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Dem Leadership Looks to Squelch Impeachment Talk By Rick Moran

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

Worried about the public perception of pushing for the impeachment of President Trump less than four months into his presidency, Democratic Party leaders are warning their more excitable members to back off calling for Trump’s ouster.

The Hill:

Democratic leaders have a message for those members of their caucus beating the drum to impeach President Trump: not so fast.

“I would suggest … there needs to be a full investigation first,” Rep. Joseph Crowley (N.Y.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, said Wednesday. “We need to get to the facts, and let the facts lead where they may.”

In the eyes of several Democrats, however, the facts already lead to impeachment.

[…]

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) spoke out at a closed-door House Democratic Caucus meeting Wednesday morning to highlight the urgency of removing Trump, whom the Democrats increasingly see as a national security liability.

Almost simultaneously, Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) took to the House floor to trumpet the impeachment call he’d sounded earlier in the week. He characterized his decision as a “position of conscience.”

It’s the first time in her long career that Rep. Waters has given a fig about “national security.” And Mr Green: Put a sock in it.

The impeachment debate is forcing Democratic leaders to walk a fine line in their approach to the ongoing Russia-Trump saga. On one hand, the Democrats want to keep the pressure on the White House and tap the energy the remarkable story is generating among members of their base, many of whom support the impeachment route. On the other, they don’t want to politicize their calls for an independent investigation.

“We have to be circumspect as we look at this tale of horrors,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.). “Because we should not give the impression that we are obsessed with removing Donald Trump from office — it will only harden his supporters.

“Based on what I’ve read and heard, Mr. Trump is in trouble, and he doesn’t need any help to get into deeper trouble.”

Top Democratic leaders insist they’re not putting any pressure on their troops to shy away from impeachment calls.

“Members can come to their own conclusions, and we don’t pretend to stand here and speak on behalf of every single individual member of our caucus,” Crowley said.

The “case for impeachment” doesn’t exist — yet. What members have is a tissue of half-truths, unsubstantiated rumors, anonymously sourced reporting, and lots and lots of wishful thinking.

There has not been a shred of hard evidence — video or audio recordings, documents, eyewitness, first-person testimony, or anything else that would stand up in a court of law, much less the court of public opinion. CONTINUE AT SITE

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MacArthur’s Spies: The Heroes of the Philippines By Elise Cooper

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

MacArthur’s Spies by Peter Eisner recounts how three individuals played a significant role in the resistance against the Japanese occupation in the Philippines during World War II. The book shows how heroes come from many backgrounds: a singer, a soldier, and a spymaster. As the Greatest Generation dies off, written accounts such as this are a reminder of how ordinary people can become extraordinary by putting themselves in danger to help others survive and achieve victory.

The emphasis of the book is on the American singer Claire Phillips, who opened a nightclub in Manila catering to Japanese officials and officers. She and those who worked for her gathered information that was passed on to the allies. In addition, she provided food, supplies, and medicine to many of the allied POWs and citizens interned in the camps. Given the code name “High Pockets,” she met with guerrilla fighters to inform them of Japanese military plans, and by all accounts, she gave credible intelligence reports.

Another contributor was U.S. Army corporal John Boone, one of the first to start a guerrilla organization against the Japanese. He had to evade not only the Japanese, who would kill him on the spot, but also homegrown Communist Filipinos and turncoats. After the Japanese overran the forces in Bataan, they demanded that the Americans surrender. Although the majority did, Boone was one of the few who disobeyed orders by refusing to surrender, and he fled into the jungles, where he aided in foiling the Japanese. Through sabotage and disruption, he and his men helped pave the way for General MacArthur’s return. Readers will enjoy how Eisner intertwines the resistance with the battles fought in and around the Philippines.

Charles “Chick” Parsons was called MacArthur’s spymaster. An American businessman who was in Manila during the Japanese advance, he convinced the enemy that he was a Panamanian diplomat. They never found out he actually was a U.S. Navy intelligence officer, and they allowed him to depart the Philippines. Having convinced MacArthur to have him return, in March 1943, he arrived back via submarine. He eluded detection by operating off the grid and became the chief aide in organizing and supplying the guerrillas, including making sure the intelligence network was successful.

