US foreign policy has been off the rails for some time

 Bob Woodward, collaborating with Robert Costa on this one, has a third book on the Trump presidency coming out. Woodward is a standard-setter for investigative journalism, but some question aspects of his pursuit of truth.  To my knowledge, though, there hasn't been any credible refutation of the material in the Trump books. If someone - besides the Very Stable Genius himself or any of the drool-besotted members of his cult - had attempted to discredit the gist of Woodward's reportage on that era, it would have made a significant splash.

The pre-release excerpt from Peril, the latest in the series, that is garnering buzz is about Joint Chiefs of Staff chair General Mark Milley's concern about Trump's deteriorating mental state in the last few months of Trump's presidency, and the measures Milley took to mitigate possible policy results. 

That Trump was coming unglued is something we were all able to verify with our own eyes and ears. His mega-boorish behavior at his October debate with Biden, his statement in the wee hours of November 4, the phone call to Brad Reffensperger begging him to "find" 11,000 votes, the tweet about how the rally scheduled for January 6 would be "wild," his inaction as the attack on the Capitol unfolded, and his big-baby refusal to attend Biden's inauguration all testify to it. Woodward's book adds some new details, but Trump's dangerousness was already established. 

Two wrongs don't make a right, however, and Milley cultivating a back-channel relationship with his Chinese counterpart and assuring him by phone that Milley would give him a heads-up if the US were going to attack China is a violation of the chain of command that warrants immediate investigation. There are procedures in place for countering bad moves being considered by a commander-in-chief; Milley's approach isn't one of them.

Milley isn't any great shakes generally speaking. His attempt to push back on charges of fostering woke-ness in the military at a House Armed Services Committee hearing in June was pretty lame.  And where was his concern for how a president under whom he was serving was handling a major foreign policy matter as Joe Biden allowed the Afghanistan withdrawal to be fatally botched? 

Milley's buddying up to General Li takes on a particularly disturbing cast in light of how US-China relations have gone so far in the Biden era. There was the dressing-down of Blinken and Sullivan by their Chinese counterparts at the Anchorage meeting in March. More recently, China has violated Taiwanese airspace in the conduct of "invasion war games."

So far in the twenty-first century, we have not been electing presidents with the foreign-policy chops this country has needed. 

Trump wasted a great deal of time and jet fuel holding summits with Kim Jong-Un. His sleazy phone call to the president of Ukraine got him impeached. He famously insulted leaders of allied nations in person and on the phone. 

Barack Obama's apology tour, his entering into a patty-cake agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear ambitions, and shameful little episodes such as letting Hugo Chavez present him with the gift of a Noam Chomsky book in front of the world's cameras all confirmed that he meant what he said about America needing fundamental transformation.

George Bush's naive notion that the Middle East and Central Asia, comprised of decidedly non-Western cultures, were ripe for Westernization did much to undo what he was right about - namely, that the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the Baathist regime in Iraq were rogue entities. He also pursued appeasement with North Korea, repeatedly sending Christopher Hill to East Asia for Six-Way Talks aimed at getting North Korea to change its stripes. 

The prospects for righting this state of affairs aren't encouraging. With both of the country's major political parties vying to out-ridiculous each other, it seems unlikely that either will nominate a presidential candidate for the 2024 race that will instill confidence in his or her seriousness about the stakes on the world stage. 

The fruits of patty-cake - today's edition

 During the later years of the Obama era, I had many posts with this title. Evidence was ample that Iran had not done much beyond complying with the narrowest interpretation of the terms of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. There'd certainly been no change of heart, no desire on Iran's part to begin to really act like a well-intentioned member of the international community. When two US Navy patrol boats were captured by Iran in the Persian Gulf, their crew members photographed on their knees with their hands behind their heads, on the day Obama was to give the State of the Union address, or when the Ayatollah Khameini or top-ranking Quds Force or Revolutionary Guards spokesmen continued the rhetoric about the US being Iran's number one enemy, or when Iran continued to build ever-more powerful missiles, or when it would get caught shipping materiel to terrorist groups, I'd write a post with this title.

The reason was to hammer home a basic point of sensible foreign policy: you don't appease rogue regimes that have repeatedly declared that you are their enemy.

Pulling out of the JCPOA was one of the handful of laudable policy moves to come out of the Trump administration in my estimation.

But I feel pretty sure Trump did it from a transactional motivation rather than from adherence to the above-mentioned principle. He thinks in terms of deals, and saw the JCPOA as a bad one.

And then he put his signature inconsistency on display by making an abrupt turn from longstanding US policy toward North Korea and setting up and participating in the summits with Kim Jong-Un. We had to listen to gushing rhetoric about beautiful letters and North Korea's enormous potential, knowing full well there'd be no resulting change in that country's stance. 

If the JCPOA was driven at least largely by Obama's and Kerry's narcissistic determination to be seen as visionary peacemakers, Trump's overtures to Kim were that determination on steroids. 

And, no surprise here, it was all for naught:

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un threatened to expand his nuclear arsenal as he disclosed a list of high-tech weapons systems under development, saying the fate of relations with the United States depends on whether it abandons its hostile policy, state media reported Saturday.

