Hanson Defends Trump? Has Bibi's Time To Be Retired Come?

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Not sure I am willing  to excuse Trump's strident/contentious behaviour by citing that of other Democrats Presidents but this is what Victor Davis Hanson has written. (See 1 below.)

I assume most Americans want what is best for our nation.  We may different ideas as to how to achieve these aspirations but I assume most want what is best for themselves and that means our nation.

That said, I am equally delighted to watch sanctimonious and self-righteous Democrats self destruct because their president stuffed the nation with radical Muslims who gained political clout and Pelosi, their House leader, is caught between demands of radical anti-Semites and her inability to do what is right.This from a pious woman who finds walls immoral that help protect our nation's sanctity and security.

What goes around comes around. (See 2 below.)
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Graham, Bibi and Golan sovereignty. (See 3 below.)
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From very dear long time friend and fellow memo reader: " Was invited to see Schultz at the Carter Center last night.  While he has gotten a lot of criticism for exploring an independent bid for the Presidency, many of his points were well-founded and he seems sincere in his desire to impact the country for the better.

Another thought on socialism.  I lay a good bit of the blame for the frustration with our economic system (not capitalism) at the feet of the Fed.  With extraordinary easy monetary policy, the Fed has socialized markets, distributing appreciation in asset prices and guarding against declines.  The markets do not trade in a free, capitalistic manner.  Given that assets are held disproportionately in society, the benefit of this policy has been unevenly distributed to asset holders.  

Last night Schultz spoke eloquently of the American dream.  He is no doubt an example of that. However, he and his company are also the beneficiaries of socialistic monetary policy.  Were I on his team, I would recommend speaking out against quantitative easing and the unlimited support of asset markets/fixing of interests rates as they are bastardizations of a free market economy and have opened the door to increased calls for distributive policies. 

Continued prayers for your quick return to the courts! P------"

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This from my friend.  I understand where he is coming from but do not  believe now is the right time for change.  I  believe politicians, like bed sheets, need to be changed from time to time. (See 3a below.)

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Dick
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1) Democratic presidents behaved a lot worse than Trump in the White House

By Victor Davis Hanson

It's more likely history will judge President Trump for accomplishments in office than for character flaws.AP

Progressives claim President Trump marks a new low in American political and presidential history, personifying a singularly odious message.

But if we examine the present pantheon of progressive icons, and strip away their reliance on liberal-media protection and transfer them instead into the present age of tabloid promiscuity and cyber omnipresence, would we now have a very different view of their presidencies?

The progressive Woodrow Wilson administration likely would never have completed its two elected terms had it operated on media protocols common just a half-century later.

For nearly a year during the failing health and death of First Lady Ellen Axson Wilson, the president fell into a state of debilitating depression, carefully hidden from the press. Much later, during the last 17 months of Wilson’s presidency, he was more or less unable to fulfill his duties due to a series of strokes that left him partially paralyzed and visually impaired. Those realities were carefully hidden from the public by the efforts of his second wife, Edith Bolling Wilson, and physician Dr. Cary Grayson.In the present case, we know that Trump is neither comatose nor is Melania running the country.

The country never learned the full extent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s paralysis. Much less did it know of FDR’s past and ongoing affairs — the mechanics of which were sometimes carried out in the White House and with the skillful aid of his own daughter Anna. By fall 1944, Roosevelt, seeking a fourth term, was suffering from a series of life-threatening conditions. Worrying that the public would not vote yet again for a terminally ill president, sympathetic journalists and military physicians covered up Roosevelt’s illnesses — on the theory that FDR would survive long enough to get elected to a fourth term and ensure a continued Democratic administration.

Clearly, in our age of the internet and social media and an inquisitorial media, Ivanka Trump could not have been helping her father conduct a stealth affair in the White House while conspiring to hide his likely terminal illness from the public.

John F. Kennedy, by contemporary standards, was a serial sexual harasser, if not a likely assaulter. While physically in the White House he carried on sexual trysts with subordinates and others without security clearances, mostly with the full knowledge of the complacent White House press corps. One former JFK intern, Mimi Alford, later wrote a memoir describing losing her virginity at 19 years of age to the president in the White House presidential bed. On his direction and in his audience, she was leveraged into performing oral intercourse in the White House swimming pool on his aide David Powers, who routinely set up the president’s extramarital trysts.

