Oslo Accords and Iran Deal. Obama Insulted and Made To Look What He Is A Feckless Weak Leader. Kerry Full of Heinz Beans.

The storm that passed through The landings was a humdinger.  Saturday, after an hour, we cleared our driveway and front yard of debris. I call it a four bagger storm!  Sunday we cleaned up the back yard which had some very large, heavy pine tree limbs that snapped along with a lot of debris  etc.  Took seven bags.

Subject: Damage on Skidaway Island - Resident video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAqpKNeh4HQ

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
My trip to Pittsburgh memo is being edited by my son and thus I will send this evening.
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This from a  dear friend, a fellow memo reader and former boat partner in reference to the unsigned letter I received and posted calling me a creep: " I don't think you are a creep or a racist or an embarrassment....well maybe your tennis is a little embarrassing.   Keep at it.  As the pilot  flying sorties said, "If you ain't taking flak, you ain't close to the target."
+++
WHEN AN ULTRA, ULTRA LIBERAL MAGAZINE SUCH AS THE NEW YORKER 

WRITES AN ARTICLE LIKE THIS,  PERHAPS AMERICA IS FINALLY WAKING UP TO THE CORRUPTION, INCOMPETENCE AND IGNORANCE OF WASHINGTON...... 

 A surprising article from the New Yorker Magazine.  This magazine has always been a left-wing apologizer, so this article is even more amazing. Don’t pass it up. Reposting.

+++

Advice to Donald. (See 2 below.)

====

The Wall Street Journal comments on The FBI Cinton File. (See 3 and 3a below.)

+++

I believe The Oslo Accords and The Iran Deal have common roots. They were both the outcome of men with large egos who believed they could accomplish positive consequences because they mistakenly were convinced they could control the person on the other side of the table.  Rabin was sure he could handle Arafat and Obama Iran's Ayatollah. Obama was driven by his desire to leave a foreign policy legacy equal to Nixon and Reagan's. Rabin though he could bring about peace and what resulted were Intifadas.

Fdr though he could handle Stalin, Chamberlain, Hitler.

The world is full of corpses, graves and tragic destruction because powerful people were ruled by their outsized ego.

I was opposed to The Oslo Accords and am opposed to The Iran Deal.  The consequences of the latter have yet to appear but I am convinced they will prove a tragic blunder.

Pressure is now on Netanyahu to negotiate with The Palestinians who are engaged in laying another trap for Israel.  It is called pre-conditions, which if agreed to, eliminate the need for any negotiations.

Additionally, Netanyahu has the problem of the religious party elements in his government. (See 4 and 4a.)

===

I always maintained America started on a Socialis path after President Wilson.  (See 5 below.)
+++
Obama  doesn't even understand he was being snubbed by China and, in the eyes of Asians, made to look pitiful and weak.  Chinese leaders knew exactly what they were doing.  They were rubbing Obama's nose into their soil and our feckless leader made light of the insult. No wonder China is threatening the nations in the South China Sea and Pacific area.  They know America has been reduced to a pitiful former nation whose power is receding.

As for Kerry, he has been living with his wife so long that he has become full of Heinz Beans.  He is the perfect foil for our pitiful president who has  turned America into a pitiful giant.  (See 6 and 6a below.)
+++

Now for some humor:

A friend of mine bought a ticket package that includes airfare and Hotel accommodations for the 2017 Super bowl here in Houston. After he bought the nonrefundable tickets, he realized that it is the same weekend as his wedding and he can’t go. So if anybody is interested in taking his place, it will be at First Baptist church in Fort Wayne Indiana, at 5:00 pm. Her name is Lisa; she’ll be the one in the white dress! 

Thanks

SEMPER FI:

"USMC Dining Etiquette"

The wisdom of an old Marine.

Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Al Gray, a crusty old 'Field Marine', loved his Marines and often slipped into the mess hall wearing a faded old field jacket without any rank or insignia on it. He would go through the chow line just like a private. In this way, he was assured of being given the same rations that the lowest enlisted man received. Woe be it to the mess officer if the food was found to be unfit in quality or quantity.

Upon becoming Commandant, General Gray was expected to do a great deal of 'formal entertaining'...fancy dinner parties in full dress blue uniform. Now, the General would rather have been in the field eating cold 'C-rats' around a fighting hole with a bunch of young 'hard charging' Marines. But the General knew his duty and as a Marine he was determined to do it to the best of his ability.

During these formal parties, a detachment of highly polished Marines from 'Eighth and Eye' (Marine Barracks located at 8th and I Streets in Washington, D.C., home of the Silent Drill Team) were detailed to assume the position of 'parade rest' at various intervals around the ballroom where the festivities were being held.

At some point during one of these affairs, a very refined, blue-haired lady picked up a tray of pastries and went around the room offering confections to the guests. When she noticed these Marines in dress blues, standing like sculptures all around the room, she was moved with admiration. She knew that several of these men were fresh from our victory in Kuwait. She made a beeline for the closest Lance Corporal, drew near him and asked, 'Would you like pastry young man?'

The young Marine snapped to 'attention' and replied, "I don't eat that shit, Ma'am." Just as quickly, he resumed the position of 'parade rest.' His gaze remained fixed on some distant point throughout the exchange.

The fancy lady was completely taken aback! She blinked, her eyes widened, her mouth dropped open. So startled was she that she immediately began to doubt what she had heard. In a quivering voice she asked, "W-W-What did you say?"

the Marine snapped back to the position of 'attention' (like the arm of a mousetrap smacking its wooden base). Then he said, '"I don't eat that shit, Ma'am." And just as smartly as before, back to the position of 'parade rest' he went.

This time, there was no doubt. The fancy lady immediately became incensed and felt insulted. After all, here she was an important lady, taking the time to offer something nice to this enlisted man

(well below her station in life), and he had the nerve to say THAT to HER! She exclaimed "Well! I never...!"

The lady remembered that she had met that military man in charge of all these soldiers' earlier. She spotted General Gray from across the room. He had a cigar clenched between his teeth and a camouflaged canteen cup full of bourbon in his left hand. He was talking to a group of 1st and 2nd Lieutenants.

So blue-haired lady went straight over to the Commandant and interrupted. "General, I offered some pastry to that young man over there, and do you know what he told me?"

General Gray cocked his eyebrow, took the cigar out of his mouth and said, "Well, no Ma'am, I don't."

The lady took in a deep breath, confident that she was adequately expressing with her body language her considerable rage and indignation. As she wagged her head in cadence with her words, and she paused between each word for effect, She said, "I - don't - eat - that - shit - Ma'am!''

The lieutenants were in a state of near apoplexy. A couple of them choked back chuckles, and turned their heads to avoid having their smirks detected. The next thought that most of them had was, 'God, I hope it wasn't one of MY Marines!' and the color left their faces.

General Gray wrinkled his brow, cut his eyes in the direction of the lieutenants, put his free hand to his chin and muttered a subdued, "Hmmm. Which one did you say it was Ma'am?," the General asked.

"That tall sturdy one right over there near the window, General," the woman said with smug satisfaction. One of the lieutenants began to look sick and put a hand on the wall for support. General Gray, seemed deep in thought, hand still to his chin, wrinkled brow. Suddenly, he looked up and his expression changed to one indicating he had made a decision.

