RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/05/foggy-bottom-has-the-sadz-and-thats-a-very-good-thing/

The real “crisis” for former State Department bureaucrats and their colleagues who have been recycled back to the Ivy League campuses from whence they came is not that Trump poses an existential threat to national security—it’s that he poses a legitimate threat to their professional sinecures.

As House Democrats invited Ivy League shrews to publicly grind their Trump-hating axe during Wednesday’s disastrous impeachment charade, President Trump returned home after confronting our allies again about their lagging financial support of NATO. The stale pact turns 70 this year and like too many Boomers these days, NATO is out of fresh ideas and still listening to worn tracks of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” while the rest of the world is listening to Drake.

Also like so many Boomers, NATO members have made financial promises they won’t keep, stacking up IOUs for someone else to pay and hoping no one notices. But Trump, a Boomer himself, is having none of it.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struggled to explain his country’s failure to fulfill the alliance’s agreement to earmark two percent of gross domestic product for defense spending—according to a NATO report, Canada only spent 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense in 2018: The United States spent nearly triple that amount. (While dismal, Canada’s expenditure last year is an improvement over 2014 when it only spent 1 percent.)

So Trump used a press conference to challenge Trudeau. “We’ll put Canada on a payment plan, I’m sure the prime minister would love that,” Trump jabbed when asked by a reporter about Canada’s reneging on their NATO pledge.

After Trump pressed for a percentage—Trudeau had to refer to an aide for the exact number—the Candians claimed they were at 1.4 percent. “They’ll get there. They know it’s important,” the president added.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dream-team-redux/

If Nadler had any sense, he would simply fold his tent and stop the damage he is doing to House candidates in 2020.

There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats’ supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the “dream team,” “all-stars,” and “hunter-killer” legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion — and they likewise proved a complete dud.

There were a number of errors that reminded us why Pelosi had originally outsourced the impeachment gambit to the duplicitous but cunning Schiff rather than to the bumbling and clueless Nadler and his Judiciary Committee, who has now all but blown up his inquiry in just its initial hours.

1) By stacking the witnesses 3–1 and ignoring Jonathan Turley, the Democrats only hyped the writ against them that they are biased and unfair. Worse still, the Republicans’ witness Turley, former Bush administration critic who had voted against Trump, came across as the far more disinterested. Could not the Democrats have found one pro-Trump professor who had soured on him and now favored impeachment? Does the self-described “snarky” Karlan have any common sense at all — or even an associate with common sense who might have warned her that her canned, preplanned smear of Barron Trump was not just boorish, but a public relations disaster?

2) We are reminded that, outside small captive audiences on campus, academics are not very good public speakers and usually argue on the basis of presumed authority rather than facts and analysis. The three partisans came across as nasal, whiney, emotional, biased, and self-referential — and their past anti-Trump tweets, and partisan careers, clips, and interviews only confirmed the current stereotypes. On Ukraine, they said the same old, same old thing in mostly the same old ways.

And the three came off like those talking academic heads in documentaries, who sometimes wish to make the most of their 2 minutes of fame by turning up the volume and animation. Turley, in contrast, is a cool veteran of televised news analysis. His op-eds are sober and judicious. And he is a skilled public debater, who knows how to keep calm and analytical. He quickly eviscerated the three with apologetic ease — and deferential smiles. So whose bright idea was it to allow three partisan mediocrities to gang up against Turley, whose  rapier thrusts are well known? Americans love underdog odds, but Turley didn’t even break a sweat in leaving gaping holes in almost every argument advanced by the experts and House panel. He may have given the best solo congressional witness performance in modern memory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-hearings-presidential-misconduct-historical-perspective/

If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.

This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.

But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.

Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.

Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.

Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.