RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Beltway fixture that Republicans have placed in charge of the House judiciary committee—i.e., the committee that, by its own description, functions as “the lawyer for the House of Representatives,” and claims an “infrequent but important role in impeachment proceedings”—is ignorant when it comes to the Constitution’s impeachment standard.

Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) took to one of the Sunday shows to demonstrate his cluelessness. After explaining that “the Constitution is very clear as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment of the president of the United States,” he proceeded to mangle that very clear standard, opining that President Obama “has not committed the kind of criminal acts that call for that.”

In point of fact, no “criminal acts” are necessary before a president may be impeached. The very clear standard the Constitution prescribes calls for impeachment upon the commission of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. Treason and bribery are, of course, well known criminal acts. As I illustrate in Faithless Execution, “high crimes and misdemeanors” is a term of art borrowed from British law. It does not refer—at least, not necessarily—to criminal acts that violate the penal code. Instead, it captures what Hamilton, in Federalist No. 65, described as:

the misconduct of public men, or in other words from the abuse or violation of some public trust. They are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated political, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.

The concept conveyed by “high crimes and misdemeanors” is executive maladministration, whether out of imperiousness, corruption or incompetence. In that sense, it is more redolent of military justice offenses than criminal acts that violate the penal code. Like a soldier, one who owes fiduciary responsibility is liable for acts that would not be considered criminal wrongs if committed by an ordinary civilian. Dereliction of duty, conduct unbecoming, profound deceitfulness, and the failure to honor an oath, to take a few obvious examples, would qualify as high crimes and misdemeanors even if they might not be indictable offenses if committed by one in whom high public trust was not reposed.

As I further relate in Faithless Execution, what the Framers were most concerned about was presidential misconduct that undermined our governing framework, particularly the separation of powers:

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/dont-look-down?f=puball

The title refers to the loveable Wylie E. Coyote screaming off a cliff with legs churning and no recognition that gravity will eventually have its way with him. This gravitational force is a metaphor for an unsustainable worldwide financial system built on fiat currency debt. Collapse would be due to hyperinflation. Such a collapse could be sudden or ~ a decade. Unfortunately, even most self-reliant Americans have no clue what is headed this way because the MSM is ignorant and has a rooting interest in believing we are well on the way to recovery with unemployment falling, the deficit cut in half and soaring asset values. Utter rubbish. With information instantly available to all (www.zerohedge.com and http://www.economicnoise.com/ are a must), ignorance of “the rest of the story” is appalling – but bring a Fed official, CEO or rosy analyst into the studio and these intrepid reporters simply gush.

Obama isn’t the cause of the potential financial tsunami coming ashore, though he is a powerful accelerant to it with every policy he has put in place. Instead this possible collapse has been building since 1971 when Nixon took us off the gold standard. And of course W. Bush contributed mightily to our circumstance as the second largest spender in history and not noticing the debt bubble inflating.

As I believe correctly described here http://www.internationalman.com/articles/understanding-hyperinflation (see Loss Due to Hyperinflation), the hyperinflation that causes catastrophe will be unlike the 1970s with rising interest rates, prices and wages because we are far worse off now. If interest rates begin to soar in order to sell our debt, it is over.

The dollar is backed by nothing but confidence that the US will remain a financial and military superpower capable and willing to defend itself and paying its debts. In the cold light of reality our dollar has less value than your laundry ticket, because the laundry ticket is at least backed up by the value of the clothes it redeems.

While $17 Trillion is the agreed amount of the national debt, it doesn’t include all the unfunded and underfunded obligations and commitments of all governments (national, states and localities). According to various contrarian experts, the actual number could be in the $100 to $200T range. That it could be this high is due to government deception and incompetence. A very important recent study by professor James Hamilton of University of California – San Diego found that off-sheet obligations of the federal government were $70T in 2012, six times what was reported. Off-sheet obligations are government trust funds (the biggies Social Security, Medicare) and things like student loan guarantees and FHA and deposit guarantees. (See http://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jhamilto/Cato_paper.pdf).

http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/nato-after-ukraine-military-modernization-in-europe?f=puball

NATO faces a challenge to modernize and sustain its nuclear posture and missile defense deployments in Europe at a time of declining defense budgets on the one hand and expanded threats on the other. The threats from Russia, the Middle East, and North Africa are serious and growing from both ballistic missile arsenals and nuclear programs.

