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July 2018

Trump Delivers on Russia His Helsinki outing was tone-deaf but his policy is cribbed from Bush and Obama By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-delivers-on-russia-1531868274?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=contextual&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Robert Mueller did his reputation for nonpartisanship no service by launching his indictment of Russia’s military hackers on the eve of what 99% of the media now say was a disastrous performance by President Trump in his summit with Vladimir Putin.

This is the same Mr. Mueller who, as FBI chief, sat for five years on the indictment of a Russian uranium executive when it would have been embarrassing to Mr. Obama’s own Russia rapprochement—and doubly embarrassing to his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, because of the connection of the Clinton Foundation to the Russian uranium business in question.

Mr. Mueller’s timing on Friday was unnecessary. His indictment is only for show. The Russian culprits will never be seen in a U.S. court.

It raises a question I did not expect to be raised: Should we now see Mr. Mueller as part of the retinue that includes former Obama CIA chief John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and (ambiguously) former FBI chief James Comey ? These men don’t like Mr. Trump or his Russia rapprochement; Mr. Brennan openly calls him a traitor.

One hesitates to draw the comparison, but Truman and Eisenhower were assailed as agents of the Soviet Union by Joseph McCarthy. Reagan was accused (by George Will) of selling out to Gorbachev. Critics of FDR’s foreign policy were actually proved right in the historical archives: The British were seeking to assure his re-election in 1940.

Politics never did stop at the water’s edge. It can’t. All presidents use foreign policy the way they do domestic policy: to create, expand or protect their domestic political capital. That’s how our system works.

And their opponents will always have recourse to the accusation that a president is a dupe or worse of foreign interests.

Mr. Trump’s performance in Helsinki left a great deal to be desired, but he delivered the policy he has promised since the 2016 campaign. It is identical to the policy of his two most recent predecessors.

Mr. Trump has a history of financial relations with Russians. He has a history of statements saying that American leaders were “weak” and relations with Russia would improve if the U.S. had a “strong” leader.

He has sought to expand America’s military power; he has sought to expand its energy power. One senses his walloping of Germany over the Nord Stream pipeline is less aimed at weakening Russia than at expanding U.S. gas sales but it would still weaken Russia.

He has said for 30 years that America’s trade deficits and its military spending on allies are related (as they are, sort of).

The best you can say about all this, there’s a consistency here. Mr. Trump may not know Palmerston, who said countries don’t have permanent friends, only permanent interests, but I wouldn’t put it past him to have seen the quote in a Charles Krauthammer column.

Of course, you can never disprove sinister influences, an impossibility on which certain fellow journalists will be hanging their reputations for years to come. But a reliable assumption that covers all cases is that presidents act in their own interest. Meanwhile, we have a democratic process, not to mention an extensive permanent bureaucracy with its own ideas, to help sort it out.

The hell of our situation is that 2016 created a big incentive for Democrats and others to adopt anti-Russia hysteria, likening Russia’s meddling to “Pearl Harbor,” a risky simile when two countries have enough nuclear weapons aimed at each other to make the world uninhabitable.

The only good news is Mr. Trump’s apparent indifference to the media’s attempt to shame him into adopting the media’s Russia policy. He may have no idea of the pressures and constraints under which Mr. Putin acts, but Mr. Trump is a one-man brake on a non-adroit hostility that doesn’t serve U.S. interests. CONTINUE AT SITE

Fired FBI Director James Comey: Vote Democrat, Or You’re A Traitor ‘All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall.’ By Madeline Osburn

http://thefederalist.com/2018/07/18/fired-fbi-director-james-comey-vote-democrat-o

Former FBI Director James Comey implied anyone who doesn’t vote for Democrats in the 2018 midterm elections is a traitor in a tweet Tuesday night. “All who believe in this country’s values must vote for Democrats this fall,” he said.

Comey has appointed himself as something of a moral compass for the country following his firing from the FBI last year.

He has been vocal in criticism of Republicans and President Trump. In April, he told ABC News he believes “the Republican Party has left me and many others.” But just a few months ago he said he doesn’t care which party Americans support, so long as they care about American values.

“I don’t think of it as my politics, I think of it as my values,” he told Meghan McCain on “The View” during his book tour. “I don’t care whether people support a Republican or a Democrat because I’m not either. I don’t care who they support. I hope the conversation with start with values, and come to policy second.”

Comey’s tweet could be considered an obstruction of justice, since Comey is currently under federal investigation. The Justice Department is examining whether he leaked classified information to the media.

The DOJ inspector general concluded his behavior as FBI director was “insubordinate” in a report released in June.

