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Wars are often the result of dumb/dangerous acts by one's predecessors and so it could be regarding Obama's Iran Deal
Israel and Trump could/will be blamed for cleaning up the mess Obama created. (See 1 below.)
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What is treasonous is the idiot who called it so.
Yes, it was stupid for sure. Giving any Democrat a log to put on the fire is soooo dumb. (See 2 below.)
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This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader who has children and served his country admirably and still is doing so. (See 3 below.)
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PC'ism overwhelms logic and common sense and that is why Democrats embrace it. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) 'ISRAEL MAY NEED TO TAKE OUT IRANIAN BASES IN SYRIA'
Former NSC head says Iranian nuke deal source of problems Iran is causing in region, and deal is "worse than we imagined."
Israel may need to take military action to prevent Iran or Hezbollah from setting up permanent bases in Syria, former National Security Council head Yaakov Amidror said on Monday.
Amidror’s comments come a day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told journalists in Paris that Israel was opposed to the Syrian cease-fire brokered recently by the US and Syria because it perpetuates Iran’s military presence in the the country.
If Israel's interests are not taken into account by those determining what the future arrangements will be in Syria – the Americans, Russians or others – “that might lead the IDF to intervene and destroy every attempt to build [permanent Iranian] infrastructure in Syria,” he said.
Amidror, a fellow at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies who has remained in contact with Netanyahu, made his comments during a press conference with journalists organized by The Israel Project.
“We will not let the Iranians and Hezbollah be the forces that will win the very brutal war in Syria” and then move their focus onto Israel, he said. Up until now Israel has been very careful to stay out of the war in Syria, saying it will only intervene – and indeed only has intervened – to protect the red lines Netanyahu established: that game-changing weaponry is not transferred to Hezbollah via Syria, that Hezbollah and Iranian troops are not on the border with Israel, and that the Iranians do not establish permanent bases in Syria.
Amidror said that the cease fire plan was made without taking into sufficient consideration Israel’s need to defend itself.
“At the end of the day it is our responsibility, not the responsibility of the Americans, or the Russians, to guarantee ourselves, and we will take all the measures that are needed for that,” he said.
Explaining how the Americans and Russians -- with which Israel has good ties and a dialogue -- agreed to a deal that could allow for a permanent Iranian presence in Syria, Amidror said that the Russian strategic goal in the cease-fire was to ensure that Assad's regime remains, and the the American strategic goal was to destroy Islamic State.
Israel, he said, needs to “take care of its strategic goal,” which he defined as “keeping Iran and Syria from building launching pads in Syria.”
Amidror said that that while Israel obviously wants to see the killing in Syria end, “the price can't be having Iran and Hezbollah on our borders.”
He said that Israel has both diplomatic and military options to keep this from happening, and said “both options should be used.”
Amidror attributed Iran's current success in the region to the Iranian nuclear deal signed two years ago. Iran, he said, is implementing a strategy that for the first time in modern history places them on the cusp of establishing a land corridor from Tehran, through Baghdad to Damascus and the Mediterranean.
“The ability of the Iranians to do what they are doing now in Syria and Iraq, and be involved in both Syria and Iraq, and their relations with Hezbollah, it is all built on the legitimacy they gained from this [nuclear] agreement,” he said.
Amidror said that it is very much in the Iranian interests to abide by the agreement, since in the meantime they are changing the contours of the entire Middle East. After the period of the agreement ends they can then dash to the nuclear finish line, with their strategic situation in the region considerably improved, as well as their ability to withstand any new wave of sanctions.
“The agreement is the source of all the problems ,” he said. “It is even more dangerous than we imagined when signed.”
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2) Donald Jr.'s meeting dumb but, so far, not criminal - and nowhere near treason
by John Yoo & David Marston
Many words describe Donald Trump Jr.'s June 2016 meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya.
Smart is not among them.
But after the torrent of claims that Moscow "meddled" in the 2016 presidential election, it is remarkable that when a Russian actually showed up to meet with Trump campaign officials, she did not interfere after all. Rather, Veselnitskaya allegedly spent 20 minutes seeking a softening of U.S. sanctions against Russia. Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, left after 10 minutes. Campaign manager Paul Manafort focused on his email. No one followed up. It is a fair inference that Manafort and Kushner attended to prevent the meeting from becoming a political embarrassment. They failed.