He looked the fancy lady right in the eyes and said,

"Well, fuck him! Don't give him any."

+++

Dick

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++1)  The author is the political correspondent for Bloomberg and wrote extensively about Obama even before he was nominated. 

"Who is Donald Trump?" The better question may be, "What is Donald Trump?" 

The answer?  A giant middle finger from average Americans to the political and media establishment. 

Some Trump supporters are like the 60s white girls who dated black guys just to annoy their parents. But most Trump supporters have simply had it with the Demo-socialists and the "Republicans In Name Only." They know there isn't a dime's worth of difference between Hillary Rodham and Jeb Bush, and only a few cents worth between Rodham and the other GOP candidates. 

Ben Carson is not an "establishment" candidate, but the Clinton machine would pulverize Carson; and the somewhat rebellious Ted Cruz will (justifiably so) be tied up with natural born citizen lawsuits (as might Marco Rubio). The Trump supporters figure they may as well have some fun tossing Molotov cocktails at Wall Street and Georgetown while they watch the nation collapse. Besides - lightning might strike, Trump might get elected, and he might actually fix a few things. Stranger things have happened (the nation elected an [islamo-]Marxist in 2008 and Bruce Jenner now wears designer dresses.) 

Millions of conservatives are justifiably furious. They gave the Republicans control of the House in 2010 and control of the Senate in 2014, and have seen them govern no differently than Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Yet those same voters are supposed to trust the GOP in 2016? Why? 

Trump did not come from out of nowhere. His candidacy was created by the last six years of Republican failures. 

No reasonable person can believe that any of the establishment candidates [dems or reps] will slash federal spending, rein in the Federal Reserve, cut burdensome business regulations, reform the tax code, or eliminate useless federal departments (the Departments of Education, Housing and Urban Development, Energy, etc.). Even Ronald Reagan was unable to eliminate the Department of Education. (Of course, getting shot at tends to make a person less of a risk-taker.) No reasonable person can believe that any of the nation's major problems will be solved by Rodham, Bush, and the other dishers of donkey fazoo now eagerly eating corn in Iowa and pancakes in New Hampshire. 

Many Americans, and especially Trump supporters, have had it with:
· Anyone named Bush
· Anyone named Clinton
· Anyone who's held political office
· Political correctness
· Illegal immigration
· Massive unemployment
· Phony "official" unemployment and inflation figures
· Welfare waste and fraud
· People faking disabilities to go on the dole
· VA waiting lists
· TSA airport groping
· ObamaCare
· The Federal Reserve's money-printing schemes
· Wall Street crooks like Jon Corzine
· Michelle Obama's vacations
· Michelle Obama's food police
· Barack Obama's golf
· Barack Obama's arrogant and condescending lectures
· Barack Obama's criticism/hatred of America
· Valerie Jarrett
· " Holiday trees"
  .Hollywood hypocrites
· Global warming nonsense
· Cop killers
· Gun confiscation threats
· Stagnant wages
· Boys in girls' bathrooms
.. Whiny, spoiled college students who can't even place the Civil War in the correct century

... and that's just the short list. 

Trump supporters believe that no Democrat wants to address these issues, and that few Republicans have the courage to address these issues. They certainly know that none of the establishment candidates are better than barely listening to them, and Trump is their way of saying, "Screw you, Hillary Rodham Rove Bush!" The more the talking head political pundits insult the Trump supporters, the more supporters he gains. (The only pundits who seem to understand what is going on are Democrats Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell and Republican John LeBoutillier. All the others argue that the voters will eventually "come to their senses" and support an establishment candidate.) 

But America does not need a tune-up at the same old garage. It needs a new engine installed by experts - and neither Rodham nor Bush are mechanics with the skills or experience to install it. Hillary Rodham is not a mechanic; she merely manages a garage her philandering husband abandoned. Jeb Bush is not a mechanic; he merely inherited a garage. Granted, Trump is also not a mechanic, but he knows where to find the best ones to work in his garage. He won't hire his brother-in-law or someone to whom he owes a favor; he will hire someone who lives and breathes cars. 

"How dare they revolt!" the "elites" are bellowing. Well, the citizens are daring to revolt, and the RINOs had better get used to it. "But Trump will hand the election to Clinton!" That is what the Karl Rove-types want people to believe, just as the leftist media eagerly shoved "Maverick" McCain down GOP throats in 2008 - knowing he would lose to Obama. But even if Trump loses and Rodham wins, she would not be dramatically different than Bush or most of his fellow candidates. They would be nothing more than caretakers, not working to restore America's greatness but merely presiding over the collapse of a massively in-debt nation. A nation can perhaps survive open borders; a nation can perhaps survive a generous welfare system. But no nation can survive both - and there is little evidence that the establishment candidates of either party understand that. The United States cannot forever continue on the path it is on. At some point it will be destroyed by its debt. 

Yes, Trump speaks like a bull wander[ing] through a china shop, but the truth is that the borders do need to be sealed; we cannot afford to feed, house, and clothe 200,000 Syrian immigrants for decades (even if we get inordinately lucky and none of them are ISIS infiltrators or Syed Farook wannabes); the world is at war with radical Islamists; all the world's glaciers are not melting; and Rosie O'Donnell is a fat pig. 

Is Trump the perfect candidate? Of course not.  Neither was Ronald Reagan. But unless we close our borders and restrict immigration, all the other issues are irrelevant. One terrorist blowing up a bridge or a tunnel could kill thousands. One jihadist poisoning a city's water supply could kill tens of thousands. One electromagnetic pulse attack from a single Iranian nuclear device could kill tens of millions. Faced with those possibilities, most Americans probably don't care that Trump relied on eminent domain to grab up a final quarter acre of property for a hotel, or that he boils the blood of the Muslim Brotherhood thugs running the Council on American-Islamic Relations. While Attorney General Loretta Lynch's greatest fear is someone giving a Muslim a dirty look, most Americans are more worried about being gunned down at a shopping mall by a crazed [islamic] lunatic who treats his prayer mat better than his three wives and who thinks 72 virgins are waiting for him in paradise. 

The establishment is frightened to death that Trump will win, but not because they believe he will harm the nation. They are afraid he will upset their taxpayer-subsidized apple carts. While Obama threatens to veto legislation that spends too little, they worry that Trump will veto legislation that spends too much. 

You can be certain that if an establishment candidate wins in November 2016 … [their] cabinet positions will be filled with the same people we've seen before. The washed-up has-beens of the Clinton and Bush administrations will be back in charge. The hacks from Goldman Sachs will continue to call the shots. Whether it is Bush's Karl Rove or Clinton's John Podesta, who makes the decisions in the White House will matter little. 

If the establishment wins, America loses.

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2)  I’m an African-American Woman. Here’s My Advice to Conservatives Wooing My Community.

By Kay Coles James 

Kay Coles James, a trustee of The Heritage Foundation, formerly served as director of the 
U.S. Office of Personnel Management and as Virginia's secretary of health and human 
resources.

The moment Donald Trump urged black voters to consider supporting him—asking, “What do you have to lose?”—the consultants and pundits sprang into coordinated action, bombarding the airwaves with their “r” and “b” words.

