I posted this because I agree with most everything Lewis has stated. He has done so more eloquently
than I. A must read and think about proposition.
I see a connection between Mueller and the trap Trump may have set for himself out of frustration with the inability of his own party to deliver. "Up Chuck" Schumer and Pelosi are political snakes and will probably prove to be venomous. (See 1 below.)
And
Sobieski calls out calls out another creep, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who hides behind House Floor immunity. But then, Illinois is known for its political scum.(See 1a below.)
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A University is only as good as its administration and faculty and UVA has just fallen off its academic pedestal. (See 2 below.)
And
The lives of thugs and haters really should not matter regardless of color. They are simply a threat to civil order. (See 2a below.)
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Sneaking the ploy through the back door that will ultimately break the back of this camel. (See 3, 3a and 3b below.)
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This is how one person can destroy an organization. Obama surrogates are like viruses planting themselves throughout our system and whose ultimate goal is to and infect and destroy our society. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Mueller Could Destroy the Last Faith in the Justice System
When Watergate brought down Richard Nixon, I was a sort of puzzled but fascinated young watcher. But I didn't question the process, except when Sam Dash, the Senate Committee attorney, admitted that he had been leaking to the media at every single step of what was supposed to be an objective process.
In fact, Watergate was a hysterical pressure campaign against Nixon, to force him to resign under no legal compulsion at all. Lyndon B. Johnson had done worse than Nixon, but Nixon infuriated the Deep State/ Democrat/ Left Media alliance. Nixon came from the generation that still had some shame, and so he resigned.
Mueller's appointment as a special prosecutor, based on a blatantly false and pornographic "dossier" launched by British spies against a duly elected POTUS, with the malignant and corrupt support of Obama appointments Clapper, Comey, and Brennan, is not going to pull the wool over our eyes. There is no Constitutional provision for a special prosecutor, and there are no triggering criteria set in law.
The establishment can demand a special prosecutor by plain lies and disinformation, as it has done with Donald Trump. Mueller is running a plain witch-hunt under false colors of law.
If Mueller should charge Jared Kushner with getting entangled with Russian powermongers long before Trump's presidential campaign, His own credibility will be zero or less. Mueller will go down in history like the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins
Which would be a good thing, because the special prosecutor is nothing but a leftist partisan hack anyway, a witch-hunter in the tradition of Hopkins. The most recent victims of SP's include Scooter Libby and Martha Stewart. The first was nailed on a process crime, in the ages-old anti-Constitutional tradition of finding a scapegoat, any scapegoat, to satisfy the establishment lust for blood; and Martha Stewart was convicted of insider trading, exactly what Dianne Feinstein and most Congress members seem to do every year, by using their inside knowledge of forthcoming legislation to line their own pockets.
Elected congressional members earn a modest salary but manage to come out as millionaires using insider trading, and abusing confidential Congressional knowledge.
This is too disgusting for words, and nailing another human being on that bloody cross of the special prosecutor is repugnant to the moral sense. The whole machinery of corruption and chicanery, the whole inversion of the justice system to serve the power class, must be torn down and rebuilt again into a clean, credible, and untainted system.
We see uncorrupted political systems occasionally abroad, and some U.S. states used to be uncorrupted. But they have turned increasingly rotten.
Since all politicians by now are smeared with the same mud, we will have to reach outside of politics to clean up the sleazy mess, and may even require a new constitutional convention.
If the legally appointed witch hunters against POTUS have committed crimes, like Comey obviously has (perjury and probably worse), many Americans will demand justice.
The stinking Augean stables really need to be torn down and rebuilt with modern sanitation.
I don't know if that is possible, but there will be many, many Americans who will demand it. The Trump campaign was a clear signal to the political class that we've had enough.
The rotating door between politics and lobbying will also have to be slammed. Somehow, sabotage money from the Saudis and Iranians, the Chinese and maybe the Russians will have to be blocked. Many thousands of tenured bureaucrats will have to be forcibly retired.
We will need an FBI head of unquestioned integrity, certainly not like Comey or his ilk.
The historical way to control intelligence agencies is to make them compete against each other. After 9/11 the U.S. bureaucracy did exactly the opposite by creating the Director of National Intelligence, which simply centralized and expanded the secret power pyramid in DC.
Today, it may well be true that the GCHQ, the British codebreaking agency, was the first to drop the "Moscow prostitutes urinating on Obama's bed" disinformation, which circulated in DC for months to give the "grounds" for the Mueller witch hunt. In the age of the web, not only are CIA and FBI and DNI a closed cult, but so are the Brits.
You can't tell them apart.
