Even when signing the two bills supporting the Hong Kong protesters, the VSG has to genuflect to Xi

What to remember when the throne-sniffers try to make this look like an act of foreign-policy vision and courage:

And here is how their hero, “Pantywaist” Trumpkov, explained his signage of the bills, for the signing of which he had already publicly begged for Xi’s forgiveness in advance on live television:

“I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong. They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity for all,” Trump said in a statement.

If you can read that statement three times, and yet continue to call Trump’s act a “major rebuke” to China, then congratulations! You’ve just become an honorary regional vice-president of the Trump Cult!

He signed it “out of respect for President Xi” and “China” — and oh, yeah, also the people of Hong Kong. Because he hopes they will all be able to “settle their differences,” which is what we all hope for when a totalitarian giant is trying to subdue a tiny and defenseless independence-minded city-state, isn’t it?

This “president” just gets punier and punier every day, doesn’t he? (That’s “huger and huger” for those of you in the cult, of course.)

Gotta protect the trade-relations atmosphere for that big deal, because winning in deals everything to the Very Stable Genius. Plus, he reserves his real respect for autocrats. He likes tough guys (think here Mike Tyson).   He doesn't think military personnel who've been captured are as heroic as those who weren't (think here John McCain). 


What a small person.

That VSG is a real piece of work

A number of fronts on which he's worked his unique brand of havoc in recent days.

There's the effect of his protectionist policy:

President Trump campaigned to get America a fair trade deal. Once in office, tariffs became his weapon of choice in a trade war aimed at negotiating better terms for the US.

The administration is still in the midst of that fight, but Americans have already felt its impact, according to paper in the Fall 2019 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. 

Authors Mary Amiti, Stephen Redding, and David Weinstein found that almost all of the 2018 tariffs were passed on to importers and consumers through higher prices.

By 2019, import tariffs were costing US consumers and firms that buy foreign goods $3.2 billion per month in added tax costs and another $1.4 billion per month in forgone trade.

The Trump administration raised tariffs in a series of six waves over the course of 2018. It started with relatively modest tariffs on solar panels and washing machines, and ended with a 10 percent tariff on more than $200 billion worth of Chinese imports.

There's the frenzy of vulgarity into which he whips his cult followers:

Trump on Americans' reaction to impeachment: “Everybody said that’s really bullshit.” Florida rally crowd now chanting "Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!"

And speaking of the Florida rally, he perpetuated the idea of a vast and sinister "deep state," and claimed his pardoning of war criminals was a blow against it:

President Trump boasted at his Florida rally on Tuesday night of taking a stand against the “Deep State” by pardoning accused and convicted war criminals, apparently taking a thinly veiled jab at the military leadership he overruled to issue the pardons.
“Just this week, I stuck up for three great warriors against the Deep State,” the president exclaimed in Sunrise, Florida. “You know what I’m talking about. I had so many people say, ‘Sir, I don’t think you should do that.’”

Trump appeared to be referencing the backlash he faced from military leaders over the pardons he issued to Clint Lorance and Matthew Golsteyn and his reversal of the demotion of Eddie Gallagher, actions that eventually resulted in the termination of Navy Secretary Richard Spencer.
“People have to fight,” the president continued. “They shouldn’t say, gee whiz. They wanted to put him in jail for 25 years. One young man was in jail for seven years. He had 16 years to go.”
After mentioning Lorance’s jail sentence for the murder of unarmed Afghan civilians, Trump told the audience that “when you look at what they did to that man, you would have been very proud at what we ended up doing.”
“He came out and he hugged his parents,” the president added. “It was a beautiful thing. I will always stick up for our great fighters.”

Trump concluded by taking another shot at military leadership, declaring that “people can sit in air-conditioned offices and complain, but it doesn’t matter to me.” 

So much for respecting the internal military chain of command and the morale, discipline and order that it makes possible.

Then there's the chasm between the way he saw Rudy Giuliani's activities in Ukraine in July and the way he sees them in November:

President Donald Trump has now denied that he directed his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani to go to Ukraine and seek out investigations on his behalf, contradicting his own words to the Ukrainian President in the White House-released transcript of the July 25 call. 

Trump also contradicted sworn testimony from members of his administration and claims from his own White House acting chief of staff. 

Ahead of a Tuesday night rally in Florida, Trump was asked by conservative radio host Bill O'Reilly if the President directed Giuliani's involvement in Ukraine. 