“Donald Trump is a racist,” posted Daily Kos. “Donald Trump is a bigot,” piped in The New York Times’ Charles Blow.

There’s a method to this madness, of course. Call someone a racist and they’ll no longer be heard. They’ve been accused of racism, after all, so they’re not just contemptible, they’re outside the realm of public discourse.

That’s why the noise makers are so busily at work.

While all of this strikes many voters as manipulative and even childish, what really troubles me is what it masks: the pain my community is suffering right now.

Everywhere I look, I see problems that cry out to be solved. African-American poverty should be going down—instead, it’s rising. Our children should be thriving—instead, millions of them live in broken homes. Our streets should be peaceful—instead, violence continues to take a devastating toll. Our schools should be nurturing excellence—instead, far too many of them are factories of failure.

And our future should be brighter—instead, we have less and less reason for hope.

In short, our community is reeling under the impact of unceasing assault.

Despite all this, we remain a proud people. We’ve suffered horribly over the centuries, and yet we survive. Our traditions have largely endured. For the most part, our churches remain intact. And our babies are born with all the intelligence, creativity, energy, and possibility that God grants to every child.

But that’s where our path veers off course. Our children grow up sicker, poorer, less well-educated, and at greater risk than other American children. Our families, once boasting more marriages and two-parent households than whites, are now battered by single parenthood, unemployment, and poverty. And our community, once the self-sustaining citadel that enabled us to survive slavery and institutional racism, is now teetering on the brink of destruction.

I recently conducted a detailed analysis of how we are faring, and what I found shocked me. On issue after issue, the numbers are heart-wrenching.

Take education, for example. In 1961, I was one of the first black students in my hometown of Richmond, Virginia, to integrate a whites-only public school. Decades after institutional segregation was outlawed, however, separate and unequal schools remain.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, schools serving majority-minority communities have the worst performance, the largest achievement gaps, the highest crime rates, and the least experienced teachers. Shockingly, the average high school graduation rate among black students in many of America’s largest cities is less than 50 percent. Less than 50 percent! And in cities like Detroit, more than nine in 10 black students can’t even read or do math at grade level.

It wasn’t always this way. Having been denied schooling during their enslavement, emancipated blacks embraced education as the ticket to freedom and equality. Then came historically black colleges and universities (including my alma mater, Hampton University), and African-Americans began to advance at every level of scholarship.

All that began to change under the weight of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” programs, as high-performing neighborhood schools gave way to bureaucracy-choked failure factories. Today, grim statistics and generations of wasted talent are the legacy of an agenda that has failed our children and community.

That’s why I say what’s really important here isn’t the political noise, but the personal tragedies it is masking.

Scores of well-paid consultants and media personalities are on the air, seemingly debating race. But their focus isn’t really on community renewal—it’s on full-combat politics. As a result, they gleefully throw around words like “racist” and “bigot” without pausing to truly, honestly consider the plight of the minority community they purport to defend. And when they’re done, they’ll put another notch in their professional belt and move on to the next campaign or news show while African-Americans continue to suffer.

That’s just not acceptable, not at all.

It’s not OK that black kids aren’t getting the very best education possible. It’s not OK that black adults are out of work and unable to pursue their dreams. It’s not OK that black families are homeless. It’s not OK that black seniors live in fear for what tomorrow may bring.

And it’s not OK that so many consultants and pundits would rather play politics than help save my people.

Fortunately, many others genuinely care about economic advancement and social justice for all Americans. They recognize we need to start over. Some now call the Republican Party home because they recognize conservative policies offer the commonsense solutions my community needs. Others try to encourage the Democratic Party to adopt more effective conservative policy solutions.

Having said that, I need to make clear that this is not a battle that can be won by a political party on its own—it depends on building strong support within the African-American community, where many of us are already working to achieve community renewal.

As for conservatives, this will take focused effort, real trust, unwavering consistency, and sensitivity to symbols, as well as the powerful acts of just showing up and listening. Personnel decisions within campaigns, transitions, and governing will make a big difference too, since having experienced, politically savvy African-Americans with stature inside those three dynamics is vital to avoiding unforced errors.

Winning this battle, then, will depend on political parties and conservatives getting it together and getting it right. As difficult as the task may seem, I know in my heart it can succeed. And I know that that success will enable my community to start over and achieve the progress it so richly deserves.

With leadership, a plan, and execution, we can get this done. Otherwise, we’ll never be able to solve the problems that exist beyond the noise.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++3)The FBI’s Clinton File

Vanishing digital devices, memory lapses and withheld emails.

ENLARGE

Hillary Clinton in Cincinnati, Ohio on Aug. 31. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS

The Federal Bureau of Investigation waited until the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend to release its investigation summary and interview notes with Hillary Clinton about her private email server, and no wonder. The new information makes a hash of what’s left of the former Secretary of State’s credibility.

Mrs. Clinton is running for President as an experienced statesman, but her handling of classified material was even more reckless about state secrets and disdainful of public records laws than even we had thought. Start with her convenient memory lapses.

For example, Mrs. Clinton told the FBI that she “did not know” that the “(C)” marks on classified material meant classified and “speculated it was referencing paragraphs marked in alphabetical order.” Yet in her famous—and last—press conference about the emails in March 2015 she said, “I’m certainly well aware of the classification requirements and did not send classified material.” To the public she claims to be a sharp professional who knows the score; to the FBI she presents herself as a clueless grandee who left the details to her minions.

Opinion Journal Video

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Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton on new evidence that Hillary Clinton’s State Department aides gave Clinton Foundation donors special treatment. Photo credit: Getty Images.

Mrs. Clinton even told FBI agents she “never had a concern” with how discussions of potential drone strikes were handled and classified and “could not recall a specific process for nominating a target for a drone strike.” In all, she told the FBI 27 times that she “could not recall” or “did not remember specifically” key details and events.

Mrs. Clinton also said in March 2015 that she used private email so she could use only one digital device, and her legal team turned two Blackberries over to the FBI. But the FBI identified 13 other mobile devices and five iPads that had potentially processed classified material. The Clintons were “unable to locate any of these devices” and only three of the iPads, says the FBI.

This also turned out to be convenient because it means the FBI couldn’t determine if those devices were hacked. The FBI summary explains that the loss of the 13 at-large devices and the “inability to recover all server equipment and the lack of complete server log data” during her tenure “limited the FBI’s forensic analysis of the server systems.”

Mrs. Clinton knew the risks of being hacked by foreign spies. Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Eric Boswell sent a 2011 memo directly to Mrs. Clinton that warned of a surge in hackers breaking into State personal email accounts. An all-points bulletin to State personnel sent under Mrs. Clinton’s name recommended against conducting State business over personal email “due to information security concerns.” She told the FBI she “did not recall” this episode, but she “understood the email system used by her husband’s personal staff had an excellent track record with respect to security and had never been breached.”

Yet the FBI reveals that the account of a Bill Clinton personal aide on the server was hacked in 2013 and the intruder “browsed e-mail folders and files.” The FBI also discovered she sent or received “hundreds of e-mails” marked classified or confidential outside of U.S. territory, where the danger of hacking is highest.

