RUTHFULLY YOURS

It was four years ago this month, that the President signed the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, better known as Dodd-Frank. Wall Street doesn’t appear particularly reformed and consumers remain at risk, now more from predatory politicians than overly aggressive bankers. Worse, the bill never addressed the role played by politicians, or the part played by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in forcing a lowering of mortgage underwriting standards, in order to meet government housing policies. It ignores the maxim that the threat of financial loss, including bankruptcy, remains the best retardant against reckless behavior.

More accurately, the bill is known as the “Lawyers’ and Consultants’ [read, lobbyists] Full Employment Act of 2010.” At 2,300 pages, with another estimated 14,000 pages of regulation, the bill created a maze for banks’ compliance departments and a boon for the lawyers necessary to guide the banks through its over-reaching tentacles. NPR reporter Gary Rivlin wrote that the financial industry has spent more than $1 billion on hundreds of lobbyists trying to chip away at the bill’s regulations. Patrick McHenry of CNN estimates that Dodd-Frank has imposed $21.8 billion in compliance costs and its regulations require 60 million hours of paper work. A single example of the latter was pointed out by Peter Wallinson a few days ago in the Wall Street Journal: J.P. Morgan Chase plans to hire 3,000 more compliance officers this year, to supplement the 7,000 added last year. At the same time, they announced the firing of 5,000 people – a swap of the non-productive for the productive.

The purpose of the legislation was to promote the financial stability of the United States by improving accountability and transparency, two traits disagreeable to lawyers who prefer chaos to simplicity and obfuscation to clarity. It was supposed to protect the American taxpayer by ending bailouts for banks “too big to fail, and it was designed to protect consumers from abusive financial practices and products.

Has it accomplished these goals? Financially, the U.S. is more stable, at least for the moment. But that may simply be a natural and rational reaction of businesses and people who have had a near-death experience. The near-collapse of the financial system in 2008 was enough, as we used to say in New Hampshire, to scare the “bejesus” out of one. It would have been odd if borrowers and lenders had not become more cautious. I suspect they still are. Keep in mind, a near-collapse of an entire financial system is extremely rare. Regardless, consumer debt remains a problem. A recent study by the Urban Institute suggests that one in three adults with a credit history – 77 million people – are so far behind in their debt payments that their accounts are now “in collections.” As the French would say, plus ça change, plus la meme chose.

Republican lawmakers in the nation’s capital are racing against the legislative clock to approve measures aimed at cleaning up the border mess that President Obama created and preventing him from issuing unilateral decrees making it much, much worse.

The Obama administration is threatening to plunge the nation into a dire constitutional crisis after Labor Day by using executive orders to grant a huge amnesty to millions of illegal aliens now in the United States. Of course, in the American system of government, Congress, not the president, is supposed to make laws. Congress has repeatedly refused to grant the amnesties that Obama seeks, but the president refuses to take no for an answer, pressing on regardless of the casualties he inflicts on the country.

There is no indication Obama is backing off.

After meeting with Obama at the White House, leftist congressman Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) again predicted the president would go forward with a massive immigration amnesty.

“I believe the president of the United States is going to act broadly and generously,” Gutiérrez said Tuesday on MSNBC when describing the White House visit that took place Friday. “That’s my belief. He didn’t say that to me but that’s what I believe he’s going to do.”

A giddy Gutiérrez said last week that the Obama administration could unilaterally provide legal status to as many as 5 million illegals.

But an amnesty fiat by the president would violate the U.S. Constitution and the separation of powers doctrine and is clearly “an impeachable offense,” according to commentator Charles Krauthammer.

Although Krauthammer doesn’t support efforts to impeach Obama which he refers to as “political suicide,” he said that unilaterally granting work permits and legal status to millions of illegal aliens would be “clearly lawless and it would be biggest domestic overreach of a president in memory.”

If you like cease-fires, then this is a great time to be alive. Those Israelis who weren’t shot in the head by Hamas terrorists (whom Andrew Sullivan insists weren’t real Hamas terrorist, trading in his obsession with Sarah Palin’s rogue pregnancy for a new conspiracy theory) or killed by a Hamas rocket, encounter almost as many cease-fires in a given day as terrorist attacks.