"No," the President said, before launching into a tangent of flattering Giuliani's credentials, calling him "a great corruption fighter" and "the greatest mayor" of New York City.

O'Reilly asked once again: "Giuliani's your personal lawyer. So you didn't direct him to go to Ukraine to do anything or put any heat on them?" 

"No, I didn't direct him, but he's a warrior, Rudy's a warrior. Rudy went, he possibly saw something. But you have to understand, Rudy (has) other people that he represents," Trump said, adding that Giuliani has "done work in Ukraine for years." 

But according to the rough transcript of a phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump repeatedly pressed for Giuliani's involvement.

Trump told Zelensky: "Mr. Giuliani is a highly respected man. He was the mayor of New York City, a great mayor, and I would like him to call you. I will ask him to call you along with the Attorney General. Rudy very much knows what's happening and he is a very capable guy. If you could speak to him that would be great." 

Trump later said: "I will have Mr. Giuliani give you a call and I am also going to have Attorney General Barr call and we will get to the bottom of it. I'm sure you will figure it out."

A third time, Trump referenced Giuliani: "I will tell Rudy and Attorney General Barr to call." 

And there's this tweet / photo that I'm going to include, although, even though it comes from the @RealDonaldTrump account, is so outrageous that I'm leaving open the possibility that somehow some kind of hoax is being perpetrated. It's not as likely as the possibility that his narcissism has corroded what little character he's ever had this badly, and that he's truly losing his marbles. We'll see.

And then there's this "rightie" from the other side of that internal spectrum who has gone off the rails in his own way

I'm speaking of Tucker Carlson, whose jaw-droppingly wild blurting have become more frequent over the past year or so.

But now we are at the point where a lefty guest on his show makes the cogent point and he makes an ass of himself:

On his Monday evening show, Carlson invited former Clinton adviser Richard Goodstein on to discuss President Trump’s impeachment as it relates to Russia and Ukraine. During a heated exchange, Carlson questioned why the United States should care about Ukraine at all. 

“Why do I care what’s going on in the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?” Carlson asked. “I’m serious. Why do I care? And why shouldn’t I root for Russia? Because I am.”

Carlson noted that he’s not worried about what happens in Europe because he lives in Washington, D.C. He claimed he’s much more concerned about China’s threat to the U.S. than he is about Russia.

Tucker was trying his best to keep Goodstein from speaking, but Goodstein was able to squeeze in  the point that Americans should care because Russian aggression against Ukraine is a flashpoint in the struggle of democracy against authoritarian hegemony.

Let me state for the record, so there's no mistake, that I find Goodstein obnoxious in his own way. You couldn't be a campaign advisor to Madame Bleachbit and not be. But he's not wrong about this.

Carlson tried to walk it back toward the end of his show, saying he was only joking about supporting Russia. But he apparently stands by his main point, that he doesn't care about that conflict. He only cares about America, whatever that means.

And leftist outlets have been having a field day with this episode. I had to scroll through eight left-of-center Google links before I got to the Washington Examiner story I've used for this post.

Kristols to the left of me, Carlsons to the "right." Real conservatism has a hard time getting an airing these days, as I predicted would happen that tragic night of May 3, 2016 in Indianapolis.

Bill Kristol types do not help those of us trying to distinguish conservatism from Trumpism

There are gradations of the swath of conservatives - or ostensible conservatives, or erstwhile conservatives - who insist on the importance of publicly proclaiming that which is objectionable about Donald Trump. "Never Trumpers," if you will. There are the ones who keep front and center the importance of stating their uncorrupted conservatism, who make it clear that they have not moved leftward one micro-inch. The folks launching the Dispatch project, such as Steven Hayes, Jonah Goldberg and David French, Resurgent folks such as Erick Erickson, Steve Berman and Peter Heck, National Review writers such as Kevin Williamson, and a few of the folks at The Bulwark fall into this classification. There are others working at various outlets, but this serves to map the terrain.

At the other end of the spectrum are those, such as Max Boot and Jennifer Rubin,  who have completely jettisoned any self-identification as conservatives. and while not publicly repositioning themselves on the Left, might as well, given that they now denounce principles they used to - or at least presumably used to - hold dear, as well as denouncing Trump.

