DeSantis's Ukraine remarks, Republican response and the blurred lines between phoniness and sincerity

 By now, you're aware of what the Florida governor said:

"While the U.S. has many vital national interests — securing our borders, addressing the crisis of readiness within our military, achieving energy security and independence, and checking the economic, cultural, and military power of the Chinese Community Party — becoming further entangled in a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia is not one of them," DeSantis said in a statement to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

A territorial dispute. Interesting way to frame it, to say the least.

A number of prominent Republicans seized the opportunity to seize the moral high ground - or something that they hope voters will see as a reasonable facsimile.

Let's start with the reaction of the one Republican addressing this whom we can be confident is driven by principle:

“The Ukrainian people are fighting for their freedom,” the former lawmaker said in a statement to The New York Times on Tuesday. “Surrendering to Putin and refusing to defend freedom makes America less safe.”

Cheney, who was known as a defense hawk during her time in Congress, said the stance by DeSantis showed “weakness.”

“Weakness is provocative and American officials who advocate this type of weakness are Putin’s greatest weapon,” Cheney said. “Abandoning Ukraine would make broader conflict, including with China and other American adversaries, more likely.”

Nikki Haley, who irreparably damaged her cred with the early 2021 pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago and who is now a declared presidential candidate, exudes the vibe of a politician striving to straddle in her response:

“President Trump is right when he says Governor DeSantis is copying him—first in his style, then on entitlement reform, and now on Ukraine,” Haley said in a statement. “I have a different style than President Trump, and while I agree with him on most policies, I do not on those.”

In her own response to the Fox News questionnaire, Haley offered an unequivocal “Yes,” when asked if defending Ukraine was in America’s vital interests.

“America is far better off with a Ukrainian victory than a Russian victory,” Haley said. “If Russia wins, there is no reason to believe it will stop at Ukraine.”

John Cornyn, the Texas Senator who serves as the grownup foil to his colleague with the same position, speaks pretty plainly about it:

“I’m disturbed by it. I think he’s a smart guy,” Cornyn told Politico. “I want to find out more about it, but I hope he feels like he doesn’t need to take that Tucker Carlson line to be competitive in the primary. It’s important for us to continue to support Ukrainians for our own security.”

As sentiment from some in his party has soured on the war, Cornyn has been one of the leading conservative voices in the Senate continuing to voice the need for U.S. support.

“The point that keeps getting lost in this war is that a Ukrainian victory is in our national interest,” Cornyn said on the Senate floor last month. “The most effective way to keep American troops out of the line of fire is to help the Ukrainians stop Putin now, before his conquest moves even further west.”

Marco Rubio rightly zeroed in on the "territorial dispute" characterization.

Thom Tillis emphasized the humanitarian-crisis aspect.  

This dustup will deepen the fissure between MAGA world and, well, pretty much the rest of the country. Everybody who is not eyeball-deep in Kool-Aid can see what the drop-Ukraine-like-a-hot-potato position for what it is. Yes, Ukraine has dealt with corruption issues since the fall of the USSR. Nations are comprised of fallen human beings, and every last one of them has ever-present challenges as a result. But from 1991 to 2014, the world understood the parameters of Ukraine's sovereignty. Putin has acted in utter disregard for that understanding since then. A reliably stable global order is what's at stake here.

Is DeSantis flaming out already?

Probably too early to say decisively, but it's heartening to see the short-term damage it's doing to his national standing. But we surely have many more plot twists to witness before determining whether it is a corrective moment or a fatal one. 

 

 

Is DeSantis a viable alternative for conservatives who want to stay Republicans but can't stand Trump?

 It's a question getting kicked around a lot right now on Twitter. 

There aren't a lot of choices if one believes that the Republican Party has a future. Pence comes in third in polls about who Pubs want to see as the presidential nominee in 2024, but what, exactly, is his lane? If it comes down to a juxtaposition of him and DeSantis, he is easily framed as the straddler, oh so careful not to commit himself on hard cultural-issue questions, whereas DeSantis seems to like to face them squarely.

But, conversely, that's a big DeSantis problem. He seems willing to use the power of the state to counter forces that no conservative is pleased with. And courts are striking him down on it. Woke corporations are a disturbing feature of 2022 American life, but it's not government's purview to deal with it.

Two figures I consider indispensable voices of sound reasoning have both said that there's no reason to go running toward DeSantis at this early date:

"I think that Ron DeSantis has lined himself up almost entirely with Donald Trump, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) told the New York Times. If DeSantis was nominated, she “would find it very difficult” to support him.

“A number of Republicans would be far, far better for the country and the GOP,” Never Trump commentator David French wrote in a Twitter thread on the “DeSantis discourse.” “So hopping on the DeSantis train simply to block Trump is *way* premature.”

But all of these considerations only matter of one feels certain that the GOP can get the Trumpist infection out of its veins over the next two or three election cycles. 

I don't. Consider DeSantis himself, for instance. He's been out campaigning for Kari Lake and Doug Mastriano.  Instant disqualifier. Negates any compelling aspects of his resume.

