t;
Also, this was sent to me by a friend who is a devotee of The New York Times. I found this article interesting and insightful Trump obviously came to The White House more uninformed and less prepared about being president than virtually all his predecessors, including Carter.
Trump is who he is but he is learning as the problems of the president have a significant impact on him. Trump wants to prove to voters they did not make a mistake and I suspect, in most ways, he will succeed because he is smart, reasonably capable of understanding his faults and might even learn how to overcome them with help from those like his Chief of Staff and trusted advisors.
What I found interesting about the article is it made no mention of Trump's relationship with his wife.
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Did a sincere, logical but naive Trump over reach regarding Putin, as probably GW did when he looked into this Russian thug's blue eyes? (See 1 below.)
I like Tom Cotton. He is bright, not overly political and might make a great CIA appointment., (See 1a below.)
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Franken was either duped by Schumer and/or lacked the guts to fight . Either way the nation, women and Senate are better off without his service.
He was a stupid comedian and an even worse Senator. Good riddance.(See 2 and 2a below.)
Meanwhile, the war on Trump continues (See 2b below.)
Nevertheless, Trump continues to keep many steps ahead of the mass media, anti-Trumpers, black leadership and assorted liberals and Democrats by speaking in Florida before a "uge" crowd belying poll numbers, followed by a speech at a Civil Right's Museum in Jackson, Mississippi, praising former civil leaders. What do current black leaders, who wrap themselves in their past glory do? They fail to show and mock Trump. How pathetic.
Trump is telling the black community he is trying to reduce illegals who compete with them and often take their jobs. He is also telling them he is pressing forward with policies providing a better education for them and all grade schoolers so they can become better, informed citizens and be more prepared to compete in the future.
Sad that black citizens do not understand how they have been sold down the river by their own self-indulgent leadership which has enriched itself at their expense. Oh well, their loss.
Earlier he was acknowledging Jerusalem is Israel's Capital and left the rest of our allies in the dust making their perpetual, pusillanimous protests as Palestinians show their true colors once again.
Finally, Mueller is looking more and more pathetic as strange behaviour on the part of a FISA judge and several of Mueller's appointees is surfacing while the FBI and Justice Department stonewall Congress.
Just another depressing week in swamp land.
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A thorough response to my posting of the article by Palestinian Kuttab, requested by a liberal friend and fellow memo reader, by a very dear conservative friend and also a fellow memo reader. (See 3 below.)
Left click: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
This is a wonderful story told by a Jewish mobster named Sugarman.
I post the link above because Sugarman makes mention of the Sonneborn Institute. My father, and seventeen other American Zionists were members of the Sonneborn Institute ( Read The Pledge by Leonard Slater)
Rudy Sonneborn was a wealthy New York Industrialist and he was a friend of Ben Gurion. Rudy, at Ben Gurion's urging, wanted to help Israel prepare for its founding as an independent nation. He gathered 18 prominent American Jews, who were like minded, in helping Israel get established, to meet with him in his New York Apartment along with Ben Gurion. (I have a picture of the event, a copy hangs in the Birmingham Library of my father's law firm and another in the Birmingham Jewish Community Center's Board Room named for my father.)
My father was assigned the job of procuring war surplus contraband from southern scrap dealers, see that it was transshipped by rail and truck to Shep Broad, another Sonneborn Institute member and dear family friend, who lived in Miami and who developed one of the city's most famous communities and shopping centers. The Broad Causeway is named in Shep's honor.
Dad was introduced to Sam Zamurray, by his then American Lebanese Law Partner, Monsoud Zanaty.. Zamurray was one America's most powerful industrialist and Chairman of United Fruit. Sam helped arrange ships which Shep then used to send the contraband to Israel.
There is more to this story but I hope you now get the connection why I am sympathetic to Israel among other reasons and am delighted Trump did what other presidents were reluctant to do because they did not want to offend those "peace loving"Palestinians and their sanctimonious friends in Europe. (See 4 below.)
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Finally:
https://www.facebook.com/
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Dick
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1)
What Was Trump’s Russia Plan?
Whatever else emerges, the administration ignored history in counting on Putin to help U.S. interests
By Andrew S. Weiss
It’s likely to be some time before we know the truth about allegations of wrongdoing in the interactions between Russia and the Trump team. It may emerge that simple self-interested deal-making explains much of Donald Trump’s affinity for Russian president Vladimir Putin, or that something more troubling was going on.
But another factor is often lost in the swirl of accusations: Mr. Trump and his advisers seem to have thought they could orchestrate a major strategic realignment with the Russians. Seeing Mr. Putin as a potential ally may have been profoundly naive—I certainly think so—but it was evidently a key part of their plans.
