Displaying posts published in

December 2018

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

What was the real point of the Mueller investigation? Since the beginning, it’s been an investigation in search of a crime rather than an investigation of a suspected crime Roger Kimball

By on December 6th, 2018

https://spectator.us/special-counsel-robert-s-mueller-iii/

Will wonders never cease? Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III is recommending that General Mike Flynn serve no jail time. Isn’t that nice of him? Of course, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III first destroyed Mike Flynn’s career and essentially pauperized him through legal fees (‘the process,’ as they say, ‘is the punishment’).

In making his recommendation, Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III cited Gen. Flynn’s ‘substantial assistance’ in the long-running soap opera that is his campaign against the president of the United States. The centerpiece of that ‘special assistance’ are the 19 interviews with the Office of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III for which Gen. Flynn sat.

But what was the original sin here? Why was Gen. Flynn targeted in the first place?

The real answer is twofold. First, former President Obama and his national security team had a special dislike for Mike Flynn. He put America first. He was not one of them. Second, Gen. Flynn, as Donald Trump’s national security adviser, was a convenient proxy for the President. Damaging Flynn would damage the President. Damaging Flynn would also send a message to other people thinking about joining the President’s team. Flynn was forced from his office just weeks after Donald Trump was inaugurated. The atmosphere in Washington was acrid with shock bordering on panic. The impossible had just happened. Donald Trump had been elected. But would anyone who was anyone actually work for the administration? Destroying so emblematic a figure as Gen. Flynn, a conspicuous patriot, would also send a message to others contemplating joining the administration: Here Be Monsters, though as it turned out the monsters were not in the President’s entourage but rather in the office of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the media industrial complex.

Those are the real reasons Gen. Flynn was targeted. The supposed answer, however, was that he lied to the FBI about a phone call he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak before Trump’s inauguration. Problem: the two FBI agents who interviewed him did not think he was lying. But Flynn pleaded guilty to just that. Why? Again, it’s the process-being-the-punishment issue. The heavy hand of Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller III had essentially bankrupted Flynn with legal fees and here was the DOJ dangling the possibility of prosecuting him for violating the Logan Act, a never-enforced 18th-century law that criminalizes negotiations between unauthorized persons and a foreign government. As Byron York noted earlier this year, to many observers, ‘it appears the Justice Department used a never-enforced law and a convoluted theory as a pretext to question Flynn — and then, when FBI questioners came away believing Flynn had not lied to them, forged ahead with a false-statements prosecution anyway.’ That’s about the size of it. Which is why, as York concluded, ‘the Flynn matter is at the very heart of the Trump-Russia affair, and there is still a lot to learn about it.’

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

What Mazie Knew: Democrats are Just too Darn Smart David Catron

By on December 6th, 2018

https://spectator.org/democrats-are-just-too-darned-smart/
Their agenda is beyond the ken of mere voters.

At the dawn of the information age, when dumb terminals began appearing on desks and the din of dot matrix printers deafened all and sundry, every enterprise of consequence employed a misanthrope charged with the care and feeding of these machines. Occasionally, this reclusive individual reluctantly submitted to questions about the output of the equipment. His response to such impertinent queries usually consisted of word salads heavily seasoned with jargon and topped off with a surly suggestion that it was just too complicated to explain to mere users. This is eerily similar to the way Democrats relate to the voters.

The latest example can be found in a conversation between Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Democrat Senator Mazie Hirono. The latter, you will recall, is the Senator from Hawaii who commanded men in general to “shut up” when many of us had the temerity to question the outrageous smear tactics that she and the other Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee deployed in their disastrous attempt to derail the Senate’s confirmation of now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Lithwick asked the Senator, “What is the thing the Democrats need to be saying about why the courts matter? Hirono responded to this as follows:

I wish I had the answer to that because one of the things that we, Democrats, have a really hard time is connecting to people’s hearts.… But we have a really hard time doing that and one of the reasons it was told to me at one of our retreats was that we Democrats know so much, that is true. And we have kind of have to tell everyone how smart we are and so we have a tendency to be very left brain.… That is not how people make decisions.