Pence likewise loses the Never-Trumper-who's-determined-to-stay-Republican with this kind of spinelessness:

Pence prostituted his reputation for Christian piety to the most vile figure in the history of American presidential politics, a man who modeled the opposite of every virtue taught in Sunday school. Pence lent his credibility as a religious man to a villain, and gave permission to millions of self-styled Christians to vote for him. Pence’s pious conscience was remarkably quiescent when Trump encouraged his followers to rough up hecklers; when he bore false witness against Muslim Americans (falsely claiming that he saw them celebrating after 9/11); when he attempted to extort the president of Ukraine to lie about Joe Biden; when he separated asylum-seeking parents from their children; when he refused to condemn the tiki-torch Nazi wannabes in Charlottesville; when he elevated a series of kooks and conspiracists to high office; and when he insisted that the election had been stolen.

Pence was fine with all of it.

. . .  Worse than simply remaining silent, he played the toady with seemingly endless reserves of self-mortification, uttering cringeworthy encomia to Trump’s “broad-shouldered leadership” (a phrase he repeated at least 17 times), and audacious lies about matters big and small.

There was no bottom to Pence’s fawning. To please Trump, he called Joe Arpaio, a convicted criminal (pardoned by Trump) and thuggish abuser of power, a “tireless champion of the rule of law” and said he was “honored” by Arpaio’s presence at his speech. He claimed, preposterously, that Trump had performed magnificently in the face of the COVID pandemic: “President Trump marshaled the full resources of our federal government from the outset. He directed us to forge a seamless partnership with governors across America in both political parties.”

When Pence traveled to Ireland on an official visit, he didn’t stay in Dublin, but traipsed140 miles west to stay at the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in Doonbeg, necessitating a 40 minute flight and hour-long drive each way. Must have been inconvenient, but then, if Trump had asked Pence to crawl both ways, he would doubtless have obliged.

Nikki Haley? Loved her as ambassador to the UN. But she was one of the first post-January 6  to make the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Instant disqualifier.

But here's the thing: It doesn't matter to the GOP what any Never-Trumper thinks anyway. Not the keep-the-party-together types or those like me who deem it hopeless. Republicans don't need us. 

The party chews up and spits out anyone who acts on principle, even those who tried as long as possible to allow for Trump's dominance of its direction, and maneuver within that framework. 

So is DeSantis a viable alternative?

Because of where I stand on the Republican Party's moral rot, I really don't find it a very interesting question.

In 2024, the GOP will put up somebody who is either a coward, a nut, or a sycophant, of some combination of the three. 

Doesn't bode any better for the country than whatever hot mess the Democrats come up with. 

Can't see that I have a horse in this race.

There's no place for principle, character or spine in the 2022 Republican Party

 Last month, at Precipice, I summarized the challenge that I've had as a cultural observer since the insertion of a new force in our nation's politics since 2015:

When I started opining on culture, politics, economics and world affairs online, and in a column I wrote for several years for our local newspaper, the lines of demarcation were more clear-cut. There was right, and there was left. I expended a great many keyboard strokes trying to get people to see that Barack Obama was a lurch leftward beyond any that had come before for the Democrats. Frank Marshall Davis, Rashid Khalidi, the Midwest Academy, Bill Ayers and all that. The task before conservatives (back when that term stood for something recognizable) was straightforward: explain and defend our glorious lineage, from Edmund Burke through Frederic Bastiat, Richard M. Weaver, Russell Kirk, National Review and on up to Reaganite fusionism, and point out the dark nature of the lineage on the other side.

It’s all quite different now, isn’t it? Yes, the Left has grown increasingly grotesque, but an entirely new element has upended everyone’s previous assumptions . . .

That’s why any pundit, let alone fundraiser or political candidate who focuses solely on the very real grotesqueness of the Democrats - “We’ll defeat these leftists and then everything will be alright” - must be viewed with suspicion. Such a figure wants you to ignore the at least equally monstrous malignancy on the Right.

Now, the governor of Florida has illustrated exactly that kind of smokescreening maneuver:

"Liz Cheney is just totally off the rails with her nonsense," DeSantis said during an interview Monday with Fox News Digital. "And I think she's not really a Republican in terms of terms of what she's doing. We want people that are going to fight the left, and that's what we need to do in this country. That's what we're doing in Florida, standing up for people's freedoms. We're opposing wokeness. We're opposing all these things." 

A tactic closely akin to the the-Left-is-all-we-have-to-oppose ploy is whataboutism taking the form of "but there was urban violence in 2020." That's how Elise Stefanik, who assumed Liz Cheney's number three position in House Republican leadership, even thou her voting record has been far less consistently conservative that Cheney's, has chosen to obscure the 800-pound gorilla in the room:

“House Democrats did not condemn the violence that happened all of 2020,” she said in reference to riots in some cities following the murder of George Floyd in police custody. “And we believe the January 6 commission is political theater.” 

Sorry, Madame Conference Chair, but that's a non-sequitur. It's not the subject at hand. 

Then there's the dragging-our-brand-across-the-finish-line-is-far-and-away-our-primary-mission approach, as exemplified by Nikki Haley in response to a question from Bret Baier on FNC's Special Report:

“Mike Pence is a good man,” Haley said. “He’s an honest man. I think he did what he thought was right on that day. But I will always say, I’m not a fan of Republicans going against Republicans.”

