The Alaska meeting went badly

 This was a test of how solidly the Biden administration's foreign policy is shaping up, an encounter with perhaps the most challenging actor on the world stage for the US. And China ate the US team's lunch:

Democrat President Joe Biden faced significant backlash on Friday following a meeting that his administration had with Chinese communist officials on U.S. soil, a meeting that was widely panned as tense, chaotic, and disastrous.

The meeting in Alaska came at the request of the Biden administration and was their attempt at trying to restart bilateral relations with China. Instead, after addressing some issues that the administration had with China, China openly mocked and attacked the U.S.

Chinese officials told Biden’s administration that the U.S. “does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength” and that “whether judged by population scale or the trend of the world, the Western world does not represent the global public opinion.”

China analyst Gordon Chang responded to the meeting by saying that China did “not come to Alaska to talk to the Biden administration.”

“They came to dictate,” Chang said. “China’s arrogant and insecure leaders are at their most dangerous. Deterrence is failing. Biden’s most urgent task is to reestablish it.”

You can be sure that North Korea and Iran read the tea leaves. 

Blinken et al need to do some retooling. 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Very Stable Genius makes the worst possible move during Yovanovitch's testimony

Real nice, Squirrel-Hair. What a time to tweet this:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Everywhere Marie Yovanovitch went turned bad. She started off in Somalia, how did that go? Then fast forward to Ukraine, where the new Ukrainian President spoke unfavorably about her in my second phone call with him. It is a U.S. President’s absolute right to appoint ambassadors.

7:01 AM - 15 Nov 2019

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....They call it “serving at the pleasure of the President.” The U.S. now has a very strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for Ukraine than O.

7:01 AM - 15 Nov 2019

While she was testifying! It didn't take any time at all for Adam Schiff to call it witness tampering.

The only viable analysis of it is pretty self-evident:

Andrea Valentini  🇨🇦‏ @GypsySpirit46

Replying to @realDonaldTrump

Bret Baier: "That was a turning point in this hearing so far. She was already a sympathetic witness & the President’s tweet ripping her allowed Schiff to point it out real time characterizing it as witness tampering or intimidation -adding an article of impeachment real-time."

Aaron Rupar‏Verified account @atrupar

Former independent counsel Ken Starr criticizes Trump's tweets attacking Yovanovitch: "I must say that the president was not advised by counsel in deciding to do this tweet. Extraordinarily poor judgment ... obviously I think this was quite injurious." 

Meanwhile, Yovanovitch - under oath, mind you - was spilling some red-hot beans:

Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified Friday during the House’s second day of public impeachment hearings that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani worked with corrupt Ukrainians to carry out her removal.

Yovanovitch testified that “it was and remains a top U.S. priority” to root out corruption in Ukraine, and said that “significant progress has been made.” But she alleges that “Ukrainians who sought to play by the old, corrupt rules sought to remove me.”

“What continues to amaze me is that they found Americans willing to partner with them and working together, they apparently succeeded in orchestrating the removal of a U.S. ambassador,” Yovanovitch said. “How could our system fail like this? How is it that foreign, corrupt interests could manipulate our government? Which country’s interests are served when the very corrupt we’ve been criticizing is allowed to prevail?”

Last month, during her closed-door testimony, Yovanovitch testified that she learned that Giuliani, in cooperation with two Florida businessmen with Ukrainian connections, went behind her back to attempt to replace her with someone more favorably inclined towards their “business dealings in Ukraine.”

Yovanovitch stated that Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who were arrested in October for campaign-finance violations and subsequently subpoenaed by the House, were interested in exporting liquid natural gas to Ukraine, a move the embassy normally supports.

“I didn’t understand that because nobody at the embassy had ever met those two individuals,” she continued. “And, you know, one of the biggest jobs of an American ambassador of the U.S. Embassy is to promote U.S. business. So, of course, if legitimate business comes to us, you know, that’s what we do, we promote U.S. business.” 