In today's white-hot partisan environment, it has escaped notice that it is not a crime to meet a Russian. Obviously, there are circumstances where it would be improper or even illegal for a political campaign official to conspire with a Russian, but the known facts of the June 2016 meeting do not come close. This conclusion should be revisited if it turns out that the campaign provided Veselnitskaya's plane ticket or had other financial arrangements with her.
For now, two words describe the Trump Tower meeting: brain-dead. But dumb does not equal criminal. Criminalizing all dumb moves in political campaigns would effectively eviscerate the First Amendment.
Critics claim that Donald Jr.'s emails show "collusion" between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. But "collusion" is not itself a federal crime (except in antitrust law). Instead, the crime of "conspiracy" requires an agreement between a Trump campaign official and a Russian governmental official to commit a specific crime. Rabid anti-Trumpers think that crime might be hacking or false statements or even espionage, but alas: no evidence. Further investigation might discover such an agreement, but nothing public at this stage rises to the level of a crime.
Claims that the meeting might constitute treason or violate federal campaign law only reveal a desperate effort to overturn the results of the 2016 presidential election. This irresponsible thinking has not just held sway among the liberal commentariat, where one would expect it to flourish, but with otherwise respectable political leaders. Sen. Tim Kaine (D., Va.) told reporters that "this is moving into perjury, false statements, and even potentially treason." He seems to have forgotten whatever he learned about the Constitution while attending Harvard Law School.
The Framers were so concerned about the potential misuse of treason trials by the federal government that they made it the only crime specifically defined in the Constitution's text. Article III states: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." Taking a meeting with a Russian lawyer, even if she might have ties to the Kremlin, simply does not amount to "levying War."
Indeed, on this point Kaine forgets his own state's history. In 1807, Virginia hosted the most important treason prosecution in American history, that against the Aaron Burr conspirators. In the Burr case, President Thomas Jefferson ordered his former vice president (who had earlier killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel) tried for attempting to raise a rebellion in the new Louisiana Purchase. Chief Justice John Marshall, who sat as the trial judge, found that the bar for "levying War" to be quite high - basically an overt act of force against the government.
Even if Donald Jr. did not actually commit a hostile act, some might argue that he gave "aid and comfort" to the enemy. Established judicial doctrine has long made clear that helping a foreign nation, alone, does not qualify as treason. A defendant can only provide aid and comfort to an enemy in the context of a war. Despite our problems with the regime of Vladimir Putin, we are currently at peace with Russia. Even during the start of the Cold War in the early 1950s, we did not prosecute the notorious Soviet spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for treason, but rather espionage, because there was no war with the USSR.
Former Democratic officials speculate that Donald Jr. may have violated federal campaign law, which prohibits candidates from soliciting contributions or "anything of value" from a foreigner. In 1996, for example, Bill Clinton fell into hot water when prosecutors and congressional investigators learned that wealthy Chinese nationals may have funneled money to his campaign. Trump critics suggest that damaging information on Hillary Clinton could qualify as something "of value," equivalent to large sums of money.
But if information itself qualifies as an in-kind campaign contribution, it is not just foreigners who will be affected - though we could care less about the rights of Russians. This theory would allow the government to interfere with legitimate and legal (no matter how roughhouse) electioneering by Americans.
Federal election law, for example, places a cap on campaign contributions from Americans at $2,700 per candidate per campaign. Suppose, in 2020, a disgruntled White House official provides the Democratic presidential campaign with information damaging to President Trump. Will that whistle-blower have made an illegal in-kind contribution? Suppose a journalist warns the Democratic candidate of an approaching Trump line of attack - will the reporter have violated campaign contribution limits?
These activities, of course, should receive the protection of the First Amendment. No court has ever upheld the prosecution of an American for transferring information to a campaign. Prohibiting Americans from gathering and spreading information about candidates would strike a deadly blow not just to the free spirit of our election campaigns, but to the robustness of our democracy.
John Yoo is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a former Bush Justice Department official. yooj@berkeley.edu
David Marston was a U.S. attorney in Philadelphia and recently retired from private practice. dave.marston8@gmail.com
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3)THOUGHT FOR THE DAY...WEEK.....MONTH....... YEARS AND YEARS
4) THE LEFT'S MANIACAL WAR ON COMMON SENSE
A major crime wave is ravaging your neighborhood – not only frequent break-ins and burglaries, but armed robberies, assaults and even murders. What do you do? Do you arm yourself and make sure your doors are locked at night and add a security system?
3)THOUGHT FOR THE DAY...WEEK.....MONTH....... YEARS AND YEARS
One noteworthy reality about Europe’s current political leadership
• Macron, the newly elected French president, has no children.