A Tale of Two Killings Chicago erupts in violence over a police shooting, but no outrage attends the far more typical killing of a bystander by a murderous felon. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/html/chicago-violence-16058.html

Last Sunday, a 59-year-old woman on the West Side of Chicago was killed by a would-be carjacker. The felon walked up to the driver’s side of the car, which was being driven by a 71-year-old man, and pulled his gun. The senior citizen refused to surrender the vehicle and kept driving. The would-be carjacker opened fire at the car, striking the woman in the head and killing her.

The night before, on the South Side, a Chicago officer killed a 37-year-old man whom the officer’s patrol partners had observed behaving in a manner suggesting that he was carrying a gun. The officers tried to question Harith Augustus, and he appeared to pull something from his wallet, according to police body-camera footage, possibly his firearms owner-identification card. One officer tried to grab Augustus (the police report said that he became combative), but he pulled away and ran into the street, where he appeared to reach for the gun holstered on his right hip. One of the officers opened fire and killed him. Augustus’s gun was recovered at the scene.

True to script, the officer-involved shooting sparked violent street anarchy on Saturday night, instigated by Black Lives Matter, the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression, and other anti-cop activist groups. Protesters threw rocks and bottles, some filled with urine, at officers. Four officers were injured. Chants included “How do you spell racist? CPD [Chicago Police Department],” and “Murderers.” Protests have continued, drawing intense local media and political attention. “This department is racist . . . and we’re tired of it,” said one of the organizers.

There were no protests against the taking of the carjacking victim’s life. Carjackings have nearly tripled in Chicago since 2015, averaging two per day in 2017 and close to that in 2018. In August 2016, officers tried to pull over a car involved in an earlier carjacking; someone inside the car opened fire and hit one of the officers in the face. The shooter was on parole for attempted armed robbery. In January 2017, a teen carjacker ambushed a 34-year-old mother in an alleyway where she had been parking her car. His initial blow to her head with his gun was so severe that it temporarily blinded her. “Quit trying to kick back, you white bitch,” the assailant said as he pistol-whipped her. Before the attack, the mother had noticed a van suspiciously idling in the alleyway, but decided to continue about her business, likely second-guessing herself about “racial profiling.” In March 2017, a man with a gun forced a 24-year-old woman into the trunk of her car and raced it around the South Side until crashing into a tree. In August 2017, a 28-year-old entrepreneur and student was fatally shot in his car when he refused to hand it over to the carjacker. In November 2017, a pair of thugs accosted an 88-year-old man and stole his Lincoln at gunpoint. They almost immediately crashed into a semitrailer truck and retaining wall; one of the two felons died in the crash.

At UPenn, Movement To Erase Campus Ties to Slavery Heats Up By Thom Nickels

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-upenn-movement-to-erase-campus-ties-to-slavery-heats-up/

New information about its 18th Century trustees sparks activism.

The University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia is a long and spiraling network of old buildings, crosswalks, and pedestrian bridges linking the Penn Library (where one may examine the papers of essayist Agnes Repplier) and the Kelly Writers House (where Susan Sontag once described the public reaction to her New Yorker essay on the September 11th attack in New York City). In the 1970s, the Penn campus was a major hangout of Ira Einhorn, founder of Earth Day and touted as a Philadelphia notable by city politicians until he was arrested for murdering and stuffing the body of his girlfriend, Holly Maddux, inside a trunk in his Powelton Village apartment.

Outwardly, the Penn campus is a pretty quiet place, although in 2017 the student newspaper, The Daily Pennsylvanian, reported that neo-Nazi posters were appearing on campus with messages like “Stop the blacks,” and “join your local Nazis.” While Penn has a policy that “no poster shall be prohibited or restricted solely on basis of content,” enough students were riled up to attract the attention of local media. Although the offending posters mysteriously disappeared shortly after their discovery, student activists covered the “LOVE” sculpture near City Hall with hundreds of anti-Nazi posters warning “We are ready to resist.”

But resist what? Neo-Nazi sympathizers in the City of Philadelphia are about as numerous as sub-groups of transgender Mennonites. If there are any neo-Nazis here, they are quiet basement dwellers who rarely make public appearances. The zero-to-none neo-Nazi activity in Philadelphia suggests that the “Nazi” posters were put up by leftists so that they would have something to protest against. False flag operations are common on the Left, since it is the Left that pushes for fascist, totalitarian interdiction of freedom of speech.

The Left, of course, also likes to espouse its calumny anonymously, because it is not interested in freedom or justice but rather seeks to control lives by government-enforced restrictions on freedom.