Mrs. Clinton also kept up a clandestine correspondence with her political Svengali and Clinton Foundation retainer Sidney Blumenthal, whose AOL account was hacked by the Romanian known as Guccifer in 2013. Though President Obama had barred Mr. Blumenthal from government, Mr. Blumenthal sent Mrs. Clinton at least 179 memos, some of which she then forwarded through the bureaucracy after having his name excised. Twenty-four of these dispatches were so sensitive that State later classified them.

In other words, Mrs. Clinton kept a man banned by her boss on the family foundation payroll, then used Mr. Blumenthal as an off-the-official-books counselor whose memos she spread around State after disguising their provenance. She conned Mr. Obama too.

The FBI documents also suggest Mrs. Clinton’s server was a deliberate effort to evade accountability. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell told Mrs. Clinton in 2009 that her communications were “official record[s] and subject to the law.” State Executive Secretary Stephen Mull also informed Cheryl Mills that a State-issued Blackberry “would be subject to FOIA requests.”

Mrs. Clinton went ahead anyway. She was almost surely trying to protect from public exposure the intimate ties between State and the Clinton Foundation—the commingling of her political operation with her official business. The FBI uncovered “approximately 17,448 unique work-related and personal emails” that were never produced, and whose revelations in recent weeks are proving so damaging to her public image.

What a record. The FBI documents should be seen as a preview of how Mrs. Clinton would govern as President, with the same get-away-with-anything entitlement that always follows the Clintons. She’s lucky she’s running for President because anyone else would have been indicted.

3a)

Why Hillary Is Never Held Accountable for Her Lies

By Victor Davis Hanson 

The media excuse her mendacity because it serves the progressive cause.

Everyone rightly catalogues Donald Trump’s fibs, distortions, and exaggerations: his assertions about his net worth, his charitable contributions, his initial supposed opposition to the Iraq War, or his “flexible” positions on illegal immigration. After all, he is flamboyant, right-wing in his present incarnation, and supposedly bends the truth either out of crass narcissism or for petty profiteering. So the watchdog media and popular culture have no problem with ridiculing Trump as a fabricator.

But not so with Hillary Clinton, whose untruths far overshadow Trump’s in both import and frequency, but are so often contextualized, excused, and forgotten because of who she is and the purpose her outright lying supposedly serves.

Lying in America has become not lying when “good” liars advance alternative narratives for noble purposes — part of our long slide into situational ethics and moral relativism.

Every new bad idea in America today can ultimately be traced to the university. And it seems to take only about 30 years for academia’s nihilism to filter through the elite institutions and make its way into popular culture. So it is with our present idea of truth as a mere construct.

In the 1980s and 1990s professors in the liberal arts became enamored of the French-speaking postmodern nihilists — among them notably Paul de Man, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jacques Lacan. They refashioned an old philosophical strain of relativism found as far back as the Greek sophists and Plato’s discussion of the noble lie. They were influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche’s attacks on absolute morality, and their youth was lived during the age of Joseph Goebbels and Pravda. The utter collapse of France in six weeks in May and June 1940 and the later shame that most of the nation either was passive or actively collaborated with the Nazi occupiers rather than proving brave resistance fighters made the idea of empiricism and truth an especially hard pill to swallow for the postwar French postmodernists.

While this group comprised quite different thinkers, they mostly agreed that reality was socially constructed and arbitrarily defined by the language of those in power.

In fact, “truth” for a postmodernist is supposedly what those who control us say it is, largely in efforts to perpetuate their own race, class, and gender privilege. You can see how thoroughly popular culture has picked up this mostly banal relativist observation and transformed it into “the Truth”—and why today we assume that lying is simply a narrative,  not a window into one’s character.

Relativist slogans abound (e.g., “One person’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter”). “Hands up, don’t shoot” was never uttered by Michael Brown, who was not an innocent “gentle giant” but a strong-armed robber who sought to take a policeman’s gun and then charged at the cop. But since his fictitious last utterances should be true, therefore they are and, presto! became the slogan of Black Lives Matter.

In the opposite fashion, there is to be no such thing as Black Lives Matter protestors calling for frying police or killing cops, since negation of the truth serves a far more noble purpose than would confirmation.

Orwell was onto the game far earlier than the French postmodernists. He rightly saw it as a postwar pathway of the Left to assuming and keeping power: What was written on the barn wall on Monday as an absolute commandment was crossed out and replaced on Tuesday, in the fashion that the Soviet Union used to airbrush out sudden enemies of the people from all past pictorial records. Who knew what the party line would be by Wednesday? What frightened Orwell was not so much lying British industrialists or celebrities, but officers of the state who sought to

dismiss the idea of the truth itself and justify the dismissal on ideological grounds.

“People’s Republic” after 1946 usually meant that the Communist country in question was never a republic or ratified by a vote of the people. “Sanctuary cities” today have neither the legal right nor the moral weight to offer exemption from federal immigration law. They do not serve any purpose other than self-interested “nullification” of the law in the fashion of 1850s Confederate states that arbitrarily declared federal statutes null and void in their jurisdictions. We know how that construct ended up.

Gender is now defined not by biology, but by culture or suspect patriarchically constructed norms. “Undocumented migrant” replaces “illegal alien” even as those who crossed illegally into the U.S. never had any documents to begin with, were foreign nationals, and were migrants going into the U.S., not mere directionless travelers.

Both Elizabeth Warren and Ward Churchill are Native Americans because they say they are. To question them on the basis that neither has any proven Indian ancestry is simply to offer a competing narrative, and one driven by racism, not their sort of altruism.

If Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King reconstruct themselves as black Americans, then their “stories” are as legitimate as any others, given their progressive agendas and their antitheses to the white male power structure.

When Hillary falls into her phony black patois to talk down to African-American audiences, in an accidental caricature of a snooty suburbanite trying to seem cool or authentic, she is no more false than she was earlier in her Annie Oakley incarnation of 2008, when she quaffed boilermakers and bowled to appeal to Obama’s despised clingers. All these are mere narrative moments, but disturbing evidence that she cheaply peddles identities for votes.

We claim there is no such thing as “truth,” as assertions gain credulity only by the degree of wealth and influence behind them (white, male, Christian heterosexuals usually are the bogeymen who establish self-interested “standards” of accuracy and fidelity). So fables in service to a progressive cause are not lying, as they would be if in league with reactionary forces.

Barack Obama can make up narratives about under-appreciated Islamic catalysts for the Western Renaissance or Enlightenment in his Cairo Speech because such mythmaking serves a noble cause of stopping “Islamophobia” and thus deserves the artificial currency of “truth.” Obama himself can invent large chunks of his “autobiography” and it is neither a lie nor a fable, given that his pr

incipled intent was to enlighten us about the burdens of growing up as the Other.

Lying for a Brian Williams or plagiarism for a Doris Kearns Goodwin or Fareed Zakaria can be passed off as the shoddy work of subordinates, or “misremembering,” or symptomatic of too full a schedule (not egoism, laziness, or efforts at career enhancement), given that all serve the progressive gods.

