He should know:
"Something very harmful and maybe irreversible is happening to human attention in our digital age. Not just distraction or addiction; social media companies are inducing people to give up their autonomy. The power to shape people's attention is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few companies. It takes a real effort to assert and defend what John Stuart Mill called 'the freedom of mind.' There is a possibility that once lost, people who grow up in the digital age will have difficulty in regaining it. This may have far-reaching political consequences. People without the freedom of mind can be easily manipulated. This danger does not loom only in the future . . . .”
— George Soros, born György Schwartz, Hungarian-American investor, businessman, philanthropist, political activist, and author, speaking at the World Economic Forum, Davos, Switzerland, January 25, 2018.
While Obama's FBI needs cleaning up Democrats blame Trump for attacking its misdeeds. (See 1 below.)
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Netanyahu generally means what he says. Many Israelis do not like Bibi but, overall, he has been a brilliant leader and accomplished a great deal on behalf of Israel and its place in the world. (See 2 below.)
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Gerald Seib helps explain Trump for those who care to listen. It's a bark and bite thing.. (See 3 below.)
And:
Poor "ole "Upchuck." (See 3a below.)
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I have maintained, for years, our beloved "Uncle" Walter Cronkite, and his friends in the mass media, helped cost us the Viet Nam War. (See 4 below.)
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We are out this evening but have taped Trump's SOTU. Pretty much know what he will say and how divided Democrats will respond or fail to do so.
I suspect, Trump might discuss the need for competent and qualified workers as job opportunities expand but more cannot pass drug tests and Opiod could be the cause. He might discuss this in concert with illegal immigration.
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Dick
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1) Cleaning Up Comey’s FBI
Director Wray needs to restore the bureau’s fallen reputation.
By The Editorial Board
Donald Trump is his own worst enemy, and his Twitter attacks on the FBI are a good example. New FBI director Christopher Wray seems to be undertaking a much-needed house cleaning of officials from the James Comey era who have damaged the bureau’s reputation, but Mr. Trump’s bumbling catcalls make that task all the harder.
A case in point is the resignation Monday of deputy director Andrew McCabe, which every Never Trump conspiracy theorist is blaming on the President’s machinations. The same President they claim is an idiot is apparently pulling off a Nixonian cover-up. If you’ve lost your mind over Mr. Trump, you’ll believe anything about him, even if it’s contradictory.
Mr. Wray has no choice other than to install new FBI leadership after the Comey calamity if he wants to assert control. That means removing the Comey loyalists who botched the Hillary Clinton email probe and may have inserted the bureau into a presidential election campaign on the basis of Russian disinformation from the Christopher Steele dossier. Cleaning house isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a necessity to restore the reputation of America’s premier law enforcement agency.
We’ll learn more about what happened in the Clinton email case when the Justice Department Inspector General concludes his investigation. But Mr. McCabe had done more than enough to warrant removal when he supervised the Clinton probe after his wife, Jill McCabe, had run for the Virginia state Senate in 2016 with the financial help of Clinton loyalist and then-Governor Terry McAuliffe.
The FBI’s ethics office cleared Mr. McCabe to stay on the Clinton case, but anyone with any ethical sense would have understood the appearance of a conflict of interest. He didn’t recuse himself from the Clinton case until a week before the 2016 election. Mr. McCabe’s name has since also appeared in troubling references in the text messages between FBI paramours Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, the main agent on the Clinton probe.
Mr. Wray needs a deputy the public can trust, not one carrying this much political baggage. Mr. McCabe is being given vacation leave to run through March when he will be able to receive full retirement benefits for having served for 20 years. Maybe he can become a paid legal commentator on CNN.
The departure of other Comey loyalists is also encouraging. Special counsel Robert Mueller removed Mr. Strzok from the probe last summer once the texts were discovered, though the news was leaked only after investigators in Congress closed in on the story. The complete tale of his involvement in the Clinton and Trump probes is far from being told.