Bill Kristol, son of the neoconservatism pioneer Irving Kristol and the historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, founder of The Weekly Standard, has apparently decided there's some kind of virtue in going that latter bunch one step further, sending out a tweet this morning that is astounding in its lack of seriousness:

Bill Kristol‏Verified account @BillKristol

I very much prefer Biden or Buttigieg or Bloomberg or Klobuchar to Warren. But the idea that one term of Warren would pose anything like the threat of a second term for Trump to the basic norms and institutions of our liberal democracy, including to free markets, is laughable.

What? 

Elizabeth Warren wants to pack the Supreme Court, snatch drug companies' patents (when asked if that was doable, she responded, "Yes! We can do that! We just need the will to do that!"), impose a wealth tax and abolish the Electoral College. She has the most egregious truth-telling problem of any current aspirant to the presidency, having lied not only about her ethnic makeup and her children going to public school, but about the Ferguson, Missouri death of Michael Brown, saying that he was murdered by officer Daren Wilson, years after a grand jury and the Obama Justice Department found Wilson innocent.

And Mr. Kristol needs to be reminded that all the Democrats he names in his tweet are cool with the extermination of fetal Americans.

It's this kind of recklessness that makes it possible for the likes of Victor Davis Hanson - who has done his own moving along the spectrum, from serious, erudite conservative to Trump shill - to pen a piece like he has today at American Greatness that takes the by-now-familiar tack of putting Trump's undeniably good moves - judicial appointments, reaffirming US support for Israel, pulling out of the Paris climate accord, deregulation - so front and center as to, in the eyes of the type of reader he is addressing, render Trump's pettiness, vindictiveness, insistence on having his ring kissed, bizarre foreign policy moves such as driving South Korea into China's arms, or saying he has to balance support for Hong Kong protestors with his keenness to cut a trade deal with Xi, whom he calls a "good friend," or abandoning the Kurds to the Turks, not to mention the fact that his "faith advisor" is a prosperity-gospel charlatan, and not to mention his sybaritic past, about which he bragged in several radio conversations with Howard Stern, inconsequential.

Hanson does point out that John F. Kennedy's frolics probably outdid Trump's, but, and I've made this point before, the adage that hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue applies here. Kennedy had the good sense to promote a public image of a dignified and devoted husband. He did not publicly brag about his misadventures.

But what a tweet like Kristol's does is lend credence to a statement like Hanson's that "Never Trumpers"

are often played as useful idiots by progressives who otherwise want nothing to do with them, and will not wish to have anything to do with them, even as apostates, in the post-Trump era.

There  are only two explanations for an utterance such as Kristol's that I can see. He's either become just plain intellectually sloppy, or he is indeed veering leftward.

It may be time for Kristol to take an extended hiatus from opining.

One thing's for sure: he's of no use to those of us trying to rescue actual conservatism from the snatches of Trumpism.

 

Another disgusting snippet from that Fox & Friends interview

As I said in my post yesterday about the VSG's call-in to the FNC morning show, I don't watch daytime TV as a general rule, so I'm picking up the various humdingers he let loose with as I poke around.

And this one is right up there with the business about Yovanovitch not hanging his picture in the Ukraine embassy and the tinfoil hat theory about CrowdStrike:

President Trump toed the line on Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests amid trade negotiations with China on Friday, telling Fox & Friends that “we have to stand with Hong Kong, but I’m also standing with President Xi.”

Trump said Friday that there is “a very good chance to make a deal,” with China, after reports in October suggested that a phase-one deal had been agreed to in principle, only for the Chinese to stall the process. The president also said that the Hong Kong situation was “a complicating factor” in negotiations, but also claimed negotiations were the reason China had not cracked down harder on protestors.

“If it weren’t for me, Hong Kong would’ve been obliterated in 14 minutes,” Trump said. “He’s got one million soldiers standing outside of Hong Kong, that aren’t going in only because I ask him ‘please don’t do that, you’ll be making a big mistake, it’s going to have a tremendous negative impact on the trade deal.’ And he wants to make a trade deal.

“I stand with Hong Kong, I stand with freedom, I stand with all of the things that I want to do,” the president continued. “But we are also in the process of making the largest trade deals in history.”

The president did not comment on whether he would sign the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, which was passed by the Senate with a bipartisan veto-proof majority on Tuesday.

So many layers of the VSG approach to being president on display here. There's the equivocation. (Someone on Twitter posed the question, can you imagine Ronald Reagan at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 saying, "Well, Mr. Gorbachev, it would be nice to see this wall come down, but you have to do what's right for the Soviet Union.") There's the wildly inflated view of his influence. There's the prioritization of deal-cutting over all else.