In 2012 the progressive future of the country hinged on the reelection of Barack Obama, so naturally ensuring that the imploding Middle East was quiet and that al-Qaeda was somnolent demanded a “truth” that an obscure videomaker and Islamophobic bigot had enraged otherwise peace-loving Muslims and incited them to burn down our consulate in Benghazi — an isolated act that had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.

If that narrative meant that National Security Adviser Susan Rice had to lie five times on Sunday talk shows, or Hillary Clinton had to deceive the families of the Benghazi dead, or Barack Obama’s Justice Department had to jail Nakoula Basseley Nakoula on a trumped-up old probation charge, then the ends of an Obama reelection more than outweighed the unethical means of achieving it. In each case, “conflicting narratives” or the “fog of war” made the idea of one absolute truth absurd. Who is to say whether $400 million in nocturnal cash transfers to the Iranians for hostages is, or is not, “ransom”?

Almost everything Hillary Clinton has said about her current scandals is a lie: No other secretary of state used a personal server; Colin Powell was certainly not her model for lawbreaking; she really did send and receive classified materials that she at the time knew were classified; she did not have lawyers examine all of her personal e-mails that she destroyed; they were not mostly about Chelsea and yoga; she did not accurately inform authorities of the actual number of her personal e-mails; there was no firewall between the State Department and the Clinton Foundation; rich individuals did meet with the secretary of state in a fashion that they would otherwise not have been able to, had they not donated vast amounts of money. And on and on. Again, all lies, but lies that in postmodern culture are merely competing progressive narratives that translate into the vulgar media as “Who is to say what pay-to-play actually is?”

Did anyone care that progressive Hillary long ago lied about her rigged $1,000 cattle-future investment beating 34 trillion to 1 odds to earn her $100,000, or her supposed foray into a combat zone in Serbia? Clinton’s lies, past and present, are fobbed off as either fantasies of right-wing conspiracists, who hope to derail her progressive agenda, or as psychodramas of a struggling progressive couple trying to do good. Either that, or they are minor problems of communication, or were courageous stances taken to advance the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, and the children.

The problem with the Clintons and all postmodern liars goes back to Epimenides’ ancient paradox of the Cretan liar: “All Cretans are liars.” Are we then to believe that the Cretan Epimenides was lying when he insisted that all Cretans (like himself) lie? Were Cretans, then, liars or not? Was Hillary lying when she set up the private server, when she explained away her criminal behavior, or when she insisted she had not lied about her prior lying about lying?

Postmodernist Hillary, however, does believe in absolute truth when it is a matter of checks to the Clinton Foundation not bouncing and aviation fuel being purchased for private jets. Postmodernists do not believe that truth exists for others in the abstract; but for themselves it most certainly does and advantageously so in the concrete.

The danger to democracy is never from the bad liars who patently fabricate for self, but from the sophisticated and progressive good liars who lie that their untruth is truth because it was all made up for us.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)The Oslo Disaster
By Prof. Efraim Karsh

Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 123

Prof. Efraim Karsh, the incoming director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, skewers the Oslo diplomatic process as “the starkest strategic blunder in Israel’s history” and as “one of the worst calamities ever to have afflicted Israelis and Palestinians.”

“Twenty three years after its euphoric launch on the White House lawn,” Karsh writes in this comprehensive study, “the Oslo ‘peace process’ has substantially worsened the position of both parties and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation ever more remote.”

“The process has led to establishment of an ineradicable terror entity on Israel’s doorstep, deepened Israel’s internal cleavages, destabilized its political system, and weakened its international standing.”

“It has been a disaster for West Bank and Gaza Palestinians too. It has brought about subjugation to corrupt and repressive PLO and Hamas regimes. These regimes have reversed the hesitant advent of civil society in these territories, shattered their socioeconomic wellbeing, and made the prospects for peace and reconciliation with Israel ever more remote.”

“This abject failure is a direct result of the Palestinian leadership’s perception of the process as a pathway not to a two-state solution – meaning Israel alongside a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza – but to the subversion of the State of Israel. They view Oslo not as a path to nation-building and state creation, but to the formation of a repressive terror entity that perpetuates conflict with Israel, while keeping its hapless constituents in constant and bewildered awe as Palestinian leaders line their pockets from the proceeds of this misery.”

Karsh details at length how the Oslo process has weakened Israel’s national security in several key respects.

On the strategic and military levels, it allowed the PLO to achieve in one fell swoop its strategic vision of transforming the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into terror hotbeds that would disrupt Israel’s way of life (to use Yasser Arafat’s words).

Politically and diplomatically, he says, Oslo instantaneously transformed the PLO (and, to a lesser extent, Hamas) into an internationally accepted political actor while upholding its commitment to Israel’s destruction, edging toward fully fledged statehood outside the Oslo framework, and steadily undermining Israel’s international standing.

The ending of Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian population of the territories within three-and-a-half years from the onset of the process has gone totally unnoticed (due partly to Palestinian propaganda, partly to Israel’s failure to get this critical point across), with the Jewish state still subject to international opprobrium for the nonexistent “occupation.”

Domestically, Oslo radicalized Israel’s Arab minority, nipping in the bud its decades-long “Israelization” process and putting it on a collision course with Israel’s Jewish community. No less importantly, it made Israeli politics captive to the vicissitudes of Palestinian-Israeli relations, with the PLO and Hamas becoming the effective arbiters of Israel’s political discourse and electoral process.

“On the face of it,” Karsh writes, “Israel’s massive setbacks can be considered Palestinian gains. Yet one’s loss is not necessarily the other’s gain. The Palestinian leadership’s zero-sum approach and predication of Palestinian national identity on hatred of the ‘other,’ rather than on a distinct shared legacy, has resulted in decades of dispersal and statelessness.”

“Even if the PLO were to succeed in gaining international recognition of a fully fledged Palestinian state (with or without a formal peace treaty with Israel) and in preventing Hamas from seizing power, it would still be a failed entity in the worst tradition of Arab dictatorships, in permanent conflict with its Israeli neighbor while brutally repressing its unfortunate subjects.”

Karsh bemoans that fact that “there has been no real reckoning by the Oslo architects and their erstwhile ‘peace camp’ successors, both in Israel and abroad, of the worst blunder in Israel’s history, and no rethinking of its disastrously misconceived assumptions – let alone any public admission of guilt or show of remorse over its horrific costs.”

“Instead, they continue to willfully ignore the Palestinian leadership’s total lack of interest in the two-state solution and serial violation of contractual obligations. They continue to whitewash ongoing Palestinian violence, belittle the extent of Israeli suffering, and blame Jerusalem for the stalled process despite the public endorsement of the two-state solution by five successive Israeli prime ministers: Peres, Barak, Sharon, Olmert, and Netanyahu.”

“Not only has the same terror-tainted Palestinian leadership come to be universally viewed as the prospective government of a future Palestinian state, but its goal of having this state established without negotiating with Israel, or even recognizing its right to exist, seems to be gaining ever wider currency.  This soft racism – asking nothing of the Palestinians as if they are too dim or too primitive to be held accountable for their own words and actions – is an assured recipe for disaster.”

