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Punta Cana, Dominican Republic.- Former president of the United States, Bill Clinton, and his wife Hillary Clinton, are vacationing in Punta Cana, La Altagracia province.

The couple was seen dining at an exclusive restaurant in the eastern part of the country, along with their friends, husbands Frank Rainieri and Haydee Kuret de Rainieri.

The former president, on his 24th visit to the country, welcomed the Dominicans who came to greet him.

He was also seen playing golf with Juan Jos Arteaga and Rolando Gonzalez Bunster, at the Corales Golf Course in Punta Cana where the PGA tournament will be held again this year.

Other celebrities

Various celebrities from art, politics, film and commerce preferred Punta Cana to wait for the new year, including the famous television presenter and businesswoman, Martha Stewart, who visited the Punta Cana Foundation and other attractions of the tourist destination located to the east of the country.

Read more:
Bill Clinton hobnobs with friends in the East - Dominican Today

Years ago, when teaching at seminary, I used to tell the students that moral relevance in the modern world was a cruel and fickle mistress. However much Christians accommodated themselves to her demands, sooner or later she would want more. Christian morality and the morality of the world simply could not be reconciled in the long term.

Apparently, this no longer applies simply to Christians and other moral traditionalists. It also applies to the artistic class. Last week, Constance Grady at Vox noted how so much pop culture of recent vintage has dated so rapidly. Hamilton, the hit musical of 2015, now appears, in 2021, to glorify the slave-owning and genocidal Founding Fathers while erasing the lives and legacies of the people of color who were actually alive in the Revolutionary era. The TV series Parks and Recreation is now considered an overrated and tunnel-visioned portrait of the failures of Obama-era liberalism. And the Harry Potter franchise is now the neo-liberal fantasy of a transphobe.

While Grady avoids the earnestness of those who regard Its a Wonderful Life as dangerous or the clichs of those who see Dolly Parton as a tool of systemic racist evil, she misses the deeper significance of the phenomenon she describes. For her, the transformed tastes of pop culture connect to the fading fortunes of Hillary Clinton and the values she represented. That makes sense. But there is a deeper cause of the shifting morals of popular culture and that is that our society has no stable framework for moral reasoning. It is therefore doomed to constant volatility.

Of course, the moral tastes of culture have always changed somewhat over time. What is notable today is the speed at which they change and the dramatic way they repudiate the immediate past. It took forty years for John Cleeses Hitler impersonation to be deemed offensive (and then, oddly, by a generation for whom Hitler was little more than a name in a history textbook). But now, jokes that were unexceptional five or ten years ago might well cost a comedian his career today. The moral shelf life of pop cultural artifacts seems much shorter now and the criteria by which they might be judged far less predictable.

The real problem underlying the phenomenon Grady observes is that the moral tastes of popular culture are just that: tastes, and thus subject to fashion and, in our social media age, to easy manipulation. Society has no solid foundation on which to build its moral codes. Decades ago, Alasdair MacIntyre noted that the loss of any shared metanarrative rendered constructive moral discourse impossible, as all moral claims were reduced to expressions of emotional preference. Philip Rieff made a similar point when he argued that the loss of any transcendent order upon which to build society meant that the moral framework of any given culture had to justify itself on the basis of itself. And that is an inherently unstable task.

Critical theory in its various forms represents the intellectualized form of this chaos. It is predicated on negationi.e., the dismantling of whatever structures happen to provide the status quo at any given momentand its advocates are committed to a constant dialectical destabilization of morality. After all, moral codes are instruments for oppressing the weak and the marginal. Yet this negation comes with a price tag for the very people committed to it. That is why so many of its major figures end up falling foul of their own philosophical tradition. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno may have been the founding fathers of critical theory, but their views on the intimate connection between homosexuality and fascism would make them unlikely candidates for guest lectures on todays Ivy League campuses, let alone for tenure track appointments. And all of Adrienne Rich's brilliant contributions to feminist thought and even to intersectionality have not prevented her reputation from being posthumously buried outside the camp in the plot reserved for transphobes and other assorted bigots. Today race theory, not feminism, might be the critical theorists' soup du jour, but this will prove no more lasting than previous iterations of the voice of the oppressed. Intersectionality witnesses to that fact; and those who live by the sword of critical theory can expect at some point to die by the same.