I think Daren Jonescu brings the laser focus of moral clarity to it:

Being on the winning side of history, where Trump so desperately yearns to be — think of how often he makes “winning” his own claim to fame and chief promise to supporters — is an unprincipled coward’s concern. That is why Trump, the unprincipled coward par excellence, supports every brutal dictator at the expense of that dictator’s slaves or potential victims. He does not see right and wrong, good and evil, freedom and tyranny. He sees only “power” and “winning” vs. “weakness” and “losing.” (The scare quotes in that last sentence are meant to indicate that Trump’s perspective on power and victory is the backwards outlook of a moral coward and intellectual weakling.) He therefore admires those who show an ability to maintain or expand their power, regardless of how they do it.

To my friends, past and present, who are willfully blinding themselves, or at best pretending the above concerns are mere peccadilloes or minor reservations about Trump’s judgment, I present a simple and sincere challenge: Please defend this punk’s actions on the world stage as anything less than treasonous.

This stuff has to be said. And stop it with the binary-choice attempt to shut down the discussion. That is not the only matter before us. And people sound stupid when they reduce it to that.

The VSG goes off the rails on Fox & Friends

I didn't watch it live - I rarely watch TV in the daytime - but there was lots of remarking upon it on Twitter, including lots of passing around of the looks of extreme discomfort on the faces of Doocy, Earhart and Kilmeade, like they were listening to the rantings of the proverbial crazy uncle at Thanksgiving.

The biggie was the VSG's stepping into the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory once again:

Call it President Trump's insanity defense — and that's a joke, but hear me out. 

Based on his freewheeling interview with Fox & Friends, Trump genuinely believed that Russia had not worked with WikiLeaks to continue a decadeslong effort to sow dissent in free democracies by hacking the poorly protected Democratic National Committee server in 2016. Instead, Trump thought that Ukraine had framed Russia for the 2016 meddling and that in addition there is a CrowdStrike server sitting in some Ukrainian basement that could prove it all. 

"The FBI went in and said, ‘We’re not giving it to you.’ They gave the server to CrowdStrike, which is a company owned by a very wealthy Ukrainian," Trump told Fox News. "And I still want to see that server. You know the FBI has still never gotten that server. That is a big part of this whole thing. Why did they give it to a Ukrainian company?" 

When host Steve Doocy pushed back on the claim, Trump doubled down on the assertion, claiming that this was why he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate corruption in the July 25 phone call. 

There are just a few problems. For starters, CrowdStrike isn't some Ukrainian corporation owned by "a very wealthy Ukrainian" as Trump asserted on television. It's a publicly traded security firm ($CRWD) based in California and co-founded by an American born in — wait for it — Russia. A New York private equity firm where Trump's ambassador to India used to work is CrowdStrike's largest outside stakeholder. And although the DNC did hire the company to transmit its data to the FBI for investigation, there's no single "server" at all.

It's worth noting that the National Republican Congressional Committee enlisted CrowdStrike's services to the tune of $40,000 as recently as this past June.

Then there's this bit of wounded vanity:

Josh Marshall‏Verified account @joshtpm

Trump on Yovanovitch: "She wouldn't hang my picture in the embassy. She is in charge of the embassy. She wouldn't hang it. It look a year-and-a-half, two years to get the picture up. She said bad things about me ... This was not an angel this woman, okay?"

As if she had nothing more pressing on her agenda than hanging pictures. As if no other presidential pictures in the history of US embassies had taken that long.

This guy can't ever go without adult supervision.

 

The only way to move from landfills to recycling is to curb human freedom and go in the red

Yesterday, I covered the monthly meeting of the board of our county's solid waste management district for the local media company I freelance report for. One item of business concerned the sole bid that the board received for the upcoming three-year contract to operate the district's two landfills and its recycling activities. The board's attorney pointed out that the bottom-line figure that the bidder quoted would exceed the district's budget, but that if one takes out recycling, it leaves a nice cushion. In other words, the landfill makes money for the district, but recycling eats that money up.

This comes up at most of the meetings. Some board members even floated the purely theoretical possibility of doing away with recycling, but then quickly said that it was not a possibility; the public would find it too politically incorrect.

So when I came across this Politico piece about San Francisco's "quest to make landfills obsolete," it grabbed my attention.