For all his alleged goatishness, Trump is currently not orchestrating group sexual encounters in the White House basement.

Lyndon Johnson was not just a serial adulterer and often corrupt, but displayed a level of crudity that would now be seen as clinical, from conducting business while defecating on the toilet to exposing his genitals to staff — apparently as some sort of Freudian proof of his own, and by extension, his nation’s, manhood. In a debate answer to a sneer from Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump seems to have referenced obliquely his private parts (“I guarantee you there’s no problem”) but never to our knowledge has he displayed them to staffers.

There is no reason to review the escapades of an impeached Bill Clinton. Despite the efforts of a sympathetic media, many of his transgressions were in part aired to the public. They ran the full gamut of a classical sexist and misogynist, from likely sexually assaulting chance acquaintances to attempting to defame and ruin the reputations of women deemed liable to disclose past liaisons.What differentiates Trump’s womanizing from that of prior presidents, like Clinton’s, is that his escapades were prior to, not during, his presidential service.

A study published by the liberal Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy found that coverage of the Trump presidency in its first hundred days was 80 percent negative, as evidenced in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, in addition to CNN, CBS, Fox News and CNBC parent NBC, as well as European news outlets the Financial Times, BBC and ARD in Germany. The same researchers found that coverage of Trump was about twice as negative as had been true of reporting on Barack Obama.

How did the media and progressive critics reconcile a supposedly historically unhinged and dangerous president with a largely successful agenda that by mid-2018 was polling positive? And how exactly had such a flawed character as Trump made impressive Cabinet appointments and restored economic vibrancy at home and deterrence abroad?

Stranger still, Trump earned vitriol often for voicing positions shared by past progressive presidents and presidential candidates: skepticism over NAFTA and the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreements, slapping tariffs on Chinese companies for dumping, congratulating Vladimir Putin and General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt for “election” victories and Xi Jinping on his “extraordinary elevation,” or issuing expansive executive orders as Obama had. Finally, the anti-Trump progressives and Democrats, especially those in the media, did not fully appreciate that the more they voiced loudly their antipathy to Trump, and did so in escalating fashion, the more Trump was able to manipulate them as proof of how unhinged and excitable the alternative to himself was.

The small number of Never Trump conservatives who equally despised Trump, also felt his crudity was unlike any other president’s. But unlike progressives, they faced an additional dilemma: The presidential messenger was often successfully enacting an agenda that they not only had in the past supported, but also at least privately admitted was empowered by Trump himself. Nonetheless, their complaint was that Republicans stood for character. And Trump lacked it.

But, on matters of character, did Trump’s tawdry trysts with women, often a decade before his presidency, mean that he lacked character and thus stained the conservative cause, in a way that the often promiscuous Roosevelt, Kennedy and Clinton had not rendered their own liberal accomplishments null and void? When reports surfaced that George H.W. Bush, in his 80s and 90s, had serially groped a few women and embarrassed them with nasty jokes, did conservatives recalibrate his administration’s record?

Past presidents were less under the media microscope, so the truth was largely hidden about the declining health of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the furious temper of Harry S. Truman, the womanizing of John F. Kennedy and the misconduct of Bill Clinton.

Dwight D. Eisenhower was a successful president in the manner that he had been an effective supreme allied commander. Yet under current Trump-era workplace protocols, Ike would likely never have been nominated, given his poorly hidden relationship with his divorced chauffeur Kay Summersby and his implausible outright denials of the affair while he held the title of supreme commander of Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe.

Our current media and political climate would have judged the careful Eisenhower reckless, or indeed callously immoral, in his downtime with the loquacious Summersby while battle raged just miles away from his headquarters.

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter were both emblematic of flyover-state, rock-solid values. They stayed married. They did not cash in while in their offices. They largely told the truth. Their administrations were mostly free of scandal. Their speech was rarely ad hominem. America certainly benefitted from their personal probity. They were, in other words, role models and ethical public servants.

But both Ford and Carter proved largely ineffective presidents. In terms of economic stagnation between 1974 and 1981, millions of lives were perhaps worse off for their tenures. Few can point to any lasting substantial achievements, apart from airline deregulation and the Arab-Israeli Camp David Accords in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War. Ford’s sad “Whip Inflation Now” button campaign and Carter’s serial disasters (stagflation, the appeasement of Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran, the rudderless foreign policy) are not arguments that good character does not matter, only that it is not necessarily always a guarantee of good governance.