A cease-fire comes along every few minutes and it can last anywhere from a minute to an hour to a few hours until Hamas once again begins firing rockets or swarming through tunnels to attack Israelis.

“War, what is it good for?” The Temptations sang. The obvious answer is that wars done right keep you from having to keep fighting.

But cease-fires with Hamas aren’t good for that or anything else.

Hamas violates its own cease-fires. It declares cease-fires and then denies that it declared them. It seems to have almost as many positions on cease-fires as John Kerry does on Iraq.

Israel’s unilateral cease-fires with Hamas are as worthless as its unilateral withdrawal from Gaza which allowed Hamas to take over the area. The cease-fires don’t stop the fighting. They don’t bring an end to the violence.

That’s what war is for.

But John Kerry is almost as obsessed with cease-fires as he is with finding a toupee that stays put during intense windsurfing sessions. The complete uselessness of the cease-fires hasn’t stopped the completely useless top diplomat from constantly proposing new ones.

Kerry defended his insistence on enrolling Israel in the Ceasefire-of-the-Minute club by claiming that enough worthless cease-fires could eventually be cashed in for one really big cease-fire.

Obama’s economic policy piled up huge amounts of debt on the theory that enough debt would eventually translate into wealth. The theory of a million worthless cease-fires adding up to peace is that same economic theory applied to the equally fraudulent realm of international diplomacy.

“The momentum generated by these short-term cease-fires is the best way to achieve a sustainable cease-fire,” Kerry said.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry’s obsession with ceasefires in Gaza has grown as tiresome as it is destructive. They yell “ceasefire” at Israel more often than a pair of cheerleaders chanting “Sis, boom, bah!” Their fetish is trite, unbecoming, and a needless obstacle to what they instead should promote: Israel’s immediate extermination of Hamas — a bloodthirsty, homicidal, militant-Islamic, Jew-killing machine.

“Hamas has broken five cease-fires that we accepted and we actually implemented,” Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Chris Wallace on the July 27 edition of Fox News Sunday. “They rejected all of them, violated all of them, including two humanitarian cease-fires in the last 24 hours.”

Netanyahu referred to last Saturday’s twelve-hour humanitarian ceasefire, to allow the Gazans time to rescue the wounded and recover the deceased. As the peaceful interval expired at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) unilaterally extended it for another four hours. But, “moments after the cease-fire officially ended, another three mortars were fired from Gaza and hit Israel in the Eshkol regional council,” CNN reported. “At about 4 p.m. ET, IDF said four rockets had been fired in the last hour.”

Thus, Hamas unilaterally launched more explosive rockets at Israel, igniting the violence anew. Obama and Kerry’s barking at Israel notwithstanding, Hamas simply will not take “ceasefire” for an answer.

Nonetheless, Kerry’s carbon footprint approaches Sasquatch proportions as he jets around with a peace plan that resembles a Hamas shopping list.

“To the ‘horror’ of the Israeli ministers, the Kerry proposal accepted Hamas’s demands for the opening of border crossings into Gaza — where Israel and Egypt fear the import of weaponry; the construction of a seaport; and the creation of a post-conflict funding channel for Hamas from Qatar and other countries,” the Times of Israel reported on Saturday. “The proposal, meanwhile, did not even provide for Israel to continue demolishing the Hamas network of ‘terror tunnels’ dug under the Israeli border.”

The Obama administration’s recent failures in the foreign-policy arena have only highlighted how far American leadership has fallen in this new century. From the Middle East to Eurasia, it often seems that President Obama is reacting to events instead of trying to shape them. Americans have begun to see his collective failures as an indictment of his presidency, and they long for clarity and purpose from their president.

The clear foreign policy that is grounded in American ideas of promoting liberty abroad and preserving our security at home is what is needed now. That is how we became a superpower. Reversing these ideas allows our adversaries to become stronger and impairs our ability to respond to present-day threats.

While Obama’s foreign-policy adventures have waxed and waned in the eyes of the American public, his indecisiveness in places such as Iraq and Syria has presented an image of weakness on the global stage.

We have failed to adequately deal with Russian aggression in Georgia and Ukraine. Recognizing that the United States would soon be changing administrations, Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. As a nation, we stood by and watched during that transition, as parts of Georgia fell under Russian rule. Vladimir Putin sensed our weakness and saw opportunity. Six years later, he annexed Crimea, and now pro-Russian forces are trying to take over more land in Ukraine.