• German chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
• British prime minister Theresa May has no children.
• Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
• Holland’s Mark Rutte,
• Sweden’s Stefan Löfven,
• Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel,
• Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon — all have no children.
• Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has no children.
• Macron, the newly elected French president, has no children.
• German chancellor Angela Merkel has no children.
• British prime minister Theresa May has no children.
• Italian prime minister Paolo Gentiloni has no children.
• Holland’s Mark Rutte,
• Sweden’s Stefan Löfven,
• Luxembourg’s Xavier Bettel,
• Scotland’s Nicola Sturgeon — all have no children.
• Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, has no children.
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"So a grossly disproportionate number of the people making decisions
about Europe’s future have no direct personal sibling or grandchildren’s interests at stake in that future"
4) THE LEFT'S MANIACAL WAR ON COMMON SENSE
Exclusive: David Kupelian highlights startling pattern of perversity, insanity, destructiveness
A major crime wave is ravaging your neighborhood – not only frequent break-ins and burglaries, but armed robberies, assaults and even murders. What do you do? Do you arm yourself and make sure your doors are locked at night and add a security system?
Or … do you intentionally leave your doors unlocked and post a large, brightly lit sign saying, “Welcome criminals and psychopaths. There’s a lot of money in here, women too. The doors are unlocked and we are unarmed”?
In today’s America, one of the two major political parties favors the latter option.
Case in point: High-profile Democrat Rahm Emanuel is currently mayor of Chicago, where more than 4,000 people were shot last year, 762 of them murdered. The former Obama White House chief of staff is proud Chicago has some of the nation’s most stringent gun-control laws, even though decades of research proves more guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens reliably results in less crime. Worse, the mayor defiantly boasts of his determination to keep Chicago a “sanctuary city” – meaning the city’s police are prohibited from cooperating with federal law enforcement in getting criminal illegal aliens off the city’s streets by deporting them. Indeed, the “sanctuary city” designation serves as a “Welcome” sign to violent criminal illegals, assuring them that Chicago, like hundreds of other sanctuary cities, is their “safe space.”
Likewise, in San Francisco, the famed BART rapid transit system is currently plagued by “swarming attacks,” in which a dozen or more teens board a train car and assault and rob passengers. On April 22, for example, 40 to 60 teens boarded a train at the Coliseum station, robbed seven passengers and beat up two. Normally, of course, surveillance footage of such crimes would be immediately released to the media so the public could help identify the perpetrators. But not in San Francisco, where BART officials steadfastly refuse to release video footage of such crimes to the media. Why would they do that? Because, you see, letting the public see the video would encourage racism, they claim.
This is the same thinking that recently led a Seattle city councilman to object to hosing human feces and urine off public sidewalks in an area with homeless shelters because it would be racially insensitive. Power-washing the sidewalks, he claims, might evoke “images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists,” and thus traumatize observers.
Unfortunately, it’s not just with regard to crime and public safety that the left piously champions policies that utterly defy common sense. It’s the same in almost every area of life:
- Responding to relentless LGBT pressure, virtually the entire sports world, including the Olympics, is now allowing powerful male athletes who “self-identify” as female to compete against actual women, often winning the women’s competitions and – in some cases – seriously injuring their less-powerful female competitors.
- With Obama-era taxes and regulations squeezing millions of people out of the labor market, keeping money and jobs offshore and smothering the U.S. economy, President Trump promises to implement the obvious common-sense fix: seriously reduce taxes and eliminate ill-conceived business-crushing regulations. But the left’s antagonism to the sensible is evident even here. Their envy toward “the rich” blinds them to the necessity of allowing businesses to be profitable and thereby expand and employ more Americans. And after Trump’s June rally in Iowa, when the president explained how he had wanted to put a rich successful person, not a poor unsuccessful one, in charge of the U.S. economy, Democrats and the “mainstream media” attacked him as a hater of the poor.