The obvious riposte to this is that most people do not give critical theory a second thought. That is true, but my claim is that the world of which the critical theorist gives a sophisticated account is the world as many of us imagine it to be: one with no agreed upon moral compass and marked by a deep suspicion of any attempt by any one group to make its truth normative, out of fear that the result will be oppressive and unjust. The consequence is constant flux of the kind Grady observes in pop culture, where todays virtuous icons are tomorrows vile scoundrels.

In the years since my warning to my seminary students, the term mistress has become too flattering a metaphor for moral relevance, implying as it does a degree of longevity in the relationship. Today, moral tastes have too short a shelf life for that. Indeed, embracing the moral spirit of the age is now more akin to having a one-night standand that with somebody who kicks you out of bed in the morning and calls the police.

Carl Trueman is a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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The Strange Fate of Hamilton and Harry Potter | Carl R. Trueman - First Things

The 2020 election was in the words of former President Trump's own department of homeland security "the most secure in American history."

But ahead of that vote, nearly 60% of all Americans said they lacked confidence in the honesty of U.S. elections, according to a Gallup poll from earlier that year.

One year later, two-thirds of all Americans believe U.S. democracy is threatened, according to a CBS News poll. That crisis of trust is bigger than just one party both Republican and Democratic voters have expressed doubt in the system.

As people stormed the Capitol last year, Sharon Story and her husband Victor didn't follow the crowd inside.

The grandmother of 10, who had driven all the way from Gaffney, South Carolina, to be there, firmly believes that the American democracy she used to teach about in her sixth grade classroom is on the edge of collapse.

"I think if they push people too far against the wall, especially the Southerners, they're not gonna take it," Story said when asked if she thought a civil war was possible in her lifetime.

And it's not just Story who worries that. University of California at San Diego political science professor Barbara F. Walter says in her book "How Civil Wars Start," when it comes to actual fighting, "we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe."

Story is also "not at all" confident that the 2020 election was the most secure in American history.

That feeling of fraud if only a feeling is what led so many to Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, to, in their minds, defend democracy.

The atmosphere at the Capitol riot was "patriotic, unity, hope," Story said.

"I feel upset," Story said, when asked how she reacts to others describing January 6 as a riot or an insurrection.

Her belief that the election was stolen is shared by millions, and it doesn't seem like anything or anybody can restore their faith.

"Not even Republicans," Story said of who she trusts. "Even Fox News, who we used to have respect for, you know, seems to let us down and called the election early."

What's particularly dangerous about this moment, though, according to Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book "How Democracies Die" is that these feelings of mistrust exist across party lines, albeit for very different reasons.

Alesha Sedasey, recalling how she felt watching Bernie Sanders lose to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary, said, "That was when I lost a good amount of my faith in the system.

Sedasey is a bartender in Brooklyn, New York, who believes the will of the voters was thwarted in 2016 by superdelegates in the primary and again by the Electoral College in the general election.

"I don't think that any part of the election had democracy fulfilled," Sedasey said. "I mean, Trump didn't get the majority of votes, so how is that democracy, right?"

While Sedasey's doubts in the system are different from those expressed at the Capitol last year, the effect is very much the same.

"It's hard to trust Congress," Sedasey said.

Despite their differences, both Sedasey and Story see themselves as defenders of the same underlying principles they both see themselves as patriots.

"I think that I am a patriot because I'm fighting for what our constitutional rights are supposed to be and what this country says it is," Sedasey said.

And both say they'll continue to vote and even organize for their side.

"I still participate in it because I have faith that there is the possibility for change," Sedasey said.

"I vote, because I always vote, but I don't know that I'll trust 'em," Story said.