Before we get to the stunning hubris of that answer, consider the patronizing premise of the question. Lithwick assumes the electorate’s failure to rise up and demand that the Senate stop carrying out its constitutional function with regard to presidential appointments to the Supreme Court is due to its inability to “understand” why the courts matter. It has obviously never occurred to her that the voters actually have quite a firm grasp on the importance of the judiciary and that this is exactly why they want President Trump and a GOP-controlled Senate to determine which jurists will plant their posteriors on the federal bench.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Tunnel vision and UNIFIL by Ruthie Blum

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.jns.org/opinion/tunnel-vision-and-unifil/
UNIFIL has done nothing since the 2006 war but sit back and relax while Hezbollah proceeded to rebuild its massive and increasingly sophisticated arsenal, courtesy of Iran, aimed at wiping Israel off the map.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu phoned U.N. Secretary General António Guterres on Wednesday and demanded that he and the rest of the international community condemn the Iran-backed, Shi’ite terrorist organization Hezbollah for constructing cross-border attack tunnels from Lebanon into Israel.

A day earlier, the Israel Defense Forces had launched “Operation Northern Shield” to locate and destroy a network of tunnels aimed at providing Hezbollah terrorists with a quick and easy way to infiltrate Israel, and potentially kidnap and kill innocent people. The tunnels are part of Hezbollah’s “Conquest of the Galilee” plan, to be implemented at the start of its next war against Israel.

No surprise there.

Like its patrons in Tehran, Hezbollah has been open about its mission to annihilate the “Zionist enemy.” As recently as last week, in fact, Iran’s terrorist proxy released a video of satellite images pointing to coordinates in central Israel, with the accompanying general threat: “Attack and you will regret it.”

A 2015 report in the pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper As-Safir was more specific, as it included quotes from Hezbollah members discussing the group’s cross-border tunnels. That Israeli officials neither verified nor denied the report was to be expected. Security considerations and anti-terrorism strategies are often at the root of silence on the part of Israel’s defense establishment.

Today, however, the IDF says that “Operation Northern Shield” has been in the works for a “number of years.” It also claims to have been aware of Hezbollah’s tunnel-building since 2006, after the end of the Second Lebanon War.

Continue reading →
NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Perpetual Presidency By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/obama-takes-credit-for-trump-economy/

Obama believes that all of Trump’s successes are due to Obama, and all of Trump’s setbacks are his own.

Former president Barack Obama recently continued his series of public broadsides against his successor, President Donald Trump.

Obama’s charges are paradoxical. On one hand, Obama seems to believe that he, rather than Trump, should be credited with the current economic boom and the emergence of the United States as the world’s largest energy producer. But Obama also has charged that Trump’s policies are pernicious and failing.

Apparently, Obama believes that all of Trump’s successes are due to Obama, and all of Trump’s setbacks are his own.

Obama certainly forgets the old rule: Presidents, fairly or not, get both credit and blame for everything that happens on their watch, from Day One to the last hour of their tenures — even when wars abroad, technological breakthroughs, natural disasters, and market collapses have nothing to do with their governance.

Trump ran on the promise of a “Make America Great Again” economic renaissance. He pledged massive deregulation, fair rather than free trade, and tax reform and reduction.

NOW WATCH: ‘Trump Wants Mexico To Send Migrants Home After Clash At Border’

Watch: 0:42
Trump Wants Mexico To Send Migrants Home After Clash At Border

Trump jawboned against outsourcing and offshoring, and praised rather than lectured private enterprise. He sought to reindustrialize the Midwest and promised to open new federal land to fossil-fuel production, complete proposed pipelines, and lift burdensome restrictions on fracking and horizontal drilling.

In contrast, Obama had argued that the U.S. could never drill itself out of oil shortages. He advocated making the use of coal so expensive that it would disappear as an American energy resource. Renewable energy sources such as wind and solar were Obama’s vision of an America energy future.

As late as last year, Larry Summers, director of the National Economic Council for two years during the Obama administration, ridiculed Trump’s boasts that he could achieve annualized GDP growth of 3 percent as the stuff of “tooth fairies and ludicrous supply-side economics.”

