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“Trump-Slayer” Ossoff Flames Out Handel keeps Tom Price’s seat in Georgia in GOP hands. Matthew Vadum

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/267063/trump-slayer-ossoff-flames-out-matthew-vadum

Republican Karen Handel easily beat back Democrat boy wonder Jon Ossoff in yesterday’s special election in Georgia’s 6th congressional district, touted as the most costly congressional race in American history.

Handel becomes the first female Republican elected to Congress from Georgia as Democrats’ effort to throw a wrench in President Trump’s already slow-moving legislative agenda fails rather spectacularly.

“Thanks to everyone who breathlessly and snarkily proclaimed #GA06 as a “referendum on POTUS @realDonaldTrump,” Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway tweeted. “You were right. #winning[.]”

President Trump tweeted his congratulations to Handel “on her big win in Georgia 6th. Fantastic job, we are all very proud of you!”

He added, “Well, the Special Elections are over and those that want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN are 5 and O! All the Fake News, all the money spent = 0[.]”

The defeat of 30-year-old Ossoff in suburban Atlanta was a crushing blow to Democrat hopes of taking back the longtime Republican seat and thereby giving the Trump Resistance movement a major psychological boost as the Russian electoral collusion conspiracy theory investigation against President Trump fails to gain any new traction. President Trump bested Hillary Clinton by only one percentage point in the district this past November, leading some pundits to describe Georgia-6 as an establishment Republican district.

Ossoff’s campaign spent $22.5 million, compared to Handel’s $3.2 million, according to reports. That is a ratio of 7 to 1 in favor of the Democrat. Despite not being a resident of his district, a fact Handel ably capitalized on, Ossoff took in almost nine times more donations from California than from Georgia. One media analysis indicated a mere 3.5 percent of Ossoff’s donations from late March to the end of May came from within the state. Celebrity endorsements from entertainers Samuel L. Jackson, Chelsea Handler, Alyssa Milano, and John Leguizamo couldn’t save Ossoff. Nor could donations from traitor Jane Fonda, and actors Sam Waterston, Kristen Bell, Connie Britton, Jessica Lange, Lynda Carter, Rhea Perlman, or Jon Cryer get Ossoff across the finish line.

Although it wasn’t the kind of double-digit blowout Republicans are accustomed to in a district that until a few months ago had been represented by Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, it still wasn’t even close.

Handel defeated Ossoff by about 52 percent to 48 percent in the runoff election. Ossoff’s percentage last night was roughly the same as the 48.12 percent he earned in the 18-way “jungle primary” contest on April 18, suggesting a huge money advantage and favorable saturation media coverage are not decisive factors in electoral politics in the Trump era.

Only the mainstream media treated the special election in the reliably Republican district as a hotly contested race that could go either way. In the end, it was all hype. The countless polls showing Ossoff ahead as Democrats struggled to turn the race into a kind of national referendum on President Trump were worthless, just like the polls that showed Hillary Clinton would defeat Trump last November.

After all, the 6th congressional district of Georgia has been Republican since Newt Gingrich took it in the 1978 election. The district garners a rating of R+8 on the Cook Partisan Voting Index, also called PVI. The PVI measures how strongly a district or state leans Republican or Democratic compared to the nation as a whole by comparing the district’s average Republican or Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in the preceding two presidential elections to the nation’s average share of the same. So R+8 means the district is 8 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole.

Despite their oft-repeated claim that the public is fed up with President Trump and strongly anti-GOP, Democrats haven’t succeeding in flipping any congressional seats in the five special elections held so far this year. Not even one. If there is a powerful undercurrent threatening to deprive Republicans of control of both chambers of Congress in the 2018 midterms it has yet to surface.

As expected, Jimmy Gomez (D) won the June 6 election in California’s 34th congressional district after Xavier Becerra (D) left to before the state’s attorney general. In the Kansas 4th, Ron Estes (R) won the April 11 election after Mike Pompeo (R) resigned to become CIA director. On May 25, Greg Gianforte (R) won Montana’s at-large seat after Ryan Zinke left to become secretary of the interior.

There was also a less closely observed special election yesterday in the 5th congressional district of South Carolina to fill the seat vacated by Republican Mick Mulvaney, who became director of the Office of Management and Budget in February.

