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September 2019

Voting against Israeli electoral apathy We Israelis are used to having our tax shekels spent on futile, top-down endeavors born of nanny-state committee meetings held to interpret and tackle societal phenomena. No wonder there’s a sense that voting won’t change anything. Ruthie Blum

https://www.jns.org/opinion/voting-against-israeli-electoral-apathy/

An informal man-in-the-street survey broadcast on Monday evening on Israel’s Channel 12 revealed what everybody has been predicting: that voter turnout for the Sept. 17 Knesset elections is going to be low.

Israelis have been claiming for months that they “have nobody to vote for,” so the item wasn’t all that surprising. What was astonishing about it, however, was that—with a mere two weeks to go before the public heads to the polls to determine the makeup of the next government—not a single person interviewed in the short clip could remember when the elections are actually taking place. It is a level of apathy rarely seen in Israel—a country filled with news junkies and busybodies.

One might argue that such a small, on-the-fly sampling constitutes flimsy anecdotal evidence. It turns out, however, that research conducted by the Central Elections Committee backs it up with more reliable statistics. These indicate that voter turnout will be even less than the 68.46 percent that it was on April 9, the election that ended in a coalition impasse.

This is not the lowest Israeli voter turnout, by any means. The only election that has seen a higher turnout since 1999, when it was 78.7 percent, was in 2015, when it reached 72.36 percent. In 2003, it was 67.8 percent; in 2006, it was 63.5 percent; in 2009, it was 64.7 percent; and in 2013, it was 67.8 percent.

TRUMP ‘FREED’ DOJ FROM ‘SELF-RIGHTEOUS CRUSADER’ JAMES COMEY: JOHN YOO

Former Assistant Attorney General John Yoo says that President Trump has freed the DOJ from the “Self Righteous Crusader” James Comey.

He made the comment when he appeared on the Ingraham Hour with Laura Ingraham.

A fellow guest, Elie Honig tried to spin the report to say that the report does not exonerate Trump or necessarily mean Comey did anything wrong.

He must have dyslexia.

Because that’s exactly what the report does.

Yoo made the case that the report freed the DOJ from the ethically challenged James Comey.

Here is a partial transcript from the program:

LAURA INGRAHAM: I want to begin with this from CNN’s legal analyst Elie Honig.

ELIE HONIG: What I think we should not lose sight of is none of [the DOJ’s inspector general report] is any sort of vindication for Donald Trump. It doesn’t change anything about what Comey was writing about in those memos, which was Donald Trump demanding loyalty of him and Donald Trump trying to get him to shut down the Flynn investigation. Those, I believe, are obstructive acts and today’s findings on Comey have nothing to do with clearing Trump of that.

INGRAHAM: John, how did he turn the IG report, which slammed Comey, short of charging him or recommend charging him. and turn it into, “well, Trump’s not vindicated?”

JOHN YOO: I’m sad to say that after reading the IG report, Trump didn’t obstruct justice, he freed it. Trump freed the Justice Department of a man, a self-righteous crusader, who rejected the results of our constitutional system and democracy — that was President Trump won the 2016 election – and then he decided the basic rules of the Justice Department didn’t apply to him in his crusade to stop President Trump.

We don’t as Justice Department prosecutors or FBI agents willingly share the results of confidential investigations to the New York Times or the press to attack people we don’t like. We keep those things confidential in order to pursue successful investigations.

Socialist Scenario May Pose Risk For Democrats By Ira Stoll see DPS note

DPS Note: 

Excellent analysis. But on a tactical level from where I sit. Whether it is Biden with a veneer of not-crazy-left, or flat out crazy left, the Democrat Party’s lurching leftward trajectory is as clear as clear can be. So whether a Democrat President’s agenda would be quickly or incrementally implemented shouldn’t provide high cover for you to vote that way if you kind of like and admire America the way it has evolved and has been since 1776. Scoop Jackson, Dan Inouye, Pat Moynihan, Joe Lieberman, where have you all gone? Heck. Jack Kennedy’d make a fine Republican candidate today. No matter how you slice the Democrat Party baloney, you’re gonna get a socialist sandwich. The only question is how much baloney (a/k/a socialism) will they pack into that first bite? Not saying there isn’t plenty to fix in our system. But the Democrat Party’s drivers don’t appear to think we are “fixable.” So I guess the question you gotta ask yourself (This is DPS3 plagerizing Dirty Harry) is, do you feel lucky? Because the “big structural change” promised by the Party’s animating forces are no different than Dirty Harry’s Smith & Wesson .44 Magnum. If you pull that trigger you may get a lot more than you bargained for.