So, regardless of who wins in 2024, many voters maybe even most could once again doubt the results, raising the question of how our republic can withstand such a crisis.

"I'm very concerned," Story said. "I think we're at a pivotal point. I think that good people can't stand by and do nothing anymore."

When asked if the U.S. would be able to keep its record as the longest continuously operating democracy, Sedasey replied, "All empires fall."

For Breaking News & Analysis Download the Free CBS News app

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Democratic and Republican voters share a mistrust in the electoral process - CBS News

Scott Jennings| Opinion Contributor

Poll: 4 in 10 in GOP say Jan 6 was very violent

Nearly a year after the Jan. 6 siege, only about 4 in 10 Republicans describe it as very or extremely violent, according to a new poll from The AP-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. (Jan. 4)

AP

History comes down to individual moments where leadership matters. Think of Lincoln forging ahead with the Emancipation Proclamation despite near-universal opposition from his political allies. Churchill rallied his people to fight for Western civilization, when the politically powerful pursued appeasement. Reagan demanded that Gorbachev tear down this wall. Kennedy forcing Wallace to step aside so that Vivian Malone and James Hood could attend school in Alabama.

When it counts, historys best leaders recognize the moments that matter and rise to the occasion, summoning the courage and vision to make the right call. And in those moments, there are no mulligans.

Donald Trump faced one of those critical leadership moments on Jan.6, 2021. His supporters, a mob he had whipped into a frenzy just hours before, rushed the U.S. Capitol and put human lives and our Constitutional order at risk. His voice alone could have called them off, a fact recognized in the moment by everyone from his own children to major opinion leaders in the conservative movement.

Trump shrunk from his responsibility. He betrayed his oath of office, which called on him, to the best of his ability, to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

The ugly visuals of a Capitol in chaos redefined Trumps legacy. His many accomplishments were pushed several paragraphs down historys pages when rioters used his flag to assault Capitol Police, when Q Shaman invaded the Senate Chamber, and when the soon-to-be-former President published a video telling the insurrectionists we love you.

More: Ex-UK student who bragged about entering Capitol on Jan. 6 sentenced to jail

The first anniversary of Jan.6 has triggered a national reflection on what happened that day, and on whether there is more political violence in our future. Mostly, weve gone to our corners. Other problems such as Covid, the immigration crisis, inflationand the draining of American prestige following the collapse of Afghanistan occupy our thoughts. The new president, elected to do one thing and one thing only, has failed spectacularly at everything other than replacing the last one. It appears the country is ready to move on from both men, even as Trump and Biden threaten us with a re-run of 2020.

But we shouldnt miss this chance to reflect on the 20-year march to Jan.6, a long, slow escalator filled with misguided, lying partisans who refused to accept electoral and institutional legitimacy following fair-and-square outcomes.

Democrats said George W. Bush was selected, not elected. Republicans clung to the erroneous, racist birther claims about Barack Obama for years. Democrats, including losing candidate Hillary Clinton, believe to this day that Russia delivered Trump the presidency in 2016. And Republicans now believe Bidens win to be illegitimate, the battle cry for Trumps probable 2024 campaign.

Along the way, other lesser election deniers like Stacey Abrams have flourished into celebrities, as contesting election outcomes aresometimes celebrated by the media even as they assail Trumps contesting of his.

There are a lot of dirty hands here. I heard a political commentator, when asked about polling in which an increasing number of Americans said political violence could sometimes be justified, say she couldnt fathom that Democrats and liberals would ever commit violent political acts. Somehow, in her view, this was a phenomenon restricted only to Trump supporters.

She mustve missed the nationwide riots that destroyed large swaths of several American cities over the last couple of years, completely fueled by left-wing agitators and egged on by Democratic politicians. Heck, Vice President Kamala Harris raised money to bail violent protestors out of jail in Minnesota.

She must have missed California Democrat Maxine Waters calling on protestors to get confrontational and to literally mob Trump administration officials. Or when Republicans from Sarah Huckabee Sanders to Ted Cruz were chased from restaurants. Or when Mitch McConnell was threatened with we know where you live as he was chased from a restaurant in Louisville, and months later found his home vandalized.