And the Giuliani bunch had some plans for what came after Yovanovitch:

At the same time that Rudy Giuliani and his now-indicted pals were pushing for President Donald Trump to remove Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from her post in Ukraine, Trump administration officials were eyeing potential contenders to take over her job.
One of the people in the mix, according to three sources familiar with the discussions, was Pete Sessions, a former congressman who called for Yovanovitch’s firing. He is also a longtime ally of the former New York Mayor, and is believed to have been the “beneficiary of approximately $3 million in independent expenditures” from a PAC funded in part by Giuliani’s indicted cronies, according to a federal indictment.

 Spin this, leg-humpers.

Tuesday roundup

One area where the moment of having been made great again seems to have petered out:

A gauge of U.S. manufacturing showed the lowest reading in more than 10 years in September as exports dived amid the escalated trade war.

The U.S. manufacturing purchasing managers’ index from the Institute for Supply Management came in at 47.8% in September, the lowest since June 2009, marking the second consecutive month of contraction. Any figure below 50% signals a contraction.

The new export orders index was only 41%, the lowest level since March 2009, down from the August reading of 43.3%, ISM data showed.

“We have now tariffed our way into a manufacturing recession in the U.S. and globally,” said Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at Bleakley Advisory Group. 

Go ahead and toss that well-marbled boneless ribeye on the grill:

A study jointly released by McMaster and Dalhousie universities, out in Science Daily yesterday, found that international scientists have “systematically reviewed the evidence” and “have recommended that most adults should continue to eat their current levels of red and processed meat.”

Wow. Here’s more from the findings:

The researchers performed four systematic reviews focused on randomized controlled trials and observational studies looking at the impact of red meat and processed meat consumption on cardiometabolic and cancer outcomes.

In one review of 12 trials with 54,000 people, the researchers did not find statistically significant or an important association between meat consumption and the risk of heart disease, diabetes or cancer.

In three systematic reviews of cohort studies following millions of people, a very small reduction in risk among those who had three fewer servings of red or processed meat a week, but the association was uncertain.

The authors also did a fifth systematic review looking at people’s attitudes and health-related values around eating red and processed meats. They found people eat meat because they see it as healthy, they like the taste and they are reluctant to change their diet.

The five systematic reviews, a recommendation and an editorial on the topic were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine today.

Secretary of State Pompeo tells the House Foreign Affairs Committee, forget about getting depositions from people from my department. You just want a chance to bully them.

What's with the VSG tweeting congratulations to Xi on Communist China's 70th anniversary?

The inspector general for the intelligence community says the whistleblower used the proper form to file his or her complaint.

This is how you deal with mortal enemies

Good on ya, Secretary Pompeo:

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that Washington would impose the “strongest sanctions in history” on Iran if the regime does not comply with a list of U.S. demands intended to bolster nuclear non-proliferation verification measures and reign in the rogue state’s support for terror groups and involvement in foreign proxy wars.

Pompeo, speaking at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, laid out a “diplomatic road map” for future relations with Iran that includes the reimplementation of the sanctions lifted under the 2015 agreement, which the U.S. withdrew from earlier this month, as well as the imposition of additional sanctions intended to bring the regime back to the negotiating table.

The former CIA director laid out a comprehensive list of requirements that Iran must comply with to avoid the painful sanctions, including the declaration of all nuclear material to the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA), the allowance of unqualified IAEA access to all nuclear sites, the conclusion of missile development, and the release of all American hostages. He suggested that the Trump administration was prepared to lift the sanctions, reestablish a commercial relationship and allow Iran access to advanced technology in exchange for good behavior.

Squeeze 'em hard and insist on al the above conditions.

Wednesday roundup

Mark Theissen on Gina Haspel's spy chops:

It was one of the Clinton administration’s biggest counterterrorism successes. Just weeks after al-Qaeda terrorists trained by Iran blew up U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, Gina Haspel’s phone rang in the middle of the night. She was in her final weeks as station chief in what the CIA describes as an “exotic and tumultuous capital” in central Eurasia, and intelligence had just emerged that two senior al-Qaeda associates linked to the embassy bombings were on their way to the country where she was stationed.