The first paragraph has to do with the impressive technology that city has employed in the task of sorting refuse, but it doesn't take long after that for the article to acknowledge that "other cities over the past several years have scaled back or even abandoned their recycling programs because they couldn't find a market for the materials." Still, San Fran presses on!

For decades, recycling and composting programs have enjoyed broad political support from San Francisco mayors, legislators and voters. “They’ve always been willing to do things other cities haven’t tried yet,” says Nick Lapis, director of advocacy for the nonprofit Californians Against Waste. “They’ve pioneered a lot of programs that either are commonplace everywhere or are going to be soon.”

As it turns out, this "willingness to do things other cities haven't tried" entails a fair degree of tyranny - excuse me, bans and regulation:

Curbside composting bins joined recycling bins in 2001, and composting and recycling became mandatory in 2009. Now, city residents and business actually compost more material than they recycle. The city has also regulated construction and demolition debris, diverting much of it from landfills through recycling and reuse. Wood goes to steam-driven power plants in North Carolina to be burned as fuel; metal goes to scrap yards, then to foundries; sheetrock is composted; crushed concrete and asphalt go into new roads and pathways. 

The city has also banned single-use plastic bags and other hard-to-recycle items. It recycles items other cities don’t: film plastic, clamshell food containers, and lower-grade plastics such as yogurt cups. San Francisco found new markets for some items after China shut the door to them last year. Its cutting-edge sorting technology produces cleaner, purer bales of recyclables, which are easier to sell. 

Residents and business owners have no choice but to take time out of their lives to fool with sorting refuse into an array of bins, and you can be sure that the nanny state is auditing your degree of compliance:

All around the city, residents and businesses don’t have just two waste bins, they have three: black for trash, blue for recycling and green for compost. From curbs outside San Francisco’s famed Victorian houses and on sidewalks outside Chinatown restaurants, Recology picks up food scraps from green compost bins the same day it picks up recycling and trash. 

Sanitation workers don’t just fling stuff into the back of their trucks. They’re auditing customers’ trash. If they see too much waste in someone’s black bin that ought to have gone into the green or blue bins, they’ll leave notes reminding the person what to recycle and compost. The notes include pictures of common items for the workers to circle — a universal means of communication in the multilingual city. It’s "very targeted communication,” Haley says, “not in a mean, police-state way, but to [say], ‘Help us clean up the recycling. Help us clean up the composting.’”

"Not in a mean, police-state way, mind you." At least not yet. Oh, and under a new law, it's up to you to pay for a sorter if you fail your audit.

B.F. Skinner would dig some of the measures the city is employing:

The city has also used behavior-modification strategies to get people to throw away less trash. It recently shrank the capacity of the black bins by half, to 16 gallons, but the monthly charge of $6.97 for each black bin is the same as for a 32-gallon recycling or composting bin. “If your recycling or your composting are so contaminated that they are trash, we can double your charge on those temporarily,” Haley says. About 500 large customers have received contamination charges, and about 100 have lost discounts for recycling and composting, he says. 

Only in the fourth and third to last paragraphs does the article glancingly deal with that pesky little matter of what all this costs:

 Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who co-sponsored the waste audit and straw ordinances, says political support for anti-waste laws is high, though businesses will always raise financial concerns. 

“That’s one of the biggest challenges we face when we’re talking about these very aspirational and wonderfully environmental policy goals,” Safai acknowledges. “How do you put it into practice without making San Francisco unaffordable for everybody?” So Safai highlights ways the laws save money: fewer supply orders for restaurants, lower garbage rates for businesses that sort.

So how to close the financial gap? More tyranny!

The next frontier may be producer responsibility laws, already adopted in Europe and parts of Canada. They fund the disposal of certain packaging and printed paper by collecting fees from companies that produce them. This month, Recology CEO Michael Sangiacomo joined with two members of the California Coastal Commission to launch a petition drive for a statewide ballot initiative. Their proposed law would tax plastic manufacturers up to 1 cent per package, ban Styrofoam food containers and require that all packaging be recyclable, reusable, or compostable by 2030.

 And if all this regulation, behavior modification, taxation and auditing doesn't do the trick, maybe the icy gaze of Saint Greta will get you to obey:

Impeachment hearings: people are concluding what they were inclined to conclude anyway

Yesterday was another grind in the House Foreign Affairs Committee impeachment hearings. Sondland in the morning, Cooper and Hale in the evening.