Our intelligence laws were written, not exactly in the horse 'n buggy days, but in the automobile and propeller airplane days of FDR.
Our head intelligence mavens seem to do more plotting against duly elected POTUS than they protect us against Jihad, China, Russia, and all the rest.
Donald Trump pulled his most trusted leaders from the military, a good idea in a time of widespread civilian corruption. These are combat-tested general officers, people who have proven their loyalty in combat. But we cannot rely on the military forever. Do we have a pool of trusted public servants we can call upon to work at the highest levels of government to protect the United States? Are priests, ministers and rabbis to be trusted these days? Are small business people, like Harry Truman, to be trusted? The answer is no.
Our schools no longer even teach Civics, so that college students are astonishingly ignorant. Richard Dreyfuss has started a web movement to unite citizens to promote the restoration of Civics teaching throughout the schools and colleges. The historical and intellectual case for constitutionalism is stronger than ever, but our campuses are "islands of tyranny in a sea of freedom." We can thank our enemies on the left for "marching through the Institutions" in the 1960s and 70s, as urged by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci.
The United States is in deep, deep trouble. Our Democrat presidents are often rooted in Machine Politics: Even Harry Truman came from the Pendergast Machine in Kansas City. Obama was mentored by Emil Jones, the Grandfather of the Illinois Machine. The lines between politics and organized crime have blurred.
We desperately need deep reform. The people want it, and a Mueller corrupt indictment may become the signal for a popular revolt.
1a) Swamp Thing Luis Gutierrez Doubles Down
Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who represents the 4th Congressional district a gerrymandered snake-shaped district designed to protect his vitriolic incumbency, has doubled down on his criticism of DHS head Gen. John Kelly as being unfit to wear his uniform for opposing the illegal and unconstitutional DACA program rejected by a Congress in which Gutierrez sat:
Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) responded to Gen. John Kelly [Ret.], after the White House chief of staff dismissed the Chicagoan's first round of criticisms.
Gutierrez said Kelly, a retired four-star Marine general, is "a politician, OK, not a general."
"What could be more mean and more vicious than to say 'you've got six months to pack up... and leave the United States'?" Gutierrez asked of Kelly.
"I don't see [him wearing] a uniform," Gutierrez told the Washington Post.
And we don’t see Rep. Gutierrez ever wearing a uniform, unlike Gen’ Kelly’s son Robert, who gave his life for his country in Afghanistan fighting to protect America and the freedom of Muslims seeking liberation from the depraved tyranny of the Taliban:
Robert Kelly, 29, was killed in a roadside bomb blast in 2010 during a foot patrol in Afghanistan's Helmand province.
Like his son, who gave his life for others who did not look like him or shared many of his beliefs, Gen. Kelly served with and commanded and witnessed the sacrifice of soldiers of all races, ethnicities, and genders. He is not a bigot, but a patriot who deserved better for seeking enforcement of the nation’s laws and Constitution than what Rep. Gutierrez gave him:
The Washington Examiner reported that U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat, took personal aim at Kelly because Kelly once reportedly spoke favorably about the program. House members reported in July that Kelly told Latino lawmakers in a closed-door meeting that he was supportive of the program, but pointed out that it was probably illegal…
“General Kelly is a hypocrite who is a disgrace to the uniform he used to wear,” the congressman said in a statement.
"General Kelly, when he was the head of Homeland Security, lied straight to the faces of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about preventing the mass deportation of DREAMers," Gutierrez also said. "He has no honor and should be drummed out of the White House along with the white supremacists and those enabling the president's actions by ‘just following orders.'"
It is Rep. Gutierrez who has no honor, as well as no respect for American citizenship, the nation’s laws, and the Constitution he was sworn to uphold. Gutierrez has long supported open borders and even supported expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program to illegal parents:
For Democrats such as Grijalva and Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., amnesty and the political benefits stemming from it are inevitable. They are quite willing to use children to exploit the inherent compassion of the American people if it means ensuring the political future of the Democratic Party through the gratitude of millions of illegal aliens allowed to come here and stay.
Gutierrez recently told a La Raza conference that it was only a "down payment" that President Obama gave the Latino community with his Deferred Action for Children Arrivals (DACA) program that halted the deportation of 600,000 of "our people":
"Now it is time for the president in the United States... (to) free the mom and dads of the DREAMers and to go further -- be broad and expansive and generous."
Unlike Rep. Luis Gutierrez, Gen. John Kelly has long his country honorably: Gutierrez is a career politician living on the taxpayer’s dime while, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, using his office to personally enrich himself:
In Chicago, where a decade long building boom has reshaped neighborhoods, politicians have come to rely on real estate interests to donate to their campaigns. But the Democratic congressman's financial relationship with some contributors goes beyond campaign cash, according to records and interviews.