Republican Ralph Norman received 51.1 percent of the vote there, defeating Democrat Archie Parnell who received 47.9 percent of the vote.

President Trump tweeted, “Ralph Norman ran a fantastic race to win in the Great State of South Carolina’s 5th District. We are all honored by your success tonight!”

The South Carolina race, like the race in Georgia, wasn’t much of a contest at all. The district was rated R+9 by the Cook Partisan Voting Index though it hasn’t been a GOP stronghold for as long as Georgia-6.

In 2010, Mulvaney defeated incumbent John Spratt, a Democrat, becoming the first Republican to represent the district since freedman Robert Smalls in 1875. Smalls became a Civil War hero when he freed himself and his crew by commandeering a Confederate transport ship and surrendering it to federal forces.

Now that Karen Handel and Ralph Norman have slammed more doors in the faces of the Resistance, expect the Left to come up with new mischief in their efforts to neutralize Donald Trump as president.

BOOKS Comments turned off

How Europe Lost Its Way To understand the continent’s current crisis, one must trace it back to its post-war roots. By Douglas Murray

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from Douglas Murray’s new book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. It is reprinted here with permission.

There is no single cause of the present sickness of Europe. The culture produced by the tributaries of Judeo-Christian culture, the Ancient Greeks and Romans, and the discoveries of the Enlightenment has not been levelled by nothing. But the final act has come about because of two simultaneous concatenations from which it is now all but impossible to recover.

The first is the mass movement of peoples into Europe. In all Western European countries this process began after the Second World War due to labour shortages. Soon Europe got hooked on the migration and could not stop the flow even if it had wanted to. The result was that what had been Europe — the home of the European peoples — gradually became a home for the entire world. The places that had been European gradually became somewhere else. So places dominated by Pakistani immigrants resembled Pakistan in everything but their location, with the recent arrivals and their children eating the food of their place of origin, speaking the language of their place of origin, and worshipping the religion of their place of origin. Streets in the cold and rainy northern towns of Europe filled with people dressed for the foothills of Pakistan or the sandstorms of Arabia. “The Empire strikes back,” noted some observers with a barely concealed smirk. Yet whereas the empires of Europe had been thrown off, these new colonies were obviously intended to be for good.

All the time Europeans found ways to pretend this could work. By insisting, for instance, that such immigration was normal. Or that if integration did not happen with the first generation then it might happen with their children, grandchildren, or another generation yet to come. Or that it didn’t matter whether people integrated or not. All the time we waved away the greater likelihood that it just wouldn’t work. This is a conclusion that the migration crisis of recent years has simply accelerated.

Which brings me to the second concatenation. For even the mass movement of millions of people into Europe would not sound such a final note for the continent were it not for the fact that (coincidentally or otherwise) at the same time Europe lost faith in its beliefs, traditions, and legitimacy. Countless factors have contributed to this development, but one is the way in which Western Europeans have lost what the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno famously called the “tragic sense of life.” They have forgotten what the World War II generation so painfully learnt: that everything you love, even the greatest and most cultured civilizations in history, can be swept away by people who are unworthy of them. Other than simply ignoring it, one of the few ways to avoid this tragic sense of life is to push it away through a belief in the tide of human progress. That tactic remains for the time being the most popular approach.

Yet all the time we skate over, and sometimes fall into, terrible doubts of our own creation. More than any other continent or culture in the world today, Europe is now deeply weighed down with guilt for its past. Alongside this outgoing version of self-distrust runs a more introverted version of the same guilt. For there is also the problem in Europe of an existential tiredness and a feeling that perhaps for Europe the story has run out and a new story must be allowed to begin. Mass immigration — the replacement of large parts of the European populations by other people — is one way in which this new story has been imagined: a change, we seemed to think, was as good as a rest. Such existential civilizational tiredness is not a uniquely modern-European phenomenon, but the fact that a society should feel like it has run out of steam at precisely the moment when a new society has begun to move in cannot help but lead to vast, epochal changes.