- Countries the world over are suffering from terrorism. Since the vast majority of these terror attacks today are committed by Muslims in the name of Islam, one obvious common-sense response for concerned nations would be to limit Muslim immigration, especially from known terror hotbeds. Yet the left – including the Democratic Party, “mainstream” media, most university populations, progressive judges and Hollywood – seems intent on doing the opposite, bringing as many Muslims as possible into Europe, the U.K. and America. For the United Kingdom and Europe – already reeling from major Islamic terror attacks, an epidemic of sexual assaults and other immigrant crimes, widespread non-assimilation and “no-go zones,” and the steady encroachment of Shariah law, female genital mutilation, “honor killings” and other anti-Western aspects of Islamic culture – it may be too late to reverse course. Not so in America – yet.President Donald Trump in February said his administration was committed to a “common sense” approach to immigration and national security, promising to do everything in his power to stop terror attacks within the U.S.”We are getting such praise for our stance, and it’s a stance of common sense – maybe a certain toughness, but it’s really more than toughness,” Trump said during his Feb. 13 press conference with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. “It’s a stance of common sense, and we are going to pursue it vigorously. And we don’t want to have our country have the kinds of problems that you’re witnessing taking place not only here, but all over the world.”
- Nowhere is common sense under greater attack by the left than in higher education. Americans were repeatedly told by pollsters last year that college-educated folk tended to favor Hillary Clinton, while those with only a high-school diploma favored Donald Trump. Did that mean Hillary Clinton voters were somehow smarter, wiser, more perceptive, more mature and better informed than Trump voters? Obviously not.In reality, not only are those attending college today subjected to the distorted, left-wing, politically correct, anti-American indoctrination ubiquitous in the modern academy, but there is also mounting evidence that campus life is actually causing mental illness! An influential 2015 report in the Atlantic, titled “The Coddling of the American Mind,” cited evidence that colleges today literally promote pathological thinking:But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
Ideology and emotion trump reality
All this raises a disturbing question: Does the left even care – at all – about evidence, facts, history, proven principles? Or is everything, including reality itself, subservient to their coveted agenda, however delusional and destructive? In my book “The Snapping of the American Mind,” I cite a mountain of peer-reviewed research documenting, beyond any reasonable doubt, the sad fact that early abuse, especially sexual abuse, often causes the abused person to later self-identify as homosexual. Yet after citing study after study
However clear, compelling, and heartbreaking the evidence, none of this apparently matters. Fewer and fewer people seem to care anymore about actual causes and effects, about the true nature of things. Instead, too many of us care only about what we want to believe, what we wish to be true. We want homosexuality to be a healthy lifestyle, even though, as the Wall Street Journal has documented, “Projections have shown that if current trends continue, half of all gay and bisexual men will be HIV-positive by age 50.” We want transgenderism to be normal, even though reason, experience, and biology all shout otherwise.
In other words, the left is so mesmerized by its utopian ideology and its pet “narratives” (euphemism for delusions) that it simply believes and acts – and aggressively strives to indoctrinate others – in accord with its alternate reality. To hardcore leftists, reason, common sense, the laws of economics and the lessons of history are all inexplicably irrelevant.
Before concluding, let’s pause, take a deep breath and ask: What exactly is this thing we call “common sense”?
Although philosophers and intellectuals since Aristotle have theorized about it, in reality common sense is simply the internal guidance system God gives man, transcending ideology, education and economic status. It is the mysterious essence of logic, clear thinking and right acting, the twin brother of conscience and the heartbeat of a competent, successful life. As such, it is a priceless gift from the Creator.
However, it is precisely because common sense represents an inner perception of what is right and sensible – which implies an obedience to a higher good – that it interferes with the designs of the perpetually angry and discontented left, which aspires to impose an entirely unworkable utopian fantasy-world on the rest of us.
Consider that although the Ten Commandments constitute the moral foundation of Western civilization, its precepts are uniquely congruent with conscience and common sense. That shouldn’t seem odd, in light of God’s biblical promises to put His laws “into [our] hearts.”
“I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people.” – Jeremiah 31:33
“This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them.” – Hebrews 10:16
Common sense tells us stealing is wrong; if you’re a little child and another kid steals your stuff, you know it’s wrong without anyone telling you and without ever having heard of the Ten Commandments. It’s God’s law written in your heart – “self-evident” truth, as Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence. In the same way, we know murder is wrong without anyone telling us; same with adultery and lying (“bearing false witness against our neighbor”). It’s a reality-based sense of truth common to us all. Or at least to all who have not yet been seduced or traumatized away from their original God-given moral sense.
What we cryptically call “the left” is at war with all that America once most cherished – liberty, genuine Christian faith and morality, equality under the law, personal responsibility, limited government and unlimited opportunity. And the primary battle in that war is the left’s ongoing frontal assault on common sense. For common sense is truly the gateway to the rest of our blessings, including our safety, prosperity, happiness and sanity itself – and to our future as a free people.
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