What has the Obama administration done in response to this aggression by Russia? Not really much, other than impose toothless sanctions on Russian businessmen close to Putin (but not the Russian president himself), which have done little to make Russia change course. Is this what Ronald Reagan would have done? Or would he have helped pro-democracy Ukrainians and pressed Europe to look for alternatives to Russian natural gas to preclude being held hostage by Russian energy? Additionally, we need to reinforce our commitments to NATO and get the former components of the Soviet Union involved. Otherwise, Putin will do this again. We need to embolden Europe to confront him.

Russia is not the only country that has taken advantage of our preoccupation with the Middle East. Recently, China has been expanding its maritime boundary in the South China Sea. It also seeks to test our resolve on long-held security commitments we have with our partners in Asia. We must do more to let our Asian allies know that we will stand with them and confront China’s territorial ambitions. China continues to threaten our country with cyber-attacks and is a repressive global power. We need to do more to support those people in China who long for democratic reform.

There is not much that is simple about the Arab–Israeli conflict, but there is one thing that is certain: The question of how many Palestinian women and children are going to die in Gaza is not going to be decided by the Israelis — it is going to be decided by Hamas.

The Jews mean to live, Hamas means to exterminate them, and there will be war until Hamas and its allies either weary of it or win it and the last Israeli Jew is dead or exiled. It is Hamas, not the Israelis, that stashes rockets and soldiers in schools and hospitals, but it is the Israelis the world expects to take account of that situation. Every creature on this Earth, from ant to gazelle, is entitled to — expected to — defend its life to the last: The Israeli Jews, practically alone among the world’s living things, are expected to make allowances for the well-being of those who are trying to exterminate them. No one lectures the antelope on restraint when the jackals come, but the Jews in the Jewish state are in the world’s judgment not entitled to what is granted every fish and insect as a matter of course.

That is one bit of strangeness, but there are a great many strange little assumptions that worm their way into our language, and our thought, when it comes to the Arab–Israeli conflict. Once a week or so, somebody will publicize a chart purporting to show the shrinkage of “Arab land” in what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories — as though Arabs did not hail from Arabia, as though they popped up out of the ground around Jerusalem like crocus blossoms. As though those Arab lands hadn’t been Turkish lands, Roman lands, Macedonian lands, Jewish lands.

As though this situation just dropped out of the sky.

Israel, as a Jewish state, is a relatively new country, having been established in 1948. But the idea of Palestine as a particular polity, much less an Arab polity, is a relatively new one, too, only 28 years older. Until the day before yesterday, the word “Palestinian” referred to Jews living in their ancestral homeland. During Roman rule, Palestine was considered a part of Syria: The prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate, was subordinate to the legate of Syria, Palestine being a not especially notable outpost. (It is perhaps for this reason that no physical evidence of Pilate’s existence was unearthed until 1961.) That situation obtained for centuries; as late as the 19th century, the idea of an Arab Palestine distinct from Syria was a novel one, and one expressed in Ottoman administrative practice rather than in anything resembling a state as the term is understood. The notion of a Palestinian Arab nation dates to only a few decades before the establishment of the modern state of Israel.

‘So sue me” is President Obama’s message to Congress. And on Wednesday the House of Representatives took up his taunt, authorizing a lawsuit to challenge the president’s failure to faithfully execute provisions of the Affordable Care Act as passed by Congress. The House lawsuit is no “stunt,” as Mr. Obama has characterized it. The lawsuit is necessary to protect the Constitution’s separation of powers, a core means of protecting individual liberty. Without a judicial check on unbounded executive power to suspend the law, this president and all who follow him will have a powerful new weapon to destroy political accountability and democracy itself.

Article I of the Constitution vests all legislative power in Congress. Article II imposes a duty on the president to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” When a law is unambiguous, the president cannot rewrite it to suit his own preferences. “The power of executing the laws,” as the Supreme Court emphasized in June in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA, “does not include a power to revise clear statutory terms that turn out not to work in practice.” If a law has defects, fixing them is Congress’s business.