The book also discusses the faceless American heroes, those captured by the Japanese. Although much is known about the Nazi atrocities during World War II, the Japanese also had their share of brutality. Citizens in Manila would have to bow and show their subservience to the Japanese or risk being slapped, kicked, and beaten. One of the worst was the Bataan Death March, where starving and thirsty American prisoners were forced to trek for miles in the wilting sun.

Eisner noted, “This march was a horror show of inhumanity. The Americans and Filipinos who fought with them were brutalized and slaughtered. When some stopped because of exhaustion, they were bayoneted on the spot. Another example occurred just after the surrender, where the Japanese mowed down the allied forces with rifle and machine gun fire. This continued throughout the war and came to a head when in August 1944 the Tokyo High Command issued a secret kill order.

“At the Palawan POW camp, prisoners became slave laborers and were forced to build an airfield. In December, under the guise of a supposed air raid, the POWs were told to go into the trenches for shelter. Suddenly, the Japanese guards dumped gallons of gasoline into the trenches and torched them.

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With Fox News’s Ratings in Free Fall, the Future Looks Bleak By Peter Barry Chowka

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

The sudden death of Roger Ailes (R.I.P.) yesterday is a grim omen for the network he envisioned and built. In the wake of the recent upheavals at Fox News, the conservative cable television network’s ratings are experiencing a precipitous decline from cable news leadership for the first time in the history of the channel. As the rest of the mainstream media continue their efforts to undermine and “resist” the Trump Administration, this development bodes ill for the future — not only of the unique kind of fair and balanced if right of center reporting pioneered by the Fox News Channel (FNC), but of the prospects for conservatives continuing to have a major media platform, maintain power, and advance their agenda in the months and years ahead.

The Fox News Channel launched on October 6, 1996. MSNBC, originally a collaboration between NBC News and Microsoft, had started three months earlier. Prior to mid-1996, CNN, the other competitor, was the exclusive cable news outlet in the United States, synonymous with “cable news.” It enjoyed a long monopoly in the field during which it was able to build its brand at home and abroad.

Lacking the backing of a huge well oiled news organzation like NBC or the tailwind legacy of a sixteen year international presence like CNN, FNC initially had a bit of a shaky start. But under the guidance of media and political genius Roger Ailes (the FNC CEO and Chairman), the financial support of international media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, and with a clear agenda (“fair and balanced” reporting with a consistent respect for conservative viewpoints), after gaining wide cable and satellite distribution, Fox pulled ahead of its two rivals. By 2002, FNC had done the unthinkable, establishing itself as the #1 cable news channel in the United States. Notwithstanding its being constantly derided by the rest of the mainstream media, Fox News’s prime time ratings dominance went largely unchallenged for the next fourteen years.

The Fox News Channel’s innovative and successful approach to presenting the news in the new millennium helped to change the TV news landscape from one dominated by breaking hard news read by mostly interchangeable news readers to a model that relied on opinionated marquee personalities and colorful left/right debate. Prime time personalities Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, for example, both of whom debuted on FNC the night that it started, continued to host programs in prime time, seemingly in perpetuity. CNN’s “breaking news is king” strategy, and its aging prime time host Larry King, were caught off guard.

For its part, the ill-conceived MSNBC floundered during its first decade. The channel’s original plan for some kind of interactive cable TV-online collaboration with Microsoft (one of MSNBC’s early prime time shows was the laughable nightly tech program The Site with Soledad O’Brien) was soon scuttled, and it experimented with both left and right wing hosts and anchors (Phil Donahue, Keith Olbermann, Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan, and even Michael Savage for a short time) before settling on a hard left approach that corresponded with the rise of Barack Obama in 2008.

The seventeen month campaign trek of Donald Trump from his announcement on June 16, 2015 to his election victory appeared to institutionalize Fox’s hegemony. FNC, it was widely assumed, now had its man in the White House and it had helped to put him there. Ironically, what happened during the first Republican candidates’ debate on August 6, 2015, carried exclusively on FNC, presaged the channel’s eventual decline.

The debate was co-hosted by Fox News’s newest star, prime time anchor and special events coverage co-anchor Megyn Kelly. Her first question, directed to Trump, was provocative and incendiary:

Kelly: “Mr. Trump, one of the things people love about you is you speak your mind and you don’t use a politician’s filter. However, that is not without its downsides, in particular, when it comes to women. You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals.’”