 

Kim’s comments during a key meeting of the ruling party this week were seen as applying pressure on the incoming administration of President-elect Joe Biden, who has called Kim a “thug” and has criticized his summits with President Donald Trump.

 

The Korean Central News Agency quoted Kim as saying the “key to establishing new relations between (North Korea) and the United States is whether the United States withdraws its hostile policy.”

The Kim regime has the same basic stance it's had for decades:

He again called the U.S. his country’s “main enemy.”

“Whoever takes office in the U.S., its basic nature and hostile policy will never change,” he said.

So when some drool-besotted Trumpist starts in with the list of supposedly great accomplishments of the Very Stable Genius and gets to this subject, you can respond, "I think we can take that one off." 

  

All for naught

Both our current president and his immediate predecessor have had a thing for appeasing America's enemies.

In the case of Barack Obama, the motivation was a mixture of the leftism he was steeped in, which sees the United States as needing to make amends for a supposed world-stage arrogance, as well as Obama's inherent narcissism, which manifested itself as a desire to be remembered as a visionary who ushered in a new era of global harmony. His narcissistic secretary of state John Kerry shared this latter motivation.

Of course, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action into which they convince an alliance of Western nations to enter with Iran was a joke. While Iran may have temporarily reduced its production of  nuclear fuel, it continued apace with missile production, sponsorship of terrorism, belligerent rhetoric and gestures of humiliation. Particularly symbolic was its capture of a US Navy crew the day of Obama's State of the Union Address. The captors made much hay of the photograph it took of the crew members on their knees with their hands behind their heads.

The Very Stable Genius is likewise a narcissist, but, as with any other trait he exhibits, it gets erratically expressed and doesn't lend itself to the kind of analysis that assumes any kind of strategy. In the case of Trump and North Korea, a notion to try cozying up to Kim rather than continue in a mode of tension just popped into his head one day. There resulted two summits, one in Singapore and one in Vietnam. Three, if you count Trump's stepping, for a few minutes, over the border between the ROK and the DPROK while on a visit to the former. There was the Trump-speak gushing about "beautiful letters" and how North Korea had the potential to be a robust player in the international community.

Again, the result is now confirmed to be a joke:

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North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has no interest in maintaining a good relationship with US president Donald Trump, it is reported on the the two year anniversary of the leaders first summit. 

Amid heightened inter-Korean affairs, the despotic regime has announced it sees no improvement in relations and says US policies prove Trump's administration remains a long-term threat to the secretive state and its people.

North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Son Gwon made statement carried by state news agency KCNA, in which he slams a "hypocritical empty promise" made by Trump at the historic meeting two years ago.

The Singapore summit in June 2018 represented the first time a sitting American president met with a North Korean leader, but the statement that came out of the meeting was light on specifics, and instead gave four general commitments. 

Ri said in retrospect the Trump administration appears to have been focusing on only scoring political points while seeking to isolate and suffocate North Korea, and threatening it with preemptive nuclear strikes and regime change.

"Never again will we provide the US chief executive with another package to be used for achievements without receiving any returns," he said.

"Nothing is more hypocritical than an empty promise." 

On Thursday North Korea criticised the United States for commenting on inter-Korean affairs, and said Washington should stay quiet if it wants the upcoming presidential election to go smoothly. 

Ri said North Korea's desire to open a new cooperative era runs deep as ever, but that the situation on the Korean peninsula is daily taking a turn for the worse. 

"The U.S. professes to be an advocate for improved relations with the DPRK, but in fact, it is hell-bent on only exacerbating the situation," Ri said.

Ostentatious fawning got the VSG exactly nowhere.

Sucking up to bad guys is never a smart move.

 

Putting Deep-State-ism in perspective

One of the most unnerving aspects of polemical discourse is when it's approached on the level of latching onto arcane bits of behavior by public figures in an attempt to point out some supposedly pivotal moment in national history. Players in web-of-intrigue scenarios are reduced to villain and hero stick figures whose nefariousness or nobility can be discerned from some phone calls they made, or emails they sent, or meetings they took.

This is why I have not had much to say about the whole bag of snakes that comprises the Mueller report and subsequent revelations such as Susan Rice's January 17, 2017 email to herself.

If one has to go to such lengths as proclaiming, "Tonight I will show you that this newly unearthed chain of emails is a bombshell the likes of which American history has never seen!," it casts a great deal of doubt on the depth of one's basic convictions about the life of the nation generally.

In other words, let's not get all shook about this, okay?

Look, it doesn't take someone with extraordinary powers of perceptivity to see that Hillary Clinton was a power-mad presidential aspirant for decades, driven by a sort of feminist determination to prove she had at least the chops for the job that her husband, whom she has always disliked intensely, had, as well as more basic motives such as greed and getting a kick out of having as many people under her thumb as possible. She's also always been quite arrogant, which is why she continued to conduct official correspondence on her private server even after she'd become Secretary of State.

It's also obvious that the meeting on the tarmac in Phoenix between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch was fishy as hell, especially given the timing.