James Baker, whom Mr. Comey installed as FBI general counsel, was reassigned in December, according to news reports. Messrs. Baker and Comey were pals at Justice and in private business at the investment management firm Bridgewater Associates. And Mr. Wray said in a statement last week that Mr. Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki, had told him in December that he intends to leave.
The political canard of the year so far—the list is already long—is that criticizing the FBI’s behavior in 2016 is an attack on American institutions and an attempt to undermine Mr. Mueller. Mr. Strzok’s role and his texts have already damaged Mr. Mueller’s probe without outside help. And since when is the FBI above political oversight? The last director who achieved that sort of sovereign immunity was J. Edgar Hoover, and we know how that turned out.
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Which brings us to last week’s news, and much weekend hyperventilating, that Mr. Trump considered firing Mr. Mueller last June but refrained after White House general counsel Don McGahn objected. Instead of applauding Mr. McGahn for his obvious good judgment, the press has mainly wondered if he was trying to protect himself. Maybe he was doing his job and trying to protect his client, the President, from Mr. Trump’s reckless impulses.
Firing Mr. Mueller would be self-destructive for Mr. Trump, who would look like he has more to hide than he claims. But this does not mean that Mr. Mueller is somehow above criticism. His evidence and criminal judgments are subject to scrutiny on the legal, ethical and constitutional merits.
Congress should also stay away from Senator Lindsey Graham’s bad idea to give unelected judges the power to second guess Mr. Trump if he did fire Mr. Mueller. This would violate the separation of powers and the President’s authority over the executive branch. If Mr. Trump dismisses Mr. Mueller, the punishment would be political for the President and probably also his party. He’d be teeing up the GOP for defeat in November—and himself for possible impeachment.
Then again, Mr. Trump hasn't fired Mr. Mueller. And Mr. Wray should continue to clean up the Comey FBI.
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2)
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| If Iran is not stopped from entrenching itself militarily in Syria or turning Lebanon into a “factory for precision missiles” aimed at Israel, then Israel will stop it, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow on Monday. Speaking with Israeli reporters via a conference call after the meeting, Netanyahu said the discussions took place at a “watershed” moment. “Will Iran entrench itself in Syria, or will this process be stopped?” Netanyahu said. “I made clear to Putin that we will stop it if it doesn’t stop by itself. We are already acting to stop it.” The prime minister said he also spoke with Putin about the threat of Iran manufacturing precision weapons in Lebanon, something Jerusalem views as “a grave threat.” Netanyahu said he told Putin that “also here, if we need to act, we will act.” Netanyahu’s comments on Lebanon come as Israel is launching a diplomatic campaign warning that it will not tolerate precision missiles manufactured in Lebanon. Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said Monday Israel was using “all the options” to prevent the production of missiles in Lebanon, including “political leverage.” A day earlier, IDF Brig.-Gen. Ronen Manelis warned in a rare op-ed on a Lebanese opposition website that a war with Israel could break out if Iran develops precision missiles in the country. Netanyahu flew to Russia for the day on Monday for his seventh face-to-face meeting with Putin in two years. The two leaders also speak frequently on the phone, and Netanyahu described Israel- Russia ties as “excellent.” The meeting came less than a week after he met US President Donald Trump in Davos, and he said that he spoke with the Russian leader about the same issues concerning Syria and Iran that he spoke about with Trump. Both men, he said, “understand” Israel’s positions. Netanyahu was accompanied by the head of Military Intelligence Maj.-Gen. Herzi Halevi, and Putin brought Russia’s Defense Minister Sergey Shoygu to the talks. Netanyahu and Putin met for some 90 minutes privately, and also held talks on bilateral issues with their wider staffs. Netanyahu said the discussions were “concrete,” not “theoretical.” With the Russian army just across the border in Syria, Netanyahu said that these meetings with Putin – and the type of cooperation that has developed between the defense establishments of both countries – is critical “so we don’t clash.” In addition, he said these meetings are also important because they allow the two sides to frankly tell the other about their positions. “In light of the changing situation, our policies also change,” Netanyahu said, adding that he relays to Putin Israel’s positions as “clearly and truthfully” as