Trump: “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

Kelly: “No, it wasn’t. Your Twitter account has several disparaging comments about women’s looks. You once told a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice it would be a pretty picture to see her on her knees. Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president, and how will you answer the charge from Hillary Clinton, who was likely to be the Democratic nominee, that you are part of the war on women?”

In a flash, Fox News’s popular celebrity anchor had thrown down a gauntlet, unfairly in the opinion of many, right in the face of a candidate who was quickly gaining attention and momentum with conservatives – the core of the FNC audience – and in the very first Republican debate of the 2016 election season seen by a record 24 million viewers!

The ensuing undercurrent of bad feeling between Trump and Kelly – often breaking out into the open on social media – dragged on for months. It soured many viewers on Kelly and diminished her appeal as the attractive and smart face of Fox News.

Kelly supposedly made up with Trump for a much-hyped, hour long prime time Fox broadcast network special. The forced détente, however, seemed fake. Later in 2016, Kelly wrote negatively about Trump in her memoir Settle for More, for which she was paid around $11 million according to deadline.com. In interviews to promote the book, Kelly said that she felt such fear during 2016 that she and her husband hired or were provided with armed bodyguards to protect her and her family from perceived dangers arising from her to-do with Trump.

The Women of Fox News

“The on-air dynamic of an older, not necessarily attractive, male authority figure and his lovely female guest (look, she’s beautiful and smart too!) is such a trademark of Fox News” opined LA Times television critic Lorraine Ali in an April 6, 2017 Times feature story “Scandal, sexism and the role of women at Fox News.”

Indeed, anyone with eyes and sensibility had to take note that very early on the Fox News channel was appealing to male viewers with a lineup of very attractive young women correspondents, anchors, and guests who, as Ali noted, were “smart too!”

As Chelsea Schilling writes at WND (May 2, 2017), “It’s no secret that Fox News has some of the most attractive female hosts in the business, and many fans have become accustomed to seeing beautiful, leggy women deliver the daily news. In fact, Google searches of almost every woman on Fox News reveal scores of images of the lady-hosts boldly baring their long legs.” Writing at Breitbart on April 27, 2017, Daniel Flynn refers to Fox News as a “hot-women-only cable news culture.”

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Sean O’Callaghan The Real Heroes of a Dirty War

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

I took up William Matchett’s splendid book as someone who, in August, 1974, murdered Inspector Peter Flanagan of RUC in a County Tyrone public house. I am deeply ashamed of that act. Like many young Irish republicans before me I thought I was fighting for Irish freedom. I was not.

Secret Victory: The Intelligence War That Beat the IRA
by William Matchett
William Matchett, 2016, 272 pages, about $30
_________________________________________

Some might regard the title of this book as making a grandiose claim. Others may deride it, or ignore both title and book, choosing instead to believe that whatever fragile peace Northern Ireland enjoys today is a blessing bestowed by Tony Blair, Gerry Adams, Bill Clinton and an assortment of peaceniks, chancers and conflict resolution groupies. Many such people have lined their pockets by grossly inflating their influence in the “peace process” and exporting their inanities to gullible audiences worldwide.

In reality they reaped the harvest of peace that others had sown in a long intelligence war, and William Matchett’s book is the perfect antidote to their delusions. The author is a former senior officer in the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary who fought the IRA (and their loyalist counterparts) for a quarter of a century and who has gone on to advise police forces across the world on counter-terrorism. He describes with the familiar understated practicality of the North’s Protestant-Unionist majority how he and his Special Branch colleagues were able to win a war of intelligence within the civil law.

One experience of mine in Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast in 1989 confirmed for me—not that I needed much convincing—the absolutely central and critical role that RUC Special Branch played in degrading the Provisional IRA, and forcing it to end its campaign of murder and intimidation against the people of Northern Ireland. I was being led, in the company of seven IRA members, through the tunnel from the jail to the courthouse, each of us handcuffed to another prisoner. I happened to be handcuffed to a senior and long-standing member of the IRA from Dungannon, County Tyrone, named Henry Louis McNally. I knew him quite well from my days as an IRA operative in the mid-1970s in County Tyrone. He was once named, by Ken Maginnis, an Ulster Unionist MP in the House of Commons, as being directly responsible for the murders of seventeen members of the security forces. He had been arrested, charged, and later convicted of the attempted murder of British soldiers travelling by bus to their base in Antrim.