Haspel swung into action, devising an operation to capture the terrorists. She worked around the clock, sleeping on the floor of her office, as agents tracked the terrorists to a local hotel, where the men were apprehended after a firefight. According to the CIA, “The successful operation not only led to the terrorists’ arrest and subsequent imprisonment, but to the seizure of computers that contained details of a terrorist plot.” For her efforts during the operation, which ultimately disrupted a terrorist cell, Haspel in 1999 received the George H.W. Bush Award for Excellence in Counterterrorism.

This is as much as the CIA has revealed, but according to press accounts, several senior al-Qaeda associates were captured in Baku, Azerbaijan, just weeks after the embassy bombings. They included Ihab Saqr , a top lieutenant of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Essam Marzouk, who also worked for Zawahiri and had trained two of the embassy bombers. Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, had reportedly intercepted signals indicating that Saqr was headed to Baku to meet an Iranian intelligence operative. 

And she gets big-time bipartisan kudos, Kamala Harris's moral preening notwithstanding:

“She has served in some really tough places, high-risk hardship posts, and has performed some extraordinary operations,” said former CIA official Henry “Hank” Crumpton, who was Haspel’s boss in the agency’s National Resources Division. According to a source familiar with her career, Haspel was once deployed in a conflict zone, when military officials from a hostile nation arrived without warning at an event she was attending. As she left, they fired at her vehicle, blowing out a tire. She still keeps the bullet as a reminder of the risks CIA officers take each day to protect the country. She knows their sacrifices firsthand. For her, some of the stars on the CIA’s Memorial Wall represent the names and faces of friends she has lost in the line of duty.

“She’s truly a spymaster,” said one retired senior intelligence official who knows Haspel well. “She’s managed intelligence operations against the hardest targets, Russia in particular. She has earned great respect from intelligence leaders around the world; even people like [Russian President Vladimir] Putin would have to respect her operational savvy.” Yet despite her many accomplishments, colleagues say, she is a paragon of humility with zero political ambition. “She’s never lobbied for a job,” one of her former CIA bosses told me . “The jobs searched for her.”

Little wonder that so many senior Obama-era intelligence officials — including Leon Panetta, John Brennan, Michael Morell, James R. Clapper Jr. and Jeremy Bash — have urged the Senate to confirm her. To vote down someone so obviously qualified as political retribution for the CIA’s now-defunct interrogation program would be a travesty. President Barack Obama’s Justice Department concluded that no crimes had been committed. Moreover, as CIA veterans point out, Brennan was himself deeply involved in the interrogation program, and was confirmed 63-34 as Obama’s CIA director, with only two Democrats and one independent voting against him. Why the double standard for the first woman nominated to lead the agency?

Excellent David Harsanyi piece at The Federalist entitled "The Barack Obama Legacy Deserves to Be Destroyed." 

More funny business from Salem Media:

It might not be unusual that a conservative-minded media organization would aim to support the Republican nominee. But the former host, Elisha Krauss, said she feels it's disingenuous to ostensibly hire hosts to be open about their views, only to pressure them behind the scenes to change. 

For months, Krauss said, Salem executives explicitly pressured her to change how she treated Trump. Though Krauss said she praised Trump when she felt he deserved it, it ultimately wasn't enough. In January 2017, Krauss said, she was shell-shocked when a casual meeting with a company executive turned into her dismissal. 

Krauss declined to discuss the details of her severance, but said the rest of her contract had been settled. 

The emails obtained by CNNMoney were sent in the summer of 2016 to Krauss and Ben Shapiro, both former co-hosts of KRLA's "The Morning Answer," and both conservative Trump critics. Krauss and Shapiro co-hosted the show along with Brian Whitman, an anti-Trump liberal, and later Jennifer Horn, a pro-Trump conservative. 