PS: Here’s the real McCoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0lvp7a7pmk

https://www.nysun.com/national/socialist-scenario-may-pose-risk-for-the-democrats/90817/

Call it the socialist scenario — the risk that Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren could combine forces to defeat Joseph Biden in the Democratic primary.

The RealClearPolitics polling averages have Biden leading Sanders and Warren nationally and in the early-voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire. These same polls, though, show the “not Biden” vote represented by Senators Sanders and Warren to be larger than the level of support for Vice President Biden.

If that vote were combined rather than split, the socialist scenario suggests, it could result in a Democratic presidential nominee who is either openly socialist, like Senator Sanders, or an ideological ally of Mr. Sanders, like Mrs. Warren, who says she is a capitalist but who is campaigning with a call for an annual wealth tax and for what she calls “big, structural change.”

The possibility is generating concern from Americans who are more cautious about “big, structural change.” The concern is heightened because Mr. Biden is old enough that he can seem vulnerable rather than inevitable.

As is often the case with socialism, however, the fantasy is some distance from reality. The primary campaigns of the previous presidential cycle are familiar precedents and somewhat reassuring ones, at least for those who aren’t enthusiasts of either Mr. Sanders or Mrs. Warren.

Zarif’s Inexcusable Warm Welcome in Europe by Mina Bai

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14804/iran-zarif-welcome-europe

The behavior of European leaders towards Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif during his visit illustrates how frightened they are of the Iranian regime and how these non-stop moralists will seemingly do anything for money. Iran’s strong anti-Israel rhetoric apparently does not bother them, either.

Trade with Iran is crucial to many European countries. That is one possible explanation for the seeming doublespeak in which European leaders have been engaging since the establishment of the Islamic Republic 40 years ago — boasting among themselves and with the United States about setting a shining example of human rights, yet giving their Iranian counterparts a pass on this issue.

Those of us who sought refuge away from the brutality of the Iranian regime observe with sadness and horror these desperate attempts by many European leaders to please Tehran. Europeans should be viewing the situation with equal sadness and horror.

Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif made a surprise appearance at the Group of Seven (G7) Summit in Biarritz, France, which ended on August 26. Prior to his attendance at the gathering in France, he stopped in Sweden and Norway. Denmark was not part of his itinerary, of course, due to Copenhagen’s rocky relations with Tehran, over last year’s assassination attempt against an Iranian Sunni separatist on Danish soil.

The purpose of Zarif’s trip to Europe, apparently, was to discuss ways to ease tensions in the Persian Gulf and rescue the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — the nuclear deal with Iran from which US President Donald Trump withdrew in May 2018.

Zarif’s European tour spurred many human rights activists and Iranian opposition groups abroad to protest. Zarif, after all, represents a regime that is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading violators of human rights. Those in Iran who raise a voice against Tehran’s policies in any realm are often incarcerated: Among them are labor activists, lawyers and women’s rights activists, children’s rights activists, journalists, members of ethnic and religious minorities, environmental activists and even wildlife activists.

Days before Zarif’s trip, in fact, UN human rights experts called on the regime in Tehran to release three women recently sentenced to decades in prison for violating the law that women must wear the hijab.