McNally was a very canny, experienced and long-term senior IRA man who followed his own timetable, operating in his native County Tyrone for going on sixteen years, interrupted only by one spell on remand. I was curious as to why this cautious man was operating far from his normal stomping ground. I asked him, and the answer I received in that tunnel was this: “Special Branch have us in a vice-like grip in Tyrone and it is just too difficult to operate, so like a fool I finished up going to Antrim to get some kills and ended up here.” Out of the mouths of babes and killers … McNally had no love for the Special Branch, but he had good reason to be realistic about them as formidable and professional enemies forged in a very unforgiving fire.

In the introduction to his book Matchett describes his first days as an eighteen-year-old recruit in the RUC, stationed in the IRA heartland of South Armagh:

At 18 it was a rude awakening to the reality of armed conflict. I was shot at, caught in roadside bombs and mortared. I lost some good friends. I would lie if I said I was not afraid. I knew the IRA men who were doing this, we all did, but we could not prove it.

This was Northern Ireland in 1982, not Beirut or Afghanistan, but a part of the UK situated on the island of Ireland. It is I think worth taking a moment to ponder those lines. The border was but a stone’s throw away and mostly the IRA simply scooted across the border into the Irish Republic where Matchett and his colleagues could not follow. And so it went on—year after bloody year. A police force that had been utterly demoralised and demonised by the events of 1969 took years to recover some sense of mission and purpose. It wasn’t until police primacy in law enforcement and intelligence gathering was restored in 1976 that a revamped and reinvigorated RUC really took on the slow and deadly task of taking back control of IRA-controlled areas of Belfast and Derry. Slowly but surely the rule of law began to assert itself. The centre of IRA activity began to retreat more and more to the rural heartlands bordering the Irish Republic. Eventually towards the end the IRA was on its knees, its last stronghold in South Armagh on the verge of collapse.

It would of course be wrong to downgrade the huge role and sacrifice undertaken by the British Army, particularly in the early 1970s. Without the Army holding the line in those difficult years the RUC, and Special Branch in particular, would almost certainly never have had the breathing space to re-organise. Matchett recognises the debt of gratitude to those soldiers who served and were injured or murdered when he writes simply, “The Army prevented Ulster from unravelling.” Of course one of the primary differences between the police and the Army was that police knew the ground where they were born, went to school, got married, had children and worked and socialised. They were of the soil, as their enemies in the IRA were, and they proved more resolute, determined and fearless in protecting their children, homeland and way of life than those who opposed them. They were often frustrated by having to observe the rule of law—but it proved the right way. They were determined to outwit and outlast the IRA—and they did. Matchett sets out in clear, precise words the operational strategies and tactics Special Branch adopted to defeat a well-armed and vicious terrorist group.

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The 25th Amendment? Forget It Impeachment would be a picnic by comparison with Trump opponents’ latest brainstorm. By Brian C. Kalt

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

Interest in Section 4 of the 25th Amendment is peaking. Multiple amateur constitutional scholars have advocated its use to remove President Trump from office, as an alternative to impeachment. But Section 4 is a tool for a different job. Its use under today’s circumstances has the potential to tear the country apart.

Section 4 is not a suitable substitute for impeachment. To be sure, impeachment sets a high bar: a majority in the House, then two-thirds in the Senate to convict and remove an official. Section 4 sounds easier: If the vice president and a majority of the cabinet declare the president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” the vice president becomes acting president.

Section 4 is a great solution if the president is missing or comatose, but a terrible one when he is conscious and in full control of his Twitter account. The first difficulty is that the president can contest the cabinet’s action. If he does, Congress assembles, debates and votes. Unless two-thirds of both House and Senate vote within 21 days to back the cabinet, the president retakes power. Because impeachment requires only a simple House majority, it is easier for the president to defeat a Section 4 action than to avoid impeachment.

Further, if the president loses a Section 4 vote, he is displaced only temporarily; nothing stops him from trying again. All he needs is the support, one time, of more than a third of either the House or Senate.

Some argue that impeachment is limited to high crimes and misdemeanors, making it inappropriate for the case of someone who is (as Mr. Trump’s calmer critics describe him) simply in over his head. But anyone who wields as much power as the president and who is grossly incompetent surely will have done something that rises to the level of an impeachable offense.