In half a dozen deals with campaign supporters since 2002, Gutierrez has made about $421,000 by investing his money in real estate deals and exiting a short time later. The congressman says he made a profit in five of those deals but lost a small amount of money on the sixth…
Gutierrez has bought and sold properties with five campaign donors, including convicted political fundraiser Antoin "Tony" Rezko…
The demise of DACA would be a deserved end to a magnet for illegal immigration based on an unconstitutional executive order by President Barack Hussein Obama who was frustrated that Congress failed to pass it as legislation named the DREAM Act. As syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer observed on Fox News’ Special Report at the time:
You can have executive orders that implement already existing laws. What Obama has done in the DREAM Act, which is exactly what you've talked about. Essentially he passed a law by executive order that the Congress had rejected, wouldn't pass, that is unbelievably unconstitutional. It's as if a Republican ran and said I don't like the capital gains tax, Congress rejects an abolition of that tax and then he orders the IRS not to collect it. People would be up in arms and would be impeaching. He's doing that over and over again on immigration
Even President Obama said he didn’t have the authority to do what he eventually did -- enact the Congressionally rejected DREAM Act through executive order:
With respect to the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case, because there are laws on the books that Congress has passed -- and I know that everybody here at Bell is studying hard so you know that we’ve got three branches of government. Congress passes the law. The executive branch’s job is to enforce and implement those laws. And then the judiciary has to interpret the laws.
There are enough laws on the books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my appropriate role as President.
Was President Obama also a dishonorable hypocrite for saying the executive order on DACA had no legitimacy in the law or Constitution? Thankfully, unlike Gutierrez, we still have Americans like John Kelly and his son Robert willing to serve their country honorably even to the point of making the ultimate sacrifice.
Daniel John Sobieski is a freelance writer whose pieces have appeared in Investor’s Business Daily, Human Events, Reason Magazine and the Chicago Sun-Times among other publications
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2) The Haters Come for Jefferson
Tuesday night, Black Lives Matter supporters made their move on the University of Virginia (UVA). Protesters climbed the statue of Thomas Jefferson in front of the Rotunda and covered the statue with a shroud. News coverage says about 100 faculty, students, and community members, some carrying Black Lives Matter signs, read a list of demands and put a sign on the statue that said: "TJ is a racist and a rapist."
Things are about to get interesting. The university has been whipped into a frenzy of hatred for anyone who opposes the removal of the Robert E. Lee statue in downtown Charlottesville. Governor McAuliffe has called them Nazis. UVA president Theresa Sullivan has said they do not represent "who we are." Now Jefferson is under attack. How will President Sullivan parse the reality of Thomas Jefferson? Will she defend Jefferson after throwing Lee under the bus? How will that logic work? It's OK to own slaves but not to fight for slavery?
Among their demands, the protesters want the removal of Confederate plaques from the Rotunda. The other nine demands range from "re-contextualizing" the Jefferson statue to banning white supremacist alumni to increasing black student enrollment from 6.4% to 19.6%. If you have any doubt that Black Lives Matter is a communist front group, just read the list of demands. It's the standard list of cultural Marxist drivel.
For instance, take the demand for increased black student enrollment. No society in the history of the human race has ever self-organized around the random distribution of races, an observation well made by Thomas Sowell. In other words, if the population of Virginia includes 19.6% black people, cultural Marxists believe that black people should be randomized throughout the population so that everywhere you go, you see 19.6% black people, and if you don't, there is an injustice that must be righted.
Therefore, 19.6% of UVA students should be black students, 19.6% of UVA faculty should be black faculty, 19.6% of the UVA police force should be black officers, 19.6% of cardiac surgeons at the UVA hospital should be black surgeons, and so on and so on. You see how this works. Never mind that actual real black people might have other interests and desires about how to live their lives.
It's the standard Marxist dialectic of defining an oppressed group with some necessary hypothetical properties, and then demanding that the oppressors fulfill the hypothetical properties. The strategy is designed to cause conflict that can only be resolved by a totalitarian state.
Now, the dialectic is at work at UVA, where, once again, the left appears to be eating its own. On Tuesday morning, President Sullivan could say "No Home for Hate Here." On Wednesday morning, she's the oppressor who must defend the legacy of Thomas Jefferson. Who's going to hate whom in this scenario? President Sullivan certainly will be ill suited for this delicate balancing of who is racist and who isn't. She's a cultural Marxist herself, and she's completely down with the cause.