UK Newspaper Whitewashes Religious Affiliation of Rotherham Muslim Grooming Gang By Megan Fox

https://pjmedia.com/trending/uk-newspaper-whitewashes-religious-affiliation-of-rotherham-muslim-grooming-gang/

Goodbye Europe, hello, brave new caliphate!

Everyone knows that the infamous Rotherham grooming gang — that terrorized, raped, and abused children while authorities looked the other way — was made up almost exclusively of Muslim men. Everyone knows it, but not everyone will report it. The UK Independent published an article on Tuesday by Lizzie Dearden with the headline: “Home Office had information on Rotherham grooming gangs in 2002 but failed to act.” The article does not mention the words “Muslim” or “Islam,” nor does it mention the ethnicity of the perpetrators even once. Instead, they chose to name only the lone white guy convicted in the scandal:

Five men have so far been convicted over the excuse and the National Crime Agency expects the total to rise after the completion of several further trials due to start this year, and more than 20 ongoing investigations. The most recent abuser jailed was 42-year-old Tony Chapman, who was imprisoned for 25 years in May for raping two girls and indecently assaulting another.

Who were the others? According to Wikipedia, they were:

Sajid Ali

Zaheer Iqbal

Riaz Makhmood

Asghar Bostan

Why did the Independent leave them out? Could they be trying to hide what everyone already knows but no one in the UK wants to admit? The entire reason these children were abused for so long without authorities doing anything about it was out of fear of being called racist if they went after Muslim men. The Independent admits that — without saying the men were Muslim, of course:

A report by Alexis Jay exposed “blatant” failures by police and the Labour-run local council, where officials feared racism accusations at the time.

Dems’ Big Lie About Kavanaugh By Betsy McCaughey

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/07/18/dems_big_lie_about_kavanaugh_137554.html

Democrats are so desperate to torpedo Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court that they’re resorting to scare tactics, telling Americans that his confirmation would put 130 million people at risk of losing their health insurance.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says Democrats can sink Kavanaugh by showing how his appointment will lead to a court majority that “repeals ACA with its protections for pre-existing conditions.” It’s demagoguery. And it’s working, as demagoguery too often does.

Senator Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a frequent Trump opponent, is already moaning that the SCOTUS appointment will determine if “West Virginians with pre-existing conditions will lose their health care.”

Not true. Even if the Supreme Court does strike down the Affordable Care Act someday, the era of insurance companies turning down applicants with health problems is over. Across the country, Republican and Democratic state lawmakers agree on that. They are busy devising smarter ways to protect people with pre-existing conditions and keep insurance affordable, with or without Obamacare. Not one of these plans throws people with health problems under the bus. Democrats’ rhetoric about losing coverage for pre-existing conditions is hysteria.

Even so, Democratic fearmongers have a shot at derailing Kavanaugh; they only need one Republican defection. With Senator John McCain, R-Ariz., absent due to brain cancer, Republicans have a razor-thin 50-49 Senate majority.

Yes, the Wars over Campus Politics Matter By Christian Alejandro Gonzalez

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/07/war-over-campus-politics-matters/What happens in the academy rarely stays there.

Universities have become key battlegrounds in the American culture wars. Conservatives rail against “leftist monoculture” in academia, liberals decry the conservative “obsession” with college campuses, and the air is quickly filled with the heat of mutual recriminations.

Amid the crossfire, some liberal commentators have offered moderate and well-reasoned interpretations of academia’s troubles. They point out that although university faculties do lean overwhelmingly to the left, it’s quite rare for students to be “successfully” indoctrinated by their progressive professors. Others note that there already exists a certain degree of viewpoint diversity in some areas of academia, given the prevalence of right-leaning professors in, for example, economics and law departments. There’s some truth to such arguments, though I would maintain that many college environments are indeed stifling intellectual freedom. (A personal example: When I wrote an essay for my college paper defending the Western literary canon, I was promptly accused in print of having been “indoctrinated by white supremacy.” Needless to say, nobody enjoys being accused of such things.)

But another common view among many liberals holds that even if academia has an ideological-homogeneity problem, it is artificially amplified by the right-wing media’s addiction to covering the excesses of leftist university culture. Sure, this argument goes, safe spaces, trigger warnings, and hysterical breakdowns over Halloween costumes can be annoying, but they do not merit the relentless stream of conservative op-eds, Fox News segments, and right-wing-news stories condemning “liberal snowflakes” and “radical professors.” The social-justice mobs might be scary, but their influence is confined to a tiny sector of society: universities, and elite universities at that.

