—leaving Americans more afraid, less free, more morally compromised, and more alone in the world. A day that initially created an unparalleled sense of unity among Americans has become the backdrop for ever-widening political polarization.

The things we got wrong which he identifies are:

• As a society, we succumbed to fear.
• We chose the wrong way to seek justice.
• At home, we reorganized the government the wrong way.
• Abroad, we squandered the world’s goodwill.
• We picked the wrong enemies.

I’m not entirely in agreement with everything on his list but I think he has a point.

I was not frightened on 9/11; I was sad because I saw pretty clearly what was going to happen. That may explain why I have opposed practically everything we have done in the aftermath.

Right on cue Joel Kotkin has a post at The American Mind on the decline of the family, not just in the United States but all over the developed world in which I include China. It’s dramatic, it looks like it’s accelerating, and it will have profound effects, few of them good. Here’s Mr. Kotkin’s peroration:

These are not issues of right or left, but concern the future of our civilization, not just economically but spiritually. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, not hem them in. Some conservatives have placed similar emphasis on the family unit. The debate should be not the utility of supporting families, but how best to do it.

This is a choice we need to make.

The days of motherhood, apple pie, and the flag being things which all Americans agree are unarguably good are long gone. The tragedy of it all is that for so many people, as Mr. Kotkin documents, a solitary life is not their preference.