Had it been possible to discuss these matters some solution might have been reached. Yet even in 2015, at the height of the migration crisis, it was speech and thought that was constricted. At the peak of the crisis in September 2015 Chancellor Merkel of Germany asked the Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, what could be done to stop European citizens’ writing criticisms of her migration policy on Facebook. “Are you working on this?” she asked him. He assured her that he was. In fact the criticism, thought, and discussion ought to have been boundless. Looking back, it is remarkable how restricted we made our discussion even whilst we opened our home to the world. A thousand years ago the peoples of Genoa and Florence were not as intermingled as they now are, but today they are all recognizably Italian and tribal differences have tended to lessen rather than grow with time. The current thinking appears to be that at some stage in the years ahead the peoples of Eritrea and Afghanistan too will be intermingled within Europe as the Genoans and Florentines are now melded into Italy. The skin color of individuals from Eritrea and Afghanistan may be different, their ethnic origins may be from further afield, but Europe will still be Europe and its people will continue to mingle in the spirit of Voltaire and St Paul, Dante, Goethe, and Bach.

As with so many popular delusions there is something in this. The nature of Europe has always shifted and — as trading cities like Venice show — has included a grand and uncommon receptiveness to foreign ideas and influence. From the Ancient Greeks and Romans onward the peoples of Europe sent out ships to scour the world and report back on what they found. Rarely, if ever, did the rest of the world return their curiosity in kind, but nevertheless the ships went out and returned with tales and discoveries that melded into the air of Europe. The receptivity was prodigious: it was not, however, boundless.

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North Korea’s Brazen Act By The Editors NRO

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

In a previous era, the death of Otto Warmbier, a 22-year-old American student, at the hands of the regime in North Korea likely would have been considered an act of war. On January 2, 2016, Warmbier was detained by regime officials, allegedly for attempting to steal a propaganda poster. Convicted of a “hostile act” against the state, he was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. Upon his release into U.S. custody last week, regime officials said that he had been in a coma for nearly 15 months, and blamed a case of botulism. In reality, Warmbier was almost certainly tortured to death by the regime.

What happened to Otto Warmbier is what has been happening to North Korean citizens for more than 70 years, since Kim Il-sung transformed the new country into what it is today: a hermetically sealed prison state operated by a hereditary dictatorship that some scholars estimate has murdered around 1.5 million people in its network of concentration camps. Those not executed by the regime have fared little better: The country is beset by malnourishment and starvation (a famine in the mid 1990s killed half a million people); its GDP per capita is somewhere south of $1,000, putting North Korea behind Rwanda, Haiti, and Sierra Leone globally; and its shoddy infrastructure causes fires that can be seen from space.

None of these issues has ever been of much concern to the Kim regime, now in its third generation. Kim Jong-un, like his father and grandfather, is dedicated to building up North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Pyongyang has been alarmingly successful in pursuing that end. The regime has missiles that can reach Japan, and reportedly is not far from being able to strike the continental U.S. North Korea is also already exporting terror in less explosive ways. The regime is responsible for several devastating cyber attacks (recently, North Korean hackers paralyzed the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, as well as industries in 150 other countries), and Kim Jong-un successfully had an estranged member of the family assassinated in Kuala Lumpur in February, in broad daylight. Meanwhile, Pyongyang maintains friendly, mutually beneficial relationships with other terror-loving regimes, including Iran and Cuba.

The fact that North Korea is now a nuclear-armed state is in no small part a consequence of nearly three decades of ill-conceived American and international policy. The last three administrations all hoped to engage the regime in constructive agreements, usually providing some form(s) of aid in exchange for promises to halt the construction of nuclear weapons. The theory was that the aid would help to facilitate economic and ultimately political liberalization.

It has not worked out that way, largely because the regime in Pyongyang is not a trustworthy partner. The Kim regime cheated on the 1994 Agreed Framework, under which it received aid in exchange for halting plutonium and uranium enrichment; in 2002, it unilaterally withdrew from the 1968 Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty; the regime reneged on its part in an agreement hammered out by the Bush administration in 2007 after less than a year; and Kim Jong-un violated the terms of the 2012 Leap Day agreement after just six weeks by testing a long-range missile.

But it’s also been a case of inconsistent, and often incoherent, American policy. Given the fact that the North Korean economy is almost entirely administered by the regime, these agreements have frequently meant that the U.S. is simultaneously sanctioning and subsidizing Pyongyang, and irregular enforcement by the U.S. Treasury Department took much of the bite out of the sanctions side.

North Korea’s brazen murder of an American citizen is reason to reevaluate.