Mr. Trump’s longstanding fascination with Russia’s leader is no secret. He has been lavishing praise on Mr. Putin for more than a decade. In October 2007, for instance, Mr. Trump told talk-show host Larry King, whether “you like [Putin] or don’t like him—he’s doing a great job...in rebuilding the image of Russia and also rebuilding Russia, period.” As a candidate in the 2016 race, he repeatedly expressed admiration for Mr. Putin’s tough-guy image.
Since becoming president, Mr. Trump has taken a more measured stance on Mr. Putin’s personal qualities, but he has frequently returned to his desire for a stronger bond between the two countries. “I hope that we do have good relations with Russia,” he said in August. “I say it loud and clear. I’ve been saying it for years. I think it’s a good thing if we have great relationships or at least good relationships with Russia.”
Mr. Trump’s frustration that this shift hasn’t materialized is palpable. He insists that the Russia investigations in Congress and by special counsel Robert Mueller have undermined potential diplomatic cooperation with the Kremlin on containing North Korea’s nuclear threat, fighting Islamic State and other issues, which could, in Mr. Trump’s words, save “millions and millions of lives.” As he now seems to concede, near-unanimous congressional support in July for new Russia sanctions, as well as the raft of bad news from the Mueller investigation, have effectively tied his administration’s hands on this front.
Yet none of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric provides a strategic rationale for why the administration would work so aggressively to relaunch relations with Moscow. One of the few public statements that does can be found in an October 2016 New York Times interview with Michael Flynn, who would soon (if only briefly) be Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. In it, Mr. Flynn said that the U.S. and Russia were united by a common enemy: radical Islam. “We can’t do what we want to do unless we work with Russia, period,” Mr. Flynn claimed.
Recently revealed documents from the government case against Mr. Flynn indicate that his ill-fated outreach in late December 2016 to then-Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was part of a wider diplomatic gambit. Mr. Obama had announced new sanctions and the expulsion of Russian diplomats as retaliation for Russian interference in the election. In a leaked email written at the time, Trump transition adviser K.T. McFarland, a month away from becoming Mr. Flynn’s deputy, said that Mr. Obama’s move was intended to “box Trump in diplomatically with Russia” and curtail the new president’s freedom to try to maneuver Russia away from its allies Iran and Syria.
Russia, she wrote, is the “key that unlocks [the] door.” Ms. McFarland’s message tracks with other evidence that Mr. Flynn, Jared Kushner and others attempted to persuade the Kremlin to help contain China.
Mr. Flynn’s request to the Kremlin not to overreact to the imposition of new sanctions by the Obama administration was a stunning break with the well-established protocol of not interfering with the actions of a sitting administration. It also raises troubling questions about what the Trump team might have offered in exchange. Sanctions relief? Reconsideration of U.S. support for Ukraine and other countries that have been victims of Russian aggression?
Given widespread reports at the time about Russian cyber and information operations seeking to influence the 2016 campaign, these efforts would have sent an unambiguous message to the Kremlin: The Trump team was relaxed about Russian meddling and eager to get down to business.
But what exactly could the Trump team hope to achieve in these efforts, even after demonstrating such an accommodating attitude? The ostensible strategic aims behind this outreach reveal, at a minimum, a remarkable naiveté about Russian foreign-policy objectives.
In Syria, rather than negotiating a Russian-American alliance to fight Islamic State, Trump’s team soon had to face up to the reality that Russian and Iranian military intervention had already transformed the war in favor of the Syrian regime, decimating U.S.-backed rebels in the process. The notion that Mr. Trump could disrupt the Russia-Iran relationship also proved fanciful. Tehran and Moscow are firmly united in opposing actions by the administration that threaten not just the Iran nuclear deal but a balance of power in the Middle East that serves the interests of both countries.
As for plans to put distance between Russia and China, Mr. Trump’s apparent strategy fared no better. On issues such as North Korea’s nuclear program, Mr. Putin is comfortable serving as Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s junior partner; both countries resist what they see as U.S. agitation for regime change in Pyongyang. More fundamentally, Mr. Putin is loath to antagonize a wealthier and far bigger neighbor with whom he shares a 2,600-mile border that was, not so long ago, heavily militarized.
Nor did Mr. Trump have the leverage to offer meaningful incentives to Mr. Putin beyond sanctions relief. His national security team seems to have persuaded him that the war in Ukraine must be ended in order to achieve his goal of normalizing relations with Moscow, but the U.S. has little in the way of diplomatic or military pressure to apply there.
Against this discouraging backdrop, it’s hard to imagine a major improvement in U.S.-Russian relations. Mr. Trump may try again, depending on how the various investigations unfold. But his troubled dealings with Russia have already proved what other administrations learned over a much longer period: In dealing with the Kremlin, across so many divergent interests, there are no easy fixes or grand bargains, even for Mr. Putin’s self-declared friends.