At the same time, there are political pressures within NATO pushing for the adoption of a “zero nuclear” posture as well as efforts to delay significantly U.S. and allied missile defense and nuclear modernization deployments. This comes as threatening countries adopt military and political doctrines that emphasize the use of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles as instruments of state power.

Ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons are weapons of terror, coercion, and blackmail. Hamas rocket attacks on Israel are meant to terrorize the population; Hezbollah and Iran threaten the coercive use of thousands of rockets against the U.S. and allied interests in the Gulf in response to any action taken to eliminate the Iranian nuclear program. Meanwhile, North Korea launches missiles and explodes nuclear devices while demanding oil and food ransoms in return for “blackmail promises” to end such demonstrations of state power. Of the 31 countries with ballistic missiles in their arsenal, nine are suspected of possessing-or do possess-nuclear weapons, broadening the threat considerably.

In short, such weapons have diplomatic, political, and military dimensions that must be taken into account when assessing NATO policy in both arenas.
Gathering Missile Threats

Missile threats to NATO come primarily from ballistic missiles deployed in Russia, Syria, and Iran. Current Iranian missiles are thought to have a range of about 1,200 miles, capable of striking most of Eastern Europe, but there remains a debate as to when Iran will also have a missile with the range to strike London, Paris, or New York. A study of global missile threats by the National Air and Space Intelligence Center last year assessed that Iran “could develop and test an ICBM capable of reaching the United States by 2015.”

And while the U.S. and NATO have repeatedly emphasized that NATO defenses against Iranian or other rogue state missiles in no way can affect Russia’s central strategic missile force, Russia has continually threatened America’s European allies with Askander missiles launched from Kaliningrad. Additionally, with its violation of the INF treaty, Russia could again have medium range missiles with which to target Eastern and Central Europe. Finally, Russia is the top arms supplier to both Iran and Syria. Syrian missiles primarily threaten Turkey, or NATO’s “southern flank,” but Syria’s cooperation with North Korea and Iran could quickly change that assessment.

Hamas isn’t shooting rockets at the Jews because of persecution, isolation or occupation. The Sunni Islamic terrorist group is doing it for the same reason that Sunnis and Shiites are killing each other in Iraq and Syria. And why its Muslim Brotherhood core group is killing Christians in Egypt.

To understand why, let’s step into a time machine and go back to the spring of 632. The Byzantine Emperor Heraclius is engaged in the first of a series of wars with Mohammed’s maddened followers. England is divided into seven quarreling kingdoms. Across the water, the Merovingians are killing each other in ways that would give George R.R. Martin nightmares. Meanwhile in a more civilized part of the world, China’s fading Sui Dynasty fields an army of over a million men in a failed effort to invade Korea.

Back in Medina, Mohammed had come down with the sniffles. He had a fever and a headache and there wasn’t any Tylenol around for miles. Mohammed hadn’t been a very good man and he made a very bad patient. Upon being told that he had pleurisy, he claimed that only people possessed by Satan came down with that disease so he couldn’t possibly have it and instead blamed the Jews for poisoning him.

His own homemade cures, such as bathing in seven skins of water from seven different wells, didn’t help. But before he died, he managed to make the Middle East an even worse place by ordering the ethnic cleansing of Jews and Christians.

“Two deens (religions) shall not co-exist in the Arabian Peninsula,” Mohammed declared. “If I live, if Allah wills, I will expel the Jews and the Christians from the Arabian Peninsula.”

There could be only one.

A lot of ink has been spent in recent weeks – and deservedly so, given the gravity of the situation – on the Israeli-Palestinian flare-up that followed the killing of three Israeli teenagers, and the subsequent revenge killing of a Palestinian youth. People far more qualified than me have written endlessly on the subject, but I did want to insert my oar.

What is concerning is the growing animosity on the part of the media and people around the world toward Israel. The media is careful that their criticisms are not cocooned in terms that could be interpreted as anti-Semitic; nevertheless they are disturbing. They are subtle, but insidious in their subtlety. Examples of what I mean could be seen in a couple of front page photos in Wednesday’s newspapers. One by Mohammed Saber of the European Pressphoto Agency that appeared in the New York Times showed smoke billowing “after an Israeli attack on Gaza City.” Another, an AP photo in my local paper, The Day, by Khali Hamra, showed Palestinians trying to salvage what they could from the rubble of a house “destroyed by an overnight Israeli airstrike in Gaza City.” Should either paper be accused of bias, they could point out that on inside pages reporters do mention rocket attacks on Israel. That is true. They do, but that doesn’t take away from the visual image one gets from skimming the story – that Israel is the aggressor, using overwhelming force against a smaller and weaker neighbor.