We saw this in her handling of the Rolling Stone rape allegations. In that case, the Marxists declared that all-American universities are home to a pervasive rape culture and that 20% of all university women are rape victims. These beliefs were widespread throughout the study body and administration at UVA. So when Rolling Stone reported that a woman named Jackie was gang-raped as a fraternity initiation rite at UVA, the collective response was "yeah, that sounds about right."
President Sullivan called the Charlottesville police and the governor, requested a special investigation, and suspended all Greek organizations for two months. It wasn't until bloggers and reporters began to question the details of the story that the truth emerged.
President Sullivan rapidly could have gotten to the bottom of the story if she had believed the fraternity members. But, being a cultural Marxist, she was not inclined to believe the fraternity men (despite the honor system at UVA that could throw them out if they were lying about it), nor to believe the answers to the simple journalistic questions: who, what, when, where, why, and how?
If she had believed the fraternity men over Rolling Stone, she would have known right away that there was no party on the night claimed in the story, that no fraternity member matched the description of the "ringleader" of the rape, that fraternities pledge in the spring and not the fall, that there were no pledges residing in the fraternity at the time, and that details about the layout of the fraternity house in the story did not match the actual fraternity house.
Really, it wasn't that hard to get the facts. Armed with the facts, she could have taken a strong stand in support of the fraternity, but she didn't. Instead, she called for outside help and let the turmoil simmer for months. The fraternity house was vandalized, the members were ostracized, and student groups mobilized to resist rape culture – all after a fake rape story that President Sullivan fell for because of her cultural beliefs.
President Sullivan's tenure at UVA has not been stellar. She was fired for 18 days in 2012 by the Board of Visitors, and she accepted the firing but then changed her mind when the faculty rose up to support her. Her modus operandi has been to check the prevailing wind and to go with the mob.
All of this brings us back to her current dilemma. After condemning supporters of the Lee statue as haters who don't represent "who we are," will she now, as president of UVA, have to stand up to defend Jefferson and thereby become one of the haters reviled by the left? Is she willing to be seen as an Alt-Right racist if she defends Jefferson the slaveholder? Or is she prepared to go the full Monty and openly join the Black Lives Matter Marxists? There is hypocrisy everywhere she might turn.
The Grounds are rife with placards proclaiming, "No Home for Hate Here." But who are the real haters: the people who want to tear down the statues or the people who support the statues? The grand irony of the "No Home for Hate Here" campaign is the level of intense hatred for anyone who's not down with the cause. Will President Sullivan choose sides?
Not likely. Faced with the current dilemma, it's likely that President Sullivan will convene some kind of committee to study the problem rather than take a stand. We'll see. Time is on her side. In January of this year, she announced that she will step down as president in 2018. The search for a new president is underway, and she may be gone by the time any decisions have to be made.
Lastly, as a UVA alumnus, I can't close this piece without a personal admission. I must admit that I was appalled by the level of illiteracy in the protesters' list of demands. There was a time when students attended class on The Grounds. Today, apparently, it's just a campus, indistinguishable from any other state university. The protesters might also want to capitalize The Lawn if they want to distinguish the area in front of the Rotunda from the grass on the football field. They might also want to have some agreement between plural and singular in their demands, as in "White supremacist hate groups, particularly UVA alumni Jason Kessler and Richard Spencer…" They might also...oh, well, never mind.
Why should I edit their document for them? The only demand these protesters should be making is for a refund of the money they spent on a UVA education. They didn't get their money's worth.
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3)
The Single-Payer Siren Song
‘Medicare for All’ may become the Democrats’ version of ‘repeal and replace.’
By William A. Galston
There must be something special in the waters of Lake Champlain. In 2011 newly elected Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin announced his intention to shift his state to a single-payer health-care system. He pursued that goal until late 2014, when a study by his staff and consultants projected that it would require imposing a payroll tax of 11.5% and raising the personal income tax by as much as 9.5 percentage points. “The risk of economic shock is too high,” Mr. Shumlin concluded as he withdrew his proposal.
There were political considerations as well. Despite successfully campaigning on a single-payer platform in 2010 and winning re-election in 2012 and 2014, Mr. Shumlin never succeeded in persuading a majority of his constituents to support his signature idea. An April 2014 survey found Vermont split down the middle, with 40% of residents approving and 39% disapproving. Perhaps the prospect of increasing the state budget by 45% gave Vermonters reason to doubt the wisdom of an abrupt shift to single-payer health care.