—Mr. Weiss, who worked on Russian affairs in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations, is the vice president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
1a) A Foreign Policy for ‘Jacksonian America’
Sen. Tom Cotton has a worldview—even a doctrine—that is hawkish and realistic, though tinged with idealism.
I met Mr. Cotton this week in his Capitol Hill office to explore his foreign-policy thinking. What emerged was the outline of a coherent if contentious worldview—one might even call it a doctrine—that begins with a sense that U.S. foreign policy has been adrift for a quarter-century.
“The coalitions of the Cold War rapidly began to break down as soon as the Soviet Union dissolved,” Mr. Cotton says. That first became clear during the debate over the Balkan wars of the Clinton years. “You had some Cold War hawks that were all of a sudden sounding like doves,” Mr. Cotton says, referring to conservatives who’d been staunchly anti-Soviet but were wary of U.S. involvement in what was then Yugoslavia. “You had Cold War doves”—including the liberal humanitarians of the Clinton administration—“that were beginning to sound like Teddy Roosevelt, ready to charge up the hill. That pattern consistently repeated itself” in subsequent years.
When it comes to America’s present challenges—from Iran to North Korea, China to Russia, Syria to Ukraine—Mr. Cotton, a conservative Republican, is squarely on Team Roosevelt. “There is always a military option,” he says. “That is the case everywhere in the world.”
But he believes that the lack of a clear organizing principle for how and when to use that power has knocked America’s global strategy off kilter. It also has created a divide between foreign-policy elites and what Mr. Cotton calls “Jacksonian America”—heartland voters who favor a strong national defense but are skeptical of foreign entanglements and humanitarian interventions.
“Foreign policy, to be durable and to be wise, must command popular support,” Mr. Cotton says. Statesmen and diplomats “might craft what they think is a wise foreign policy—something that Metternich or Bismarck might draw up in his study,” he continues. “But without the support of Jacksonian America, the people who are going to cash the checks that are written by elites in New York and Washington”—that is, to pay the price for intervention—“no foreign policy can ultimately be successful.”
On that score, he thinks the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations all fell short. “Some of the interventions over the last 25 years, I think, have been plainly unwise and had very limited popular support, and they’ve created foreign-policy disasters,” he says. As a prime example, he cites the desultory 2011 air campaign in Libya, whose aftermath is now “destabilizing Europe and creating new terrorist breeding grounds.” President Obama, Mr. Cotton argues, “probably did the wrong thing” in helping to oust Moammar Gadhafi while leaving Bashar Assad alone. If the U.S. had intervened in Syria and not Libya, “we might have had a happier end in both.”
What about Iraq, where Mr. Cotton served as a U.S. Army infantry captain? The senator does not say, as President Trump has, that the invasion was a mistake—although neither does he tell me, as he insisted as recently as 2016, that Iraq was a “necessary, just and noble war.”
Instead, he observes that the war’s mismanagement alienated voters and cost Republicans dearly. The Bush administration, he adds, erred in prioritizing democratic ambitions ahead of the basic task of securing the country: “There was a belief in the immediate aftermath of the invasion in 2003 that we could simply fly the flag of democracy, have an election with some purple fingers”—the symbol of proud Iraqi voters in 2005—“slap a uniform on some people, call it an army and declare victory.” On the other hand, he calls the 2007 surge George W. Bush’s “finest hour.”
For Mr. Cotton, the lesson from Iraq is not that the U.S. should be more circumspect about confronting hostile powers. Rather, it is that security must come first—before “political reconciliation, economic development, democracy promotion, human rights or anything else. Without security, there’s nothing else.” That’s one reason Mr. Cotton’s hawkish approach to Iran emphasizes strictly military objectives, not political or ideological ones. “Any military action against Iran,” he says, “would look more like Operation Desert Fox from Iraq in December of 1998 or Operation El Dorado Canyon in Libya in 1986.” Those were limited bombing campaigns designed to punish misbehaving regimes. Mr. Cotton insists—controversially—that such an attack on Iran would not require a sustained military commitment: “It would be primarily a naval and air attack against its nuclear infrastructure.”
Mr. Cotton sees Iran as a greater long-term challenge than North Korea. But Kim Jong Un’s nuclear brinkmanship is the more immediate threat. “If I were the leader of Japan or I were the leader of South Korea,” he says emphatically, “and I had any reason to doubt U.S. resolve to extend its nuclear deterrent to me, then I would absolutely pursue nuclear weapons.”
Mr. Trump has suggested he is relying on Beijing to help solve the North Korea problem. Mr. Cotton thinks that is unlikely: “China is a rival in every regard. China is not a partner.” He calls China’s 2001 admission to the World Trade Organization “one of the biggest failures of post-Cold War foreign policy.” He is fiercely critical of the view that integrating China into the global economy would cause it to liberalize internally. “Those who argue that position,” he tells me, “should have their judgment impeached in future, similar arguments.”