Section 4 is also horribly hazardous. The fatal flaw emerges from this passage: “When the President transmits . . . his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of [the cabinet] transmit within four days . . . their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

After reading that, who do you think holds presidential power during the four-day waiting period between the president’s declaration and the cabinet’s counterdeclaration? The answer is the vice president. The best reading of the text and the only reading of the crystal-clear legislative history is that the president does not immediately retake power.

Several intelligent but poorly informed commentators have gotten that wrong and said that the president would retake power immediately. A besieged president would have a tremendous incentive to look at the text, interpret it favorably to himself, and rally his supporters around that interpretation. He would assert that he had retaken power immediately and—showing his ability to discharge the powers and duties of his office—he would fire his disloyal cabinet and name more-agreeable allies as acting secretaries.CONTINUE AT SITE

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The Mueller Caveat His integrity is unquestioned. But can he be objective toward Comey? By Kimberley A. Strassel

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

Professional medical organizations have a simple guideline: It’s a bad idea for doctors to treat their friends or relatives. No matter how skilled, no matter how upright, a doctor who does risks losing his objectivity. The big question is whether this applies to Washington’s new scandal doctor, Robert Mueller.

In tapping Mr. Mueller as special counsel to look into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein has certainly doused the political flames. Democrats were forced to tone down their chant for instant impeachment. Republicans were able to step back from the escalating headlines.

That’s because the new guy is as skilled and upright as they come. A Robert Mueller word-association game would go something like this: integrity, honor, respect, order, discipline, honesty, fairness. He is a decorated Marine, a Princeton grad, a respected federal prosecutor and a former FBI director. Mr. Mueller has tackled strongmen and terrorists, working under Republicans and Democrats. He has little use for the press or the limelight, which—in the current hysterical environment—is a singular qualification.

In short, nobody doubts Mr. Mueller will lead as professional an investigation as he is capable of conducting. It’s the “capable” bit that provides the one note of concern.

Mr. Mueller is no doctor. But he is part of the brotherhood of prosecutors. Justice Department attorneys have their squabbles and differences, but they count themselves as a legal elite, charged with a noble purpose. They largely keep their own counsel and aren’t much for outside criticism.

The FBI’s culture is even more famous and pronounced. Tens of thousands of special agents and staff from different backgrounds come together to protect the country from criminals and terrorists. Outside the military, no other Washington body rivals the FBI’s esprit de corps. CONTINUE AT SITE

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Behind the Scenes of the Trump Administration’s Tug-of-war Over the Israel Embassy Move by Barak Ravid and Amir Tibon

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

Keep the embassy in Tel Aviv or move it to Jerusalem? The issue has turned into a fierce struggle between Trump’s advisers and his top cabinet members. He has until June 1 to decide.

A large whiteboard hangs in the office of Steve Bannon, U.S. President Donald Trump’s strategic advisor. In closely packed lines of black marker, it lists Trump’s campaign promises – a kind of to-do list. One of the first goals in the foreign affairs and defense category is moving the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

Two competing groups of senior Trump administration officials have been waging war over this issue for over four months, beginning during the transition period before Trump took office. On one side are some of his closest senior political advisors and appointments; on the other are leading cabinet ministers and most of the professional civil servants.

A senior Israeli official who heard from one of Trump’s advisors said that before Trump’s January 20 inauguration, there was a fierce argument over whether a pledge to move the embassy should be included in his inaugural address. The Prime Minister’s Office awaited the speech with a mix of anticipation and trepidation, but discovered that the opponents won out, and the embassy move was dropped from the speech.

The battle is expected to continue even after Trump’s visit to the Middle East, right up until June 1 – the date on which the presidential waiver signed by former U.S. President Barack Obama six months ago, which froze the embassy’s move to Jerusalem, will expire.

According to several people familiar with the administration’s internal debates – both in Israel and America, all of whom asked to remain anonymous – the group urging Trump to refuse to sign the waiver and finally move the embassy is headed by Bannon himself. A number of these sources told Haaretz that Bannon doesn’t see the embassy move as a promise by Trump to Israel, but as a promise to the president’s right-wing nationalist base that put him in the White House.

“He understands that many of the president’s voters want to see this promise kept,” said a former senior U.S. official who is in touch with the current administration.