“For so long as not a single Palestinian leader evinces genuine acceptance of the two-state solution or acts in a way signifying an unqualified embrace of the idea, there can be no true or lasting reconciliation with Israel. And so long as the territories continue to be governed by the PLO’s and Hamas’s rule of the jungle, no Palestinian civil society, let alone a viable state, can develop.”

“Just as the creation of free and democratic societies in Germany and Japan after World War II necessitated a comprehensive sociopolitical and educational transformation, so it will only be when Palestinian society undergoes a real ‘spring’ that the century-long conflict between Arabs and Jews can at long last be resolved and a semi-functioning Palestinian state come into being. This requires sweeping the corrupt and oppressive PLO and Hamas rulers from power, eliminating endemic violence from political and social life, and teaching the virtues of coexistence with Israeli neighbors.”

“Sadly, the possibility of a Palestinian spring, which seemed to be in the offing in 1993 when the PLO hovered on the verge of extinction and West Bank and Gaza leadership appeared eager to strike a historic deal within the framework of the Washington peace negotiations, has been destroyed for the foreseeable future by the Oslo ‘peace process’.”

A renowned authority on Middle Eastern history and politics, Prof. Karsh has authored over 100 scholarly articles and sixteen books, and is editor of the Middle East Quarterlyand Israel Affairs academic journals.

He taught for 25 years at King’s College London, where he founded and directed the Middle East and Mediterranean Studies Program (currently the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies). In 2013 he joined Bar-Ilan University as professor of political science. In November 2016 he will succeed Prof. Efraim Inbar as director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies.

4a)Netanyahu: 'I won't let anyone launch a putsch against me'

As Transport Minister Yisrael Katz sits next to PM Netanyahu during cabinet session for the first time since the inception of the political dispute, Netanyahu sends clear warning: 'Ministers are appointed to solve crises, not to create them.'
By Moran Azulay and Yael Friedson

Heightened tensions between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Transport Minister Yisrael Katz were conspicuously apparent during Sunday’s cabinet meeting with the two exchanging not a single word throughout.

As the Shabbat-train dispute continues to reverberate into yet another week, the government cabinet convened for a tense morning session.

During the discussions, Transport Minister Yisrael Katz—who is rumored to be next on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political hit list after the two publicly locked horns in recent weeks over the issue—sat next to his boss but refused to comment on the matter before the meeting.

Netanyahu however did not remain silent. “I won’t let anyone launch a putsch against me,” he said earlier Sunday morning.

As the Shabbat-train dispute continues to reverberate into yet another week, the government cabinet convened for a tense Sunday morning session.

Prime Minister Netanyahu and Yisrael Katz (Photo: Yael Friedson)

During the discussions, Public Transport Minister Yisrael Katz—who is rumored to be next on Prime Minister Netanyahu’s political hit list after the two publicly locked horns in recent weeks over the issue—sat next to his boss but refused to comment on the matter before the meeting.

Netanyahu however did not remain silent. “I won’t let anyone launch a putsch against me,” he said earlier Sunday during meeting of Likud ministers.

During his opening cabinet remarks, the prime minister wasted no time in addressing the matter.

“This crisis is completely unnecessary; there was no need for it to come to this. There has been a status quo in Israel for many years. When work needs to be done on Shabbat, it is done, just as it was last Saturday on the Ayalon Highway,” Netanyahu said.

“When work doesn't have to be done on Shabbat, they it isn't. This is the rule that has been guiding us and will continue guiding us. Over the past seven years, the government has invested close to NIS 30 billion in a massive expansion of the roads, train tracks, and, of course, in building interchanges, tunnels, etc.,” he continued. “We've succeeded in doing all of that without any unnecessary crises. When you don't want a crisis, it can be avoided. I expected full cooperation from all of the ministers."

Asked whether Netanyahu had decided to fire Katz, Coalition Chairman MK David Bitan (Likud) did not deny it. “It is a possible option. We are trying to avoid this but at the moment we are not succeeding in doing so,” Bitan said during an interview with Ynet. “There is a serious confidence crisis and this is an option from his point of view. We are trying to stop the decision.”

Soldiers scramble for the bus to arrive on time to their bases (Photo: Motti Kimchi)

Bitan went on to say, “I suggested all kinds of compromises. Today things are not good and the situation needs to be calmed. I am trying but the way to do it is to work in harmony so that that we can solve the crisis together. The minister can cooperate with the prime minister in order to solve the crisis. We need to find a compromise.”

Addressing the ongoing political dispute with the Haredi party, Bitan described it as “real. No one understands why the Israel Railways is insisting on doing things the way it is and creating a real crisis.”

The inconvenience was caused when, last week, a political furor broke out over planned infrastructure-improvement construction that was supposed to take place during Shabbat, when the trains do not run.

Packed bus as main train line disabled

The ultra-Orthodox factions in the government objected and threatened to withdraw from the coalition—effectively bringing down the government. Under pressure, the prime minister proposed a compromise in which he suggested that out of the 20 projects that Israel Railways had requested to undertake on Shabbat, 17 would be cancelled. On Friday however, Haredi politicians insisted that all 20 projects be cancelled.

Giving in to Haredi demands, Netanyahu's decision caused major disruptions to the public transport networks as the Haifa-Tel Aviv line was put out of operations for maintenance work on Sunday, leading to heavy traffic buildups, massive lines at bus staions and crowded buses. Haphazard solutions were sought such as Egged bus company sending 140 extra buses to the roads. However, huge delays were caused and traffic mounted significantly.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
5)  What a Tangled Web

By Deana Chadwell

As we grope toward election day we’re hearing more foggy thinking than most of us can process. We hear people say, like a broken record, that the sluggish, dwindling economy is Bush’s fault. Or it’s proof that capitalism doesn’t work. That makes as much sense as claiming the recipe for the failed cake was at fault when you know you added 4 ingredients the original instructions didn’t mention. You can’t stir salsa into a chocolate cake and get a successful dessert. And yet we do that all the time and no one seems to notice.

What passes for clear cause-and-effect reasoning is appalling. Let’s say you bought an eight-year-old car from a used car dealer who failed to tell you it had been T-boned by a drunk running a red light. Then this car proves hard to handle at high speeds. Whose fault is it that you now own a lemon? The dealer who lied, or you, who didn’t do a good job shopping. But would you blame the person who owned the car before you? The wreck wasn’t even his fault. Would you blame the entire auto industry? People do; it’s Bush’s fault.

Now, I’m no Thomas Sowell, but I can read and I can think and one of the best ways to do that is to write. Writing requires sorting, and cataloguing, and organizing, so let’s group some ideas into appropriate piles ---

Basic socialism:

Equality is the poster principle for socialism. Everyone has to pay his “fair share” (whatever that means). That’s the web the leftists weave to trap the unsuspecting. The system works like this: tax the rich, but since there aren’t enough rich with enough money to make much difference, you also overtax the middle class. This has two effects –

1. The rich either go elsewhere or quit producing because the returns are too low, and/or

2. The middle class doesn’t have enough expendable income to buy the products the rich were producing, so the factories shut down and neither the working class nor the middle class even have jobs, and the rich no longer have any capital. The government is now responsible for providing for all three classes since no one is working, but the government can’t do it because it can no longer collect enough taxes (hence a burgeoning national debt and the mess Venezuela finds itself in today).