But it is Israel that responded to the killings in the way civilized nations ought. They arrested six Israeli youths as suspects in the brutal killing of the Palestinian teenager. Has Palestine arrested, or held anyone in connection with the equally brutal murder of three Israeli teenagers? Of course not. It is Israel that has made an effort to limit civilian casualties. They call occupants of houses known to harbor terrorists, urging them to get out, and fire warning shots in attempts to reduce civilian casualties. It is Hamas that indiscriminately lobs rockets at Beersheba, Rehovot, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. And it is Hamas that urges occupants of targeted homes to remain as they are, to act as human shields, to be used as pawns on the PR battlefield being fought in world-wide media.

A sentiment often attributed to Joseph Goebbels or Adolph Hitler, but one which is true is that if you repeat a lie (or a story) often enough, it becomes accepted as gospel. George Orwell made a similar observation in his dystopian novel, 1984. He wrote, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” That, in my opinion, is what is happening in the saga between Israel and the Palestinians. The Israelis are being portrayed as the aggressor, against less well-equipped Palestinians. Little is made of the terrorist organization Hamas, which occupies Gaza and shares power with Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah Party, a political party that emerged from the Palestinian National Liberation Movement.

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Between the Settlers and the Unsettlers, the One-State Solution Is on Our Doorstep

Why Israel will soon be the only state able to govern Judea and Samaria, and the only military force capable of securing its borders

A one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is upon us. It won’t arrive by Naftali Bennett’s proposal to annex the West Bank’s Area C, or through the efforts of BDS campaigners and Jewish Voice for Peace to alter the Jewish state. But it will happen, sooner rather than later, as the states on Israel’s borders disintegrate and other regional players annex whatever they can. As that happens, Israeli sovereignty in Judea and Samaria is becoming inevitable.

Last week’s rocket attacks from Gaza failed to inflict many casualties in Israel—but they administered a mortal wound to Palestinian self-governance. Hamas launched its deepest strikes ever into Israel after the IDF cracked down on its West Bank operations following the murder last month of three Israeli boys, arresting nearly 900 members of Hamas and other terrorist groups. Humiliated in the territories, and unable to pay its 44,000 Gaza employees, Hamas acted from weakness, gambling that missile attacks would elicit a new Intifada on the West Bank. Although Fatah militias joined in the rocket attacks from Gaza, for now the Palestinian organizations are in their worst disarray in 20 years.

The settlers of Judea and Samaria have stood in the cross-hairs of Western diplomacy for two decades, during which the word “settler” has become a term of the highest international opprobrium. Yet the past decade of spiraling conflicts in the Middle East have revealed that what is settled in the region is far less significant than what is unsettled. Iran’s intervention into the Syrian civil conflict has drawn the Sunni powers into a war of attrition that already has displaced more than 10 million people, mostly Sunnis, and put many more at risk. The settled, traditional, tribal life of the Levant has been shattered. Never before in the history of the region have so many young men had so little hope, so few communal ties, and so many reasons to take up arms.

David Without a Sling ‘Making David Into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel’

It may be hard for some to believe, given the endless attacks on the Jewish state today, that in the not-too-distant past, Israel was as beloved as it is now widely reviled. More remarkable, it was especially loved on the left, where now it is scorned. The process by which Israel turned from paragon into pariah is the subject of Joshua Muravchik’s well-argued new book Making David into Goliath.

Muravchik sets the stage by describing the time when Israel was popular. One factor he cites was the reservoir of sympathy created after the Holocaust. For “progressives,” Israel’s socialist leadership was another source of solidarity. The kibbutzim were particularly admired outside of Israel as successful experiments in communal living. In the state’s early years, leaders from around the world came to visit the kibbutzim and pay homage.

All this changed in the aftermath of the Six Day War. Muravchik documents the wide sympathy in Europe as well as in the United States—including in the media—which Israel enjoyed immediately prior to the war. At that time, it looked as if Israel might be annihilated by its Arab neighbors, who made no secret of their intention to rid the world of the Jewish State.