Another dominant figure in the group pushing for the embassy move is new U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. During the campaign, it was Friedman who, in interviews with both the American and the Israeli media, repeatedly stressed Trump’s promise to move the embassy. Last December, when Trump appointed him as ambassador, he said he would work to strengthen ties between America and Israel, “and look forward to doing this from the U.S. embassy in Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem.”

Ever since Trump took office on January 20, Friedman has been pushing the president to keep his promise. In an interview with the daily Israel Hayom this week, Freidman said he gave the president his personal opinion on the matter. But two administration officials said Friedman did much more than that. “Friedman is working on the embassy issue all the time,” one said.

Friedman, who submitted his credentials to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin this week, immediately began preparing senior Israeli officials for the possibility that his efforts will fail and Trump will decide not to move the embassy at this stage. “Even if it doesn’t happen now, it will happen later,” he told one of his Israeli interlocutors. “Don’t press. Give us time.”

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Trump’s Goes to Saudi Arabia and Jerusalem By Rachel Ehrenfeld

Posted By on May 19th, 2017

On his way to Riyadh, President Trump should watch Noam Chomsky’s TV interview on May 17, talking about Saudi Arabia. Chomsky’s observation of the Desert Kingdom might help remind the President who the Saudis really are. “Saudi Arabia is the center of radical Islamic extremism” Chomsky stated. “The spread of Saudi extremist Wahhabi doctrine over the Sunni world is one of the real disasters of the modern era. It’s a source of not only funding for extremist radical Islam and the jihadi outgrowths of it, but also, doctrinally, mosques, clerics, schools, madrassas (where you study just Qur’an), is spreading all over the huge Sunni areas from Saudi influence,” he added.

Trump, however, is not going to Saudi Arabia to pick a fight. His advisors explained that the President’s goal is tp show his support to the Sunni Muslim world.

According to National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, the President’s speech at the opening ceremony of yet another Saudi center “for fighting radicalism and promoting moderation,” would incredibly focus on “a peaceful vision of Islam to dominate across the world.” (added emphasis).

We will have to wait until the President deliver his speech. But based on what McMaster’s briefing, Trump’s speech is likely to echo President Obama’s speech on June 4, 2009, in Cairo, in which he falsely attributed “tolerance and racial equality” to Islam, and whitewashed Islamic terrorism, claiming: “Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism – it is an important part of promoting peace.” While the leaders of some 50 countries with a Muslim majority would no doubt be delighted, this is strange coming from a U.S. General who spent years leading the battle against violent Sunni and Shia Muslim extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Trump administration’s effort to help a Sunni coalition against ISIS and Iran is important, because “We all have the same enemy and we all want the same thing.”Is there no one in the administration to remember and remind Trump what happened when the U.S. helped the Sunni Taliban to defeat the former Soviet Union? Al Qaeda happened.

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French Legislative Elections: Part 1 by Nidra Poller

Posted By on May 18th, 2017

Ra’anana, Israel 14 May 2017

The sun is shining, the air is sweet and breezy, the birds are chirping and the jacandas are ablaze in purple blossoms. I’m like a restless pupil in summertime, looking out the window and aching to run out of the classroom and dive into glorious nature.

Far away in Paris, François Hollande is handing over to Emmanuel Macron the nuclear scepter and other secret codes and coded secrets of the Elysée Palace. There will be all sorts of media winks and hints with flashbacks to the last such exercise when the newly elected Hollande nastily skipped the courtesy of escorting outgoing President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla Bruni to the car that would carry them to their new civilian life.

I can’t cheat on time, place & perspective. Instead of following the inauguration as if I were there, I want to see it from this perspective, from Israel…where the question of Aliyah hovers over French Jews, those that have already made the choice, and the others.

My dear friend and colleague Moti Kedar asks me if France is doomed. His parents made Aliyah from Poland in the early 30s, he was born in Israel where he has fruitfully multiplied. Demographically, he says, France doesn’t add up. It subtracts. How did he put it? A nation that doesn’t make children is heading straight for the museum. I am always at a loss to answer this existential question. Of course I respond at great length and exhaustively, but without any statistics or hardware to justify my long term predictions. Or is it simply hope? Not idle hope, not “where’s the problem?” Simply hope instead of dejection, hope as a form of light, my default mode.