"What I have been hearing on TMA... has not been in the spirit of 'supporting the GOP nominee,'" one Salem executive, Terry Fahy, general manager at Salem, wrote in an email to Shapiro and Krauss on July 19, 2016. "In fact, it seems that the show gets into negative minutiae of the Trump campaign and the GOP convention (e.g. criticizing Trump for having his kids speak at the convention.) Do we really need a side by side audio comparison of Trump's wife's speech with Michelle Obama's? How is that ultimately relevant to the big picture and advance the cause?"

Eventually the axe fell:

 On a Sunday in January 2017, at a meeting she was told to bring her husband and child to, Krauss said a Salem executive told her she had just hosted her final show. She was not to communicate with anyone at the station or her listeners. She was done. Her listeners, she said, were told she was the one who decided to leave.

By the way, Conrad Black has a new book out that gushes all over his idol the Very Stable Genius, if you're into that sort of thing. Maybe Salem ought to talk to him about a show.


The NYT tries just a little too hard to spin Pompeo's absence for the big announcement:

On Tuesday, the Times breathlessly reported that Secretary of State Pompeo was absent from Washington when Trump announced he was pulling the U.S. out of the nuclear deal with Iran. “At a Key Moment, Trump’s Top Diplomat Is Again Thousands of Miles Away,” the headline harumphed. 

The Times reported that “senior State Department officials were momentarily speechless on Tuesday when asked why Mr. Pompeo did not delay his trip by a day to be in Washington during Mr. Trump’s Iran deal announcement.” According to the Times, European diplomats complained privately that they were “having trouble getting answers from Washington.” 

But the Times knew that Pompeo was heading to North Korea make sure that three Americans who had been jailed by the dictatorship would be coming home. It reported as much in this same story. And ultimately, Pompeo not only returned with the three prisoners, but also worked on arranging a date and location for Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un.

The guy had work to do.

In an ABC interview, Vice President Pence said that one of the detainees freed from North Korea asked to get out of the plane while it refueled in Anchorage to see the sunlight, which he hadn't seen in "a long time." 

Noam Chomsky is one warped dude:

During the question and answer session after his talk, Chomsky aimed his misguided philosophizing at Christianity, saying that the faith that isn't Islam has set out to threaten the globe. Campus Reform noted:

“People in high places now claim to be devout Christians, and on the basis of Christian ideals they’re saying let’s proceed to destroy the world,” Chomsky asserted, adding, “I don’t know anybody in the Islamic world that’s doing that.”

Where has he been? From everything I've seen, the regimes oppressing women, children, and gays aren't Christian. The nations that threaten modern democracy do not worship Jesus as Lord. The vast majority of acts of terrorism aren't committed by Baptists or Episcopalians either. There's a common thread through most of the violence in the world: radical Islam. 

Great Ben Shapiro piece at The Weekly Standard entitled "How Conservatives Can Win Back Young Americans."

 

 

Dem grandstanding on Pompeo is pure gotcha politics

The comment thread underneath the post immediately below this one basically consists of a commenter expressing his loathing for Trump due to Trump's very obvious character shortcomings, a view pretty close to my own, and my response that that is all the more reason to see to it that he is surrounded by the most sober-minded, principled and consistent advisors that can be found.

We have that in Mike Pompeo, who has an engineering degree, a law degree, a record of distinguished Army service, and who founded and ran an aerospace machining company. He's been CIA chief for about a year, and now he's the nominee for Secretary of State.

There is no good reason to oppose his nomination, and Dem attempts to offer one ring very hollow:

n the coming months, President Trump will have to deal with the fallout from his strike on Syria, the growing conflict between Israel and Iran, the future of the Iran nuclear agreement, Chinese belligerence toward Taiwan, the planned summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and whatever unexpected international crises that erupt. Even if you accept the critique of Trump as someone who has no fixed worldview, little in the way of principle, and is dangerously enamored of the "madman" theory of strategic ambiguity, you would therefore want him, it seems to me, to be surrounded by personnel who are experienced, knowledgeable, capable, and steadfast—individuals who can serve as ballast, who can tether the president to geopolitical reality.