Last year, Congress passed and President Obama signed into law the North Korea Sanctions and Policy Enhancement Act, which mandated sanctions on entities that have contributed to North Korea’s nuclear program or are complicit in its human-rights abuses, and on the country’s mineral and metal trade (a key source of the regime’s hard currency). The Trump administration should expand on this foundation.

Start with the banks. Since 2007, the U.S. has allowed North Korean financial transactions to flow more or less unencumbered through the U.S. banking system. Because almost all transactions in U.S. dollars pass through U.S. banks, the Treasury Department could, if it wishes, effectively end North Korea’s access to the dollar system, by supplementing the sanctions on North Korean banks imposed by current law with secondary sanctions on any banks that transact with North Korea. When the U.S. did this from 2005 to 2007, banks around the world — including in China — froze or closed North Korean accounts rather than risk their access to the U.S. financial system. Secondary sanctions are crucial to squeezing the regime. Pyongyang’s power relies on a network of bad actors: China launders its money, Iran buys its weapons, Cambodia re-flags its ships (which are smuggling the weapons). The U.S. must be willing to enforce sanctions against these actors, too.

While the U.S. more aggressively goes after the assets of North Korea’s elites — currently, only about 200 North Korean entities have had their assets frozen, compared to about 400 in Cuba and more than 800 in Iran — it could also agitate to have North Korean banks kicked out of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, reducing its access to the global financial infrastructure. In 2012, the U.S. successfully pressured SWIFT to expel Iran. Meanwhile, the U.S. should be pressuring Europe, as well as countries in Africa and Asia, to stop employing North Korean slave laborers. As many as 100,000 North Koreans have been sent abroad by the regime (guess who’s building stadiums for the 2022 World Cup in Qatar?), and defectors report that the regime confiscates 90 percent of their wages when they return home.

On the diplomatic front, North Korea receives an undeserved imprimatur as a member of the United Nations; the Trump administration should work to expel it, as well as from its other international memberships (e.g., the ASEAN Regional Forum and the International Olympic Committee). The State Department should also restore its designation as a state sponsor of terror, removed by the Bush administration in 2008.

And militarily? There are no good military options when it comes to North Korea, it’s true; setting aside the threat of a nuclear response, the North could wreak havoc on some of its neighbors just with conventional arms. But the U.S. can still wield a big stick. The idea that North Korea will stand down if the U.S. reduces its activity around the Korean Peninsula has been decisively proven false, so the U.S. should not hesitate to flex its muscle. The U.S. and South Korea should continue with joint military exercises. Meanwhile, the White House should work to strengthen missile-defense capacities throughout the region. The decision by South Korea’s newly elected president Moon Jae-in to suspend further deployment of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system pending an environmental-impact assessment may be a precursor to rejecting THAAD altogether; the White House should work with President Moon to make sure that does not happen. The administration should also be working to strengthen its relationship with Japan.

Finally, it should go without saying that the United States should be working from the inside to subvert the regime.

It is persistently remarked that North Korea will never change until China stops shielding it, and there’s truth to that. But the United States has leverage, nonetheless, and especially now. And China’s position may be wavering: There are reports that Beijing is considering distancing itself from Pyongyang, and a younger generation of leaders in the Communist party is not at all convinced that bolstering North Korea is, in the long run, worth the trouble. These are pressure points that the United States can exploit.

There is no such thing as a “manageable” nuclear North Korea; ultimately, the Kim family and its crime syndicate must go. The U.S. should recognize the murderous regime in Pyongyang for what it is, and respond accordingly.

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Georgia Election: In a Bad District for Trump, Karen Handel Persisted By Dan McLaughlin

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

For nine months in 1916, the French and German armies battled with insane ferocity over a small patch of land in Northern France, committing over two million soldiers, spending the lives of over 300,000 men (and more than that wounded) and at the epicenter of the battle, pouring millions of shells (literally over a ton of explosives) on an area covering about twelve square miles. The Battle of Verdun was about control of a modest piece of strategically useful territory, but it was really about a lot more: two national combatants testing their strength, resources, and resolve, stakes far more important than an individual town or ridge. Virtually every inch of land that was fought over was destroyed. The victors, the French, held nothing more than what they started the battle with, and their army was broken so badly it has not yet recovered a century later. The losers, the Germans, lost the war.