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Commonwealth Option By Jack Fowler

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/the-commonwealth-option/

With the Brexit issue coming to a head next week when Parliament formally considers PM Theresa May’s Draft Withdrawal Agreement, a number of leading British conservatives and allies — including former NR director Robert Agostinelli and acclaimed historian Andrew Roberts — penned a letter, a version of which was published by the Telegraph, calling for MPs to vote against the agreement (“put it out of its misery”) and instead support a “Super Canada” option. The complete and original version of the letter follows:

The Prime Minister’s proposed Brexit deal has been discussed in detail, and to describe it would replicate the excellent work of many journalists. However, we feel that it has broad and historical implications for the UK’s future relationship with the World, especially our traditional allies in the Commonwealth (and Anglosphere)

Britain is facing a stark choice between two paths.

One path leads to stasis, where the expressed will of the people is delayed indefinitely, and the nation lacks the tools of statecraft necessary to forge a renewed partnership with Europe outside the political structures of the European Union, as well as to pursue new partnerships with our traditional and cultural allies and the world beyond.

Another path leads to a mutually respectful accord with Europe, respect for the democratic process as expressed on June 23, 2016, as well as the opportunity to help build the foundation of a new globalisation – one more resilient, equitable and responsive than its predecessor.

Continue reading →
ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians: No Difference Between Hamas and Fatah by Khaled Abu Toameh

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13391/palestinians-hamas-fatah-difference

It is supposedly fine for Mahmoud Abbas and his officials to condemn Hamas on a daily basis. It is supposedly not fine, however, for the US administration to condemn Hamas for its terrorist attacks against Israel.

“The proposed [unseen] US resolution is harmful to the Palestinians’ right of resistance.” — Emad Omar, Palestinian political analyst.

This is obviously a short-lived honeymoon that will end the day after the UN General Assembly vote on the anti-Hamas resolution. The morning after the vote, Abbas will wake up to the realization that Hamas was a strange bedfellow indeed.

Has Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas changed his position toward his rivals in Hamas? This is the question that some Palestinians have been asking in the wake of Abbas’s opposition to a US-sponsored draft resolution that asks the United Nations General Assembly to condemn Hamas for repeatedly firing rockets at Israel and instigating violence.

Abbas’s hatred of Hamas is far from secret. For years – and until today – Abbas has used every available platform to launch scathing attacks on Hamas.

He accused Hamas of foiling Arab efforts to end the dispute with his ruling Fatah faction.

He accused Hamas of masterminding a series of explosions targeting the homes of some of his senior Fatah officials in the Gaza Strip.

He accused Hamas of staging a coup in 2007 against his Palestinian Authority (PA) in the Gaza Strip and seeking to establish a separate Palestinian there.

He accused Hamas of standing behind the botched assassination attempt on his prime minister, Rami Hamdallah, in the Gaza Strip earlier this year. He even made a metaphoric remark that, “shoes will be pouring on the heads of Hamas leaders.”

In his last speech at the UN General Assembly, Abbas repeated his charges against Hamas and threatened to impose new punitive measures against the Gaza Strip unless Hamas allows his government to assume full control over the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave.

Continue reading →
MEDIA, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Why the Press Pays Less Attention to the Murder of Journalists Not Named Khashoggi by Peter Baum

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13375/journalists-murder

Ironically, the same members of the media who have been obsessed with Khashoggi and the Saudi-US alliance have devoted little space to the reality that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has been imprisoning, torturing and killing journalists for years.

The ongoing story of Khashoggi’s murder at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, more than being a function of concern for the Saudi journalist, was less important to Western journalists than attacking the Trump administration.

While the October 2 murder of the Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi, continues to be discussed across the world, the November 23 assassination of a Syrian journalist, Raed Fares, and his devoted friend and cameraman, Hammoud al-Jneid, gunned down in Fares’s home village of Kafrandel, Syria.

This neglect is noteworthy: Fares was among the most prominent critics of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s brutal regime. According to CBS News:

In 2013, Fares posted a satirical YouTube video depicting cave men repeatedly killed by the men representing the Syrian government as men wearing American and European Union flags idly sit by. “This is how the international community reacted to the genocide committed by Assad against the Syrian people,” Fares wrote.