The slightest glance at Pompeo's official biography is enough to confirm that he is such a man. How many senators, Republican or Democrat, graduated at the top of their class at West Point, served as a cavalry officer, graduated from Harvard Law School and edited the Harvard Law Review, then went on to become a successful businessman? These are precisely the qualities that led the Senate in January 2017 to confirm Pompeo as CIA director in a bipartisan 66-32 vote.

A position in which, by the high standards of administration critics, Pompeo has excelled. "When it came to representing the judgments of the CIA, he was scrupulous," former CIA director Michael Hayden, no friend of Trump's, said recently. "I've seen no indication whatsoever that he's done anything but fairly describe what it is his analysts believe to be true and that includes the hypercharged, politically sensitive third-rail issue of what the Russians did in 2016."

So Pompeo is credentialed, succeeded in a tough position, and represented intelligence straightforwardly to President Trump. And yet none of this is enough for the Democrats, including those who supported Pompeo's nomination for CIA director, for the specious reason that the president shouldn't have a secretary of state who agrees with him. The Senate Democrats are operating under the assumption that it is disqualifying for a nominee to hold views shared by the duly elected president and majorities in both houses of Congress. They say Pompeo is too hawkish, despite his personal meeting with Kim Jong Un. Or they say Pompeo is dishonest for not revealing to them his classified visit to North Korea. Or they attack Pompeo for holding the same position on same-sex marriage as Barack Obama circa 2012. Or they worry that Pompeo is too worried about Islamism, and not worried enough about climate change. Next they'll complain that he's never donated to Planned Parenthood.

Yes, it's true: Mike Pompeo is not a liberal Democrat. Knock me over with a feather.

Of course, the real reason Democrats are circling the wagons against this nomination has nothing to do with Pompeo's politics. It's because the Democrats recognize the political weakness of the Trump administration ahead of the midterm elections and want to cripple it further. But have they paused for a moment to consider what might happen if their wish is granted and Pompeo is not confirmed? Who do they think Trump will nominate then? Lena Dunham?

More likely, Trump, as he has done in other areas of the bureaucracy for the last 16 months, won't nominate anyone at all. He will leave the office of secretary of state unfilled while he and Pompeo manage diplomacy from the Oval Office and Langley, respectively. What this scenario achieves for the Democrats or the country, I do not know.

Now, back to the fact that Trump is objectionable as president, which he is. That's not the issue here. The issue is the power-mad nature of the contemporary Democrat party. They'd be doing this to cabinet nominees if we had any other Republican in the Oval Office.

North Korea: so far, no patty-cake

Well.

It's certainly been an interesting month for North Korea's interactions with the US and the world, hasn't it? South Korean president Moon says that the North assured him that its goal is denuclearization without preconditions. Kim goes on his first visit to a foreign country (China) as leader, takes his wife who joins him for a state banquet and a visit to the Academy of Sciences, meets secretly with Mike Pompeo over Easter weekend, and says it aims to end the official state of war with South Korea that has existed since 1950.

There are two possibilities here, broadly speaking.

Let's dispense with the least likely one, namely, that Kim has figured out that history will view him far more favorably if he brings his nation into the modern world,  drops the threatening posture, and begins to exude reasonability.

Given his, and his regime's, track record from the late 1940s to a few weeks ago, it's far more likely that he and his party leaders and generals are engaged in a giant ruse:

the potential trouble ahead is that this is the meeting that the Kim dynasty has always wanted and has been “gaming out” for many years. Pyongyang’s playbook is now well-known: draw out negotiations for as long as possible while demanding a peace treaty and other concessions, recognition as a nuclear state and the normalization of relations with the United States. Until recently, North Korean’s chastened patrons — the Chinese — went along with the Trump campaign of pressure against Kim, themselves fearing that Trump was capable of anything.