But when, to general amazement, Israel defeated the Arab armies and captured lands previously held by Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, it overnight became the ruler of millions of Arabs. The Arabs would take advantage of this, setting in motion a redefinition of the conflict. No longer was it tiny Israel against a vast Arab world. “Now it was Israel versus the homeless Palestinians. David had become Goliath,” Muravchik states.

As those familiar with the conflict know, Palestinian peoplehood was not the first choice of identification for the Arabs living on the west bank of the Jordan River. They had viewed themselves as “Syrian,” or as part of a pan-Arab world, in which all Arabs belong to a supra-national whole.

Indeed, the Arabs of Palestine resisted the label “Palestinian” for some time. It was only after 1967 that they began to see themselves as “Palestinian,” and to be trumpeted as such by an Arab world cognizant of the propaganda value of doing so. As the Egyptian weekly Al Mussawar admitted in 1968: “The masses of the Palestinian people are only the advance-guard of the Arab nation … a plan for rousing world opinion in stages, as it would not be able to understand or accept a war by a hundred million Arabs against a small state.”

The Rolling Stones’ first concert in Israel began as the holiday of Shavuot ended, and quite fittingly, too. When better for rock-n-roll royals to journey to the Holy Land than during one of Judaism’s three festivals of pilgrimage? Moreover, when better to affirm Israel’s identity as a Jewish state and homeland? The Stones’ performance in Israel was an implicit rebuke to artists—most notoriously, Roger Waters—who have chosen to boycott Israel selectively. While a slew of acts have canceled performances—among them Elvis Costello, Snoop Dogg, Carlos Santana, and Gil Scott-Heron—the Stones enthusiastically embraced their gig in the Jewish state, with all the panache that has made them the longest-running rock act in the world.

Around the same time as the Stones’ gala night in Tel Aviv, the Modern Language Association (MLA), the premier association of literature scholars in the United States, was releasing the results of yet another anti-Israel initiative. It put the pro-BDS (Boycotts, Divestments, Sanctions) measure to a vote of its nearly-30,000 members—who rejected it decisively. Fully 94% of MLA members proved unwilling to endorse bigotry, dishonesty, and the shameful wish (albeit expressed by only 6% of its members) to single out the Jewish state for opprobrium.

Though the MLA ruled in favor of Israel, the episode revealed that such poisonous beliefs have quite a toehold in an organization supposedly devoted to fair-minded inquiry. To provide an opportunity for members to debate the resolution, the MLA set up a members-only listserv on which opinions for and against it could be posted. The comments on that listserv have now been made public and show the true colors of some of the groups members—who prove to be paranoid, obsessed with conspiracy theories, virulently anti-Israel, and even anti-Semitic. While every organization has its kooks, these are academics charged with teaching our country’s young people. That they are willing to spew such hatred should alarm anyone who expects scholars to place a premium on truth.

One commenter alluded to “Zionist attack dogs” who put pressure “on universities by Zionist funders and lobby groups to quell any dissent.” A similar “conspiratorial” comment on the listserv made use of that traditional anti-Semitic trope: that Jews control the media, government, and academia, and use their influence to suppress criticism of Israel. The individual who posted this dreck also decried the “humongous influence that Jewish scholars have in the decision-making process of Academia in general.” Clearly, to this worthy professor, opponents of the initiative were not simply in honest disagreement with it, but outsiders gunning for control. It never seems to have occurred to the faction that challenges Israel’s right to exist that the fault may lie with the weakness of their argument, not with the tactics of their ideological opponents.

http://www.pm.gc.ca/news/2014/07/13/statement-prime-minister-canada-response-situation-israel

Prime Minister Stephen Harper today issued the following statement in response to the situation in Israel:

“The indiscriminate rocket attacks from Gaza on Israel are terrorist acts, for which there is no justification. It is evident that Hamas is deliberately using human shields to further terror in the region.

“Failure by the international community to condemn these reprehensible actions would encourage these terrorists to continue their appalling actions. Canada calls on its allies and partners to recognize that these terrorist acts are unacceptable and that solidarity with Israel is the best way of stopping the conflict.

“Canada is unequivocally behind Israel. We support its right to defend itself, by itself, against these terror attacks, and urge Hamas to immediately cease their indiscriminate attacks on innocent Israeli civilians.

“Canada reiterates its call for the Palestinian government to disarm Hamas and other Palestinian terrorist groups operating in Gaza, including the Iranian proxy, Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”