At the same time Beijing is becoming more repressive at home, it is challenging the U.S. “in every domain, not just militarily, but politically and economically and diplomatically.” Mr. Cotton worries that China, a rising power, can afford to play the long game, and that “in many ways, they’ve been beating us at that game.” The U.S. needs to “join the competition in every way,” including by conducting more freedom-of-navigation operations in the disputed South China Sea. Yet in the very long game, Mr. Cotton says, America’s market liberalism gives it a clear advantage: “Nothing in China’s state-driven economy has rewritten the basic rules of market-driven economics that have made the Anglo-Americans the dominant world power for 400 years.”
Has the Trump administration undercut this advantage by pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which had been designed to draw other Asian countries into America’s orbit? “I know that many of the countries in the Trans-Pacific Partnership who thought they got a good deal from the Obama administration have pitched that line,” Mr. Cotton answers. “I know that Xi Jinping ”—China’s president—“has pitched that line as well. I’m skeptical.” Mr. Cotton’s view on TPP seems less an exercise in antitrade philosophy than a bow to political reality: “Ultimately, the American people simply did not want to ratify that agreement.” The voters who swung the 2016 election to Mr. Trump “believed that we needed to make fewer economic and political concessions to allies than might have been necessary in the Cold War to defeat the Soviet Union.”
If Mr. Cotton sounds comfortable accommodating the Trumpist mood on trade, he rejects the view that the U.S. might be able to “get along” with Russia, as Mr. Trump frequently suggests. “Russia is the great land power of the Old World,” he says. “The United States is the great maritime power of the New World. Those facts will never change; those facts will always create tension between our nations.”
Mr. Cotton points to a book on his coffee table, “Democracy in America” by Alexis de Tocqueville. “I assume you’ve read that book over there,” he says. Tocqueville, Mr. Cotton paraphrases, predicted that Russia’s authoritarian spirit and America’s democratic spirit put the two countries on a collision course. As Tocqueville puts it, “each seems called by some secret desire of Providence one day to hold in its hands the destinies of half the world.”
In discussing Vladimir Putin, Mr. Cotton makes clear his prime concern is U.S. interests, not the Russian president’s dictatorial practices at home. “I condemn Russia for their atrocious treatment of their own people,” he says. “But it’s of graver concern that they are bombing our allies in Syria, or that they are invading sovereign countries in the heart of Europe.” Russia’s various aggressions, he says, “spring from the common core of Vladimir Putin being a dictator.”
Mr. Cotton’s hawkish realism is tinged with idealism. “It simply is a fact,” he says, “that the American people have moral aspirations about America’s role in the world, and about the Founding principles of America being universal.” There’s no contradiction, however, if favoring democracy also serves U.S. interests.
“The easiest way to prevent attack is to secure the Western Hemisphere,” he says, and “the easiest way to secure the Western Hemisphere is to defend forward in the Old World”—by which he means the Middle East and Asia as well as Europe. “In doing so, we would need to have alliances and those alliances are easier to build with countries that share our principles. That doesn’t mean that we can only work with democratic governments or with capitalist societies, but those are longer-lasting, more durable alliances.”
Mr. Cotton does not share liberal internationalists’ alarm over developments in Poland and Hungary, both of which are consolidating power around populist parties of the right. “Many of those Central and Eastern European countries are moving towards nationalism. and I think that’s an understandable trend,” he says. “If your nation had spent 100 years being invaded and occupied and facing genocide you might be happy with the way you are as well—which is small and politically, culturally, ethnically, linguistically homogenous. Much of the turn in these countries . . . is against the Brussels-driven transnationalist movement in Europe.”
This points to the obvious establishmentarian critique of the Cotton Doctrine: that a shortsighted focus on security over values and national interest over multilateralism risks damaging American interests in the long run. But there’s another, more serious risk: that the impulse to send American troops to so many chaotic and disorderly places cannot hold the support of Jacksonian America. If military intervention leads to quagmire, it could widen the gap between elites and the public that Mr. Cotton says he is trying to bridge.
If he can navigate around these treacherous pitfalls, the Republican Party may one day be his. But even if he can’t, his ambition to ground America’s long-drifting foreign policy is serious and valuable. The Cotton Doctrine represents a first draft of the GOP’s effort to rebuild a coalition that began to fall apart not long after the Berlin Wall.
Mr. Willick is an assistant editorial features editor at the Journal.
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2) Al Franken’s Non Sequitur
The Minnesota Senator says he’s innocent but resigns anyway.
By
Al Franken announced his resignation from the Senate on Thursday, and after listening to his exit address our question is why? The Minnesota left-hander said he did nothing wrong, claimed the Ethics Committee would vindicate him, and assailed his opponents as far worse than he is. So why not stick around and clear his name?