Donald Trump has, of course, been breaking people who once prided themselves on being animated by principle since he entered the political fray. What a lifetime ago it seems when 

Lindsey Graham characterized the Very Stable Genius thusly:

"If Donald Trump carries the banner of my party," Graham said, "I think it taints conservatism for generations to come. I think his campaign is opportunistic, race-baiting, religious bigotry, xenophobia. Other than that, he’d be a good nominee."

and Rick Perry put it like this:

"Let no one be mistaken Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised, and discarded," Perry said during a speech in Washington, D.C. "It cannot be pacified or ignored for it will destroy a set of principles that has lifted more people out of poverty than any force in the history of the civilized world and that is the cause of conservatism."

and Ted Cruz, full of righteous indignation, said this:

“This man is a pathological liar. He doesn't know the difference between truth and lies. He lies practically every word that comes out of his mouth,” Cruz told reporters in Evansville, Indiana.

The Hoosier State primary is crucial for Cruz’s goal of preventing Trump from gaining enough delegates to secure the GOP presiential nomination. Most polls show Trump with a lead in the state, and Cruz’s attacks against his rival on Tuesday went into his personal life in a way Trump’s opponents have largely avoided until now.

“Donald Trump is a serial philanderer and he boasts about it,” Cruz said. “This is not a secret, he is proud of being a serial philanderer." 

The only people left in the Republican Party interested in having any personal honor almost certainly have no future in it. They don't even respect each other. They each and all know that they opted to be motivated by fear of a four-year-old in a 76-year-old man's body. 

They claim to be so concerned about the impact of progressive aggression on the foundations of the American way of life, but deep inside they know they've chosen a path that is utterly ineffective in addressing it.

The entire party, save for the handful of outliers with no voice in it, is in the throes of a delusion borne of cowardice. 

 

 

 

 

Nikki Haley finds out that even the slightest deviation from slavish devotion gets you cut loose by the VSG

 This is rich.

Nikki Haley has been the poster girl for have-it-both-ways-ism since the Very Stable Genius lost the November election. 

In mid-December, the was playing the we-must-humor-him-in-his-delusion card:

Channeling George Costanza in mid-December, Haley refused to confront Trump over his election lies because he believed they were true. “I understand the president. I understand that genuinely, to his core, he believes he was wronged,” Haley told Alberta. “This is not him making it up.”

Then came the interview with Tim Alberta of Politico in which she went for the he's-done-as-a-force-in-our-party angle:

“We need to acknowledge he let us down,” Haley, who served in her ambassador role under Trump, said. “He went down a path he shouldn’t have, and we shouldn’t have followed him, and we shouldn’t have listened to him. And we can’t let that ever happen again.”

Haley’s remarks are her strongest yet against the former president in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and come as Trump's legal team is set to present its defense of Trump on Friday in his second Senate impeachment trial.

She was mighty ticked off, doncha know:

“When I tell you I’m angry, it’s an understatement,” Haley said. “I am so disappointed in the fact that [despite] the loyalty and friendship he had with Mike Pence, that he would do that to him. Like, I’m disgusted by it.”

Then, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, she went for the oh-come-on-let's-be-grown-ups-capable-of-embracing-complexity-here-and-eschew-polarization angle:

. . . the liberal media . . . wants to stoke a nonstop Republican civil war. The media playbook starts with the demand that everyone pick sides about Donald Trump—either love or hate everything about him. The moment anyone on the right offers the slightest criticism of the 45th president, the media goes berserk: Republicans are trying to have it both ways! It’s a calculated strategy to pit conservatives against one another. It’s also a ridiculous false choice. Real life is never that simple. Someone can do both good and bad things. 

People feel strongly about Mr. Trump, but we can acknowledge reality. People on the left, if they’re honest, can find Trump accomplishments they like—a coronavirus vaccine in record time, Middle East peace, more accountability from China. People on the right can find fault with Trump actions, including on Jan. 6. Right or left, when people make these distinctions, they’re not trying to have it both ways. They’re using their brains.

Just as important, they’re proving people are more than their party affiliations. If we can’t make judgments beyond whether someone is Republican or Democrat, then America can’t face its biggest challenges. We separate into two camps that always hate each other. We become estranged from family and friends over politics.

And now comes the hardee-har-har moment. 

She wanted to make the pilgrimage, a la Kevin McCarthy, to Mar-a-Lago, but the VSG has said, "Nothing doing."

She's certainly mastered the art of 2021 Republican self-abasement, although, to be fair, it seems she's been outdone, at least for the time being, by Ted Cruz. How were the margaritas at that Cancun resort, Ted?

 

 

Can we ease up on the inclination to assume a position of hard and fast dismissal of Nikki Haley?

This is the kind of thing that really ratchets up my dispiritedness level.

Nikki Haley's political career trajectory has been gladdening to watch. She went from being a South Carolina governor with a pretty good track record from a conservative standpoint to one of the four outstanding UN ambassadors of my lifetime, the others being Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Jeane Kirkpatrick and John Bolton. Her ringing defenses of Israel and full-throated defiances of various bad actors were enough to make me believe that Western civilization perhaps had a chance.