Fares was also a key voice in the “Arab Spring,” and he daily challenged Assad as well as terrorist organizations operating in Syria, such as the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah. According to The New Yorker:

Three years before his assassination, to the day, Fares posted a photo on Facebook of a protest banner lampooning the fact that other countries were fighting proxy wars in Syria: “BLACK FRIDAY SPECIAL OFFER, WHOEVER WHEREVER YOU ARE, BRING YOUR ENEMY AND COME FIGHT IN SYRIA FOR FREE (FREE LAND & SKY) LIMITED TIME OFFER.”

“In the absence of peaceful, democratic political voices,” Fares noted in an op-ed for The Washington Post, “terrorists have been able to convince Syria’s vulnerable youth that violence and destruction can somehow pave the way to stability.” One can view his talk to the Oslo Freedom Forum here. In an interview with NPR, Fares said:

“… Jabhat al-Nusra tried to bomb my car. And I was in it, but I survived. And December, 2014, Jabhat al-Nusra, they kidnapped me from their checkpoint, and three days in their jail. They hanged me to the ceiling for six hours. But an activist in Istanbul, he came and talked to them and convinced them to release me. And earlier this year, they attacked my Radio Fresh station and attacked the Women’s Center, which belongs to us.”

Continue reading →
BOOKS Comments turned off

PRAISE FOR THE MAGNIFICENT REBECCA WEST (1892-1983) BY PETER BAEHR

By on December 6th, 2018

https://quillette.com/2018/12/03/the-unsafe-feminist-rebecca-
The Unsafe Feminist: Rebecca West and the ‘Bitter Rapture’ of Truth

In an era when indulgent university administrators and professors treat students like spoiled children, one longs for intellectuals who address their audience as adults. The British novelist, biographer, literary critic, travel writer and political commentator Rebecca West (1892-1983) is the tonic we need. Like other great authors of the 20th century—including George Orwell and Doris Lessing—West never received a university education. That may help explain her intellectual non-conformism and free-wheeling spirit.

West brushed against orthodoxy like barbed wire against chiffon. She was a suffragist who rejected pacifism in the First World War (and the Second); a leftist who fought communism; an internationalist who spoke up for small nations; an individualist who valued authority and tradition. West never crouched in one position. She was unflinchingly realistic. Human conflict, she said, is inescapable. It is as much a feature of art as it is of states. Eros, too, creates antagonism, for sex is dangerous. Yet human co-operation is ubiquitous. Women and men need each other, and can and do love each other. A feminism that treats women as if they were vulnerable children, and that blames a man for a woman’s own irresponsibility, was seen by West as absurd. Needless to say, her attitude to life is as far from the nursery-school feminism of today’s university—smothering, alarmist, bureaucratic—as it is possible to be.

Freedom carries obligations, West believed—the first of which is to grow up. “I believe in liberty,” she declared in a 1952 credo, particularly the liberty of a person to “be able to say and do what he wishes and what is within his power.” Because every individual is unique, each person “must know some things which are known to nobody else.” The transmission of such knowledge, which “could not be learned from any other source,” requires a space in which people are able to speak their minds.

The contrast between a state of innocence and a mature comprehension of life’s intractable demands (the “hard task of being adult,” as she put it in her 1931 book Ending in Earnest) is central to Rebecca West’s philosophy. We do not expect children to be active in politics; we protect children from politics. Nor do we consider adults who behave like children to be competent human agents. Maturity is the sine qua non of liberty because a pluralist society, unlike an authoritarian one, requires actors of independent mind who can draw a distinction between their civic responsibilities and private sentiments, who are sufficiently restrained to care for the world even as they pursue their own pleasures, and who are willing to take on onerous public burdens. Like great art, the liberal pursuit of freedom demands intelligence and discernment—a readiness “to test the veracity” of fantasies that all of us harbor to some degree and to evaluate “their importance in the light of the intellect.”

Maturity is evidenced, in short, where individuals embrace the “bitter rapture which attends the discovery of any truth,” and where they would rather be disconsolate in “communion with reality” than comforted by orthodoxy. West’s thesis is reminiscent of German social scientist Max Weber’s belief that a politics of responsibility requires “realistic passion.” What marks a mature person (ein reifer Mensch), Weber wrote in Politics as a Vocation (1919), is an attitude of principled realism enabling one to bear the perversity of the world without succumbing to cynicism.