possible. Netanyahu said he and Putin talked about various “scenarios of escalation” in the region, and how they can be dealt with. Netanyahu said that with the Mideast at a crossroads, there is an opportunity to stabilize Syria and Lebanon, but that there is one actor – Iran – which is trying to do the opposite. The prime minister said he raised the issue of the Iranian nuclear deal, and he told Putin that if changes were not made to the deal, then it was likely that the US would walk away from it. The meeting took place at the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow, where the two leaders took part in the opening of an exhibit to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day call called “Sobibor: Victorious over Death,” which is dedicated to the 1943 uprising in the Nazi extermination camp. The exhibit tells the story of Alexander Pechersky, a Red Army officer who led a successful breakout from the camp. Netanyahu thanked Putin for coming to the museum, and he said their joint appearance “reflects our common struggle against the greatest evil that humanity has known, and the awful price paid by my people, the Jewish people, and the Russian people and the great sacrifice of 20 million Russians alongside our 6 million, and the heroism of the Red Army in achieving victory over the Nazis.” Netanyahu said the “main lesson of the rise of the Nazis and, afterward, their defeat, is that one needs to take a strong and timely stand against murderous ideologies.” The prime minister said this is “also our mission today” and the reason he came to Russia: “our common efforts to promote security and stability in our region.” Putin said that memory of the Holocaust is “a warning against any attempt to jump on the idea of global domination, to announce, build or assert one’s grandeur based on racism, ethnic or any other supremacy. Russia categorically rejects any such attempt. The history of the 20th century shows to what extent the consequences of such essentially anti-human ideology can lead.” Putin gave Netanyahu as a gift a letter the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, who save some 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust, sent to his wife. Netanyahu said he will pass it on to Yad Vashem. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3) Trump Likes Controversy, Conflict Less So The distinction is important, and it is woven through Trump’s operating style during his first year in officeBy Gerald F. Seib
When President Donald Trump walks to the rostrum in the House of Representatives Tuesday night to deliver his State of the Union address, he will be facing a throng of lawmakers who, even after a full year of exposure, are still trying to figure him out.
Here is a tip for them as they consider how to work with the president: He likes controversy, but he isn’t all that fond of conflict.
That might seem like a contradiction, but it actually isn’t. The distinction is important, and is woven through Mr. Trump’s operating style during his first year in office.
He relishes stirring up controversy, and, in fact, believes stirring the pot advances his reputation as an outside agitator and improves his position by keeping adversaries off balance. But he usually keeps controversy at arm’s length, using his Twitter feed or offhand comments to attack and posture.
By contrast, when he finally comes face-to-face with both friends and foes, his actual positions are often less contentious and rigid than his public posturing suggests. His Twitter bark is worse than his personal bite.
Thus, he angrily withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact, but then he walked into the very den of economic globalists at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week to say that he is prepared to negotiate a new version of it. He ordered the U.S. out of the Paris accord on climate change, but told British interviewer Piers Morgan over the weekend that, thanks in part to the personal intervention of French President Emmanuel Macron, who, “as you know, I like,” he might rejoin the accord.
When he is standing apart from negotiations over a new immigration system, he denigrates his Democratic counterparts, saying they have no interest in securing the border and are “only interested” in obstruction. But in a room with congressional leaders he sounded ready to do a deal with them, and even provide political cover for those who agreed—and then last week proposed the very path to citizenship that Democrats have been demanding for so-called “Dreamers,” young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children.
He complains about both his attorney general, Jeff Sessions, and special counsel Robert Mueller. But he repeatedly has backed away from firing them. Perhaps he learned from the notable exception to this pattern, when he actually did fire James Comey as head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which proved to be one of the most disastrous presidential decisions in recent times.