I haven't read her new book, but apparently it has launched a speculative back-and-forth as to whether her service in the Trump administration has caused her fealty to core principles to take a back seat :

Haley recounts a closed-door encounter with then-White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: "Kelly and Tillerson confided in me that when they resisted the president, they weren't being insubordinate, they were trying to save the country … Tillerson went on to tell me the reason he resisted the president's decisions was because, if he didn't, people would die. This was how high the stakes were, he and Kelly told me. We are doing the best we can do to save the country, they said. We need you to work with us and help us do it. This went on for over an hour."

O'Donnell asked, "You memorialized that conversation? It definitely happened?"

"It absolutely happened," said Haley. "And instead of saying that to me, they should've been saying that to the president, not asking me to join them on their sidebar plan. It should've been, 'Go tell the president what your differences are, and quit if you don't like what he's doing.' But to undermine a president is really a very dangerous thing. And it goes against the Constitution, and it goes against what the American people want. And it was offensive."

[We asked them to respond. John Kelly tells "Sunday Morning": "If by resistance and stalling she means putting a staff process in place … to ensure the (president) knew all the pros and cons of what policy decision he might be contemplating so he could make an informed decision, then guilty as charged."]

Haley remains a fierce Trump loyalist, including on the issue of his asking the Ukrainian president to dig for dirt on the family of Democratic candidate Joe Biden.
O'Donnell asked, "Do you think ultimately the president will be impeached and removed from office?"

Haley replied, "No. On what? You're gonna impeach a president for asking for a favor that didn't happen and giving money and it wasn't withheld? I don't know what you would impeach him on. And look, Norah, impeachment is, like, the death penalty for a public official. When you look at the transcript, there's nothing in that transcript that warrants the death penalty for the president."

"To be clear, it was not a complete transcript. There are still things that are missing from it. And in it, he does say, 'I would like you to do us a favor, though.'"

"The Ukrainians never did the investigation. And the president released the funds. I mean, when you look at those, there's just nothing impeachable there. And more than that, I think the biggest thing that bothers me is the American people should decide this. Why do we have a bunch of people in Congress making that decision?"

Of course, this portion of the interview is going to get both sides of the whether-impeachment-is-something-that-ought-to-happen question up on their hind legs.

CBS News has not helped matters any by inserting the subjective term "loyalist" into its reportage here. I don't think a parsing of her weigh-ins on any controversies impacting her since Trump's been president warrant that label. She's distanced herself when he's gone off the rails.

That said, I'm not pleased with her Mulvaney-esque treatment of the Trump-Zelensky phone call. Squirrel-Hair was definitely signaling that he expected some sniffing for Biden family nefariousness in exchange for busting loose the military aid.

And  given Kelly's response, boldfaced above, it seems there's a real difference in the interpretation of their interactions about this.

Still, I'd caution Heath Mayo, a figure I'd not come across until recently, but who spearheads a group / movement whose aims I am solidly behind, Principles First, to step back and consider the big picture. I don't know that his jettisoning of Haley does anything but create further fissures among a bloc of us who ought to be finding common ground.  He seems ready to completely dismiss her, which strikes me as hasty:

Heath Mayo‏ @HeathMayo

Heath Mayo Retweeted John Hudson

Wow. Now @NikkiHaley is misrepresenting and disparaging the service of her colleagues John Kelly and Rex Tillerson. Good on Kelly for having none of it. Nikki’s nosediving fast—and it’s sad to watch.

Then again, maybe he has some kind of inside insight that spurs him to conclude thusly. Maybe she has been overcome with raw political calculation, making her post-public-service moves entirely based on which side her bread is buttered on.

But this seems to me to be of a piece with some recent beating-up that Rich Lowry has come in for with regard to his new book on how nationalism can be a good thing, or Ted Cruz's maneuverings through the sociopolitical lanscape of the current moment.


Where I'm going with all this is this: Please, let's not be eating our own at this particular moment. There are not that many of us to begin with. I don't know exactly how we stack up statistically against Trumpism and jackbooted, foaming-at-the-mouth leftism, but we can ill afford to engage in a circular firing squad.

I just don't think there was some moment in the last three years at which Nikki Haley stood in her office or her home dining room and, with eyes bugging out, declared to the heavens above, "MAGA!"

So please ease up. Let's stay serious. Primacy of principles really means respectfully engaging others with a track record of being motivated by just that. 

It's very late in the day. There's not a lot of time to fool with yet another layer of turf battles, especially those that are unnecessary.

Nikki Haley gives Ilhan Omar a proper smackin'

The Minnesota Congresswoman gave an interview to Amy Goodman of the sewer of West-hatred "independent news hour" Democracy Now! and used the occasion to blame the United States for the current situation in Venezuela.

National treasure Nikki Haley wasn't about to let that go unaddressed:

 @NikkiHaley

Nikki Haley Retweeted John Cooper

.@IlhanMN the avg Venezuelan adult has lost 24 lbs. Babies have no medicine. Families have to walk miles in the heat to get the only meal they may have that day. All bc of the corrupt Maduro regime. Your comments are so far from the truth. Cuba and Russia appreciate your support.