In some sense, Donald Trump was replaying the role of the unpopular tenure of loudmouth Democrat Harry Truman, the president from 1945 to 1953.

“Give ’em Hell” Harry came into office following the death of Franklin Roosevelt. He miraculously won the 1948 election against all expert opinion and polls.

Truman left office in January 1953 widely hated. Indeed, his final approval ratings (32 percent) were the lowest of any departing president except for those of Richard Nixon.

The outsider Truman had always been immersed in scandal, owing to his deep ties to the corrupt Kansas City political machine.

When the novice Vice President Truman took office after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, he knew little about the grand strategy of World War II — and nothing about the ongoing atomic-bomb project.

For the next seven-plus years, Truman shocked — and successfully led — the country.

Over the objections of many in his Cabinet, Truman ignored critics and ordered the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan to end the war. Against the advice of most of the State Department, he recognized the new state of Israel.

He offended Roosevelt holdovers by breaking with wartime ally the Soviet Union and chartering the foundations of Cold War communist containment. Many in the Pentagon opposed his racial integration of the armed forces. National-security advisors counseled against sending troops to save South Korea.

Liberals opposed fellow Democrat Truman’s creation of the Central Intelligence Agency. Truman was widely loathed for firing controversial five-star general and American hero Douglas MacArthur.

There were often widespread calls in the press for Truman to resign. Impeachment was often mentioned. Truman, in short, did things other presidents had not dared to do.

Truman occasionally swore. He had nightly drinks. He played poker with cronies. And he shocked aides and the public with his vulgarity and crass attacks on political enemies.

Truman cheaply compared 1948 presidential opponent Thomas Dewey to Hitler and attacked him as a supposed pawn of bigots and war profiteers.

Truman hyperbolically claimed a Republican victory in 1948 would threaten America’s very liberty.

In the pre-Twitter age, Truman could never keep his mouth shut: “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.”

When a reviewer for The Washington Post trashed Truman’s daughter’s concert performance, Truman threatened him with physical violence.

“It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful,” Truman wrote in a letter to critic Paul Hume.

“Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens, you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes and perhaps a supporter below!”

Such outbursts were Trumpian to the core.

It took a half-century for historians to concede that the mercurial and often adolescent Truman had solid accomplishments, especially in foreign affairs — in part because Truman conveyed a sense that he did not much care for staying in Washington, a city in which he was not invested, did not like and would quickly leave at the end of his tenure.

Even Truman’s crassness eventually was appreciated as integral to his image of a “plain speaking” and “the Buck Stops Here” decisive leader.

Had Truman access to Twitter, he could have self-destructed in a flurry of ad-hominem electronic outbursts. Yet Truman proved largely successful because of what he did, and in spite of what he said.

Donald J. Trump’s presidency is too brief to yet be judged absolutely. His personal foibles are too embedded within current political and media hatred to be assessed dispassionately.

Too many assessments too quickly have been made about Trump, without much historical context and usually with too much passion.

Neither is it yet clear that Trump is a bad man or a good president, or vice versa, or neither or both.

But if the past is sometimes a guide to the present, Trump in theory certainly could become a more effective president than would have been his likely more circumspect Republican primary rivals, while perhaps demonstrating that he is far more uncouth.

The paradox again raises the question: When any one man can change the lives of 330 million, what exactly is presidential morality after all — private and personal sins, or the transgressions that affect millions of lives for the worse?

Adapted excerpt from “The Case for Trump” by Victor Davis Hanson. Copyright © 2019. Available from Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, a division of PBG Publishing, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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2)

Pelosi Is Hoist On the House’s Own Petard

Editorial of The New York Sun

Speaker Nancy Pelosi certainly chose the right moment to declare that she’s against impeaching President Trump. The special prosecutor, Robert Mueller, is, if one believes the papers, only days away from handing in to the attorney general a report on what he found out in respect of collusion with the Russ regime. Must be that Mrs. Pelosi thinks he’s come up with zilch.

After all, if Mr. Mueller were to conclude the president committed high crimes or misdemeanors, which is what a president has to have done to be ousted via impeachment, then there’s only one constitutional thing do be done with it. That would be to hand the report over to the very House for which Mrs. Pelosi speaks. It’s the only body with the constitutional power to impeach.