The demonstrations in Europe were aimed both at Zarif and at European authorities for hosting him. In Stockholm on August 21, peaceful protesters outside the Swedish Parliament were so harassed and beaten by police that Reza Pahlavi — the Maryland-based heir to the throne of the former Iranian monarchy (his father’s ouster coincided with the 1979 Islamic revolution that ushered in the reign of the ayatollahs) — released the following statement:

China’s Organ Harvesting A gruesome violation against undisclosed victims. September 3, 2019 John Glynn

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274720/chinas-organ-harvesting-john-glynn

In June of this year, an independent tribunal based in London came to a chilling conclusion: detainees in China are being killed, their organs are being harvested and some victims find themselves falsely accused of committing crimes that never occurred.

The China Tribunal, chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, who was a prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, determined that:

forced organ harvesting has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale, [and] the tribunal has had no evidence that the significant infrastructure associated with China’s transplantation industry has been dismantled and absent a satisfactory explanation as to the source of readily available organs concludes that forced organ harvesting continues till today.

Before coming to their damning conclusion, the tribunal members spoke with medical experts and human rights investigators. According to the committee, thousands of people “have died indescribably hideous deaths for no reason.” The committee members warn “that more may suffer in similar ways and that all of us live on a planet where extreme wickedness may be found in the power of those, for the time being, running a country with one of the oldest civilizations known to modern man.”

Zinns of Omission Mary Grabar definitively discredits America’s top history textbook. Bruce Bawer

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274799/zinns-omission-bruce-bawer

Perhaps the nicest thing you can say about Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States is that it shows that even in the era of the Internet a book can continue to have an immense social impact. In Zinn’s case, however, that impact could hardly be more dangerous. Published in 1980, Zinn’s book has for some time been, as Mary Grabar notes in her definitive new study of it, Debunking Howard Zinn, both the bestselling trade history of America and the bestselling American history textbook. When Zinn wrote it, he intended it to provide a skeptical (shall we say) alternative to previous accounts of US history, which Zinn, hardcore America-hater that he was, saw as excessively pro-American. Today, Zinn’s book isn’t just an insidious alternative; it is the reigning book in the field, and its once alternative take on US history has become received wisdom on the establishment left. Not a few of the students who read the book years ago when they were college students, and who fell for Zinn’s take on US history hook, line, and sinker, are now teachers who are using the same book to indoctrinate their own charges.

Many of us have been aware for years of Zinn’s perfidious influence – and have fretted over it in print. But to read Grabar is to realize that the situation is even worse than many of us thought – and to learn things about Zinn that one didn’t know before. One of the things I learned from Grabar is that Matt Damon – who, in the 1997 movie Good Will Hunting (which he co-wrote and starred in) worked in a plug for Zinn’s book that gave it a major boost – grew up with Zinn as a neighbor and was sucked in by People’s History by the age of ten.

Inspector General’s Report Exposes Another ‘Collusion’ Myth Julie Kelly

amgreatness.com/2019/09/02/inspector-generals-report-exposes-another-collusion-myth/

The Michael Flynn “thing” President Trump discussed with James Comey in 2017 wasn’t Russian collusion. It was the bogus Logan Act claim.

It is the most damning memo in James Comey’s dossier on Donald Trump: An account of an alleged conversation between Comey and Trump about then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

According to Comey, during a private meeting in the Oval Office on February 14, 2017, President Trump asked the former FBI director to drop an inquiry into Flynn about his discussions with the Russian ambassador shortly after the election. (Flynn had resigned amid media reports he possibly violated an arcane federal law.)

“He misled the Vice President but he didn’t do anything wrong in the call,” Comey claimed Trump said to him. “[Trump] said, ‘I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go.”

According to Russian collusion truthers, those alleged comments form the most convincing evidence that Team Trump not only conspired with the Russians and tried to cover it up, but that the president broke the law by asking his FBI director to halt an investigation into one of his top advisors.

The memo is cited numerous times in the second volume of the Mueller report to implicate the president for obstructing justice by interfering in the Russian investigation, although Comey’s memo is the only evidence of such an act. (Trump has disputed Comey’s description of the conversation.)

Ever since the memo was leaked to the news media by a Comey pal more than two years ago, the American public has been warned how that brief discussion between Comey and Trump represented an egregious presidential power play: Trump, the story goes, was squeezing his top G-Man to stop looking into his campaign for conspiring with the Kremlin because everyone associated with Trump, we were told, was guilty.