Mr. Franken started off by saying how “excited” he had been a couple of months ago that America had finally begun a “conversation” in which men listened “to women about the ways in which men’s actions affect them.”
But then, he said, “the conversation turned to me. Over the last few weeks, a number of women have come forward to talk about how they felt my actions had affected them. I was shocked. I was upset. But in responding to their claims, I also wanted to be respectful of that broader conversation, because all women deserve to be heard, and their experiences taken seriously.
“I think that was the right thing to do. I also think it gave some people the false impression that I was admitting to doing things that, in fact, I haven’t done. Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.”
In other words, Mr. Franken thinks some of his eight accusers are mistaken and the others may be lying. His only admission is that he is a great advocate for women.
He continued: “I am proud that, during my time in the Senate, I have used my power to be a champion for women—and that I have earned a reputation as someone who respects the women I work alongside every day. I know there’s been a very different picture of me painted over the last few weeks. But I know who I really am.
“Serving in the United States Senate has been the great honor of my life. I know in my heart that nothing I have done as a Senator—nothing—has brought dishonor on this institution. And I am confident that the Ethics Committee would agree.
“Nevertheless, today I am announcing that, in the coming weeks, I will be resigning as a member of the United States Senate.”
Nevertheless? Talk about a political non sequitur. Mr. Franken has behaved with “honor,” the Ethics Committee would clear him, but he’s still resigning?
The closest Mr. Franken came to a remotely plausible explanation is when he said, “This decision is not about me. It’s about the people of Minnesota. And it’s become clear that I can’t both pursue the Ethics Committee process and, at the same time, remain an effective Senator for them.”
Yet plenty of Members of Congress have endured an ethics investigation while conducting normal business. And if Mr. Franken really did nothing wrong, he is doing Minnesota voters a disservice by letting himself be run out of the body half way through the term they elected him to serve. By defending himself he would also be helping others, in Congress and out, who are accused unfairly.
The truth is that Mr. Franken is being run out of town by fellow Democrats in large part for their own political purposes. They want him banished so they can claim to have cleaned their own stables so they can attack Republicans who support Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore and Donald Trump. Mr. Franken is political ballast who had to go.
We’d even have a little sympathy for him had he not chosen the disingenuous exit of claiming innocence but resigning anyway.
2a) Al Franken Departs Without Grace
And a reminder for Alabama voters and social conservatives that character is crucial.
Al Franken has promised under pressure to step down from the U.S. Senate “in the coming weeks.” He was not accused of such grave crimes as rape or preying on underage children. He was accused instead of grabbing, fondling, lunging at and humiliating seven women. If true, and I think we see a pattern here, this would make him a pig, a bully and a hypocrite. His departure, while personally sad, is no loss to American democracy.
It was not mad Puritanism that chased him from office; it was his colleagues’ finally, belatedly announcing and establishing standards of behavior. This is not an unreasonable or unhelpful thing to do.
Journalists and political figures of my generation have been wryly remembering what we had to put up with in the old days—how a woman couldn’t get on an elevator with Sen. Strom Thurmond without being pinched or patted. All true. But even Thurmond would not have survived a photo of him leering over a sleeping woman and posing—deliberately, perhaps sadistically, so the moment could be memorialized—as he grabbed or simulated grabbing her breasts, which is what Mr. Franken did. The Franken case represents not a collapse of tolerance for flawed human behavior but a rise of judgment about what is acceptable.
People speak of mixed motives and say it’s all brute politics. The Democrats are positioning themselves for the high ground should Republican Roy Moore be elected. They’re aligning themselves with the passions of their base, while clearing the way for a probe into sexual-harassment accusations against the president. New York’s Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the charge that forced Mr. Franken’s departure, hopes to run for president in 2020 as a champion of women, so the move was happily on-brand. I don’t doubt all of this is true. Little in politics comes from wholly clean hands.
The speech in which Mr. Franken announced he would leave was too clever. Rather than a quick, dignified statement in which he put the scandal on his back and bore it away, he spoke on the Senate floor for 11 minutes. He milked it. Modesty was called for, but he wasn’t modest. He spoke of hard work and sacrifice, said it often wasn’t fun, asserted he “improved people’s lives.” Of the charges: “Some of the allegations against me are simply not true. Others, I remember very differently.” He seemed to want the female Senators who’d asked him to step down to feel guilty. As a senator, “I have used my power to be a champion of women, and . . . I’ve earned a reputation as someone who respects the women I work alongside every day.”
He named as a key issue fighting for “kids facing bullying.”
He took a hard shot at President Trump and Mr. Moore, finding “irony in the fact that I am leaving while a man who has bragged on tape about his history of sexual assaults sits in the Oval Office, and a man who has repeatedly preyed on young girls campaigns for the Senate with the full support of his party.” The latter is not true, and a professional like Mr. Franken would know it. If Mr. Moore had the full support of his party, the polls would not be close, and Mr. Moore’s supporters would not be daily denouncing Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the Republican establishment.