She mustve missed the Bernie Sanders supporter who so hated Donald Trump that they shot up the Republican congressmen practicing for the congressional baseball game, nearly killing Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana.

The issue is the same: people dissatisfied with institutional outcomes decided that intimidation, riotingand violence were justifiable responses.

Sure, there were some peaceful BLM protestors out there just like there were peaceful Trump supporters in Washington on Jan.6. But there were more than a handful of violent offenders in both groups, raging against a machine that they believed had betrayed them.

In the case of the Jan.6 rioters, they believed Trump, who fed them falsehoods, had their backs. The racial protest rioters were egged on for years by falsehood spewing leaders, too. Remember hands up, dont shoot? That never happened, according to President Obama's own Department of Justice.

Your politics will dictate your reaction to this paragraph. Liberals will recoil at the idea of comparing leftist rioters to the Jan.6 insurrectionists. Conservatives will howl at being lumped in with people looting Targetsand burning buildings.

But these rioters arent all that different. Theyve lost faith in our government and have come to believe that violence will produce better outcomes. Theyve been misled by selfish, failed leaders who found momentary advantage in arousing the passions of their supporters, but at extreme cost to the country's future.

This escalator will continue to go up until we choose to stop it.

US Capitol riot arrests:What we know about the Kentucky people charged

Most Republicans voted for Trump twice and were quite pleased with the results three conservatives on the Supreme Court and scores of lower court judges confirmed, too; tax cuts and regulatory reforms that produced the best economy in recent memory; trade policies that were fair to working-class Americans; finally standing up to China when it seemed no other politician would; a sane border policy. They have few qualms with his policy direction, even as he broke party orthodoxy on matters. And thats not to mention his deliverance of a long-desired pugilism in dealing with the media and leftist Democratic culture warriors.

US Capitol riot: Police officer dragged down steps and beaten

Video from the U.S. Capitol riot shows a police officer being dragged down the steps of the building and beaten.

USA TODAY, Storyful

But it is quite possible for a Republican, in their heart of hearts, to have voted for Trump twice, approved of the results, and be completely horrified at his post-election and Jan.6 dereliction of duty. If you believe that violence on Jan.6 was justified, you aren't a constitutional or law-and-order conservative. You are an anarchist, plain and simple.

The reckoning will come in 2024. Trump is likely to run again, a clear favorite for the GOP nomination. But the vulnerabilities he drags into his next race for the White House makes him the least likely Republican to recapture 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the GOP.

Republican Rep.Peter Meijer of Michigan, who voted to impeach Trump after Jan.6, now says his party has no choice but to rally around the former president. But the GOP bench is deep, full of potential presidents who could deliver the same results and fighting spirit, but who aren't carrying the baggage of having failed so spectacularly in a key, career-defining moment (or who carry the stain of having lost the national popular vote in two straight elections).

Liberals fail to see the failings of those in their ranks who encourage falsehoods and riots about elections and social problems. Conservatives seem resigned to another Trump nomination, and to relitigating the 2020 election four years hence.

And this lack of imagination and vision among our leaders despite a public desperately hungry for something better is why the escalator of political violence may well have many more floors to climb.

The rest is here:
Jan. 6, one year later. Why partisan violence isn't reserved for insurrectionists | Opinion - Courier Journal

If anyone had any doubts about the wisdom of tempting fate then they probably havent considered the case of Betty White and People magazine. Assuming that some Spectator readers are not also subscribers to People, I should inform you that the cover for the current issue features the last of The Golden Girls. Betty White turns 100! sings the headline, with the subtitle Funny never gets old. But while funny may not get old, the issue soon did. White died a few days shy of her 100th birthday, just as People magazine hit the newsstands. It sits there still, the worst example of a cover tempting fate since November 2016, when Newsweek brought out an issue with Hillary Clinton on the front under the headline Madam President.