Nikki Haley added,

Now, that's what a real UN ambassador looks like

Is she the coolest or what?

 The US ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, on Thursday joined Venezuelan protesters outside the world body headquarters and called for the ouster of President Nicolas Maduro.

Haley's embrace of demonstrators was highly unusual for a diplomat from a major power at the staid United Nations and came a day after President Donald Trump hinted at military options against Maduro's leftist government.

"We are going to fight for Venezuela and we are going to continue doing it until Maduro is gone!" Haley shouted from a megaphone.

"We need your voices to be loud and I will tell you, the US voice is going to be loud," she said.

It's called moral vision. It's called standing against tyranny.

I wish she were president.

This vicious

You'll recall my post from last Wednesday  on the new intensity of the Left's viciousness which concluded thusly:

They hate freedom, God, common sense, and human dignity. They're historically and economically illiterate.

And they are fiercely determined to take this country over.

Given the opportunity, they will trample you and me into the dust.

One last note: Trumpism is not the antidote.

Since then, we've seen two glaring examples of this new intensity.

There's the New York Times's blatant attempt to make Nikki Haley look like she got the State Department to put up expensive curtains in her apartment, when the curtains were ordered during 2016.

The Grey Lady's attempt to cover its tracks is pathetically lame, and that's because it doesn't want to see an unequivocal reversal of the public's understanding of the matter.

 As a number of people pointed out on Twitter, editors usually review articles before publication, not afterward. Remember the superiority of the “layers of fact checkers and editors” at mainstream media outlets? Good times, good times. This retraction asks readers to believe that realization of the issue came hours after the hit piece’s publication, long after readers complained about the framing of the story around Nikki Haley. The article has a publication date of September 13, although that typically means it got published late at night of that date. Regardless, it was up for at least 12 hours before the editors began to think that it might need a review.

Furthermore, this explanation is at best incomplete, and at worst substantially deceptive. The paper didn’t get new reporting that clarified Haley’s non-role in the spending decision — all they had to do is read the sixth paragraph of the original version of their own story. The editors want to pass this off a poor choice of emphasis, when the editors had every opportunity to realize the problem before publication. It was right there in the story! Discovering the problem only required reading the article for comprehension. And yet, the editors not only allowed the focus to remain on Haley, the headline writer followed suit and the image was selected to highlight it.

One more point to note, too — how did the editors reframe the story after the retraction? While the story notes that the apartment and curtain system were chosen by the Obama administration, the piece never gets around to naming the UN ambassador at the time, Samantha Power, not even to note that she would have benefited from it, as they did with Haley. 

And any respect anyone not of the Left ever had for Dianne Feinstein is surely a thing of the past in the wake of the last-minute-letter stunt attempting to smear Brett Kavanaugh.  

The aspect of this that really chills the bones is that those involved in both situations knew that the intended objects of smear are public officials of the utmost integrity. But in their estimation, Haley's defense of Israel and firm stance against Iran, and Kavanaugh's insistence on interpreting the Constitution as it was written are policies so threatening to their vision of what America ought to be transformed into that any tactic is justified to thwart them.

There's not an ounce of decency left among these people.

It is very late in the day.

Saturday roundup

North Korea:

The must-read on this subject is by Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute at National Review:

Given the hopes that President Trump’s North Korea policy had generated in the roughly 18 months leading up to Singapore, the results were little short of shocking. There is no way to sugarcoat it: Kim Jong-un and the North Korean side ran the table. After one-on-one talks with their most dangerous American adversary in decades and high-level deliberations with the “hard-line” Trump team, the North walked away with a joint communiqué that read almost as if it had been drafted by the DPRK ministry of foreign affairs. 

The dimensions of North Korea’s victory in Singapore only seemed to grow in the following days, with new revelations and declarations by the two sides. What remains unclear at this writing is whether the American side fully comprehends the scale of its losses, and how Washington will eventually try to cope with the setbacks the meeting set in motion.

Kim Jong-un’s first and most obvious victory was the legitimation the summit’s pageantry accorded him and his regime. The Dear Respected Leader was treated as if he were the head of a legitimate state and indeed of a world power rather than the boss of a state-run crime cartel that a U.N. Commission of Inquiry wants to charge with crimes against humanity. In addition to the intrinsic photo-op benefit of a face-to-face with an American president who had traveled halfway across the globe to meet him, the Dear Respected Leader bathed in praise from the leader of the free world: Kim Jong-un was “a talented man who loves his country very much,” “a worthy negotiator,” and a person with whom Trump had “developed a very special bond.” Kim even garnered an invitation to the White House. These incalculably valuable gifts went entirely unreciprocated.

Second: Kim was handed a major victory in terms of what went missing from the summit agenda. For the Kim regime’s security infractions are by no means limited to its domestic nuke and missile projects.