None of it seems to be moving the needle much. Democrats and leftist journalists and commentators are sure that the record shows a steadily mounting collection of fatally damaging evidence. Trumpists are certain that the whole thing gets proven more of a nothingburger with each new testimony. There are some outliers. Ken Starr believes there's a good chance Republican Senators will soon go to the White House for a Watergate-style intervention.

One can find public opinion polls to confirm sentiment for or against impeachment.

That's the thing, at least at this point: It looks like one big exercise in confirmation bias.

I do think that there's a good chance that Pompeo's desire to exit the administration "in one piece," as Time puts it, is a harbinger of more administration turnover. He has many years left in which to make public service contributions, and he doesn't need the taint of all this. The case of Nikki Haley is indeed curious, though. She's made her exit; there's no apparent reason for her to still be hitching her wagon to the Trump train, which really hampers her options.

I'm reluctant to make predictions, but it does kind of look like the impeachment effort will come to naught and the Very Stable Genius will face one of the collectivists who were on the debate stage in Atlanta last night. He'll take the low road, missing great opportunities to make the case for three-pillared conservatism, instead coining juvenile nicknames and harping, with his signature braggadocio, on the good aspects of the economy (and leaving the bad ones, such as the effects of tariffs on manufacturing and agriculture, out of his message). And we'll probably get four more years of chaos and embarrassment. Post-America is pretty far gone, what with the percentage of millennials who would vote for a socialist, but post-Americans can still do basic math, and the numbers for Medicare for All and the Green New Deal don't add up.

DISCLAIMER: All of the above could be proven wrong next year, or even next week.

Pompeo's announcement that the US will recognize West Bank settlements as legal: an excellent move

A piece by David Harsanyi at National Review today  makes the important point that while Trump's foreign policy has been nearly uniformly dangerously reckless (well, Harsanyi's term is a little more understated; he calls it "mercurial"), the one exception is forthright support for Israel. We have seen this administration make good on the move of the US embassy to Jerusalem that every president has promised since 1995, as well as recognition of the Golan Heights as Israeli territory.

And now comes this excellent move:

. . . yesterday Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced that United States would no longer take the position that Israeli civilian “settlements” in the West Bank are “inconsistent with international law.” (Or, as our German ambassador Richard Grenell aptly put it, the United States would “no longer meddle in local Israeli zoning and building-permits issues.”) Many of those “settlements” — cities, really, some of them in existence for decades — are part of a de facto border, and they are never going to be bulldozed. That’s also reality.

It has always been a mistake for the United States to treat disputed territories in the West Bank as occupied. For one thing, it was impossible for Israel to “occupy” Palestinian territories because no such nation has ever existed. Israel spilled much blood taking the West Bank in self-defense from Jordan after that nation joined Egypt and Syria in the attempted destruction of Israel in 1967. Even then, Jordan had no legal claim to the territory. Israel offered 98 percent of the West Bank back right after the 1967 war, and on numerous occasions afterward. It was always refused. 

At the very least, U.S. policy treating Jews who returned to their ancient homeland as occupiers should have been voided the day Israel signed a peace treaty with Jordan in 1994. Because the much-talked-about United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 does nothing to undermine the Jewish claim, no matter how often it’s misrepresented by Israel’s antagonists. In it, the U.N. established Israel’s legal right to negotiate a peace with defensible borders with existing states. Resolution 242 doesn’t mention the word “Palestinian” anywhere. Nowhere does the resolution call on Israel to withdraw to the pre–Six-Day War lines. Nowhere does it stipulate that Judea and Samaria should be Judenfrei.

As always, though, any decision that helps Israel is framed by many in the media as an effort to weaken “Palestinian efforts to achieve statehood.” This is myth. Fatah might have deluded its own people and the world for decades, but there’s no conceivable peace deal that includes a truly divided Jerusalem or a Right of Return or any indefensible border with a Palestinian state. No sane nation would consent to the creation of an antagonistic neighbor under those terms, much less allow the remnants of the Palestine Liberation Organization and their on-and-off political partners Hamas and their Iranian benefactors to set up shop. None of Trump’s moves undermine peace. They simply clarify the contours of a realistic deal. 

Something else to consider is that this puts the EU position on the matter in sharp relief. Its top court recently ruled that products imported from the West Bank must be labeled as such, rather than as being made in Israel.  

Your tax dollars paid for a real-time attack on Vindman as he testified

This:

The official Twitter account of the White House was used on Tuesday to distribute a personal attack on the credibility of decorated Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, while he was testifying before the House Intelligence Committee.