These barriers between the branches are not formalities—they were designed to prevent the accumulation of excessive power in one branch. As the Supreme Court explained in New York v. United States (1992), the “Constitution protects us from our own best intentions: It divides power among sovereigns and among branches of government precisely so that we may resist the temptation to concentrate power in one location as an expedient solution to the crisis of the day.”

The barriers also reflect the Framers’ belief that some powers are better suited for a particular branch of government because of its institutional characteristics.

The travelling “impeachment” carnival that put down stakes in Washington this summer may boost cable ratings, but the amusement rides and midway games are for children. The real story that could have political consequences is Wednesday’s 225-201 House vote to pursue a lawsuit challenging President Obama’s abuse of executive power.

The impeachment farce is getting so much attention because Democrats and some on the right see it as a money maker. Little did we know when we wrote recently that Sarah Palin and MSNBC had a shared interest in pushing impeachment that the former Alaska governor would soon debut her own $9.95-a-month subscription Web channel. When you’re trying to steal eyeballs from Glenn Beck and talk radio, it’s all about market share. Impeachment is a marketing tool, and never let anyone seem more furious at Barack Obama.

As for Democrats, they hope impeachment can motivate their otherwise dispirited donors and voters. Everyone from First Lady Michelle Obama to Nancy Pelosi to White House senior counsellor Dan Pfeiffer is begging the GOP to impeach their hero. House Democrats boasted that they raised some $2.1 million over the weekend from the ploy. Impeach him again—harder.
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The shame is that this bipartisan cynicism is giving Democrats and the media the chance to dismiss Speaker John Boehner’s lawsuit as equally frivolous. As Mr. Obama likes to mock, “So sue me.” They said the same about the lawsuit challenging ObamaCare’s individual mandate and federal subsidies, only to see those emerge as serious legal disputes.

One wishes Barack Obama and John Kerry more luck in Ukraine and the Middle East than Neville Chamberlain had in Munich.

If it’s true that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, then maybe we’re in luck. Many people in this unhappy year are reading histories of World War I, such as Margaret MacMillan’s “The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.” That long-ago catastrophe began 100 years ago this week. The revisiting of this dark history may be why so many people today are asking if our own world—tense or aflame in so many places—resembles 1914, or 1938.

Whatever the answer, it is the remembering of past mistakes that matters, if the point is to avoid the high price of re-making those mistakes. A less hopeful view, in an era whose history comes and goes like pixels, would be that Santayana understated the problem. Even remembering the past may not be enough to protect a world poorly led. To understate: Leading from behind has never ended well.

In a recent essay for the Journal, Margaret MacMillan summarized the after-effects of World War I. Two resonate now. Political extremism gained traction, because so many people lost confidence in the existing political order or in the abilities of its leadership. That bred the isolationism of the 1920s and ’30s. Isolationism was a refusal to see the whole world clearly. Self-interest, then and now, has its limits.

Which brings our new readings into the learning curves of history up to 1938. But not quite. First a revealing stop in the years just before Munich, when in 1935 Benito Mussolini’s Italy invaded Ethiopia.

Mute Them!

There is no “other side” and who is this Peter Beinart all of a sudden? I’ve heard his name mentioned as a meshimut, a Jew who hates his own flesh, and only when I saw him on CNN did I realize the extent of the illness. Sick boy. People like that are not merely perverse. They glory in their perversity.

He grew louder and more obnoxious as he kept rubbing it in against Israel. He even drowned out Alan Dershowitz.

Why is Dersh even on the same panel? Dersh is a supporter of Israel. He also supports a “two-state solution.” How’s that workin’ out for ya?

As I’ve said, Gaza IS the two-state solution and Hamas terror is the result. Remind me not to pick horses with you, Mr. Harvard professor.

Why am I even watching this? Well I am, but I am not listening.

Years ago I realized that the mute button is the greatest invention known to man. So I have muted every commercial since. I don’t know what’s buying or what’s selling….and these days everybody is selling Hamas. These are also commercials with the usual deceptions, only more so, because in selling cars or soap there is always some truth to the message.

For Hamas the fabrications are 100 percent. But the networks are buying. They insist on listening to the mumbo jumbo. Both sides, y’know.

I wonder if the same networks rushed to Berlin to hear what Joseph Goebbels had to say. Yes, give him equal time to illustrate the rightness of his kamph.