Yet here’s what Mrs. Pelosi said, according to a Washington Post scribe: ‘I haven’t said this to any press person before. But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.’

If we were Mrs. Pelosi — a stretch to be sure, but the honor would be ours — we’d have stood pat. Just said nothing. After all, she’s got several committees investigating the President, not to mention his children. They’re saying the most horrible things about him. Congressman Nadler, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has already said that Mr. Trump has obstructed justice.

That’s what Mr. Nadler, who chairs the very committee that would hand up any articles of impeachment, said, right on ABC. It may be that Mrs. Pelosi would have preferred to stand pat but is actually worried more about what her colleagues in the House are going to do than she is about what Mr. Trump has — or, better yet, hasn’t been shown to have — done.

William Shakespeare, call your office. It’ll take someone with his abilities on a typewriter to capture the exquisiteness of Mrs. Pelosi’s predicament. She’s got such radicals as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Ayanna Pressley and a whole socialistic camarilla pressing her from the one side — a new generation challenging her with the idea of socialism.

Plus, too, Mrs. Pelosi is faced with fiercely ideological committee chairmen like Adam Schiff at Intelligence, Eliot Engel at Foreign Affairs, Elijah Cummings at Oversight, Richard Neal at Ways and Means, and Maxine Waters at Financial Services. All competing with an injudicious Judiciary chairman who’s gone and declared the President guilty of obstruction before his own committee has spoken.

What in the world would it mean if after all this, the House fails to find something to use for an impeachment the House’s own speaker doesn’t want? Not to mention the prospect that if the House does impeach, the Senate — at least on the current evidence — is unlikely convict. That, of course, could change, but Mrs. Pelosi’s new formulation on impeaching the President is: “He just isn’t worth it.” From her lips to God’s ears.

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3) Is Netanyahu angling for a Golan gift from Trump before election?

By HERB KEINON

Standing on the Golan Heights overlooking Syria, US Senator Lindsey Graham said on Monday that he will return to Washington and, together with Senator Ted Cruz, work for the US to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu helicoptered to the strategic plateau with Graham and US Ambassador David Friedman, fueling speculation that he is trying to get US President Donald Trump to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights before the April 9 elections. Such a move would be a huge gift to Netanyahu before the voting.

Netanyahu is expected to meet Trump in the White House in about two weeks.

Graham, who has developed a good relationship with Trump and whose advice the president often seeks out on foreign policy matters, said that he is in Israel as an American, “trying to figure out what is best for America – and what is best for America and for Americans is a safe, secure and prosperous Israel.”

The US and Israel share common values, have common enemies, “and from a military point of view, Israel is the best friend the United States can possibly have in a troubled region,” the Republican from South Carolina said, adding that “I cannot tell you” how much intelligence Israel shares with the US that “protects our homeland.”

“So if you believe as I do that the State of Israel is a strategic partner of the United States, and that its survival and prosperity and security are relevant to American national security, you would come here to the Golan,” he said.

Graham said that while the Golan Heights was for decades one of Israel’s more peaceful borders, this is no longer the case.

“So I’ve got a simple message,” he said. “I will go back to the United States Senate, and working together with Senator Cruz, I will start an effort the recognize the Golan as part of the State of Israel now and forever, because to give this territory up would be a strategic nightmare for the State of Israel.” Besides, said Graham – chairman of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee – “who would you give it up to?”

Netanyahu, speaking in Hebrew, characterized Graham’s words as “very strong remarks that articulate America’s support for Israel, the policy of President Trump, and takes it to a concrete step – to keep the Golan as part of Israel.”

Otherwise, Netanyahu said, “our border would be with Iran on the banks of the Kinneret, something we cannot accept.”

The prime minister said that Graham’s remarks signaled a very “important” direction and was “very promising for Israel’s national security.”

Speaking in English, the premier said that the Golan has been a part of Israel from the earliest part of Jewish history, and certainly since Israel took it over during the 1967 war and formally annexed it in 1981.

“The Golan is part of Israel, and the Golan must stay a part of Israel forever,” he said. “And I think it is very important that the international community recognize this fact and accept it, and most especially our great friend, the United States of America.”