“Tim Morrison, Alexander Vindman’s former boss, testified in his deposition that he had concerns about Vindman’s judgment,” the White House pushed to its 19.3 million followers shortly before 1:00pm.

Morrison's assessment was already known to all involved, and in fact, Jim Jordan had tried to make hay with it a bit earlier:

Earlier in the hearing, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked Vindman about Morrison's concerns about his judgment. Vindman, who is still employed by the National Security Council, responded by reading aloud former top Russia adviser Fiona Hill's final performance review of his work:

"Alex is a top 1% military officer and the best Army officer I have worked with in my 15 years of government service. He is brilliant, unflappable and exercises excellent judgment."

Second one of these real-time Twitter chime-ins, and this one from the official White House account.

The fruits of Trumpist foreign policy

You'll recall this LITD post from four days ago entitled "The VSG Gives South Korea Good Reason To Doubt The US Has Its Back." The gist of why that's so was this:

Trump is demanding that South Korea pay roughly 400% more in 2020 to cover the cost of keeping US troops on the peninsula, a congressional aide and an administration official confirmed to CNN.

The price hike has frustrated Pentagon officials and deeply concerned Republican and Democratic lawmakers, according to military officials and congressional aides. It has angered and unnerved Seoul, where leaders are questioning US commitment to their alliance and wondering whether Trump will pull US forces if they don't pay up. 

"Nothing says I love you like a shakedown," said Vipin Narang, an associate professor at MIT who follows the Korean peninsula, summarizing South Korean uncertainty about the US. 

In the US, congressional aides and Korea experts familiar with the talks say the President's $4.7 billion demand came out of thin air, sending State and Defense Department officials scrambling to justify the number with a slew of new charges that may include Seoul paying some costs for US personnel present on the peninsula and for troops and equipment that rotate through. 

It's already borne this fruit:

The defence ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in north-east Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s long-standing alliances in the region are fraying. 

On the sidelines of regional security talks in Bangkok on Sunday, Jeong Kyeong-doo, the South Korean minister of defence, and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, agreed to set up more military hotlines and to push ahead with a visit by Mr Jeong to China next year to “foster bilateral exchanges and cooperation in defence”, South Korea’s defence ministry said.  

Seoul’s announcement coincided with growing resentment at the $5 billion (£3.9bn) annual fee that Washington is demanding to keep 28,500 US troops in South Korea.

That figure is a sharp increase from the $923 million that Seoul paid this year, which was an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. 

I can't conceive of a more reckless policy. It's certainly not calming North Korea down.

The VSG is certainly setting in motion historical shifts, all right. They're just not the kind that bode well for US interests.

This is why you don't cave

I've seen some of the tweets expressing two somewhat related points of view:

• "Come on, let's remember that we've always maintained it was just a chicken sandwich."
• "Their foundation is still giving to other overtly Christian charitable organizations."

I'm sorry, but it was a cave. It happened too soon after the Ellie Goulding situation to think that that wasn't a factor.

And you can never appease identity-politics jackboots enough. You can puke all over yourself to show how woke you've become, and they will not be satisfied.

Exhibit A:

As one might have predicted, the move was not enough to quell the backlash from activist groups on the Left the company was apparently attempting to appease. Powerful LGBT agenda lobby GLAAD quickly posted a statement condemning Chick-fil-A for allegedly still being anti-LGBT.

“If Chick-Fil-A is serious about their pledge to stop holding hands with divisive anti-LGBTQ activists, then further transparency is needed regarding their deep ties to organizations like Focus on the Family, which exist purely to harm LGBTQ people and families,” a statement from the organization reads.

“Chick-Fil-A investors, employees, and customers can greet today’s announcement with cautious optimism,” the statement continues, “but should remember that similar press statements were previously proven to be empty.”

“In addition to refraining from financially supporting anti-LGBTQ organizations, Chick-Fil-A still lacks policies to ensure safe workplaces for LGBTQ employees and should unequivocally speak out against the anti-LGBTQ reputation that their brand represents,” GLAAD concludes.

And notice the passive-aggressive snowflake-ism oozing from the phrase "ensure safe workplaces." Is there some kind of documentation to the effect that Ckick-fil-A workplaces aren't safe?

This was a colossal blunder.