Vermont is not some random canary in the mineshaft. The Green Mountain State is among the most liberal in the country. Barack Obama prevailed by 37 percentage points in 2008 and 36 points in 2012. Hillary Clinton’s snake-bitten 2016 campaign managed a 26-point victory. The state is ethnically homogeneous, with a median household income above the national average. It is hard to think of a state better positioned to embrace single-payer health care, yet a determined governor couldn’t get close to pushing it through.
But now Democratic presidential aspirants are rushing to endorse Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s soon-to-be-released national single-payer plan. Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris already back it. Sens. Cory Booker and Kirsten Gillibrand have announced plans to co-sponsor it as well.
From the perspective of the contest for the Democratic nomination in 2020, this strategy is easy to understand. Mr. Sanders came closer to upsetting Mrs. Clinton than most observers thought possible. For now, the progressive wing of the party is energized, and the party’s ideological center of gravity has shifted.
In 2000, when Al Gore defeated Bill Bradley for the Democratic presidential nomination, 44% of Democrats regarded themselves as moderate and only 28% as liberal. By 2008, when Mr. Obama narrowly prevailed over Mrs. Clinton, the moderates’ share had fallen to 41% while the liberal share had increased to 33%.
Since then, the pace of ideological change has accelerated. Today, liberals make up the largest share of Democrats—48%. Moderates have fallen further, to only 36%. And the conservative wing, nearly one-quarter of the total in 2000, now amounts to barely one-seventh of the party.
If you want to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, it might seem, the best strategy is to emerge as the champion of its newly dominant progressive faction, and coming out for single-payer might seem the best way to do it.
Whether this is the best formula for winning a general election contest is another matter. Sens. Warren, Harris, Booker and Gillibrand are coastal Democrats from bright-blue states. Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, a veteran populist from a swing state that Donald Trump carried by a stunning eight points in 2016, has conspicuously declined to endorse the Sanders bill, preferring to build bipartisan support for a more modest proposal to allow Americans to buy into Medicare when they reach 55. Democrats should ask themselves which of their elected officials better understands how to win back the Midwestern states that made Mr. Trump president.
This is not just a political calculation. From a policy standpoint, the danger is that “Medicare for All” will become the Democrats’ “repeal and replace ObamaCare.”
In May 2016, the Urban Institute—not previously known as a hotbed of conservatism—released its analysis of the Medicare for All proposal Sen. Sanders offered during his presidential campaign. The study found that if the plan were enacted into law, the federal government would absorb the bulk of the current spending by states, localities, employers and households. Federal spending would rise by $2.5 trillion in the plan’s first year, and by $32 trillion over the first decade.
A parallel study conducted by the bipartisan Tax Policy Center found that Mr. Sanders’s revenue proposals would raise only $15.3 trillion over the first decade, leaving a gap of $16.6 trillion between expenditures and revenues. “The proposed taxes,” the Urban Institute observed, are “much too low to fully finance the plan,” and “additional sources of revenue would have to be identified.”
It will be interesting to see whether Sen. Sanders’s new proposal can meet these objections. Even if it does, Democrats interested in regaining a national majority should look before they leap.
3a) Bernie’s Socialism Goes Mainstream
‘Medicare for all’ is fast becoming a Democratic Party litmus test.
Hillary Clinton’s memoir of her presidential campaign is getting most of the media attention this week, but that’s the politics of progressive nostalgia. If you want to know where the Democratic Party is going, Bernie Sanders showed the way Wednesday with his proposal for a complete government takeover of health care.
“Medicare for all,” the Vermont Socialist calls it, and what was once a crank idea is fast becoming a progressive litmus test for Democratic candidates. Fifteen Democratic Senators endorsed it, including possible 2020 presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Kamala Harris (Calif.) and even Cory Booker (N.J.) Hard to believe, but not long ago Mr. Booker was posing as a moderate.
The Sanders bill would expand Medicare—now available to people 65 and older—to the entire U.S. population over four years. Our readers understand how expensive such “free” medical care would be in runaway costs for taxpayers and rationed care in the form of the long waiting lists that exist in other socialist systems.
But no one should think this can’t happen here. The Republican failure on health care guarantees the continuing decline of ObamaCare and that creates an opening for Democrats to escalate their designs for more government control. Barack Obama once told us that he favored such a single-payer system but America wasn’t ready for it. But in an era of political tumult, anything can happen, all the more so when millennials can’t remember the 1990s, much less the Cold War. All the old battles are new again.
3b) COMMENTARY MAGAZINE
So I spent the day reading What Happened, Hillary Rodham Clinton’s simultaneously interesting and dreadful book about the 2016 campaign.