Continue reading →
POLITICS Comments turned off

Talking Millennials Out of Socialism Can a generation marked by privilege and arrogance be reasoned with? Bruce Thornton

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272124/talking-millennials-out-socialism-bruce-thornton

Writing last week about the new affection for socialism on the part of Millellenials, electoral maven Karl Rove warned us not to ignore or dismiss this enthusiasm. Socialism’s long record of failure “doesn’t mean new forms of socialism can’t gain a following.” Rove’s solution is for Republicans to “do the hard work of updating old arguments,” and “hone their arguments” against socialist policies in preparation for the 2020 presidential race.

Welcome to 2500 years of dubious thinking about the power of rational persuasion and coherent argument to talk people out of bad ideas. It didn’t save Socrates from the hemlock, and it’s unlikely to change the minds of the worst-educated, most self-centered, and most pampered cohort in American history.

This stubborn belief in the power of rational thought and knowledge to improve human life lies at the heart of modern political ideologies like Marxism and progressivism. Both assume that the knowledge useful for politically organizing a state or society is “scientific,” comprising principles and techniques that are beyond ideology and universally true. Hence the need for enlightened technocratic elites to control social institutions and use power in order to rationally arrange human existence more justly and efficiently.

The flaw in this thinking was first identified by contemporaries of Plato, whose Republic imagined a utopia of elite Guardians educated to exercise totalitarian control over society. And the earliest critics of Plato’s flawed assumptions about human nature were likewise Greek writers such as Thucydides and Sophocles. Both argued that a human nature universally subject to irrational passions, free will, and a tragic world would always to some degree triumph over the rational mind.

Yet despite the subsequent millennia in which history has demonstrated that the road to utopia is lined with mountains of corpses, the dream of creating heaven on earth by applying rational techniques of control and improvement over human beings has not lost its allure. In modern times, the decline of faith and the belief in a transcendent reality has made us even more vulnerable to political religions, those delusional visions of human power and will alone able to eliminate the tragic limits of earthly life, such as inequality, suffering, injustice, and violence.

Continue reading →
WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Justin Trudeau’s Canada Embraces a World Without Borders By Salim Mansur

By on December 6th, 2018

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/justin_trudeaus_canada_embraces_a_world_without_borders.html

The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to sign the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration at an intergovernmental meeting in Marrakech, Morocco, on December 10, 2018.

Few Canadians are aware of what this UN Global Compact represents; even fewer have been consulted, and without any mandate except for a parliamentary majority, Justin Trudeau is committed in signing Canada into an agreement with far-reaching consequences — not only for Canadians. Canada agreeing to abide by the agreement will also have consequences for Americans, as among migrants entering Canada might well be those intending to sneak into the United States across the world’s longest open border.

The UN Global Compact spells out, in 34 pages of fine print, requirements for member-states to adopt as policy accommodating unfettered mass migration from the global South to the North.

Human migration is as old as human history. But in modern times, especially in the period following the end of the Second World War, resulting in massive dislocation of the European population, settlement of migrants was arranged and conducted by national governments with support of their citizens. The Global Compact, instead, is a UN top-down arrangement to deal with the migration problem turned into the most disruptive global crisis in recent years. This time, the crisis is the result of the massive failure of UN-engineered policies of socio-economic development of post-colonial societies in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America.

What we have witnessed since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the end of the Cold War in 1992, is a spike in wars, genocide, failed states, and terrorism. These have cumulatively resulted in mass migration as an escape from the collective failure of people in those countries to build and administer an orderly society, despite trillions of aid dollars provided by countries of the North, directly or through the UN agencies.

And despite this record of the failure of UN-driven development policies, the UN remains insistent on demanding more of the same in its 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Global Compact is a critical part of this agenda, based on the notion that “Migration contributes to positive development outcomes.”

There is little or no evidence of migration from the global South providing for positive development in the developing countries of that global South. Instead, the Global Compact turns migration into a human rights issue and confers “rights” on migrants that are the same as those of the citizens of the host countries, “rights” those governments are obliged to “respect, protect and fulfil.”

Continue reading →