There's probably a lot in all of it that should send some folks to the hoosegow, but is it really worth tying up the resources of the current iteration of the Justice Department to keep pursuing it all?

Now, the July 5, 2016 presser that Comey gave continues to perplex me. He spent fifteen minutes outlining why the DoJ ought to prosecute Madame Bleachbit, only to wrap things up by recommending that they not.

Comey's perplexing generally. Prior to all this, he'd had a reputation as an uncontroversial straight shooter. He helped prosecute the Gambino crime family. He stood by severely weakened John Ashcroft, who was in an intensive care unit with gall bladder surgery complications and was being pressured to continue the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program. Bush himself was impressed enough by this display of integrity and loyalty to make changes to the program. Comey was a registered Republican until recently.

And then came all the events looked at by the Mueller investigative team.

It's pretty clear that there was a clique within the DoJ / FBI that had it in for Donald Trump once he became the Republican presidential nominee. You don't have to do too deep of a dive to see that Peter Stzrok, Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe thought it would be horrible if Donald Trump became president, and conducted themselves professionally driven by that sentiment. The FISA warrants, the Steele dossier and the role of Fusion GPS - all shady as hell.

Then there's the role of Michael Flynn. Was he set up? A pretty solid case can be made that he was. Of course, the overheated types would chime in with, "Hell, yes, he was! They ruined the life of a distinguished civil servant!"

Now, let us remember that he did tell a falsehood about his Russia contacts, and he was a paid foreign agent of both Turkey and Russia. In the hand-off-the-baton meeting Obama and Trump had in January 2017, Obama advised Trump not to hire Flynn as national security adviser:

Obama’s warning pre-dated the concerns inside the government about Flynn’s contacts with the Russian ambassador, one of the officials said. Obama passed along a general caution that he believed Flynn was not suitable for such a high level post, the official added.

The overall point here is that palace-intrigue scenarios are the wrong places to go looking for answers to the question of whether someone is fit to be us president or not.

My reasons for vehemently opposing Barack Obama did not have much to do with the scandals that arose during his time in office, even the "scandal" Trump calls Obamagate. My problem with Obama, my moniker for whom here at LITD during his time as a figure of central focus was The Most Equal Comrade, was that he'd been a hard-core leftist pretty much all his life. His mentors were the likes of Frank Marshall Davis, Frances Fox Piven, Heather Booth, Greg Galluzzo, Jeremiah Wright, Rashid Khalidi and Bill Ayers. He thought America was fundamentally unfair and needed to be transformed. I'm far more disturbed by the plain old policy-level stuff he was able to get enacted - think the "Affordable" Care act, EPA regulations, the JCPOA - than scandal-type matters.

And my reasons for vehemently opposing Donald Trump are that he is solely motivated by self-glorification. He is a phony. He doesn't care about the Republican Party, much less conservatism. He doesn't have the slightest grasp of the foundational principles of Western civilization. He gives lip service to Christianity for entirely self-serving reasons. He doesn't read anything, from briefing papers to novels to works of philosophy or history. He has no depth. He has a track record of sybaritic abandon that I suspect he's till proud of. He's petty and vindictive. He demands loyalty but does not return it.

So I don't consider this whole re-dredging of the web of shenanigans discussed above a front-burner issue. The existence of a so-called Deep State is not among the five most pressing issues on our nation's plate at the moment.

Don't fixate on the shiny object. Reserve most of your focus for the pandemic, the economic situation, the leftist agenda of the Democrats and Donald Trump's obvious unfitness to be president.

Two overarchingly important points about the Mueller report: the meddling started on the Most Equal Comrade's watch, and, while the Very Stable Genius isn't guilty of crimes, he's shown to be weak and of low character

Scott Jennings, former advisor to George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell, has a piece at CNN today that lays out point number one:

The Mueller report flatly states that Russia began interfering in American democracy in 2014. Over the next couple of years, the effort blossomed into a robust attempt to interfere in our 2016 presidential election. The Obama administration knew this was going on and yet did nothing. In 2016, Obama's National Security Adviser Susan Rice told her staff to "stand down" and "knock it off" as they drew up plans to "strike back" against the Russians, according to an account from Michael Isikoff and David Corn in their book "Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump". 

Why did Obama go soft on Russia? My opinion is that it was because he was singularly focused on the nuclear deal with Iran. Obama wanted Putin in the deal, and to stand up to him on election interference would have, in Obama's estimation, upset that negotiation. This turned out to be a disastrous policy decision.

Obama's supporters claim he did stand up to Russia by deploying sanctions after the election to punish them for their actions. But, Obama, according to the Washington Post, "approved a modest package... with economic sanctions so narrowly targeted that even those who helped design them describe their impact as largely symbolic." In other words, a toothless response to a serious incursion.

But don't just take my word for it that Obama failed. Congressman Adam Schiff, who disgraced himself in this process by claiming collusion when Mueller found that none exists, once said that "the Obama administration should have done a lot more." The Washington Post reported that a senior Obama administration official said they "sort of choked" in failing to stop the Russian government's brazen activities. And Obama's ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, said, "The punishment did not fit the crime" about the weak sanctions rolled out after the 2016 election.