He also complains openly about other aides, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the White House chief of staff, John Kelly. But he then promptly backs away and praises them, as if he had never whacked the hornet’s nest in the first place. When he wants someone to leave, he is more likely to drop hints he wants them to depart on their own, or have someone else send them overboard, than to fire them himself.
“Donald Trump enjoys controversy and to a degree thrives on it,” says Christopher Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media and a presidential friend. “Controversy helps ratings, taking a page from his very successful showbiz career.”
But, he adds: “He often stakes out very extreme positions. He does this partly for rhetorical effort or to stake out a negotiating position. It’s worked for him in business so he’s applying it to politics.”
Mr. Ruddy notes that, after calling for the deportation of all illegal immigrants during the 2016 presidential campaign, “now he’s close to embracing” the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that gives legal status to Dreamers. If he gets funding for a border wall and an end to programs allowing entry to immigrants’ extended families and a lottery system for visas, he will accept a path to citizenship for Dreamers, Mr. Ruddy says: “In his mind, he’s a winner and he is, if he gets this deal.”
The problem is that the president’s allies and enemies alike, at home and abroad, have a hard time figuring out where bluster ends and reality begins. What is the bottom line? Nobody seems to know for sure, perhaps including the president himself. That opens up the risk of missed opportunities and, worse, miscalculations, which could prove deadly in tense national-security situations.
Jason Miller, who was communications director for the Trump presidential campaign and remains in touch with the White House, suggests viewing the president’s approach as a “one-two negotiating tactic…Tweets are a one-way written message delivery vehicle to lay down markers, while in-person meetings are an opportunity to show progress and cooperation that get us one step closer to the desired outcome.”
Mr. Miller advises members of Congress that “the president is only going to bring up issues he genuinely wants to find consensus on…There’s always room for compromise after policy markers are laid out.”
3a) Poor Chuck Schumer
The Senate Minority Leader made it to the top, but at the worst possible moment.
By William McGurn
In only one year as Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer has managed to pull off some large but dubious achievements.
The biggest came last week, when New York’s senior senator became the only Democrat in recent memory to lose a government shutdown fight. The way he lost was as distinctive as the loss itself. Having vowed on a Friday not to agree to a funding bill until Congress had a bipartisan agreement to protect the so-called Dreamers (immigrants who came to America illegally as children), by Monday he was crying uncle. By Tuesday angry protesters appeared outside his Brooklyn apartment building, shouting that Mr. Schumer had sold the Dreamers out.
In short, Mr. Schumer’s hard-line start and surrender finish produced the worst of all worlds. To begin with, he provoked more ridicule from a president who seems to enjoy taunting him, especially on Twitter . And Mr. Trump continues to do so, recently tweeting that a legislative solution for the Dreamers “has been made increasingly difficult by the fact that Cryin’ Chuck Schumer took such a beating over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration!”
Meanwhile, Mr. Trump also offered a framework for an immigration deal that contains genuine concessions, such as a path to citizenship for all 1.8 million people who qualified for DACA—not just the 800,000 who had enrolled. The president has also suggested, plausibly, that Mr. Schumer refuses to cut a deal because the Democrats prefer to exploit the plight of the Dreamers rather than reach a genuine bipartisan solution.
On the eve of Mr. Trump’s first State of the Union, it puts him in an interesting place. Here’s a what-if: What if Mr. Trump looked up at the gallery full of Dreamers during his address and said, “I have offered a good-faith compromise that would not only resolve your place in America but open to you the precious gift of American citizenship. All I ask is that Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi meet me halfway”?
Still, as trying as Mr. Trump must be, even worse for Mr. Schumer is the split in his own party. It might roughly be characterized as between those looking at 2018 and those looking to 2020.
In the 2018 midterms, Democrats will be defending 26 Senate seats—10 of them in states Mr. Trump carried. Most of these Democrats were irritated by how Mr. Schumer’s stand opened them up to accusations (and the inevitable attack ads) that they’re willing to shut down the government to protect illegal immigrants. So upset were these Democrats by Mr. Schumer’s uncompromising stand that before the weekend was out they had abandoned him for a deal with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to reopen the government.