But now the Chinese will support any negotiations that may break the United States’ alliance with South Korea. Kim and China’s leader, Xi Jinping, find themselves in alignment once again in seeking to remove U.S. troops from the Korean peninsula and gradually “de-couple” Seoul and Washington. As it does this, North Korea and China will aim to isolate Japan as the last remaining place in the Asia-Pacific where U.S. troops are permanently stationed. Kim and Xi know exactly what they want and will use these negotiations as a platform to achieve these goals.

What th US has to do is take the North Korean posture at its face value and hold them to what they're saying:

Team USA is going up against a regime that has been on a roll in outwitting the United States across many administrations, and that is supported by a China that wants the United States out of Asia. The key to success is to push for immediate denuclearization while preparing for a long-term parallel strategy of coercive diplomacy against North Korea and continued pushback against Chinese moves to break U.S. alliances in Asia.

However, if the North succeeds in drawing out the talks with promises of future denuclearization, engaging Washington in endless fights about verification or demands for concessions without any immediate actions in return, Washington will have lost important time that otherwise could have been spent strengthening the coalition of pressure.

Now, consider the state of limbo in which Pompeo is currently operating. He is exactly the kind of guy to have the meeting with Kim that he had at the beginning of this month, but North Korea will be keep a close eye on whether his situation is solid or precarious - that is, whether the US Congress grants him its imprimatur for becoming Secretary of State:

Frankly, the cause of the Trump-Tillerson friction makes no difference. All that matters is that it was there, and everyone knew about it. By sending Pompeo to North Korea to negotiate on his behalf, Trump has sent exactly the opposite message about Pompeo to the world. Pompeo is the president’s guy, the man he sent to negotiate with the Hermit Kingdom. Don’t mess with him, unless you’re willing to mess with Trump.

Fifteen Senate Democrats voted to confirm Pompeo to his current job as CIA director. Clearly, they thought he had the temperament, character, experience and smarts to do that job. Some, clearly under pressure from their left-wing bases, have backed off those votes, using weasel words to explain why they are now planning to flip flop and cast votes against his confirmation as secretary of State. That was before the news of Pompeo’s visit to North Korea. This changes the calculus.

Will Claire McCaskill cater to her liberal base in Missouri and leave herself forced to defend an action that can reasonably be said to have led to the collapse of talks with North Korea? What about Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Tim Kaine in Virginia, Angus King in Maine, Amy Klobuchar in Minnesota and Joe Manchin in West Virginia, each of whom voted to confirm Pompeo to his current position, and all of whom are on the ballot in November? The campaign ads write themselves. I, for one, cannot wait.

We know of one Senate Dem, Heidi Heidtkamp of North Dakota, who sees the stakes here.

There are some oddball thumbs-down positions being taken on the Pub side.

All in all, though, it looks like he has the votes.

This spring is going to call for steely resolve on the part of the US like it hasn't mustered for some time. North Korea (and China) are going to look for any and all signs of blinking.

The Tillerson ouster - initial thoughts

For starters, it was another example of the Very Stable Genius's lame style of dismissing folks. Tillerson found out via Twitter while he was in Africa and about to address the nerve-agent attack on a former double agent of Russian nationality and his daughter in Britain.  Word is that he wanted to stay in his position.

Pompeo is going to be a better fit. Pompeo understands that the Iran deal was garbage.

In fact, Tillerson's views were all over the map. He wanted to stay in the JCPOA and the Paris climate accord. He was on record back in his days as Exxon Mobil CEO as saying he advocated a carbon tax. On the other hand, he was on record as being against government regulation in general. He supported the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement and free trade generally, which is a good position for him to have, but put him in opposition to the populists who formed the first wave of Trumps' base.

Tillerson seems like a man of good character and a nice person, but his appointment to the position he was just ousted from was a head-scratcher. And the way the VSG handled his letting-go was a head-shaker.