First, let us dispense with the ludicrous idea that she shouldn’t have written or published it, which was bandied about last week on social media by worried Democrats. First, she probably didn’t actually write all that much of it (she gives credit in the acknowledgments to Dan Schwerin and Megan Rooney, her campaign speechwriters, whom she describes “sitting side by side on my couch, computers on their laps, working on a piece of text”). Second, after the personal abuse she received from Donald Trump in 2016, she owed and owes him no honeymoon deference. Third, Democrats who worry her words will somehow harm their path forward are being both unkind and unjust. And finally, because in concept What Happened is a refreshing and original attempt to offer a candid assessment of a political failure from the perspective of the person who failed. Had it been good, it would have been an instant classic.
It isn’t good, but it’s bad in ways that are instructive. It turns out Mrs. Clinton does not have a gift for genuine introspection; most of her acknowledgments of error are grudging and incomplete, or accompanied by passionate self-justifications and accusations of unfair and unjust treatment at the hands of Trump, the Republicans, the media, men, racists, right-wingers, Matt Lauer, and Bernie Sanders. It’s hard to blame her for this; most of us could not examine our own faults comfortably in print. But it makes the experience of reading the book somewhat tiresome.
To say on the one hand that she won the popular vote and only lost by 77,000 votes in three states and on the other that she lost because of misogyny and racism and nativism is the stuff that would make any reader who isn’t automatically of her camp scratch his or her head in bafflement. Barack Obama won two commanding victories with absolute majorities in 2008 and 2012; how then was her defeat, the defeat of one of the whitest people in America, the result of hatred of black people? The illogic is discomfiting and circular.
She is on firmer ground when she goes after James Comey for his outrageous handling of the email investigation into her. She is right to complain bitterly that his July press conference, in which he all but alleged she had engaged in criminal behavior while announcing no charges against her, was a shocking dereliction of duty. And her argument that his late intrusion into the campaign with his October 28 letter announcing the FBI was examining new information spelled her doom cannot be dismissed.
But this is the problem with examining what happened without really examining it. You could make the claim that Hillary’s defeat was written in the cards at the very beginning of her campaign when she made Huma Abedin her closest aide. Why? Because Abedin was married to Anthony Weiner, the disgraced sex-texting former Congressman and NYC mayoral candidate whose seized-by-the-FBI laptop was the reason Comey reopened the investigation. Clinton could not have known that would happen 20 months earlier, of course. What she could and should have known is that her presidential campaign needed to be as far away from Anthony Weiner as possible because he is a human disease. As unfair as that might have been to her loyal aide Abedin, her political cause on behalf of herself, her party, and the country should have been deemed bigger than the loyalty she might owe any one person. A better and tougher campaign would have kept Abedin on the outside. That is the kind of hard-headed–even hard-hearted–decision a savvy and cool-eyed politician must make. And this is the sort of observation that a tough-minded self-examination would have offered.
She complains that she did everything she should have done and said everything people said she should have said and still lost. She offers convincing proof that this is so and openly expresses bafflement that she was not given credit for speaking to the white working class and its issues, etc. The problem that she cannot face, as her bafflement suggests, is that people didn’t believe she meant what she said, in part because what she said was an endless series of platitudes she could not convince anyone was anything more than platitudes. Whatever Trump is, he’s not platitudinous.
The most interesting part of What Happened comes when she examines the reasons Vladimir Putin had for feeling antipathetic toward her and her own growing concern about Russian intrusion into the West’s political processes. The least interesting, and the most risible, sections involve her effort to come across as a regular person who loves hot sauce (“I’ve been a fan since 1992, when I became convinced it boosted my immune system, as research now shows it does”) and occasionally eats ice cream (“One hot night in Omaha, Nebraska, I was consumed with the desire for an ice cream bar . . .[an aide] called an advance staffer, who kind picked some up from the drug store and met us at the plane on our way out of town”). The falsest moment comes when she explains why she chose to run for president again, which she unconvincingly pretends was a choice that was hard for her to make: “It was the chance to do the most good I would ever be able to do.”
Gimme a break, Tartuffe.
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4)
4)
What Happened to the ADL?
- Potential donors to the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) need to ask themselves, to what use their
money will be put?
In the months leading up to the U.S. presidential election in November 2016, a former director of the World Jewish Congress decried the direction in which the new head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was taking the international human rights group. In a series of columns, Isi Leibler -- a prominent Australian Israeli -- blasted ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that "represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics."
Leibler first took issue with Greenblatt's April 2016 address to the far-Left Jewish organization J Street, backed by anti-Israel billionaire George Soros.