The residents of Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District can be forgiven for feeling like the villagers of Verdun after a special election that pulverized the district with ad spending and activists. Patrick Ruffini estimated on Twitter this morning that the two parties combined to spend more money in this House race ($50 million) than Ronald Reagan spent on his 1984 presidential re-election (even adjusting Reagan’s $28 million campaign for inflation). At this writing, given the projected outcome, the net result looks very much like Verdun: a costly and depressing victory for the Republicans, bled white defending their own turf, and a debacle for Democrats, who came home empty-handed and must be able to win districts like GA-06 if they are to take control of the House in 2018 and carry out their chief policy goal of impeaching President Trump.

GA-06 was always going to be a heavy lift for both sides. For Democrats, the obstacles were obvious: it’s a deeply conservative district, Newt Gingrich’s old district, that Mitt Romney won 61-38 in 2012, where then-Congressman Tom Price was regularly re-elected with ease. Their candidate, Jon Ossoff, is young and looks younger, had no real base of support in Georgia (the vast majority of his donors were out of state), and doesn’t even live in the district. His opponent, Karen Handel, was much better-known: she was first elected to office in the district fourteen years ago, previously won statewide office as Secretary of State, ran respectable races for Governor in 2010 and Senate in 2014, and won national notoriety in 2012 over her ultimately unsuccessful effort to separate a national cancer charity from Planned Parenthood.

For Republicans, the race was difficult because this is probably the least Trump-friendly Republican district in the country, an upscale, educated suburban district full of transplants from around the country who work for big multinational corporations headquartered in Atlanta. Trump won it by just a point, running double digits behind Romney, and his approval ratings are well lower now than even his dismal favorability numbers on Election Day. Trump lost just four counties in the state in the 2016 presidential primary, but three of those four (Fulton, Cobb, and DeKalb) make up GA-06, all of which went for Marco Rubio. Trump’s worst counties in Georgia in the primary:

DeKalb: Rubio 41, Trump 25
Fulton: Rubio 42, Trump 27
Clarke: Rubio 35, Trump 27
Cobb: Rubio 35, Trump 31

In November as well, Trump ran poorly in these counties compared to incumbent Senator Johnny Isakson – his worst counties in the state relative to Isakson:

Fulton: Isakson -23, Trump -41
Macon: Isakson -12, Trump -27

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Anthony Daniels: Forgers, Impostors and the News Business

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

Many people, when they know a subject really well, find newspaper accounts of it misleading or inaccurate, even as to the most elementary facts. And yet the strange thing is that it does not discourage them from continuing to read newspapers and even believe them.

I have always felt some affection for the perpetrators of literary fraud: for William Henry Ireland, for example, a young man of limited accomplishment (in his father’s opinion) who at the end of the eighteenth century forged Shakespearean documents to earn his father’s notice and praise. Amazingly enough the forgery was not immediately exposed as such, and Ireland even went so far as to “discover” the manuscript of a Shakespearean tragedy called Vortigern that was actually staged, albeit only for two performances. He made fools of serious scholars—always a delightful spectacle—until he was thoroughly exposed by Edmond Malone, though even afterwards he found learned defenders. Later he wrote a pathetic but sometimes moving memoir of his malfeasance.

I have asked myself why I feel so strange an affinity to forgers and impostors, and have come to the conclusion that it has something to do with my journalistic career. Journalists who are asked, as I used often to be, to write authoritative analyses of complex events that happened only two hours ago and about which they have no more information than that which is publicly available, to be solemnly read the following morning by millions of readers, are nearly always perilously close, at least if they are honest with themselves, to intellectual fraud. It is fellow-feeling, then, that is at the root of my sympathy for literary forgers and impostors.

A newspaper not universally known or appreciated for its attachment to the literal truth used often to call me in the middle of my medical avocations to ask whether I could write a thousand words by four o’clock on some subject or other, and if I protested that I couldn’t because I knew nothing of the subject it would grant me an extension of half an hour, presumably for research, that is to say until four-thirty. In vain did I argue that I could write a much better article if I were given a day or two to prepare it; for the newspaper, whose time horizons were as limited as those of a mayfly, it was always now or never, even if the subject were one of lasting importance. To have a reasonably coherent thousand words in time was always much more important for the newspaper than such minor qualities as depth or accuracy. Also to be eschewed was any kind of nuance. Nuance, said the editor, only confused readers and drove down sales. Readers needed messages neat.