The bitter tone was odd in a speech summing up a political life, but perhaps he means to extend it. We’ll see. He spent a lot of time lauding the people of Minnesota.
Mr. Franken’s weakness as a political figure was having no sympathy for those who disagree with him, not bothering to understand how the other side thinks, while always claiming for himself the high moral ground. This now common attitude frays political bonds; once it was considered poor political comportment.
Mr. Franken is a media master who has spent his entire adult life in front of a camera. He will no doubt go on to write books, teach, go on television. “I’ll be fine,” he said. Who would doubt it? In coming years he may slyly position himself as the victim, long ago, of a mindless moral backlash. He is talented and this may come to be believed.
As for the Alabama Senate election, in a strikingly good New York Times essay this week, Commentary’s Sohrab Ahmari told Christian conservatives, especially those who’ll vote next week, some things they needed to hear. Mr. Ahmari stated forthrightly what many, including in this space, have been casting about for and not quite achieved.
Calling himself “a staunch social conservative,” Mr. Ahmari addressed evangelicals and social conservatives—“people I consider allies”—about their embrace of Mr. Moore, the subject of credible charges of sexual predation.
The question of how social conservatives “should practice politics in the age of Trump” has again presented itself, Mr. Ahmari observes. The president offers them “an appealing menu of policies and judicial nominations,” and it is understandable that they’d find them attractive “after a decade during which the left embraced a new, aggressive mode of secular progressivism and continued its war against tradition long after it had won most courtroom and ballot-box battles.”
But “vulgar populists” exact too high a price, Mr. Ahmari adds—namely, “complicity in the degradation, conspiracism, thinly veiled bigotry and leader-worship that is their stock in trade.” A public culture “informed by the Bible and traditional morality is essential to America’s constitutional order,” but the answer is not to accept “a terrible bargain” by backing men such as Moore.
Putting conservative judges on the federal bench “is not the only path to political success in America.” Mr. Trump picked Neil Gorsuch, to his credit. But any of the 2016 GOP contenders would have picked someone similar. We look to our leaders not only to enact policies but “to represent our nation on the global stage with the dignity that their offices demand.” American exceptionalism takes a hit every time the president demeans someone on Twitter; the Senate will be harmed if Mr. Moore is seated.
“Idolatry of class, nation, race and leader is a constant temptation for people of faith, and too many are succumbing to it today,” Mr. Ahmari writes. Supporters of Messrs. Trump and Moore are deeply and understandably pessimistic: “Many fear that under secularism’s relentless onslaught, Judeo-Christianity will be banished,” in time, from the public square. “I feel similar angst.”
But in our time “the Christian idea bested Soviet Communism, an ideology that was far more hostile to religious faith than America’s Enlightenment liberalism has ever been.” In America, Christians have “the First Amendment and freedom of conscience.” And there are other reasons for optimism. The sexual abuse scandals themselves suggest liberals may be rethinking “some aspects of the sexual revolution.”
Noting that “Christians are called to live in faith, hope and charity,” Mr. Ahmari urges them not let fear drive them to tie their fate to insufficient and inadequate leaders.
It is sound if hard advice: Don’t let your fears—even wholly legitimate ones—drive you. Hold on, have faith, retain standards.
In the short term this can be difficult. In the long run it’s the only way to win.
2b) The Long War on Donald Trump
The president is guilty of something. It’s Robert Mueller’s job to figure out what.
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
Pressing in on many of Donald Trump’s critics finally is the unreality of a Putin-Trump conspiracy to put him in the White House, so now the switch has been to accuse him, after the election, of violating the Logan Act in demanding concessions from (not granting concessions to) Russia on behalf of an ally, Israel.
If that doesn’t work, he can be accused of obstruction of justice—the crime of interfering in the investigation of noncrimes. His financial history is also ripe. And his sexual history. The Al Franken episode is a Rubicon. Mr. Franken’s offenses may be real but have so raised the stakes that politicians must now live in fear of even the false allegation.
So apparently closes a chapter in which to doubt the Putin-Trump conspiracy theory was a sign of mental illness, which opened its own can of worms. “Splitting” is a mental symptom, all right, especially in borderline personality disorder. Splitting is also a method of columnists. Example: All true things about Donald Trump are bad, all bad things about Donald Trump are true.
Trump is guilty of something. It’s Robert Mueller’s job to figure out what, even if today’s theory of the crime is the obverse of yesterday’s.
Splitting columns write themselves, and tend toward lists, as if piling up claims is a substitute for examining them. So Christopher Steele was said to be a “credible” ex-spy, though unasked is what exactly he was in a position to be credible about: only that he faithfully relayed claims made by his source’s sources to his sources, and a little bit about how this game of telephone was set in motion—i.e., money was dished out.