Friedman tweeted after the tour that “compelling evidence” was “presented of the critical strategic importance of Israeli control of this territory. Senator Graham spoke movingly and with great moral clarity on this subject.” A day earlier, Friedman accompanied Graham on a tour of the Gaza border area where they inspected a Hamas terror tunnel that Israel uncovered.

3a) NETANYAHU….YOU DID GREAT BUT, TIME FOR A CHANGE

 By Sherwin Pomerantz

On the afternoon of April 12,1945, I was a 5 year old Jewish kid living in the Bronx, along with almost a million other Jews where it was, for want of a better description, a golden shtetl. 

At about five o’clock, a loud noise emanated from the hallway of the six story building in which we lived.  In the hallways, on every floor, all the neighbors poured out of their apartments screaming “Roosevelt is dead!!!!”  And the wailing and crying continued for some hours thereafter.  One heard cries of “What will be?  How will we survive?”

To New York Jews, the overwhelming majority of whom were Democrats, Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was the savior who ended the depression that began in 1929 and also successfully brought victory to the allies in World War II.  Never mind that he missed every opportunity to provide succor to Jews facing genocide in Europe nor was he willing to open America’s gates to those who could get out of that inferno.  Even in spite of all of that Roosevelt was a hero to the Jewish community and a four-term president of the United States.

However, after his death members of the U.S. Congress realized that in spite of what FDR had accomplished it was not in the best interests of a functioning democracy to have a head of state remain in office without term limits.  While in this particular case no real damage was done to the democracy, they understood that the absence of term limits also made it possible for tyrants to come to the fore and remain in office indefinitely. (Certainly, a scary thought in today’s milieu.)

As a result, just six years later on February 27, 1951 the 22^nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States was ratified enacting a two-term limit (i.e. 8 years) on anyone elected to the Presidency of the U.S.  That remains the law until today.

On April 9^th we Israelis will go to the polls to elect new members of the Knesset and, perforce, empower someone to form a government and act as the prime minister.  Now the polls show the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with a slight lead over his presumed opponent, Benny Gantz but we are still almost a month from Election Day so anything can happen in the interim.

Nevertheless, the question remains as to whether or not Netanyahu should continue serving or, in the interests of a maintaining a vibrant democracy, is it time for a change? 

On March 31^st Netanyahu will have served as prime minister for 10 years as the head of three different governments.   He is known to be strong on both economic and security issues, has overseen significant GDP growth, kept a lot of bad things from happening and, more or less, is perceived as having done a good job as prime minister.

For sure, diaspora Jews rightly think they have been thrown under the bus by his actions or lack thereof, the ultra-Orthodox controlled rabbinate has too much power, his new coalition if he wins will have racist politicians as members and peace with the Palestinians will not be any closer.  

And of course this week on Facebook he responded to actress Rotem Sela by saying “Israel is not a country of all its citizens.  According to the nation-state law that we passed, Israel is the state of the Jewish people — and belongs to them alone,” adding “there is no problem with Arab citizens – they have equal rights like everybody.” Netanyahu finished his message by making a statement he has repeated throughout the election cycle. “It’s either a strong right-wing government led by me, or a weak left-wing government led by Yair Lapid and Gantz, with the support of the Arab parties.”  Definitely not the kind of statement that will win votes anywhere but on the right.

However, all of that is almost unimportant when compared to the key issue.   While Israel does not have term limits, a vibrant democracy is insured by a regular change in leadership so that no one can think of himself or herself as king. 

I have no way of telling whether Gantz will do a better or worse job than that of Netanyahu.  But what I do know is that, by definition, no one is indispensable and 10 years is more than enough of one prime minister.   So I for one, even though I am still a member of the Central Committee of the Likud (thanks to a request by Natan Sharansky to do this after his party merged with the Likud some years ago) will enter the polling booth on April 9^th and vote for the Blue and White Party.  My hope is that Benny Gantz will be asked by the President of Israel to form our next government.

I thank Prime Minister Netanyahu for all he has done for Israel and am willing to overlook his mistakes, everyone makes them.  However, it is time for a change.

In the words of George Bernard Shaw: “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”  .

Sherwin Pomerantz is a 35 year resident of Israel, past National President of the Association of Americans & Canadians in Israel and CEO of Atid EDI Ltd., a Jerusalem-based business development consulting group.

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