All of which is simply to say that I am fully aware of how careful we should be. Yet here I go. I think that the coronavirus is over. Or at least it will become clear in the next few weeks that it is over. That is not to say that no one will get Covid, or any of its variants, or that insane rules will not continue to be applied, largely by Celts in this country. But it is to say that it will be harder and harder to apply any such rules, let alone enforce them, and that as the first weeks of 2022 roll on people will increasingly realise that we are done with all this.

The reasons are obvious. Firstly, the current fixation with lockdowns and similar restrictions is unsustainable. Children cannot continue to be kept away from school. Workers cannot permanently be kept away from their offices. Entertainment of all kinds cannot keep stop-starting. Life, in all of its forms, must simply be allowed to go on.

A second reason is that of course it is by now abundantly clear that the Omicron variant is the easiest variant to date, both to catch and to recover from. Almost every-body seems to have had it, and for most of us it was no worse than a bit of a sniffle. This couldnt be said of all the earlier variants, but it can be said with some certainty about this one. Some of us had a runny nose. Others had a sore throat. But few of us saw the tunnel, the lights, or our lives flashing before us. If ever there were a variant to live with, it is this one.

Yet still some people want to resist this, continuing among other things to wilfully mix up cases, hospitalisations and deaths. The journalists at the Downing Street press conferences will probably continue to call for more stringent measures for the rest of the year, and the various authorities in our country will continue to invent new ways to look ridiculous.

For example, as I write the idiotic Labour government in the stupidly devolved Wales is still advising the Welsh people not to go into the office or risk being fined. As though they needed much encouragement that way. Yet while office work is discouraged the Welsh are allowed to go to the pub, meaning that the only place outside of the home that the Welsh are being encouraged to work from is the pub. Another encouragement they did not need.

It is worse in Scotland. Some readers will have seen the pathetic spectacle of policemen and women raiding Hogmanay celebrations and trying to confiscate the locals drinks. The masked, visibility-jacket-wearing representatives of the committee on public safety were caught on video actually marching half-pissed Scotsmen in full kilt regalia out of a bar. The police even took their bottles of whisky off the table. Why did they do this?

In Scotland, at the time of writing, precisely one person is in the ICU with confirmed Omicron. One. In the whole of Scotland. And for this Nicola Sturgeon orders the police to drag the drinkers out of the bars? I may be a terrible, sell-out Sassenach half-breed in the eyes of Sturgeon, but even I can tell you that what happened in Scotland over Hogmanay is more likely than anything any foreign saboteur could conjure up to erode the concept of policing by consent.

It is the same around the world. Over in the Netherlands the government seized the opportunity of Omicron to order their umpteenth national lockdown and curfew. A large demonstration against these measures took place on Sunday and culminated in the Dutch police wielding their batons against the locals and setting police dogs on to them. For their own good. It is a more brutal version of what some Americans are doing to each other.

Mask mandates on planes may not be stopping anyone from getting Omicron (cloth masks now being officially declared useless against this variant), but they are certainly setting passengers against each other on domestic flights. One video that did the rounds this week showed a woman so enraged at a maskless man on her plane that she whipped off her own mask to scream at him for being maskless. The exchange did not disrupt Dorothy Parkers reputation as the wittiest woman in American history, but it did culminate in the female passenger spitting at the male passenger. Because if there is one thing that is sure to stop the spread of the virus it is people on planes spitting like camels at each other for not taking the necessary precautions to prevent particle transmission.

My point is that in country after country, it is becoming clear that none of this is sustainable. That does not mean that it will not go on for some while longer. Things that are unsustainable usually do. But it will soon become clear that there are societies, states and whole countries that are successfully getting on with life, and others that are not. And as people in the countries that want to lock down for the rest of the decade look to those places like Florida which are successfully getting on with things, they will want their own lives to look like that too.

As I say, I know what it is to tempt fate. But that is my view. And RIP Betty White.

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The time has come to get on with our lives - Spectator.co.uk