Okay, so we know that the MEC was at least asleep at the switch, and may have been calculating that it was not the time to bring the meddling up, because he was so intent on appeasing a rogue state, because he thought history would therefore portray him as a visionary peacemaker.

But after him we got another president whose flimsy character ought to give us pause, as David French, writing at Time, makes clear:

We now know for sure what kind of man Donald Trump is. Beyond the tweets, the rallies, the interviews, the debates, the press conferences, the scandals, the best-selling yet unclearly sourced insider books and the unrelenting braggadocio and aggrandizement, a comprehensive read of the Mueller report brings to life the portrait of the man Donald Trump more than anything before it.

It takes the traits we already knew he exhibited — his mendacity, his propensity to surround himself with crooks and grifters, and his single-minded self-focus — and places them in the context of a sweeping narrative about a presidential campaign and presidency devoid of ethics, honor or even strength. The stories paint a picture of a president who is both petty and small, so very small.

One of the most telling moments occurs on page 102 in the obstruction of justice section of the Special Counsel’s analysis. It tells a short version of a story we largely already knew. When Donald Trump’s son, Donald Junior, learned that the New York Times was about to break the news of his now-infamous June 9, 2016, meeting in Trump Tower with Russian lawyer Natalya Veselnitskaya, his first instinct was to come clean.

He drafted a statement that began, “I was asked to have a meeting by an acquaintance I knew … with an individual who I was told might have information helpful to the campaign.” But his father said no. His father demanded that the statement be revised to omit the motivation for the meeting. Donald Jr. complied and misled America. 

Think for a moment about that story. With his campaign in the media crosshairs, President Trump threw his son under the bus. He made his son transmit his own deceptions. He exposed his son to the scorn and ridicule he so richly deserved.

There are other important moments in the report. Here’s one we didn’t know before. According to the report, in June 2017, President Trump dictated a message for his former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski — who had been fired in June 2016, a few months after a misdemeanor battery charge against him had been brought and then dropped — to dictate to then Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Trump was directing Sessions to essentially reverse his recusal from the Russian investigation to narrow the scope of the Special Counsel’s investigation. Trump wanted Mueller to merely investigate “election meddling for future elections.” 

Lewandowski never delivered Trump’s message. He scheduled a meeting with Sessions, but when Sessions canceled, Lewandowski never followed through. A disgraced former campaign manager felt free to disregard a directive from the President of the United States.

It’s difficult to overestimate the extent to which Trump’s appeal to his core supporters is built around the notion that — regardless of his other flaws — he possesses a core strength, a willingness to “fight” and an ability to strike a degree of fear in the hearts of his opponents. I live in the heart of Trump country in Tennessee, and I have consistently heard the same refrain from his most loyal supporters. Trump, as they say, “kicks ass.” He was the ultimate alpha male, a political version of Tony Soprano, a formidable boss who commands an army of loyal consiglieri. Cross him at your peril.
But now, thanks to the Mueller report, his “fights” look more like temper tantrums, and those closest to him — including low men like Lewandowski and far-more-noble men like former White House counsel Donald McGahn — understand that his fury is passing and his directives are unreliable, seemingly transitory and easily forgotten or disregarded.

Moreover, his vaunted personal judgment — an image cultivated through years of careful television production on The Apprentice — has been exposed as well. When one reads Robert Mueller’s account of Trump’s own campaign chair’s extraordinary efforts to maintain an encrypted connection to Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs, it’s plain that Trump was played. Paul Manafort used Trump’s gullibility as a business opportunity.

Folks, this is why I call the country we live in post-America. The last two presidents we elected have been reckless, shallow men. And three of the four most recent (W is the exception for those who need it spelled out) have been flaming narcissists.

The United States of America used to elect presidents that, even if they were shaky from a character standpoint, grasped the magnitude and gravity of their responsibilities and tried to prevent making destructive messes. They often didn't succeed, but I don't think that since the 1930s, when FDR pursued economic policies he knew damn well were going to prolong the Depression, we've seen such executive-branch deliberate harmfulness.

 

 

The parallels and the differences between the Very Stable Genius's brand of narcissism and that of his predecessor, the Most Equal Comrade

Incisive Daren Jonescu blog post in which he gets to the heart of this subject:

In response to my post about President Trump’s “Tariff Man” boast about China, a great friend notes that Trump’s public statements (primarily tweets) almost invariably emphasize the first person singular, a mannerism he shares with his predecessor, and one very much in keeping with both men’s entrenched narcissism.

I would only qualify that reasonable comparison with the observation that if there is one difference between Obama’s “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” narcissism and Trump’s “Look at me, look at me” narcissism, it is in the motivating attitudes.

Obama really seems to believe, without any doubt, that he is cut from a superior cloth, and that everyone would agree with that self-assessment without hesitation. Trump, by contrast, is a classic example of short man syndrome, or small hands syndrome in his case. Unlike Obama’s insouciant smugness, Trump’s tone is always suggestive of one begging his audience to believe he is as impressive as he says he is. He boasts of being great friends with all of the world’s tyrants partly because he truly admires their power, but also because he needs you to know he has really, reallymet and talked personally with all those important people, and they liked him! So you should too!