I quickly discovered how little time it took in the age of the internet to appear authoritative, even on subjects to which I had never previously given a moment’s thought or notice. In the kingdom of the ignorant (that the newspaper believes its readers to be), the man with one fact was king. In those days the newspaper was prosperous and paid very well; and it is not everyone who can sound like an expert by four or four-thirty. I never wrote anything that I believed to be untrue, except under very special circumstances, but I had no illusions about the wholeness of the truths I was relaying. When the next day I saw people reading my article on the bus or train, I felt like snatching the newspaper from their hands and telling them not to bother. As Pudd’nhead Wilson said, it’s better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.

I was even sent abroad sometimes to cover major events in small countries whose language I could not speak and whose history I did not know. Foreign correspondents are social birds and flock together in the bar of the country’s one five-star hotel where they sit and originate or absorb rumours, many of them demonstrably false, by the most minimal effort. The other source of my information was taxi-drivers, who were either well-informed or at least impressively self-assured. Many a taxi-driver’s prejudices have been printed in the august journals of distant lands.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Delingpole: Trump Is Western Democracy’s Last Man Standing Against the Green Terror James Delingpole

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

Donald Trump is the only leader left in the world defending Western democracy against eco fascism.

Don’t just take it from me. Read this Belgian philosopher, Drieu Godefridi, interviewed in the French liberal newspaper Contrepoints and translated here by Friends of Science Calgary.

He believes that the Paris climate agreement was a global socialist plot which the U.S. was absolutely right to escape:

[President Trump] perfectly grasped the essence of the Paris Agreement, which is to redistribute the wealth of the West to the rest of the world – he expressly declared it on the Lawn of the White House, on June 1st, 2017 when making the American exit from Paris official. In so doing, he has stopped the formidable internationalist socialist machinery that was in the process of being set up. In other words, he has refused to validate the third-world moral intuition, and the scientific pretext that gave birth to the Paris Agreement.

Environmentalism, argues Godefridi, is just another facet of the left’s ongoing war against democracy:

What we have been seeing for the past two decades, in the areas of climate, gender theory, immigration and terrorism, and so on, is that activist minority ideologues have confiscated democratic debate.

What makes it so especially dangerous is that unlike, say, gender theory – which everyone knows to be made-up leftist nonsense – climate change has a superficial scientific plausibility capable of fooling people who ought to know better. But really, it’s just another mask for globalism.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Notable & Quotable: A Lesson of the 1967 War ‘The revisionists have much of the story right but they miss a crucial factor.’

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

https://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-a-lesson-of-the-1967-war-1497998869

The Hudson Institute’s Michael Doran, testifying before the U.N. Security Council about the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War, June 20:

May I again remind you of the example of [Egypt’s] Gamal Abdel Nasser ? A revisionist school of historiography claims that he never wanted war in 1967. His best military units were bogged down in Yemen, his economy was a shambles, and his relations with Jordan and Syria, his putative allies, were abysmal. Why would a leader in such a precarious position behave so recklessly?

The revisionists have much of the story right but they miss a crucial factor. Nasser was applying lessons that he learned a decade earlier, during the Suez Crisis. Then, as in 1967, he had precipitated a war that he could not possibly win militarily, but which he believed he could win politically, because, he gambled, the superpowers and the United Nations would intercede on his behalf. In 1956, that proved a very smart bet. In 1967, however, it utterly failed—with disastrous consequences for Egypt—to say nothing of the Palestinians. How much better would it have been for all parties if, back in 1956, the United Nations had insisted that, in return for an Israeli withdrawal from Egyptian territory, Nasser must grant Israel meaningful security guarantees?

The key lesson of 1967 war is that peace is best achieved not by United Nations intercession but by facilitating direct negotiations between the parties.

HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

Congress and Obama Depleted the Military The Trump budget would increase spending only 3%. With today’s threats, that’s not nearly enough. By Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

North Korea is making alarming progress in its ballistic-missile and nuclear-weapons programs. Russia and China are developing and fielding advanced weapons against which the U.S. may not be able to defend. Al Qaeda operates in more countries than ever. Islamic State is targeting the West and launching attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. Iran is supporting terrorist organizations across the globe, modernizing its ballistic-missile and other capabilities and likely continuing to pursue nuclear weapons.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee last week that the U.S. is losing the military edge on which our security has long relied: “Today, every operating domain—including outer space, air, sea, undersea, land and cyberspace—is contested.”

Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, seconded that worry in written testimony for the same hearing: “Without sustained, sufficient and predictable funding,” he wrote, “I assess that within five years we will lose our ability to project power; the basis of how we defend the homeland, advance U.S. interests, and meet our alliance commitments.”

In short, the situation President Trump inherited is dire. America today faces an array of threats more serious and complex than at any time in the past 75 years.

President Obama and his policies are largely to blame. The 2011 Budget Control Act, which mandated across-the-board cuts, known as sequestration, at a time when threats were growing, has also done serious damage. “No enemy in the field,” Mr. Mattis told lawmakers, “has done more to harm the combat readiness of our military than sequestration.”

What have eight years of Mr. Obama’s policies, and six years of the Budget Control Act, wrought? The military superiority America relied on after the end of the Cold War has been seriously eroded, our capabilities diminished. In the past three months alone, military leaders have testified that:

• The Army is “outranged, outgunned, outdated,” with only three of 58 brigade combat teams ready to “fight tonight.”

• The Navy is the smallest and least ready it has been in modern times. Fewer than half the Navy’s aircraft can fly because so many are grounded for maintenance or because they lack spare parts.

• The Air Force is the oldest and smallest it has ever been, and less than half of its combat forces are sufficiently ready to fight tonight.

• The Marine Corps is insufficiently manned, trained and equipped across the depth of the force.

Rebuilding America’s defenses will require a massive, concerted and long-term effort that must begin today. Mr. Trump rightly promised to do this during last year’s presidential election. Unfortunately, the White House budget submitted to Congress earlier this month fails to provide the necessary resources.

The White House has requested only 3% more funding for defense than Mr. Obama’s proposed 2018 budget, meaning the Pentagon would essentially tread water for at least a year—time the U.S. cannot spare in this threat environment. Instead of leading the effort to repeal the Budget Control Act, the White House budget envisions extending it by six years, to 2027. The president’s budget also cuts funding in absolutely essential areas, including $300 million from missile defense and $1 billion from Navy shipbuilding. In sum, the 2018 White House defense budget differs little from what Mr. Obama would have requested were he still president. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Fighting Poverty Isn’t Brain Surgery, but Ben Carson Can Do Both ‘I don’t get upset when people say horrible things,’ the HUD secretary says. ‘People don’t like change.’By Jason L. Riley

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

At the end of our interview last week, I asked Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson for an example of the outside-the-box thinking that served him so well in his prior career as a pioneering neurosurgeon.

“Sure. I started advocating cervicomedullary decompression for achondroplasia,” said Dr. Carson, before shooting me a sly grin and switching to English. Achondroplasia, he explained, is the most common form of dwarfism, and 40 years ago about 7% of people born with the condition died in infancy. “It’s because they had tight, abnormal bone formation at the base of their skull, and that was squeezing the brain stem. And they would just stop breathing. Surgeons would try to go in sometimes and fix it, but it was so tight that they frequently made it worse or killed the patient.”

When he first talked about using a different surgical procedure on children with achondroplasia, at a medical conference in Rome in the mid-1980s, many objected: “The geneticists said, ‘You surgeons. If you would just leave these people alone, only 7% of them would die. But you guys think you can do anything.’ ”

Back home at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, colleagues complained to the hospital president that “Carson’s a wild man. You’ve got to stop him.” But Dr. Carson didn’t stop. “Finally, I had done enough cases where I was able to reveal the data. None of [the patients] had died, and they were doing well. And even though I’d gotten all that pushback, now it’s a standard procedure.”

“I don’t get upset when people say horrible things,” the secretary told me. “I understand human nature. People don’t like change.” A disposition that serves him well these days, when taking cheap shots at Ben Carson is something of a sport among reporters and cable-news sages. Never mind that he grew up poor in inner-city Detroit, raised by a single mother with mental-health problems who worked as a housekeeper. Or that he blasted through racial barriers in his medical career. Or that he has used his fame and fortune to expand the educational opportunities of low-income minorities. After all, what could a person from that background possibly know about helping people in difficult circumstances?