The Rules of Geopolitics Are Different in Asia Indo-Pacific states care about great-power balance, not promoting democracy. By Walter Russell Mead

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-rules-of-geopolitics-are-different-in-asia-11567460320

Colombo, Sri Lanka

The drama in Washington sometimes makes this difficult to remember, but the most important foreign-policy development of the current presidential term isn’t the president’s tweets. It is the slow, inexorable shift in American strategy from the Atlantic and Mediterranean theaters of world politics to what U.S. diplomats and military officials call the “Indo-Pacific.” That shift, which the Obama administration called the “pivot to Asia,” isn’t the special property of Republicans or Democrats, of national-security hawks or doves.

Yet if Americans are increasingly united on the importance of the Indo-Pacific, we are very far from united on strategy there. This is partly because the executive branch is led by a president with unconventional views who is often at daggers drawn with the network of professionals and institutions that have shaped American foreign policy for many decades. But larger forces are at work than President Trump.

Never in human history have so many people and states faced such an avalanche of political and economic change as the Indo-Pacific faces today. If American policy makers find it challenging to understand and respond, they aren’t alone. The teams around Xi Jinping, Narendra Modi and Shinzo Abe are often similarly perplexed.

Socialism Is for the Incurious Human reality is drained of dignity and reduced to raw material for the schemes of utopian power. By Roger Kimball

https://www.wsj.com/articles/socialism-is-for-the-incurious-11567460002

I was struck by a news report this summer about Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont. It has long been known that he and his wife chose to spend their honeymoon in the Soviet Union. But it was news that he never availed himself of the opportunity to visit Alexander Solzhenitsyn when the great writer and moral witness was living as a refugee in Cavendish, Vt., between 1976 and his death in 2008.

Some comments about that story attribute Mr. Sanders’s negligence to ideology, as if he, being a fan of the Soviet Union, made a silent protest by ignoring the famous anti-Soviet figure in his midst. But I think the deeper reason for his neglect was a quality of the socialist or communist or revolutionary sensibility that is too little remarked. I mean its ingrained, indeed its programmatic, lack of curiosity about other people.

The philosopher Sir Roger Scruton, in a thoughtful anatomy of the French Revolution, is one of the few people to underscore this feature of the totalitarian habit of mind. “This absence of curiosity,” Mr. Scruton notes, “is a permanent characteristic of the revolutionary consciousness.”

An important reason for this lack of curiosity is the prominent role that abstractions play in the mental and moral metabolism of the totalitarian sensibility. This feature was articulated with some poignancy by Rousseau, who, at the end of his life, sadly observed: “I think I know man, but as for men, I know them not.”

Everyone Loses in Germany Voters in state elections effectively choose ‘none of the above.’

https://www.wsj.com/articles/everyone-loses-in-germany-11567445967

European elections these days are generally contests between a beleaguered mainstream and insurgent alternatives. Voters in two German states on Sunday chose a form of “none of the above” as the country stumbles out of the Angela Merkel era.

The biggest vote-getters were the main parties of the center. Mrs. Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) came out on top in Saxony, a state they’ve governed since 1990. The center-left Social Democrats (SPD), with whom Mrs. Merkel maintains an awkward coalition at the national level, are on track to maintain their long-time control in Brandenburg.

Yet both parties emerged with diminished support. The CDU’s share in Saxony fell to 32% from above 39% in 2014, while the SPD’s Brandenburg total dropped to 26% from 32%. The result raises new questions about Mrs. Merkel’s preferred successor to lead the CDU and the country, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who doesn’t excite voters anywhere. It also accentuates the crisis of confidence afflicting the leaderless SPD, which can’t decide whether its national coalition with Mrs. Merkel is hurting or helping its fortunes.

The alternatives also underperformed expectations. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party did increase its vote totals to 27.5% in Saxony and 23.5% in Brandenburg from 10% and 12% five years ago, respectively. But this is unlikely to be a harbinger of national success, even if the AfD is currently the largest opposition party in the national parliament.