As Professor Bruce Bechtol Jr. details in an important forthcoming book, North Korea is a WMD merchant for Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and other elements in the Middle East, supporting and in turn being supported by an unholy alliance of terror agents abroad. Not unrelated, North Korea maintains immense stockpiles of chemical weapons, as Kim Jong-un’s assassination of his half-brother in a Malaysian airport with nerve agents was certainly intended to remind us. North Korea is also actively involved in cyber warfare and cyber crime, as the Sony hacking and the cyber-robbing of numerous overseas banks attest. DPRK security services routinely abduct foreign nationals — from Japan, South Korea, Europe, and maybe even America — as has been documented by HRNK, the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. And then there is the nightmare of human rights under the regime — a catastrophe unparalleled in the modern world — and its commitment to eradicating the Republic of Korea, a U.N. member state.In getting a pass on all these matters in the official record of its deliberations with Washington, North Korea scored a huge plus. 

Third: Regarding the key issues that were mentioned in the joint statement, the U.S. ended up adopting North Korean code language. 

Until (let’s say) yesterday, the U.S. objective in the North Korean nuclear crisis was to induce the DPRK to dismantle its nuclear armaments and the industrial infrastructure for them. Likewise with long-range missiles. Thus the long-standing U.S. formulation of “CVID”: “complete verifiable irreversible denuclearization.”  But because the nuclear quest is central to DPRK strategy and security, the real, existing North Korean state cannot be expected to acquiesce in CVID — ever. Thus its own alternative formulation, with which America concurred in Singapore: “complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”

In this sly formulation, South Korea would also have to “denuclearize” — even though it possesses no nukes and allows none on its soil. How? By cutting its military ties to its nuclear-armed ally, the U.S. And if one probes the meaning of this formulation further with North Korean interlocutors, one finds that even in this unlikely scenario, the DPRK would treat its “denuclearization” as a question of arms control — as in, if America agrees to drawing down to just 40 nukes, Pyongyang could think about doing the same. The language of “denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula” ensured that no tangible progress on CVID was promised in the joint statement.

Likewise the communiqué’s curious North Korean–style language about agreeing to build a “peace regime” on the Korean Peninsula. What is the difference between a “peace regime” and plain old “peace,” or, say, a peace treaty among all concerned parties? From the North Korean standpoint, a “peace regime” will not be in place until U.S. troops and defense guarantees are gone — and a peace treaty between North and South may not be part of a “peace regime,” either, because that would require the DPRK to recognize the right of the ROK to exist, a proposition it has always rejected.

Fourth: The North delivered absolutely nothing on the American wish list at the summit and offered only the vaguest of indications about any deliverables in the future. No accounting of the current nuke and missile inventory. No accounting of the defense infrastructure currently mass-producing nukes and missiles. No accounting of WMD sales and services in the Middle East, or cyber-crime activities, or counterfeiting, or drug sales. Not even a small goodwill gesture, such as the release of Japanese abductees or an admission that North Korean agents did indeed kidnap David Sneddon, a young American last seen in China, as many who have followed the case believe.Nor did Team Trump’s much-vaunted timetable for handing over nukes and dismantling WMD facilities emerge. Quite the contrary: As Bruce Klingner of the Heritage Foundation and others have pointed out, the joint language commits North Korea to even less than any of its previous (flagrantly violated) nuclear agreements did: less than its agreements with South Korea in 1991 and 1992; less than its Agreed Framework in 1994; less even than the miserable Joint Statement from the so-called Six-Party Talks in 2005. 

Mona Charen's Ricochet piece, "Historic Snooker," from a few days ago is worth your while as well:

Why is our president smiling? You can always argue that democratic leaders must treat with dictators and even villains of various stripes for the sake of winning a war or securing the peace. You can even argue that sometimes presidents flatter unsavory leaders to build trust and ease tensions. But no historical comparisons can illuminate Trump’s ricochets between hysterical threats (“fire and fury”) and pusillanimous praise (“very talented”) without any substantive change on the part of the dictator. What has changed since the State of the Union address in which Trump honored the memory of Otto Warmbier and detailed the atrocities of the North Korean regime? In gratitude for the exchange of pleasantries, the release of a few hostages, and vague offers of “denuclearization” Trump has made himself Kim’s doormat.

As a matter of substance, the Singapore summit achieved less than nothing. It was a profound defeat for U.S. world influence and for democratic decency, arguably the worst summit outcome since Yalta. Kim promised to consider “denuclearization,” exactly as his father and grandfather had done repeatedly over the past several decades – breaking their promises each and every time. For this puff of cotton candy, Trump agreed to halt “U.S. war games” (using the North Korean term for joint military exercises with South Korea) which Trump himself called provocative! He invited Kim to the White House. He also issued the risible tweet announcing, ahem, peace in our time: “There is no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea. 

It’s difficult to determine just how stupid Trump thinks the American people are. But there is no question that Trump’s affection for strongmen and thugs, evident before in his praise of the Chinese murderers of Tiananmen, and his warm words for Putin, Duterte, and Xi, has now extended to the worst tyrant/killer on the planet. Trump did far more than overlook Kim’s atrocious human rights abuses, he became Kim’s PR man. “he’s a very talented man and I also learned he loves his country very much.” He has a “great personality” and is “very smart.”