The tricky question of whether to send athletes to the 2018 Winter Olympics

The games start in a couple of months. The State Department is saying that all precautions will be taken to ensure US teams' safety, but consider:

the administration needs to first quantify just how dangerous it might be. Not only do we have our own State Department declaring that the risk of war with North Korea is growing every day, but Kim Jong-un has already called war unavoidable. Sure, that might be written off as the usual rhetoric between hostile adversaries, but to deny the possibility is to defy reality. And let’s just assume for a moment that Kim is actually crazy enough to launch a first strike. We already know he’d love the chance to take out most of Seoul, but when you add in thousands of famous athletes from most of the western nations he despises it’s got to be a tempting target.

Keep in mind that Russia has already been booted from the games… sort of. (They may still be sending some competitors, but without their flag.) I have to wonder whether they might believe they’re dodging a bullet (literally) if they don’t show up at all. Back home in America, we already have people suggesting that maybe it’s time to pull the families of U.S. military members out of South Korea. It may be seen as yet another provocative move, but frankly, I think it’s worth considering.

Tough call.

Now, just who is crafting Mideast policy - the State Department or Kushner?

Kushner figures into the post below rather prominently, and the whole matter of his contact with Russians during the transition period a year ago bears watching.

But step back a level and consider what the overall situation is. He and his wife Ivanka are known to lean left of center on enough issues - the Paris Accord, family leave - to merit a left-of-center classification generally. He is a Washington newbie, a product of the New York skyscraper-buyning-and-selling crowd from which his father-in-law comes. And he gets to D.C. and is given this bulging portfolio that includes all kinds of things, including responsibilities that ought to be the purview of the State Department.

I'm speaking in particular of Mideast policy.

Which gets us back to the previous post. He is a practicing Jew, even got his wife to convert. Evidence points to his spearheading an effort a year ago to get major UN players to hold off on a vote condemning Israel for building "settlements" neighborhoods in the greater Jerusalem area.

So what's up with this?

The biggest indicator that Rex Tillerson should probably just walk, due to a lack of respect for his position is the continued existence of Jared Kushner as senior White House adviser.

One of many huge indicators that Jared Kushner is in over his head and that nepotism is really bad policy is the negotiations going on right now between Kushner and the Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

So what are they talking about?

According to Bloomberg:

The central goal of the Kushner-Prince Mohammed negotiations, as described by two people with knowledge of the talks, is for an historic agreement featuring the creation of a Palestinian state or territory backed financially by a number of countries including Saudi Arabia, which could put tens of billions of dollars toward the effort.

A lasting Middle East peace treaty has been a U.S. goal for decades, and at the start of his administration Trump assigned the 36-year-old Kushner to head up the effort to make it happen.

Because nepotism…

Meanwhile, Tillerson is [rightly] freaking out. For starters, they’re not keeping the nation’s top diplomat in the loop. This is Kushner taking off on his own, doing his own thing. Daddy Trump gave him the green light.

Secondly, this is an incredibly sensitive issue, and that region is volatile, on its good days. Tillerson is afraid Kushner is going to bungle it so bad that all hell breaks loose.

And, once again, DJT's penchant for shooting off his mouth proves to have lasting and counterproductive reverberations:

Tillerson doesn’t believe Trump is even being informed about what Kushner is doing.
Kushner has grown close to the Saudi prince, so there’s this fear that he’s promised him things that he doesn’t have the authority to promise.

The State Department officials’ skepticism about the Middle East discussions also reveals ongoing frustration at the president’s decision to go around them and the U.S. diplomatic corps he frequently disparages. Instead, Trump placed delicate peace negotiations in the hands of Kushner, who has no experience in diplomacy and little background in the complexities of one of the world’s most volatile regions.