Election night

Since my last report at 8 PM on election night, the figures have been refined. The final count is:

percentage

votes

Emmanuel Macron

66.1 %

20,753,797

Marine Le Pen

33.9%

10,644,118

Abstentions

12,101,416

Blanks

3,019,735

Exit polls were posted on non-French media several hours before the official announcement of the results. The candidates and their supporters knew, of course. Stiff silence at the Front National venue at the Chalet du Lac in the Bois de Boulogne where Marine obviously would not be celebrating a victory. At the Louvre, Macron fans were rushing into the courtyard, grabbing pastel t-shirts and French flags from the ellpeurs [helpers] like marathon runners reaching for water bottles without losing a step. Everyone remembers the proliferation of huge foreign flags, mostly from Muslim countries, at the Bastille where François Hollande celebrated 5 years ago. Nothing was left to chance this time. The roving mike did catch some uninhibited folklore from an ecstatic African supporter: “I was on my way to the toilets to pee,” she said, “when I heard them announce that Macron is the winner!!! Wow!!!

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A coup attempt, not a Constitutional crisis By David P. Goldman

Posted By on May 18th, 2017

A ranking Republican statesman this week told an off-the-record gathering that a “coup” attempt was in progress against President Donald Trump, with collusion between the largely Democratic media and Trump’s numerous enemies in the Republican Party. The object of the coup, the Republican leader added, was not impeachment, but the recruitment of a critical mass of Republican senators and congressmen to the claim that Trump was “unfit” for office and to force his resignation.

It’s helpful to fan away the psychedelic fumes of allegation and innuendo and clarify just what Trump might have done wrong. Trump will not be impeached, and he will not be harried out of office. But he faces a formidable combination of media hostility—what the president today denounced as a “witch hunt”—and a divided White House staff prone to press leaks. The likely outcome will be a prolonged dirty war of words that will delay Trump’s domestic agenda and tie down his loyalists with the chores of fire-fighting.

One thinks of Gulliver tied down by the Lilliputians. Trump was elected by campaigning against the Republican Establishment as well as Obama, ridiculing their policy blunders in Iraq and Afghanistan and questioning their credibility. In the flurry of personal attacks, the underlying policy issues have faded into the background, and that gives the initiative to Trump’s enemies.

Nothing that has been alleged, much less proven, about President Trump comes close to the threshold for impeachment, as Prof. Jonathan Turley of George Washington University’s law school explained in a May 17 comment in TheHill.com. Even if Trump asked then FBI Director James Comey to go easy on Gen. Michael Flynn, Prof. Turley notes, “Encouraging leniency or advocating for an associate is improper but not necessarily” illegal. The charge of obstruction of justice presumes that there is an issue before the bar of justice, but as Turley adds, “There is no indication of a grand jury proceeding at the time of the Valentine’s Day meeting between Trump and Comey. Obstruction cases generally are built around judicial proceedings — not Oval Office meetings.”

The appointment of the respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller as special counsel to look into allegations of Russian interference in the November 2016 election strongly suggests that the Trump team feels it has nothing to fear from a thorough review. In the case Trump’s detractors appear to be bluffing. Press reports of contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russian diplomats and businessmen appear to reflect the sort of conversations that every presidential campaign conducts with important foreign governments. It is not clear that Russia was responsible for the delivery of embarrassing Democratic National Committee emails to Wikileaks, moreover. Pro-Trump media report that a DNC staffer Seth Rich was Wikileaks’ source. Rich was murdered on a Washington street in July 2016, and a counter-conspiracy theory is circulating about his death.

Then there is the alleged leak of highly classified intelligence on the laptop bomb threat to airliners, of which Wall Street Journal editors intoned, “Loose Lips Sink Presidencies.” Exactly what the president told the Russians is under dispute, but the salient fact in the case is that presidents and cabinet members frequently leak classified information without prompting the condemnations that piled up on Trump. Obama’s then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta leaked the role of Pakistani physician Shakil Afridi in locating Osama bin Laden’s lair, and President Obama himself revealed that Seal Team 6 had killed Obama, making the unit a subsequent target for terrorists. Apart from inadvertent leaks, the Obama administration deliberately leaked British nuclear secrets to Russia, over bitter protests from London.