In the press, however, the secretary is most often portrayed as a doctrinaire conservative who is out of his depth running an agency tasked with assisting the poor. After he told a town-hall audience in May that poverty is “in part a mindset” and “to a large extent also a state of mind,” commentators couldn’t stop snickering. But Mr. Carson stands by his words. “I don’t say that without evidence. I think of my own life. I think of the way I used to think when I was at the bottom of my class and going nowhere fast,” he told me. “A lot of it is . . . being told the system is against you or that you’re a victim.” Some individuals and organizations “want to convince people that somebody else is in charge of them, and that’s why they get angry at people like me who say it’s partly the way you think.”

Media portrayals notwithstanding, Secretary Carson told me he is not opposed to government assistance and safety nets. “We have an obligation to take care of people who can’t care for themselves—the elderly, the disabled, the mentally ill—and certainly at HUD we’re going to take care of those people.” A case in point, he added, is dealing more effectively with the homeless population. We’re doing a better job at sheltering them but not at diagnosing why they became homeless in the first place and then treating it. “If you don’t do two and three, then you’re wasting your time.”

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Anchorman III What was on the teleprompter at CBS News?By James Freeman

Posted By on June 21st, 2017

There was a time, a time before cable news, when the network anchorman reigned supreme. Thank goodness those days are long gone, but like the dominant broadcasters of yore, Scott Pelley of CBS News has a voice that could make a wolverine purr. Still, it’s not clear that anyone could make sense of the words that Mr. Pelley was speaking on Thursday.

In a commentary for the “CBS Evening News,” Mr. Pelley began:

It’s time to ask whether the attack on the United States Congress Wednesday was foreseeable, predictable and, to some degree, self-inflicted.

Some of the gunshot wounds might have been self-inflicted? If CBS had discovered evidence that those attending the congressional baseball practice had actually been wounded by their own bullets, rather than shots fired by James Hodgkinson, this surely would have been the scoop of the year. But Mr. Pelley quickly made clear that he and his colleagues had no such evidence. Instead, he was suggesting that the victims of the attempted assassinations might bear some blame for motivating Hodgkinson to attack:

Too many leaders, and political commentators, who set an example for us to follow have led us into an abyss of violent rhetoric which, it should be no surprise, has led to violence.

Blaming anyone other than the shooter for attempted assassination is generally a mistake. And the timing could hardly have been worse. Mr. Pelley was intoning his commentary on the same day that victim Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) was undergoing one of the series of surgeries he has required since the Wednesday attack. Last weekend his condition was upgraded to serious from critical. On Thursday, the day of the Pelley commentary, shooting victim Matt Mika was also in critical condition. Capitol Police Officer Crystal Griner was also still in the hospital on Thursday, according to CNN.

Given the timing and the circumstances that Mr. Pelley chose to make his case, one might have expected him to cite some truly damning rhetoric that had been uttered by the victims, if not direct evidence that they had incited Hodgkinson to carry out his bloody attack. One would have been wrong. The CBS voice offered not a shred of evidence that any of the shooting victims had done anything to create an “abyss of violent rhetoric,” or to inspire the actions of the man who tried to assassinate them. Instead, the anchorman mentioned a politician who was not targeted:

Bernie Sanders has called the president the “most dangerous in history.” And the shooter yesterday was a Sanders volunteer.

You might think that no sane person would act on political hate speech, and you’d be right. Trouble is, there are a lot of Americans who struggle with mental illness.

Mr. Pelley offered no evidence that Hodgkinson suffered from mental illness, nor did he explain how comments by Mr. Sanders could possibly raise the question of whether the victims’ wounds might be “self-inflicted.”

Believe it or not, the segment went downhill from there. The CBS newsman concluded by citing President Trump’s harsh rhetoric about his network and other media outlets, as if Mr. Pelley and his colleagues were the real victims of last week’s violence.

Coincidentally on Friday Mr. Pelley left the CBS nightly anchor chair to focus on his reports for the CBS program, “60 Minutes.” The move had been announced in May and in media terms, Mr Pelley remains kind of a big deal.