Yet Trump, who has long spoken of Mideast peace as the ultimate trophy for a career dealmaker, has shown unwavering faith in his son-in-law’s ability to deliver.“If you can’t produce peace in the Middle East, nobody can,” the president told Kushner onstage at a black-tie event celebrating his inauguration in January. “All my life I’ve been hearing that’s the toughest deal to make, but I have a feeling Jared is going to do a great job.”

I don’t know if that’s more naïve, reckless, ignorant, or a dangerous combination of all three. It most certainly shows an alarming lack of understanding of the region.

But, hey. Nepotism. 

Yesterday, both Tillerson and Trump reacted dismissively to published reports that Tillerson is on his way out. But do you really think the former CEO of Exxon Mobil is going to be willingly reduced to playing cleanup crew for a skyscraper-buyer who is winging it in the conduct of some of the world's most volatile relationships?

Saturday roundup

Doug Bandow has a piece at The National Interest entitled "German Politics: From Boring and Stable to Unpredictable." The main point is that the two parties that have been by far the major players since the late 1940s, the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats (well, there was that 1946 - 1989 period during which the eastern portion had as its for-all-intents-and-purposes exclusive party the Socialist Unity Party) have waned markedly in influence and a number of more populist groups have been on the rise. This was really brought home in Merkel's recent failed attempt to forge a grand coalition.

Germany is one of those countries that has actually been a series of nation-states, from the days of the Holy Roman Empire through the entity known as Prussia through the North German Federation, the empire of the Kaiser days, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the side-by-side German nation-states of the above-mentioned period, and the current iteration. Memorable leaders have held sway during these periods, including Frederic the Great, The first and second Wilhelms, Bismarck, the monstrous Adolph Hitler. Since his end in a Berlin bunker, the succession of leaders has been - well, somewhat boring and stable. But through it all, there has been a readily identifiable culture, one that at times has contributed some of the greatest music and literature to the world, and seen the development of a number of social-science disciplines that have come to modern prominence.

Because of the lack of political continuity, however, the rest of Europe has always had good reason to be wary of what Germany was up to. Are we entering such a period now? Also, what effect is the recent influx of immigrants having on the cultural continuity?


Ivanka Trump is taking her own entourage to the Global Entrepreneurial Summit in India, and it doesn't include any high-level State Department people.

Yesterday, I linked to two pieces by Erick Erickson in which he talks about staying put in central Georgia rather than moving to the Acela Corridor and how it's impacted his career. David French at NRO today takes the context out a level, looking at the change in the tone of Erickson's polemics as his faith has deepened and assumed central importance in his life:

Erickson built his early reputation as a fearless conservative firebrand. His language could be lacerating, his devotion to the conservative cause seemed absolute, and he was on no one’s short list of cultural peacemakers.

But life happens. No, that’s not correct; God happens. Christians are familiar with the concepts of justification and sanctification. Justification is the moment when God — through His Son’s atoning sacrifice — declares a man righteous in His sight. Sanctification is the lifelong process of spirit battling flesh, of the redeemed man’s journey to holiness. In other words, it means that we change, and God uses many different instruments to accomplish that change.

Indeed. As I said yesterday, when God positions himself front and center in one's waking consciousness, One starts looking at the basics of how one is treating other people.

This is the question before me as an opinion writer as well: how to stand unwaveringly for principles one knows to be good, right and true without copping an attitude.


The other day, I put up a post entitled "Someone Please Take Away His Phone." The particular cringe-inducing Twitter snit Trump was engaged in at that time was with LaVar Ball. Well, no one has heeded my imploring. The national embarrassment president has now geared up for his annual Twitter tussle with Time magazine over whether he'll be named Man of the Year. Only Squirrel-Hair could have the world's most powerful position and still have the world's most fragile ego. "Probably is no good." A comprehensive archive of his he-really-tweeted-that outbursts would be quite a read.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line says that Attorney General Jeff Sessions may actually be the Trump cabinet member getting the most - and most conservative - things accomplished. Fronts on which this can be seen include voting rights, immigration and identity-politics issues.