Once upon a time, no reputable paper would print a sensational claim from a source who won’t vouch for its truth, who got it from a source he won’t identify, who got it from a source he can’t or won’t identify, and all were paid.
Citing Mr. Steele’s credibility was not even a competent appeal to authority, since his credibility derives from a profession that specializes partly in disinformation.
We could go on. Nothing in George Papadopoulos’s charge sheet for lying to the FBI suggests the words “emails of Clinton” referred to Democratic National Committee emails. Yet this allowed the press to assume the Trump campaign was in touch with Russian intelligence about a then as-yet-unpublicized real crime.
You’d be surprised at the papers that didn’t quote the words “emails of Clinton” so as not to lend evidence against their own assumption that these were DNC emails. An honorable exception was the Washington Post’s Matt Zapotosky, who wrote: “But at that time, it was well known that Clinton had deleted tens of thousands of emails she deemed personal from her private server. Those messages were of great interest to Republicans. . . . It was unclear to what emails the professor was referring or if he truly had access to any messages damaging to Clinton.”
Let us go now from the psychological motive to the sociological motive—i.e. from self-deceiving to others-deceiving: If a particular perception of an event somehow appears to have become the social norm, people seeking to build or protect their reputations will begin endorsing it through their words and deeds, regardless of their actual thoughts.
So-called reputational cascades, as described here in a 1999 paper by Timur Kuran and Cass Sunstein, are particularly powerful. Sean Hannity, if confronted with proof of Trump collusion, for the sake of commercial survival would have to recant. But a negative can’t be proved, so anti-Trump conspiratorialists will never have to recant, at least not until they have something equally damning to lay against Mr. Trump.
Just maybe, though, an intertwined story can start to be noticed. “He was the top counterintelligence agent and an asset to the bureau and America.” Variations on this quote appeared in several news stories about Peter Strzok, the high-ranking FBI official removed from the Mueller task force due to anti-Trump text messages with his paramour.
But here’s the real question: Why was the FBI’s No. 2 counterintelligence official so hip-deep in the Hillary Clinton email investigation? Mr. Strzok, it turns out, conducted the key interviews. He scripted the exact words used to chastise Mrs. Clinton without implying criminal liability.
Think back to now-forgotten reports in the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN that an intelligence intercept, later understood to be a Russian plant, played a pivotal role in FBI Chief James Comey’s decision to intervene publicly in the Clinton email matter.
More than ever, it seems probable that his intervention was contrived as a counterintelligence exercise from the start, not a criminal inquiry to find out if Mrs. Clinton had committed a crime. Mrs. Clinton would win. Russia’s plan to discredit her victory must be foiled. So began a cascade of incompetent or worse FBI meddling in U.S. domestic politics, which will turn out to be the story of the decade once the Trump collusion story has given up the ghost.
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Might be good to deconstruct his psycho-babble. Here goes:
Let’s start with the title:
· Backfire? Were Palestinians eagerly awaiting this declaration to (back) fire? They have been firing and stabbing and ramming and bombing and knifing for well over 100 years. Actually even before they knew they were Palestinians.
· “Washington’s attempt to impose Mideast peace”? since when did DC do such a thing? Is it imposed in Syria, Yemen, Lebanon? The Mideast is not just about Palestinians. Moreover, this is not part of any talks, negotiations, or agreements. It is an attempt not to repeat the same behavior expecting different results. Moreover, it is not over all of Jerusalem. More on that later.
If indeed the US tactic “appears to implement” Pipe’s (“the right-wing Jewish American writer”) it is certainly a welcome departure from decades-old state department policies. The (latent?) anti-Semitic characterization is over the top.
Kuttab (a Palestinian “peace proponent” in sheep’s skin?) claims there were 3 actions designed to coerce/harm the Palestinians. I am against harming anyone but I am yet to see anyone coercing the Palestinians to do anything. What I see is a great deal of catering to and funding of their whims. So if indeed there are 3 attempts to coerce (not to harm), perhaps 3 are not enough….trouble is that he does not state correctly the actions nor the reasons for them. So let me help him:
· Threat not renew the PLO’s mission in Washington: As CNN reported, that was done if the Palestinians don't get serious about peace talks with Israel, State Department officials said. Indeed. For the last 20 years or the Palestinians were full of demands but refused to negotiate.
· The House passes the Taylor Act. Suffice it to say that a Palestinian murdered an American (Taylor). As Kuttab surely does not imply the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934… This bill prohibits certain assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961 from being made available for the West Bank and Gaza unless the Department of State certifies that the Palestinian Authority ends violence against US and Israeli citizens, publicly condemns such acts, and eliminated payment to jailed terrorist. If Kuttab is not aware of it he should be reminded that human life (any life) is a prime human right. He should applaud the Taylor Act not bicker about it. Doing so means that he is claiming the Palestinians have the right to murder.