Trump granted Kim’s legitimacy: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor. They have a great fervor.”

In 2014, a United Nations report concluded that North Korea’s crimes against humanity “entail extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation.”

What of all that? Trump is understanding, even impressed. “Hey, he’s a tough guy. When you take over a country — a tough country, tough people — and you take it over from your father, I don’t care who you are, what you are, how much of an advantage you have. If you can do that at 27 years old, I mean, that’s one in 10,000 that could do that. So he’s a very smart guy. He’s a great negotiator.”

What was Trump’s chief argument in 2016? The U.S. had been the victim of “bad deals,” with other countries and he was the great deal maker. He fingered the Iran deal as the worst deal in history. His defenders will excuse the truckling to Kim as a clever gambit to extract concessions. But Kim has offered absolutely nothing. All of the concessions have come from the United States, including the most crucial one – we’ve put ourselves on the same moral plane as North Korea. That’s what Make America Great Again has achieved.

The Border Crisis:

Heather MacDonald at City Journal gets to the heart of the matter:

Underlying this episode were several cardinal principles of left-wing activism: that favored victim groups must never be held responsible for their actions, and that policy should be made based on immediate claims of need, with no regard to long-term consequences. The reigning assumption during the family-separation meltdown was that the adults who brought children with them across the border had no responsibility for their subsequent plight. The only actor with agency was the federal government; it alone bore the blame for alien minors being placed in detention facilities. Yet the but-for cause of the child separation was the adult’s decision to cross illegally into the U.S., child in tow. If you don’t want to be separated from your or another person’s child, don’t cross the border illegally. Likewise, any whisper of immigration enforcement inside the border is inevitably greeted with cries that such enforcement would cause illegal aliens to be “fearful.” If you don’t want to fear deportation, don’t assume the risk of deportation, however slight that risk may be, by illegal entry.

Obeying the law, however, is something that must never be demanded of politically correct victims. If lawbreaking carries negative consequences, the fault lies with the legal system, not with an individual’s decision to break the law in the first place.

This principle is at work in the ongoing attacks on the criminal-justice system as well: the overrepresentation of blacks in prison is attributed to allegedly racist actors and institutions, not to lawbreaking by the criminals. Non-legal forms of distress are also covered by the no-agency rule. If single mothers experience elevated rates of poverty, the fault lies with a heartless welfare system, not with their decision to conceive a child out-of-wedlock. The father, of course, is as good as nonexistent, in the eyes of the single-mother welfare lobby. If teen mothers are stressed out, the problem lies in the absence of daycare centers in high schools.

The “progressive” solution to these dilemmas is to confer an immediate benefit on the alleged victim that will alleviate the problem in the short term, perverse incentives be damned. Illegal aliens with children must be exempt from immigration rules. The likelihood that such a policy will encourage more illegal aliens to come is out of sight, out of mind (if not covertly viewed as an affirmative good). If having more out-of-wedlock children puts a strain on a single mother’s welfare check and food stamps, then the government should increase the allotment to reflect the additional births. If that single mother and her children show up at a shelter claiming homelessness, give them an apartment. If such free housing encourages more single mothers to flood the shelter system, contract for more apartments.

Also check out Rich Lowry's latest column, entitled "Dems' True Goal Is To End All Border Enforcement," which has appeared in the New York Post as well as Jewish World Review.

Post-America's Crumbling Civility:

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweets about her attempt to patronize a restaurant:

Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left. Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so

A Facebook friend of mine (he's a buddy in the offline world as well) reports that our societal brittleness has reduced his longstanding friendships by one:

Well today it happened. I was called by one of my old friends "one of the biggest pieces of shit" that he knows, and asked me to unfriend him.
Why you may ask?
For presenting and defending conservative points of view.

Sad times my brethren, sad times. 

You probably know about Nikki Haley announcing that the US was pulling out of the UN Human Rights Council. (It probably should have been noted and celebrated here at LITD; it's been a busy week.) Since then, she's had the opportunity to demonstrate why it was an excellent move. 

Future first female POTUS Nikki Haley is exactly right. In the same week that saw Ms. Haley deliver a blistering “Dear John” letter to the UN “Human Rights” Council, the alleged watchdog group also had the pleasure of enduring her entirely justified clapback wrath at their new report scrutinizing US poverty. The “Human Rights” Council, which includes Afghanistan, China, and Cuba, condemned the US for lowering tax rates on rich people and curbing certain programs for poor citizens. This, despite the fact noted by Haley that the US currently has its lowest unemployment rate in decades.

The Council, which includes Iraq, Pakistan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was set to present the report Friday, which was drafted by Philip Alston, a man who left his home country of Australia and took a high-paying seat as a law professor in the United States of America at New York University. Haley lambasted the apparently non-satirical report as “misleading and politically motivated” (also, water is wet).