He also looks at the parallels and differences between each president's cult following:

Obama’s following was motivated by a combination of ideological sympathy and illusions of cultural hipness. Those quasi-fascist posters of Obama that became popular iconography and T-shirt logos throughout his “reign” were a perfect crystallization of those two sides of his support base.

Trump’s supporters are more of a personality cult, in the literal, unqualified sense. Beliefs, trendiness, and so on have little or nothing to do with his base. They love him because he is Trump, period.

So for Obama to test the limits of what his followers will support, he has to couch his proposals in ideological rationalizations, even if they are mostly based on emotions, e.g.,“If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Trump, meanwhile, would have his base’s support regardless of what he proposed. In other words, if Obama came out one day in favor of eliminating the minimum wage and reducing corporate tax rates, most of his followers who were actually paying attention (rather than just wearing the T-shirt) would express outrage and possibly even abandon him, at least if such anti-Marxist proposals became a pattern. By contrast, if Trump came out and said he favored socialized medicine, gun control, appeasing North Korea, and high tariffs, his base would say, and of course has in fact said, “Thank God for Trump,” and would viciously smear anyone who questioned the validity of these policies as mentally ill, or as “an Obama (or Hillary or Jeb) lover.”

Which faction is more dangerous in practice? I guess that depends on what Trump actually proposes, since there seems to be no limit to what his gang of hypnotized monkeys will swallow for him. 

A bit later in his essay, he gets into the matter of how "conservatives" who got on the Squirrel-Hair train and never looked back have treated him for refusing to guzzle the Kool-Aid. That mainly played itself out at The American Thinker, a site to which I have also contributed.

A large portion of the more active members of Trump’s base took over a very popular conservative website where I used to be a regular and successful contributor. They would pour in by the thousands to call me (and other popular regulars who refused to turn off their rational faculties for Trump, such as Steve McCann and C. Edmund Wright) vicious and outrageous names, and accuse me (and the others) of all the usual Trumpy lies of convenience. Many of them, strangely, were people who had read my writing for years and flattered me with plenty of generous compliments. But the moment they boarded the Trump train, and discovered that I hadn’t jumped on with them, that was it. I was persona non grata, and everything we had ever agreed on was irrelevant. I was one of “Them” now — a cuckservative, a RINO, a progressive, a Jeb supporter, an America-hater, an establishment hack, a Hillary lover, and the rest of the song and dance.

I know them. And I won’t pretend they are something they are not (i.e., reasonable Americans), just because we might agree on a few policy issues once in a while. To suggest that my “assumptions” about them — which are essentially Trump’s assumptions, as noted above — helped him to become President is both insulting and absurd. I tried to talk to them respectfully and seriously, back when it mattered. They spat in my face, as they do with anyone who tries, and would certainly have ripped me limb from limb if they had thought their orange idol willed it. So I gave up — on them and their lost souls, that is.

Yup. Distortion and obfuscation is how the throne-sniffers roll when confronted with substantiation for the claim that the VSG is - well, what he makes plain that he is on a daily basis.

Regarding Jonescu's overarching point, consider what this says about post-America: three of our four most recent presidents have been pathological narcissists.

 

On the Most Equal Comrade's Johannesburg remarks

You're probably aware that the MEC spoke at the event commemorating Nelson Mandela's 100th birthday. 

It's surprisingly even-handed. After duly noting that out-and-out-racism characterized the social systems established by European colonial powers in various parts of Africa, he expands his scope to acknowledge the universality of the human urge to confer inferior status on others.  The five sentences he devotes to the subject sound like they could have come from any number of Thomas Sowell essays:

Such a view of the world—that certain races, certain nations, certain groups were inherently superior, and that violence and coercion is the primary basis for governance, that the strong necessarily exploit the weak, that wealth is determined primarily by conquest—that view of the world was hardly confined to relations between Europe and Africa, or relations between whites and blacks. Whites were happy to exploit other whites when they could. And, by the way, blacks were often willing to exploit other blacks. Around the globe, the majority of people lived at subsistence levels, without a say in the politics or economic forces that determined their lives. Often they were subject to the whims and cruelties of distant leaders. The average person saw no possibility of advancing from the circumstances of their birth. Women were almost uniformly subordinate to men. Privilege and status was rigidly bound by caste and color and ethnicity and religion.

Yes, he immediately follows that up with an assertion of how that impulse has played itself out in the United States - something he's always relished pointing out - and he then devotes a significant portion of his speech to inequality. He does conclude, however, on an innocuous note, applauding the work of NGOs that are making a one-on-one difference in the lives of impoverished people, and exhorting us all to look around and see who is in need and act to help them.

And at one point he drives home the above observation (about how whites and blacks have each done their share of conquering and exporting) even more incisively, admonishing those who would say that "privilege" automatically excludes certain groups from certain conversations:

. . . democracy demands that we’re able also to get inside the reality of people who are different than us so we can understand their point of view. Maybe we can change their minds, but maybe they’ll change ours. And you can’t do this if you just out of hand disregard what your opponents have to say from the start. And you can’t do it if you insist that those who aren’t like you—because they’re white, or because they’re male—that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling, that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.