 

The Devil's grip on post-America's throat is leaving thumbprints

A Sprite commercial, for the love of God:

In an inexplicable move, Sprite has released a new commercial that has nothing to do with soda and everything to do with force-feeding the public transgender theology dressed up as love and acceptance. What this has to do with quenching thirst, I have no idea.

Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire makes an interesting point. "Someone please explain the ethical difference between an ad that promotes breast binding and an ad that promotes anorexia. I bet you can't." First, both conditions are mental disorders. Body dysmorphia is nearly indistinguishable from gender dysphoria. Both people look into a mirror and see something that is not there, but only one will be treated properly for it. The other will be sent off to butchers who will remove healthy body parts to indulge the patient's delusion. Worse, minor children suffering from gender dysphoria are given sterilizing drugs that are not fully understood nor studied.

Corporations that get on the LGBTQWTF bandwagon are not new. Every June we must put up with the endless rainbow logos and virtue-signaling that takes over everything. But the choice to release this commercial in November, several months after Pride Month, is one more signal that the Transgender Mafia is stepping up their game and you will not be getting a reprieve for the rest of the year.

It's not enough to inundate people with transgender propaganda in the month of June. We must be subjected to it every single day of the year until we all conform and celebrate mental disorders. Those who suffer from similar disorders don't think this approach of accepting and celebrating illness is helpful. 

And one of the few corporations left in post-America that merited admiration for putting its fealty to Christian faith front and center has begun the process of surrender to The Enemy:

Chick-fil-A said Monday that it has stopped donations to several Christian organizations after receiving backlash from LGBT rights activists over the last several weeks.

The U.S. fast food chain said that as it expands, it will no longer donate to the Salvation Army, the Paul Anderson Youth Home, and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, which opposes same-sex marriage. The company’s charity, the Chick-fil-A Foundation, has donated millions of dollars to the two organizations.

“We made multi-year commitments to both organizations and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018,” a representative for Chick-fil-A said, saying the chain will now focus its charitable donations on “education, homelessness and hunger.”

The franchise, famous for closing on Sunday and including Bible verses on its paper cups, plans to donate a total of close to $9 million to charity include a $25,000 to a local food bank for each new restaurant the company opens.

“There’s no question we know that, as we go into new markets, we need to be clear about who we are,” Chick-fil-A President and Chief Operating Officer Tim Tassopoulos told Bisnow. “There are lots of articles and newscasts about Chick-fil-A, and we thought we needed to be clear about our message.”

Pray without ceasing for this nation. Almighty God will not put up with post-America's thrusting of its middle finger heavenward forever. And pray to be strong as the depravity and the resultant divine wrath make it every more challenging to go forth arrayed in His full armor.

It is so very late in the day.

 

 

Good on ya, YAF

You'll recall my recent post about the recent speech Michelle Malkin gave at a Young America's Foundation event at UCLA. My jaw nearly dropped to the floor as I read it.

Malkin has always tended toward a fierceness in her tone, but she's applied it in ways I'd generally admired. She's done some courageous and exhaustive investigative reporting over the years. She's founded several websites which she subsequently sold and are now important parts of the conservative constellation. Most significantly for the present situation, she's come in for a lot of racially based attacks for her Filipino ethnicity.

Which is why the terrain she's now decided to stand upon is just mind-boggling:

Not only does she go after Ben Shapiro and Paul Ryan, she lights into Trumpists such as Charlie Kirk and Kimberly Guilfoyle.

So, if the Very Stable Genius's cult worshippers aren't sufficiently hard-ass for her, for just whom does she reserve her admiration? Are you ready? Nick Fuentes and Peter Brimelow.

Just wow.

And that, in turn, is why I'm immensely gratified to see this development:

A conservative group cut ties with right-wing columnist Michelle Malkin on Sunday over her support for an anti-Semitic internet personality, ramping up a growing conservative civil war centered on college campuses.

Malkin’s firing from Young America’s Foundation, whose speakers bureau had booked Malkin for speeches across the country for the past 17 years, marks the latest battle between supporters of Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes and more establishment conservative figures. 

“Michelle Malkin in no longer part of YAF’s campus lecture program,” a YAF spokesman said in an email to The Daily Beast.
Malkin didn’t respond to a request for comment. 

It would be interesting to know just what the inflection point was at which she - well, went nuts.

But the larger point is that she has to be jettisoned. At a juncture like our present one, at which there are already plenty of harmful fissures within conservatism, we don't need the distraction of a defense of the alt-right at a YAF function. I doubt it will happen again.