Boris Johnson Declares ‘It’s Not Too Late to Save Brexit’ in Blistering Resignation Speech By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/boris-johnson-declares-not-too-late-to-save-brexit/

In a resignation speech Wednesday, MP Boris Johnson castigated Prime Minister Theresa May for failing to uphold the British electorate’s vision of Brexit in negotiations with the European Union, insisting that it’s “not too late” to negotiate a return to complete British sovereignty.

Johnson began the speech by praising May’s initial vision for Brexit, laid out in a speech she delivered last year at Lancaster House, but quickly pivoted, accusing her of allowing a “fog of self-doubt” to compromise Britain’s position in talks with the E.U.

“Even though our EU friends and partners liked the Lancaster House vision — it was what they were expecting from an ambitious partner — we never actually went to Brussels and turned it into a negotiating offer,” Johnson said before the House of Commons.

The former foreign secretary and Mayor of London went on to detail the specific sacrifices he believed May had made thus far in negotiations, emphasizing Britain’s lack of autonomy to negotiate its own trade deals under the agreement she has proposed.

Germany’s Dysfunctional Deportation System by Soeren Kern

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12723/germany-deportation-system

Aidoudi’s asylum request was rejected in 2007 after allegations surfaced that he had undergone military training at an al-Qaeda jihadi camp in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2000. During his training, he had allegedly worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin-Laden.

The government in North Rhine-Westphalia confirmed that for years Aidoudi had been receiving €1,168 ($1,400) each month in welfare and child support payments.

“Salafists such as Sami A. have no business in Germany and should be deported. Germany should not be a retirement retreat for jihadists.” — Alexander Dobrindt, Member of the German Bundestag.

A court in Gelsenkirchen has ruled that deporting a self-declared Islamist — suspected of being a bodyguard of the former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden — was “grossly unlawful” and ordered him returned to Germany.

The case has cast a spotlight on the dysfunctional nature of Germany’s deportation system, as well as on Germany’s politicized judicial system, which on human rights grounds is making it nearly impossible to expel illegal migrants, including those who pose security threats.

The 42-year-old failed asylum seeker from Tunisia — identified by German authorities as Sami A., but known in his native country as Sami Aidoudi — had been living in Germany since 1997. Aidoudi, a Salafist Islamist, is believed by German authorities to have spent time in Afghanistan and Pakistan before the al-Qaeda attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. Since then, he was under surveillance by German intelligence for propagating Islamist teachings and attempting to radicalize young Muslims. He had “far reaching” relationships with Salafist and jihadist networks, according to an official report leaked to the German newsmagazine, Focus.

Aidoudi’s asylum request was rejected in 2007 after allegations surfaced that he had undergone military training at an al-Qaeda jihadi camp in Afghanistan between 1999 and 2000. During his training, he had allegedly worked as a bodyguard for Osama bin-Laden. Aidoudi denied the charges and claimed to have been studying during that time in Karachi, Pakistan.

Despite rejecting Aidoudi’s asylum application, German courts repeatedly blocked his deportation out of fears that he could be tortured or mistreated in his homeland.

How the World Really Views Israel by Shoshana Bryen

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12717/israel-iroquois

The nations of the world want to know what Israel knows and have what Israel has — whether they have formal diplomatic relations with Jerusalem or not.

Israel’s expansive sharing of water, solar and agricultural technology is legendary, as is Israel’s emergency rapid response team. But military cooperation underpins freedom of navigation in the air and on the seas — the source of international prosperity through trade — and secures people in their borders. Security makes everything else possible.

Israel and the Iroquois Nation came together this week — In Israel — at the Lacrosse World Championship. The Iroquois Nation team was subjected to enormous pressure to boycott, but they steadfastly refused to be swayed. The Iroquois, who invented Lacrosse in about 1100 CE, know a thing or two about indigenous peoples reclaiming their land. And they know a thing or two about Israel. Bravo to them.

There are those who insist that Israel is “isolated,” that it lacks friends and allies. Israel’s place in the larger world, however — except, perhaps, in the halls of the UN — is expanding, not only with the Iroquois Nation, but with the nations of the world that want to know what Israel knows and have what Israel has, whether they have formal diplomatic relations with Jerusalem or not.

Israel’s expansive sharing of water, solar and agricultural technology is legendary, as is Israel’s emergency rapid response team. But military cooperation underpins freedom of navigation in the air and on the seas – the source of international prosperity through trade – and secures people in their borders. Security makes everything else possible, and Israel is in the center of the universe of security cooperation.

Late last year, Israel hosted the largest aerial training exercise in its history – Blue Flag in the Negev Desert. There were 70 aircraft from around the world, hundreds of pilots, and air-support team members. Participants included the United States, France, Italy, Greece, Poland, Germany and India. It was the first time French, German and Indian contingents trained in Israel.