So far today, I've run across two takes on his speech, each on the right side of the spectrum and each from minds I admire a great deal, that, by their opposite positions, stake out a spectrum of their own.

One is from Kat Timpf at NRO, who points out the inarguable - that Obama is quite right to refute identity-politics exclusions. The other is from Peter Heck at The Resurgent, who says, quite rightly, that this kind of talk from the police-who-arrested-Henry-Louis-Gates-acted-stupidly / if-I-had-a-son-he'd-look-like-Trayvon proselytizer-in-chief is rich indeed.

My own view is that it's of a piece with his general tendency to finger-wag. He's also fairly sharp in this respect. He knows that mentioning the universality of the impulse to confer inferiority, and going, even if pretty gently, against the grain regarding identity politics, he gives himself room to wax emphatically on matters dear to his leftist heart. As I say, he's sharp. He says that it's important to hear out and converse with those who argue that a move toward "sustainable" energy is too costly, but that positing that the global climate is not in any kind of trouble is beyond the pale. He knows just where he wants to draw the line and legitimize exclusion.

Taken in sum, Obama's speech is emblematic of the style that catapulted him from community organizer to president in the space of a little over a decade: collectivism delivered with a calm, glib demeanor. He learned the lessons of the Midwest Academy well. Push for radical social change, but do so in an inviting manner that keeps any threatening overtones to a minimum.

Reacting to this speech is an opportunity for conservatives to do something we have to do a lot these days: hold up two disparate things simultaneously and acknowledge the truth of both. Obama's points about the universality of the human urge to oppress and the dead-end nature of identity-politics exclusion are spot-on, and he made them in the service of the point he really wanted to make, which is that, in his worldview, certain demographics in this world keep others under their thumb.

It doesn't have to be a fabulous speech that spurs us to reconsider our overall assessment of Barack Obama, and neither does it have to be the most cynical utterance we've ever heard. To take one of these positions or the other is to default to tribalism mode and excuse ourselves from allowing nuance into our thinking.



The words were right, and the speaker said them for self-serving purposes.

That happens a lot, actually.

The DACA political football is the kind of messiness that ensues when principles aren't adhered to from the get-go

In the last couple of days, layer upon layer of messiness has been heaped upon the unlawful program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, initiated by the previous administration. Quite simply, DACA instructs immigration authorities to refrain from taking deportation measures in the cases of people who had come to the US when younger. than 16 and had jumped through certain bureaucratic hoops.
The first layer of messiness arises from the fact that a good number of such people ('dreamers") understandably evoke our sympathy. Their educations, the friendships they've formed, any work history they've amassed, have all occurred on US soil.
The notion of bending principle - an illegal alien is an illegal alien - thus got a toehold. The discussion among everybody save for Ann Coulter consequently centered around humane ways to stem the tide of further illegal immigration.
Because Donald Trump started blathering about a "big beautiful wall" early in his campaign (in fact, during one Republican-candidates debate, it "just got a little taller"), his appeal was cemented for a swath of the voting populace that harbored resentment about the aliens' presence, particularly in the workforce, a resentment that was front and center among its public-policy concerns.
Of course, he was elected president, and the conversation between the two ends of Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue turned to options for compromising between humane treatment of "dreamers" and otherwise enforcing laws on the books.
There were some parameters around what kind of compromise was going to be possible, notably the Trump administration's intention to rescind DACA.
The bipartisan meeting Trump held with Congressional leaders the other day evoked a telling array of reactions. The above-mentioned Coulter has been in meltdown mode. Sane conservatives saw it as fairly typical behavior for a modern president: going into it with at least the public perception that he had strong views he was going to defend, but quickly demonstrating that "willingness to reach across the aisle" to hammer out something hopefully adequately palatable to everyone.
More about that meeting in a moment.
But on the heels of it came San Francisco federal judge William Alsup's ruling that the administration couldn't rescind DACA. The ruling reads more like an opinion piece in a left-leaning magazine than a legal document. Much of its position hinges on a tweet from Trump. Alsup called the rescinding move "arbitrary and capricious" even though it was based on conclusions reached by Attorney General Sessions.
The fact is that, even though Obama and Trump made moves in exact opposition to each other, they were each executive actions based on what the executive branch had determined about legality.
The administration quickly made it clear that it would take the matter to another court - SCOTUS, if necessary.
But back to the bipartisan meeting. This exchange between Trump and Senator Feinstein is causing unprecedented gnashing of teeth among DJT's populist base:

From the official White House transcript:

SENATOR FEINSTEIN: I think there needs to be a willingness on both sides. And I think — and I don’t know how you would feel about this, but I’d like to ask the question: What about a clean DACA bill now, with a commitment that we go into a comprehensive immigration reform procedure? Like we did back — oh, I remember when Kennedy was here and it was really a major, major effort, and it was a great disappointment that it went nowhere.

THE PRESIDENT: I remember that. I have no problem. I think that’s basically what Dick is saying. We’re going to come up with DACA. We’re going to do DACA, and then we can start immediately on the phase two, which would be comprehensive.

SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Would you be agreeable to that?

THE PRESIDENT:  Yeah, I would like — I would like to do that. Go ahead. I think a lot of people would like to see that, but I think we have to do DACA first.

The bold language was especially troubling, because Trump was agreeing to a clean DACA bill.

It gets juicier. That transcript has now been doctored to remove what you see in boldface.

Here's the essence of the matter: The wall is not a top-priority component of a workable (that is, firm yet humane) immigration policy. Enforcement of E-Verify is far more important. If the US doesn't hold the promise of providing a livelihood, folks are going to be far less motivated to come here illegally. Resolving the DACA matter in a way that ensures that there's no resulting chain migration is the next most important item.

There are those who hearken back to Reagan's 1986 granting of amnesty to illegal aliens, and they have a point. Dutch was a giant, but he was still a human being, which means that he got some things wrong as president.

The larger point is that the camel's-nose-inside-the-tent principle applies every time an immutable principle is treated as a malleable item on a wish list. It's the reason North Korea is now a nuclear threat. It's the reason the Supreme Court was able to make up a "right" to homosexual "marriage" out of whole cloth. It's the reason our government subsidizes the manufacture of solar panels.

In short, compromise is way overrated. There's really not much in the realm of public policy that doesn't hinge on principle, and any initial nibbling around the edges of it is going to eventually lead to its getting voraciously devoured.

There is no "Arab world" consensus that the Israel-Palestinian question is the central Middle East issue

Great Zev Chafets piece at Bloomberg today about how, in an age in which Iran poses a dire threat to the entire world, Israel is not the crux on which Middle East stability and security hinges.

He contrasts the recent announcement that the US will make good on the 1995 act passed by the US Congress declaring Jerusalem as the Israeli capital with the policies of the two most notorious anti-Israel US presidents, Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama:

Neither of those former presidents actually came out and said that Israel was the cause of all the Middle East’s problems. But they both based their regional diplomacy on the assumption.

In 2006, while promoting a book that likened Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians with South African apartheid, Carter opened a window on his real thoughts. "The heart and mind of every Muslim is affected by whether or not the Israel-Palestine issue is dealt with fairly,” he told an interviewer. He added that the U.S. is hated by "former close friends" such as Egypt and Jordan, "because we won’t do anything about the Palestinian plight."

This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

In the mid-1940s, an on-balance pretty good Democrat president, Harry Truman, demonstrated far more vision and understanding of an overarching West than his State Department:

 This is what the American-Israeli scholar Martin Kramer calls “linkage” -- the myopic tendency to see Israel as a wrench in the wheel of America’s Arab policy. In that interview, Carter even called it the "linkage fact." But, to be fair, the concept didn’t originate with him.

It goes back at least to the end of World War II. In 1945, the State Department sent newly inaugurated President Harry Truman a memo warning of “continual tenseness in the situation in the Near East largely as a result of the Palestine question.” State’s recommendation was to avoid Zionist activists and think about America’s long-term interests.

Truman (like Trump) had a low opinion of expert advice. In 1947, he ordered a reluctant U.S. ambassador vote “yes” in the United Nations General Assembly on the creation of the Jewish state. The contrary assessment among the diplomats Truman derided as the “striped pants boys” was, I think it is fair to say, misguided.  

More recently, we see that much of the "Arab world" actually has had a "meh" response to the Jerusalem announcement:

When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey called an emergency summit of the Organization of Islamic States to protest Trump’s Jerusalem decision, more than half of the invited heads of state and prime ministers didn’t bother to show up.

And then there is the approach of the Most Equal Comrade. As we've learned in the last few days, the MEC's administration apparently was letting Iranian proxy Hezbollah run cocaine into the United States, because it was more important to the MEC - and his State Department - to get a worthless "deal" in Iran's nuclear program. That kind of emphasis on appeasement of a mortal enemy was on full display in his answer to a question about the Israel-Palestinian issue:

In an appearance with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, he was asked if reining in Iran’s nuclear ambitions was a necessary precursor to reviving the peace process. “If there is a linkage between Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, I personally believe it actually runs the other way,” he replied. “To the extent that we can make peace with the Palestinians -- between the Palestinians and the Israelis -- then I actually think it strengthens our hand in the international community in dealing with a potential Iranian threat.”

With the recent Jerusalem announcement, and the presence of Nikki Haley, who has, over the course of this year proven to be a national treasure, America seems to finally be getting its head on straight regarding what actual problems are in the Mideast, and what phenomena aren't really such a being deal.

 

 

How badly did Barack Obama want to appease our mortal enemy?

The patty-cake with Iran JCPOA entered into by the P5+1, under the leadership of Secretary Global-Test and Wendy Sherman of the post-American State Department, is perhaps the most reckless agreement ever signed by this nation. It's now so firmly entrenched that there's no way to undo all the business deals entered into by companies in P5+1 countries. But one day, sooner not later, Iran is going to pose as big a threat as North Korea currently poses.