Leibler wrote that Greenblatt "incorporated [in his speech] criticisms of Israel that were thoroughly inappropriate...[and] indirectly gave a seal of approval for the Obama administration to impose solutions on future borders that could dramatically compromise Israel's security."
Ironically, Greenblatt's rebuttal, in the form of a letter to the editor of The Jerusalem Post, illustrated Leibler's point. He not only defended J Street, referring to the people in the audience as "a group of deeply thoughtful college students whose commitment to Israel is genuine and whose passion on the issues is impressive;" he claimed that he had not been morally equivocating Israel and the Palestinians.
Columnist Isi Leibler blasted Jonathan Greenblatt (pictured above), CEO of the Anti-Defamation League and a former adviser to President Obama, for turning the 100-year-old organization, whose mission is to monitor and expose anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, into a platform that "represents an echo chamber of left-wing Democratic politics." (Image source: Erik Hersman/Flickr)
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In a subsequent piece, Leibler called Greenblatt to task for having "lost the plot, behaving as though he remained employed by the Obama administration." Leibler cited the ADL's July 13, 2016 statement "welcoming the Republican Party platform on Israel," but expressing "disappoint[ment] that the platform draft departs from longstanding support of a two-state solution to the Israeli Palestinian conflict... the only viable way to secure Israel as both a Jewish and democratic state."
Leibler wrote:
"One can disagree about a two-state policy, but for an American Jewish organization which must remain bipartisan and should be concentrating on anti-Semitism to issue such a statement breaches all conventions. It is totally beyond the ADL's mandate to involve itself in such partisan political issues."
Yet this is just what Greenblatt did. In a September 13, 2016 article in the journal Foreign Policy, he contested a video clip of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pointing to the Palestinian Authority's outright refusal to have even a single Jew reside within the boundaries of a future Palestinian state. In the piece, titled "Sorry, Bibi, the Palestinians are not 'ethnic cleansing' Jewish settlers," Greenblatt wrote that Netanyahu "chose to raise an inappropriate straw man regarding Palestinian policy toward Israeli settlements."
Far more questionable, however, has been the ADL's support for the Black Lives Matter(BLM) movement -- a group established in 2013 to counter police brutality against African Americans, but that quickly mushroomed into a full-fledged "intersectional" anti-American, anti-white, anti-Israel, pro-radical Palestinian organization.
About this, too, Greenblatt made what critics claim is a convoluted statement -- saying that the ADL has no "official relationship with the body of activists who claim membership in this effort," and attributing its "anti-Israel — and at times anti-Semitic — positions" to a "small minority of leaders within the Black Lives Matter movement."
In November 2016, during his opening remarks at the ADL's "Never Is Now" conference in New York City, Greenblatt responded to a Fox News interview with a pro-Trump PAC spokesman citing World War II-era Japanese internment camps -- when discussing possible ways to keep tabs on terrorists in the U.S. -- by announcing:
"I pledge to you that because I am committed to the fight against anti-Semitism that if one day Muslim Americans are forced to register their identities, that is the day that this proud Jew will register as Muslim."
After U.S. President Donald Trump's inauguration in January 2017, the ADL "unambiguously condemned" his proposed executive order on immigration and refugees. Greenblatt stated:
"History will look back on this order as a sad moment in American History – the time when the president turned his back on people fleeing for their lives. This will effectively shut America's doors to the most vulnerable people in the world who seek refuge from unspeakable pain and suffering... [such as] the Sunni family whose son languishes in prison in Iran... [and] LGBT youth in Yemen terrorized because of their sexual orientation or gender identity...Yes, we need strict screening but our current system is sufficient in keeping America safe... More than most, our community knows what happens when the doors to freedom are shut. That is why ADL relentlessly will fight this policy in the weeks and months to come. Our history and heritage compel us to take a stand."
In other words, Trump had barely entered the White House before Greenblatt "took a stand" against him -- one that had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, to boot. This was not surprising. A month earlier, in an address to the Knesset (Israel's parliament) in Jerusalem, he said he was worried about what the future would hold with Trump at the helm of his country:
"[P]erhaps more so than any moment in modern memory, we truly do not know what the president-elect will do when he becomes the 45th person to occupy the Oval Office. I would be remiss if I did not share with you the very deep sense of concern shared by many in the American Jewish community in this moment of uncertainty. And there is legitimate cause for concern."
Greenblatt went on to lodge a not-so-veiled accusation against Trump for the resurgence of anti-Semitism in the United States, comparing it to 1930s Germany and going so far as to say that "one of the main cheerleaders of [the Alt-Right] movement will be sitting in the West Wing, literally down the hall from the Oval Office." Without naming names, Greenblatt was apparently referring to Steve Bannon.