This economic model affects society negatively by rewarding damaging attitudes and behaviors -- laziness, disrespect, boredom, hopelessness, anger. These character traits cannot support a vibrant and prosperous economy. They destroy trust, an essential in all business dealings. They do not support general moral integrity, therefore requiring more laws and government supervision.

If you add auxiliary socialist modalities like environmental activism, political correctness, government-run schools, and nationalized healthcare you have government controlling the means of production, control of personal property, personal health, and public speech. Almost everyone is poor -- but there is still no equality because those at the top of this heap -- the government people -- get very, very rich, yet they produce nothing.  Government becomes the god of the society because everyone is reliant on it for everything.

Basic capitalism:

The capitalist view is that equality is not nearly as important as freedom, merit, and fairness. In a free market those with ideas, initiative, talent, and endurance end up with more money and power than those they hire, but they do hire a lot of people and they keep good workers by paying them and treating them well. Those responsible for production are inspired to do so because they are rewarded for it.

The free market monitors itself since those who build and sell inferior products lose customers and therefore revenue. Customer demand determines what and how much is produced. Businesses address environmental issues because they cannot afford to run out of natural resources or harm their customer base. Because all this happens naturally there are always ups and downs. These occasional retractions in the market serve to weed out nonfunctional businesses and they keep the market lean and efficient.

Such an economic system requires and produces people of determination, decency, high work ethic and social responsibility. The society values and rewards those traits. For those few who resist living responsibly, there is government.

The free market produces enough revenue to support a reasonably sized government designed to keep folks safe from the unproductive and dangerous people mentioned above, foreign and domestic. It doesn’t need to do much more.

The demarcation between these two economic models is simple and clear: one features government controlling everything, the other, the free market, calls the shots -- i.e. the individual, but the two have become so tangled here in the last century that cause-and-effect is obvious only to those who read and grasp economic theory.  The American economy is supposed to be a free market economy, yet we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, our government micromanages businesses via stringent and destructive EPA, OSHA, and union entanglements. The government now controls large parts of the auto industry, education, and healthcare. How is that a free market economy?

Adding more to the confusion, when government begins encroaching on business, business has only three options: 1. Quit, 2. Move their business to another country, or 3. Get in bed with the regime.  Health insurance companies had little choice but to go along with Obamacare. Target could see the handwriting on the wall so it jumped out ahead on Obama’s bathroom decree. As capitalists we’d like to see corporations as the good guys, but when their lobbyists consort with government bullies, it’s hard to watch.

And we must realize that government schools are not going to teach economics in any way that isn’t flattering to government control of the economy. Duh. It’s no wonder that most folks don’t realize that economic “laws” are just as unavoidable as scientific law. The law of supply and demand is always true. If cost of production goes up, the price goes up as sure as the sun rises. Government can’t control the market any more than it can outlaw tornadoes or cockroaches. All government can do is slow down and strangle the natural processes of laissez faire economics.

We are now trapped in an Alice-in-Wonderland system so corrupted by cronyism and nonsensical over-regulation that we wouldn’t be shocked to see Michelle banging a croquet hedgehog around the White House lawn using a flamingo mallet. The administration, through its spokesperson, Josh Earnest (you can’t make this stuff up) insists that all’s well, it’s Bush’s fault, and all children should pee together. Certainly that will create jobs.

Just ask a man on the street and he’ll tell you that all things bad are Republican; he has no clue how the economy works, or what complications happen when government sticks its spoon in the stew, or how personal morality plays into the whole thing. It’s all too complicated and he’s been lied to so much that he has no idea which way is up.

The socialist half of this society has been pretending theirs is a winning option ever since Woodrow Wilson and the graduated income tax. They have been twisting and weaving and screwing the truth around until the web is large enough to capture and hold the goose, but not its golden eggs.

Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She taught high school English for 30 years and currently teaches writing at Pacific Bible College in Medford, Oregon. 

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++6) Kerry's soft words blunt U.S. hard power at sea

By Eli Lake Bloomberg View

Published Sept. 5, 2016

image: http://media.cagle.com/83/2014/03/07/145384_600.jpg?ref=relatedBox

There are times when I want President Barack Obama to invent a global crisis for John Kerry to solve, just to keep his secretary of state from making the real ones worse. Consider what happened at New Delhi this week, where Kerry offered a remarkable comment about the current tensions in the South China Sea. He said there was no "military solution."

Kerry was asked about China's public indifference to a decision in July from an international tribunal at the Hague that flatly rejected China's claims to the territorial waters of the Philippines in the South China Sea.

"We want to support a code of conduct for the management of the South China Sea," Kerry said. "We support diplomacy in an effort to try to resolve this with an understanding that there really is no, quote, 'military solution.' "

He added the U.S. was not interested in "fanning the flames of conflict but rather trying to encourage the parties to resolve their disputes and claims through the legal process and through diplomacy."

There are two things that are remarkable about Kerry's thoughts on this matter. To start, the U.S. position has been that the ruling of the Hague tribunal was not negotiable. While Washington does not officially take sides in territorial disputes in the South China Sea, it supports the rule of law and opposes China's efforts to assert sovereignty over these waters unilaterally. So what does it mean that Kerry is calling on both parties to take steps to resolve the issue as if this was the Arab-Israeli peace process? The only party "fanning the flames of conflict" in the South China Sea has been China.

More remarkable, though, is Kerry's utterance about military solutions. To start, the Chinese clearly believe there is a military solution to their problems in the South China Sea. That's why they keep militarizing the artificial islands they have been dredging up there.

More important, the Obama administration's primary policy for responding to all of this has been a military solution, so to speak. It has sent elements of the Seventh Fleet on "freedom of navigation" missions into disputed areas. And while these missions have not overtly challenged the waters around China's artificial islands, the military has been the driver of the U.S. policy response.

The pace and tenor of U.S. joint military exercises with East Asian allies has been a response to China's claims in the South China sea as well. To say nothing of new rounds of U.S. arms sales to countries threatened by China's activities as well. Most of the administration's vaunted "pivot to Asia" has been an attempt to reposition military assets.

None of this precludes U.S. diplomacy with China, but Kerry's efforts at conflict resolution undermine such diplomacy at a time when Chinese aggression has been censured by an international tribunal.

Daniel Blumenthal, the director of Asia Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me Thursday: "Almost any response we have against China's aggression in the South China Sea is going to have a military component."

He clarified that this doesn't mean the U.S. should start a war with China, but he said almost every expert outside and inside the government has identified military steps the U.S. could take to deter China. These include things like U.S. Navy convoys to accompany Filipino fishermen into waters claimed by China, or sailing more aggressive missions into the waters surrounding China's artificial islands.

All of this is particularly important now in the run-up to this weekend's G-20 conference at Hangzhou. In recent months, China has signaled that it plans to begin dredging new artificial islands at Scarborough Shoal, which it continues to block from Filipino fishermen despite the international tribunal ruling. This threat is serious enough that Obama himself warned China's premier, Xi Jinping, to back away from the shoals in March, on the sidelines of the Nuclear Security Summit.