· Kuttab laments that the Act is seen as preventing support to “Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails and their families.” He is being more than disingenuous on this claim: these are not regular prisoners and their crimes are not breaking and entering. These are terrorists recognized as such by numerous governments around the world.
· And now he gets to the declaration about Jerusalem that he claims “is in violations of UN resolutions.” And his point is? UN resolutions are not constitutional, they are not binding, nor are the part of the 10 commandment. Some of those are as ridiculous as what the UN represents.
Now Kuttab resorts to some media statistic claiming that as an American “firster” Trump only mentioned America 4 times while he mentioned Israel 21 times.
· Indeed he mentioned America 4 times. He also said “Americans” once. So a total of 5.
· He mentioned Israel 22 times (not 21)
· But Trump mentioned Palestinians 6 times (more than he mentioned the US). Surely Kuttab knows how to count? He runs Palestinian Pulse, a polling outfit. How convenient to ignore the factual mention of Palestinians.
Kuttab states that the declaration “…appears to be saying that he is not necessarily seeking a negotiated peace between the Middle Eastern parties, but is deciding that the conflict is over…” Surely Kuttab saw/read the end of the speech where Trump stated: “I ask the leaders of the region political and religious, Israeli and Palestinian, Jewish and Christian and Muslim to join us in the noble quest for lasting peace.” What does Kuttab not understand about this?
Then Kuttab prides of a member of Fatah Central Committee for saying “…that Palestinians have not lost the will to say no.” For those who do not know: Fatah (Arabic) and PLO stand for “Palestine Liberation Organization”. All of Palestine. As far as I recall their covenant declaring that “Israel is null and void” is yet to be changed. Yes they agreed to a two state solution, now they are reverting to one state….herein lies their problem: They are very good at saying no.
Then Kuttab, the pollster, provides some interesting numbers:
· 300,000 Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem
· 12 million Palestinians around the world,
· 370 million Arabs
· 1.8 billion Muslims
o Knowing of Arab tendencies to inflate figure I tried to look them up. Wikipedia reports that in 2008 the number of registered Arabs in East Jerusalem was 154,081. Even assuming a population growth of 10% (a very generous assumption that ignores residents leaving the city as well as natural death) the numbers may hover around 165,000-170,000. Not the figure cited by Kuttab.
o Wikipedia generously assess Palestinian world population at 10.5 million. That includes Arabs in Israel (1.3 million). It is worth seeing how Arab and Palestinian sources freely play with such figures.
o Indeed assessment is that Muslims constitute about 1.8 billion (about a quarter of the world’s population). Yet the implication is that they are united in their political, ideological or religious positions. That is a fallacy as all too well attested by continuous strife between Sunni and Shia, between states, tribes and clans. Perhaps Kuttab feels (or wishes) that they are unified against Israel.
Kuttab allows that: “The US shift in policy would make sense if Palestinians were being totally unreasonable and making excessive demands.” And “Trump administration's position were supported by others in the international community and had the full support of the American people.” He is actually correct. The Palestinian positions are indeed unreasonable and inconsistent and frankly unacceptable. They do not want just their state. They want Israel to cease to exist. Isn’t that an unreasonable demand? Indeed most countries and even inside the Trump administration there has been opposition to the declaration. So what. It has been done. And those countries will join once they realize that their interests will be better served by doing so.
Kuttab is right that Jerusalem, as well as other issues, should be resolved by negotiations. What prevents the Arabs to come to the negotiating table?
Kuttab states that 25 prominent Israelis oppose Trump’s declaration. How impressive! Did he ever hear of internal Jewish disagreement? I am sure that President Trump is immediately going to rescind his declaration because 25 prominent Israelis object to it. Didn’t Korach object to Moses?
Towards the end Kuttab errs big time. The declaration is not a deal. The deal is yet to be worked out. It will be worked out only if the Arabs learn to say yes to peace and to the end of conflict. If they want it they can have ittomorrow. They should be the first to welcome declaring (West) Jerusalem as the capital of Israel because it does not take anything away from them. Their very own behavior does.
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4)Top Trump Aide Departing The Administration
Deputy national security adviser Dina Powell, a driving force behind the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, plans to leave the White House as part of an anticipated wave of departures following President Trump’s first year in office, according to four senior administration officials.
Unlike some top White House officials who were fired or resigned amid controversy earlier this year, Powell is exiting on good terms with the president, the officials said. She and Trump have discussed her departure and are working on an arrangement for Powell to continue advising the administration on Middle East policy from outside the government, according to the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Powell’s departure has not yet been publicly announced.
Powell committed to serving in her national security job for a full year and her decision to leave is her own, the officials said. She plans to move home early next year to New York, where her family lives.
National security adviser H.R. McMaster called Powell “one of the most talented and effective leaders with whom I have ever served.”
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