Greenblatt's openness about his political views was to be expected. When it was announced in November 2014 that he would be replacing long-time ADL director Abraham L. Foxman after his retirement in July 2015, Jews on all sides of the political spectrum called the move a "dramatic shift." This was not merely due to the difference in age and stage between the two men -- Foxman was the child of Holocaust survivors and Greenblatt a second-generation, tech-savvy social activist -- but because Foxman, although himself a liberal, was a staunch defender of Israel against Palestinian anti-Semitism, while Greenblatt's support for the Jewish state has been more conditional on the policies of the Netanyahu government.
In the aftermath of the August 12, 2017 "Unite the Right" demonstrations in Charlottesville, Virginia -- during which a white supremacist murdered a young woman and wounded many other people in a car-ramming attack -- the ADL joined all other Jewish organizations in condemning the anti-Semitism on display. Although the event was held to protest the imminent removal of a statue of Civil War Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, it quickly escalated into an altercation between Ku Klux Klan members shouting anti-Semitic slogans and left-wing radicals from the Antifa ("anti-fascist") movement.
When Trump responded by condemning "all sides," rather than denouncing the far-right anti-Semites, the ADL was not alone in criticizing him for it. Greenblatt's attack, however, was not simply harsh; it was also a defense of Antifa.
"President Trump went beyond the pale today in equating racist white supremacists in Charlottesville with counter protesters who were there to stand up against hate," he said. Yet Antifa is a radical organization that employs violence as a tactic, and also contains a strong anti-Zionist component.
Trump's mentioning of "all sides," then, may have been an error of judgment, given the explosive political and cultural climate, but -- as has become evident with the emerging of more details about Charlottesville and subsequent demonstrations -- it was tragically true.
Furthermore, even after Trump issued a clear condemnation two days later of "criminals and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and other hate groups," Greenblatt was not satisfied.
"Let's be clear: I think we should expect a leader in the highest office in the land to step above the lowest possible bar," he said. "We need to move from words to real action." Then, as he had done during his Knesset address, he proceeded to imply that certain White House staff members were on the side of the white supremacists. "Individuals who are associated with, for example, the alt-right found their way into positions of authority in the West Wing."
Greenblatt's partisanship seems to have paid off, and not only figuratively. Immediately after the events in Charlottesville and the outcry over Trump's initial reaction to them, major companies began announcing massive donations to the ADL and another NGO, the left-wing, anti-Trump Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).
As of the time of this writing, JP Morgan, Apple, and the George and Amal Clooney Foundation for Justice had pledged $1 million to the ADL and the SPLC each or together -- and, rebuking Trump, 21st Century Fox said it, too, would be contributing $1 million to the ADL, while urging others to do the same. JP Morgan and Apple also initiated a two-for-one match for employee donations to those organizations.
Separately, the ADL reported a 1,000% increase in online donations since August 13, a day after the Charlottesville rally. It is interesting to note that just over two weeks later, Greenblatt announced the creation of a new position at the ADL and hired George Selim -- an Arab-American former official at the Department of Homeland Security who worked under Presidents George W. Bush, Obama and Trump -- to fill it. Selim, whose past meetings with Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated groups is "raising concerns" about this role, will lead the organization's education, law enforcement and community security programs, and oversee its Center on Extremism, according to Greenblatt.
It is certainly the right of individuals, foundations and private companies to contribute to causes they deem worthy. It is forbidden, however, for NGOs listed by Internal Revenue Service as 501(c)(3) organizations -- charities -- to engage in political activity on behalf of or against candidates for or in public office. According to the IRS Code, "Violating this prohibition may result in denial or revocation of tax-exempt status and the imposition of certain excise taxes."
The ADL and the SPLC currently enjoy tax-exempt status. Unlike the SPLC, however, which has irked even many liberals for its exaggeration of hate-crime statistics to keep itself relevant and handsomely funded -- and whose reputation was damaged over the recent discovery that it has been funneling millions of dollars to offshore accounts -- the ADL is a widely respected, influential group in the Jewish world and among international human rights circles.
If, as Leibler suggested, the ADL has "lost the plot" under Greenblatt, it deserves to lose its tax-exempt status. Although this is not likely to happen, the ADL board nevertheless must step in to curb Greenblatt's political activism and restore the organization's reputation as a serious anti-Semitism watchdog. In the meantime, potential donors to the ADL need to ask themselves, to what use their money will be put?
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Ruthie Blum is the author of "To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the 'Arab Spring.'"
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