Senior Japanese officials whom I met with in Tokyo last week told me that if China were to build and militarize islands in the shoals, it would have effective military control of the entire South China Sea, and could position aircraft and ships dangerously close to U.S. Naval assets in the Philippines. One Japanese official suggested the U.S. should consider a blockade of the shoals to prevent the Chinese from achieving their plan. (Another military solution, I know.)

In this respect, Kerry has sent a dangerous signal to China and America's East Asian allies. Andrew Shearer, senior adviser on Asia Pacific security with the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former national security adviser to two Australian prime ministers, told me Kerry's job is to reassure our allies. He said the secretary's statement in New Delhi "risks reducing deterrence."

None of this should be surprising. Kerry's worldview is shaped by his experience in the Vietnam War, which as a young veteran he campaigned against. Kerry told Wall Street Journal reporter Jay Solomon that he believes "war is the failure of diplomacy." This is, after all, the same secretary of state who brought James Taylor to Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre to play, "You've Got a Friend."

But America's friends need to know their most important ally is willing to stand up to China in the South China Sea. This should start with an acknowledgment that the U.S. has many military solutions to the crisis created there by China's military.

6a) https://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/chinas-insult-and-obamas-climate-kow-tow/

PJMedia: THE ROSETT REPORT

China's Insult and Obama's Climate Kowtow

 

BY CLAUDIA ROSETT

U.S. President Barack Obama arrives on Air Force One at the Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport, Saturday, Sept. 3, 2016, in Hangzhou, China, to attend the G-20 summit. (AP Photo/Mark Shiefelbein)

President Obama took office in 2009 promising that his brand of engagement would yield global respect for the United States. We've since had more than seven years of leading from behind, standing "shoulder to shoulder" with the "international community," snubbing of allies, appeasing of enemies and cutting America down to size. As Obama makes what will likely be his final official visit to China, how's it going?

Well, China, as host of the current G-20 summit, rolled out the red carpet -- or at least the red-carpeted airplane stairs -- for the arriving leaders of such countries as Britain, Australia, Germany and Russia.

For President Obama, arriving yesterday on Air Force One, there was no such dignified reception. Instead, there was a shoving match with the press and a confrontation with National Security Adviser Susan Rice, in which a Chinese official shouted "This is our country. This is our airport." For lack of any portable stairs rolled to the front door of the presidential plane, Obama was left to jog down the aircraft's own stairs at the back.

Obama downplayed the insult, telling reporters "not to over-crank the significance."

Maybe that makes sense in the bubble-world of the Ben-Rhodes-foreign-policy narrative, where the tide of war is forever receding, the arc of history bends toward justice, the oceans rise and fall at the command of Obama's pen and phone, and the echo chamber, on cue, applauds.

But China's reception was an insult, pure and simple. No one need study the tea leaves to understand that this was a gesture of gross disrespect, seen around the world, putting the American president in his place -- especially as compared with the warm reception for Russia's President Vladimir Putin.

While the missing red-carpeted staircase is mainly symbolic, the realities behind it are increasingly dangerous. Among them are China's territorial grabs a sea, provocations toward the U.S. Navy, cyber attacks, military exercises with Russia and evident tolerance  -- despite United Nations sanctions -- of illicit traffic that enables North Korea's continuing nuclear missile program.

For Obama, however, the evident priority in China was to sign on to the Paris climate accord, shoulder-to-shoulder with China's President Xi Jinping. Bundling together the rising threats to the U.S. under the oddly collegial phrase "for all the challenges we face," Obama in remarks from China went on to celebrate his submission to United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, jointly with Xi, of the documents required to formally enter into the Paris Agreement.

According to Obama, this climate deal could be a "turning point for our planet," a grand legacy of a presidency in which he made it his mission "to make sure that America does its part to protect this planet for future generations."

Really? The ironies here are off the charts. As PJMedia's Rick Moran points out, China dealt with the Paris Agreement as a treaty -- which it clearly is -- and at least went through the motions of getting approval from a rubber-stamp legislature. Obama, faced with a genuinely elected legislature in which the Senate would almost certainly have rejected the Paris Agreement, decided to handle this erstwhile planetary "turning point" as a mere embellishment on a previous treaty, the "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change," which entered into force in 1994.

So the "ratification" document Obama brought with him to China was the product of one of his pen-and-phone executive actions, offering to the UN Secretary-General a commitment Obama was not entitled to make, and which American voters had never agreed to.

Following such stunts as the Iran nuclear deal (which Obama hustled to the UN for approval, but never submitted to the Senate as a Treaty), this is becoming a new norm that is, in itself, profoundly dangerous to the foundations of the American Republic. Obama's job, summed up in the oath he swore when taking office (twice), is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The Constitution requires that a president make treaties only with the "Advice and Consent of the Senate," where a two-thirds majority is required for ratification.

China's Xi and his advisers are surely aware of this strange inversion, in which the American president is willing to roll right over the U.S. Constitution in order to grandstand from China about saving the planet. It's a good bet that to the rulers of China -- and Russia, and a great many others -- Obama's "ratification" of the Paris climate deal looks not like leadership, but like a kow-tow.

All the more so because in practice, this deal amounts to Americans paying tribute. Let's set aside for the moment the valid question -- in a debate not remotely "settled" -- of whether the climate of the planet can actually be fine-tuned, as the Paris accord proposes, to within two degrees celsius over coming decades by central planning to control carbon emissions. Whatever the science, the economic aspect of this deal amounts to an expanding web of regulations and wealth transfers, coordinated by a mix of international and federal bureaucrats.

For Americans, as Obama races during his final months in office to entrench this Paris deal (with pen-and-phone) in the domestic system, the result will be to increase the regulatory strictures already strangling an economy now growing at a dismal 1%. You, the American consumer, taxpayer, shunted-aside voter, will pay.

For China, the cost is far less clear. As the state-controlled China Daily summarizesthe arrangements, China has pledged to "peak" carbon emissions by 2030. Obama, by contrast, has promised that America will cut emissions by 28% by 2025, as compared to the year 2005.

In other words, small wonder China is happy to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Obama on this deal. Basically, especially with Obama in the cockpit, America starts paying now. China has 14 years to play around before the deal starts to bite. Plus, under China's despotic system, coupled with a treaty in which governments are effectively held accountable only by their own citizens, the rulers in Beijing have plenty of room to toss their international commitments right out the window.

On the maritime front, that is what Beijing has just done in rejecting the July 12 decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Hague, which ruled against China's grab for the disputed Scarborough Shoal, near the Philippines. In China's increasingly aggressive push for control off its shores, Obama's "engagement" has, if anything, emboldened Beijing.

Which brings us back to the matter of respect, and which leaders get the red-carpet treatment in China these days, and which don't. Xi and his colleagues see an American president who treats his own country's Constitution, voters  and national interests with no respect. For Beijing, that amounts to an enfeebled America. That translates into an opportunity, a wide-open invitation from the White House, to drive home to the world a message that China is on the rise -- receiving at its latest summit an American president who arrives with tribute in his pocket. For such an emissary, no red carpet is needed. Of course he can exit from the back of his plane.

Ms. Rosett is Foreign Policy Fellow with the Independent Women’s Forum, and a foreign affairs columnist for Forbes. com.

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