Haley added:

It is patently ridiculous for the United Nations to examine poverty in America. In our country, the President, Members of Congress, Governors, Mayors, and City Council members actively engage on poverty issues every day. Compare that to the many countries around the world, whose governments knowingly abuse human rights and cause pain and suffering.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, a socialist democratic socialist, defended the report against his own country, calling the scathing examination “totally appropriate”. Specifically, he highlighted the 40 million who still live in poverty* (defined by the Census Bureau’s mobile goalpost as $25,100/yr for a family of four--roughly the average salary of Poland or Greece) and the 30 million who do not carry health insurance since they are no longer forced by the federal government to buy any (this of course leaves poor citizens with no medical recourse other than the full coverage already provided for them by Medicaid). Sen. Sanders’ criticism of US wages was a scorching indictment of the nation listed as having the 2nd highest average salaries in the world after Luxembourg according to the OECD. No doubt this will only bolster the credibility of the findings of the “Human Rights” Council, which includes Saudi Arabia, the Philippines, and Venezuela. 

Another must-read this weekend: Kristen Soltis Anderson's Washington Examiner piece, "The Four Species of Beltway Republicans."  She categorizes them as the Trump enthusiasts, the establishmentarians, the internal opposition, and the remnant.

 

 

Friday roundup

Senator Corey Booker uses the confirmation hearing for a new Secretary of State to get into some identity-politics grandstanding and expose his own disdain for Christianity:

On Thursday, Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) offered a bizarre critique of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo: Pompeo wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about homosexual sex.

Yes, this is a real thing.

Booker asked Pompeo, “Do you believe gay sex is a perversion?”

Pompeo is a religious Christian, so presumably he does. He answered, quite properly, “When I was a politician, I had a very clear view on whether it was appropriate for two same-sex persons to marry. I stand by that.” He also informed Booker, “My respect for every individual regardless of sexual orientation is the same.”

Booker was outraged by Pompeo’s reply. His time ran, however, before he could grill Pompeo on whether he enjoyed Brokeback Mountain sufficiently or cried at the end of Moonlight.

This is anti-Christian bigotry from Booker. It’s that simple. Religious people of all major faiths — Christian, Jewish, Muslim — believe homosexual activity is a sin. Full stop. The Bible is quite clear about this in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the New Testament is clear about it in Romans and Corinthians and Timothy. The Koran isn’t shy on the issue, either. None of that means that religious people thereby want the rights of gays and lesbians violated. I, for example, am fully libertarian on same-sex marriage, and have been for years. Religious people think lots of things are sins, and also think that people have a right to do the wrong thing. The same logic undergirds support for the First Amendment: I hate racism, but people have a right to say racist things. I may dislike sin, but a government dedicated to stamping out sin rather than preventing violation of rights is called tyranny. 

But according to Booker, you must celebrate sin in order to believe there is a right for people to commit sin that has no externalities in a free society. This makes sense from a Leftist point of view, where government is the great instrument of the good, not a mere protector of rights — the same people who try to stamp out dissenting thought through “hate speech” legislation are likely to believe that religious Americans feel the same way about using government to stamp out sin. But they’re wrong. And they’re religious bigots.

Worse, Booker’s shtick is unconstitutional if it were to be applied legally. The Constitution forbids religious tests for office. What Pompeo thinks about sin has nothing to do with what he thinks about public policy, unless Booker has evidence otherwise. If not, this is simple intolerance. Ironically, Booker would go on to essentially admit that point a few minutes later when he ripped into Brigitte Gabriel for supposedly expressing bigotry for questioning the compatability between Islam and democracy. 

Speaking of identity politics, students at Hobart and Smith Colleges disrupt a motivational speech about overcoming adversity to prattle about "structural racism":

Super Bowl champion and NFL legend Burgess Owens — who dares to be conservative— took a lot of hate for speaking out “against” his “own people” during a speech he gave at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in March.

Owens is 66, and has personal recollections of when there actually was structural racism in America. And he lived through it and overcame it. But that message didn't mean squat to the snotnosed jackboots in the audience:

During the Q&A panel, a female attending the lecture asked Owens his thoughts about police brutality.

“What was your name again?” the unidentified female inquired.

Owens told the woman his name, to which she quipped, “Thought it was Tom,” which seemed to point to the controversial nickname, “Uncle Tom.”

Clearly put off by Owens’ remarks, the woman then left the auditorium.

“There goes our biggest problem,” Owens said. “The minute you start calling names, you’ve already stopped the debate. You’re not looking for answers. You’re looking for ways of insulting, and that’s not how Americans do it.”

A male audience member went on a loud rant about the school bringing in “xenophobic” speakers like Owens.

When the lecture’s moderator stepped in to shut down the inflammatory and irrelevant line of questioning, others students rallied and began shouting for the male to be able to continue speaking.

“Why is it OK to bring people to talk against their own people?” the male erupted, and began shouting about “structural racism.”

I rather resonate with this Steve Berman post at The Resurgent entitled "I'm Tired and I Have a Headache."

There was recently a piece at Medium on how California, which is losing residents and businesses in droves, is the model for an inevitable blue America. It is real short on substantiation, but long on the self congratulation on how much leftists caaaaare that is their signature trait. They really think Cali-style collectivism has such appeal that the GOP will wither on the vine and most of its members will gravitate to the Dems. David French at NRO provides a resolute takedown.

Scooter Libby is pardoned.

Nikki Haley gives Russia a proper smackin' at a UN emergency meeting.