But so hot were Global-Test, Sherman, and the Most Equal Comrade to get it inked - and declare if official, even though it should have been a treaty and thereby been ratified by Congress - that it began upping our danger level even before it was a done deal:

Before Barack Obama decided to pursue the nuclear deal with Iran, the DEA had a major operation called Project Cassandra. This operation had identified Hezbollah as a major supplier of cocaine to the US and other countries, along with its usual terrorist activities on behalf of its sponsors in Tehran. The DEA and FBI had built criminal cases against major players in Hezbollah’s drug and arms networks, succeeding in getting sealed indictments and finding witnesses for prosecution.

And then the Obama administration stepped in to drain it of all resources, just to protect its deal with Iran:

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote. …

Asher, for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah,” he said.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.”

Cassandra turned out to be an ironic code name for the operation. In Greek mythology, Cassandra, the daughter of King Priam of Troy, was doomed to utter accurate prophecies that went unbelieved by all who heard them.

This years-long effort to identify Hezbollah’s drug and arms operations and to find their financial resources ended up going the way of Cassandra’s prophecies, too — being utterly ignored despite their truth. (In fact, the project name derived specifically, if indirectly, from this myth.)
Not all of these cases involved international operations, either. The DEA and FBI found Hezbollah operations in the US, and yet the Department of Justice refused to prosecute the cases:

In Philadelphia, the FBI-led task force had spent two years bolstering its case claiming that Safieddine had overseen an effort to purchase 1,200 military-grade assault rifles bound for Lebanon, with the help of Kelly and the special narcoterrorism prosecutors in New York.

Now, they had two key eyewitnesses. One would identify Safieddine as the Hezbollah official sitting behind a smoked-glass barricade who approved the assault weapons deal. And an agent and prosecutor had flown to a remote Asian hotel and spent four days persuading another eyewitness to testify about Safieddine’s role in an even bigger weapons and drugs conspiracy, multiple former law enforcement officials confirmed to POLITICO.

Convinced they had a strong case, the New York prosecutors sent a formal prosecution request to senior Justice Department lawyers in Washington, as required in such high-profile cases. The Justice Department rejected it, and the FBI and DEA agents were never told why, those former officials said.

According to Meyer’s sources, Hezbollah has a lot of tentacles in the US, including in rental car companies on the legal side, and a booming cocaine smuggling and distribution business on the illegal side. It should have been easy to pursue those cases in US courts. And yet the Obama administration wanted nothing to do with cutting off Hezbollah’s economic underpinnings in the US, even while listing them as a terrorist organization. 

This is scurrilous in the extreme. So mad with the desire to have a legacy as visionary usherers-in of a golden era of international harmony were these preening narcissists that they let Iran's worldwide jihad network prosper and expand.

Much of the damage the previous administration did to post-America is now being reversed, but this is one genie it will be daunting at best to put back in the bottle.

Will any of these people ever be held to account?

Let's proceed with an inquisitive yet open mind

John Hinderaker at Power Line, in the course of a post about the Associated Press soft-pedaling the previous administration's application for a FISA order to snoop on DJT team people, succinctly states how this should progress at this juncture:

This scandal cries out for aggressive investigation. Let’s see the initial FISA application, and the court order denying it. Then let’s see the second application, and the order that approved it. Let’s put the Obama administration officials who signed the applications under oath, and find out who put them up to it. Let’s find out what judges denied the first application, and what judges granted the second one. Let’s get the details on the Obama administration’s spying. Did they tap the Trump campaign’s telephones? If so, which lines? Did they hack into the Trump campaign’s servers? If so, which ones?

Obviously, as President Trump said, the Obama administration learned nothing of significance from its spying on the Trump campaign. But it now appears that the election of 2016 may have been hacked after all, in a far more meaningful way than an intrusion into Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s email account. It may have been hacked by the Obama administration. We need to find out what happened. Congress should give top priority to this investigation.

Yes, Squirrel-Hair once again made the most bone-headed use of Twitter he possibly could have in chiming in on this. Nonetheless, the goings-on of last summer and fall merit the closest scrutiny.

You don't shrug and move on - which is, from the perspective of a thirst for truth, tantamount to caving - despite the ratcheted-up-to-the-maximum tension in the national air that is undeniably the norm of our times.

The essential truth of what has gone down here most be brought into the light.

The Manning pardon

Eleventh-hour presidential pardons are the kind of Oval Office act about which the figure doing the acting generally doesn't feel any compulsion to comment. Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, for instance and then pretty much went mum.

Such seems to be the case with the Most Equal Comrade's commutation of the sentence of "Chelsea" Manning, who will walk out of Leavenworth in May.

This one will be parsed by historians for decades to come.

It has one MEC administration official, SecDef Ashton Carter, angered, as well as a prominent Dem senator, Robert Menendez.

Is this merely of a piece with other MEC interim-period moves, such as putting Arctic oil fields off-limits and ramping up coal-industry regs, in which he just lets 'er rip, almost eager to show his true colors as never before? Or is there some behind-the-scenes explanation that won't become clear for years due to strategic considerations?

I'm betting on the former.

UPDATE: The MEC's commutation of the sentence of FALN terrorist Oscar Lopez-Rivera would seem to bolster my inclination.