In the opposite corner are the 2020 Senate Democrats, i.e., those eyeing a White House run. They sense, correctly, that their party’s base is in full resistance mode. It is no coincidence almost all these Democratic senators—including Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand —voted against ending the shutdown. Some are further embellishing their purist credentials by voting against almost every Trump nominee.
Indulging anti-Trump absolutism is not without its price. Notwithstanding the prevailing orthodoxy that Republicans will be overwhelmed by a blue wave in the 2018 midterms, vulnerable Democratic incumbents such as North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp and Indiana’s Joe Donnelly don’t seem so sure.
Republican leaders faced this same dynamic themselves, notably in 2013 when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz persuaded enough Republicans that if they would only shut down the government, they could force Mr. Obama to agree to defund his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare. Republicans who opposed the shutdown found themselves traduced as RINOs—Republicans in name only. It too ended in humiliating retreat.
Of course, it’s one thing for an individual senator to push his caucus into a futile gesture. It’s quite another for a party leader to do so.
The irony is that by nature Mr. Schumer inclines more to deal-making than suicidal last stands. His problem is that Mr. Trump is an even more polarizing figure for Democrats than President Obama was for Republicans, and what these Democrats want now is to resist. But if Mr. Schumer allows the Democratic zeal for resistance to take the form of rejecting every Trump offer for compromise, Mr. Schumer may well pull off another miracle by making Donald Trump look like the reasonable one in Washington.
For years, Mr. Schumer has been climbing the greasy pole, finally reaching the top last year when he replaced retiring Sen. Harry Reid as leader of the Senate Democrats. Normally the priority of a minority leader would be to regain control of the chamber in which he serves. Alas for poor Mr. Schumer, his tragedy is to have reached the top at precisely the worst moment, caught between a Republican president who can’t stop demeaning him and a Democratic Party that seems determined to ensure he remains a minority leader.
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4) Did Fake News Lose the Vietnam War?
Journalists wrongly portrayed the Tet Offensive as a U.S. defeat and never corrected the record.
By William J. Luti
Seemingly out of nowhere, a shock wave hit South Vietnam on Jan. 30, 1968. In a coordinated assault unprecedented in ferocity and scale, more than 100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong soldiers stormed out of their sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. They went on to attack more than 100 towns and cities across South Vietnam.
The following 77 days changed the course of the Vietnam War. The American people were bombarded with a nightly stream of devastating television and daily print reporting. Yet what they saw was so at odds with the reality on the ground that many Vietnam veterans believe truth itself was under attack.
The Tet Offensive had ambitious objectives: cause a mass uprising against the government, collapse the South Vietnamese Army, and inflict mass casualties on U.S. forces. The men in the Hanoi Politburo—knowing the war’s real center of gravity was in Washington —hoped the attack ultimately would sap the American people’s will to fight.
A key component of this strategy was terror. Thousands of South Vietnamese government officials, schoolteachers, doctors, missionaries and ordinary civilians—especially in Hue City—were rounded up and executed in an act of butchery not often seen on the battlefield.
Despite their ferocity, by most objective military standards, the communists achieved none of their goals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces held fast, regrouped and fought back. By late March they had achieved a decisive victory over the communist forces. Hanoi wouldn’t be able to mount another full-scale invasion of South Vietnam until the 1972 Easter offensive.
But in living rooms across America, the nightly news described an overwhelming American defeat. The late Washington Post Saigon correspondent Peter Braestrup later concluded the event marked a major failure in the history of American journalism.
Braestrup, in “Big Story: How the American Press and Television Reported and Interpreted the Crisis of Tet 1968 in Vietnam and Washington” (1977), attributed this portrayal to television’s showbiz tradition. TV news editors put little premium on breadth of coverage, fact-finding or context.
The TV correspondent, Braestrup wrote, like the anchorman back home, had to pose on camera with authority. He had to maintain a dominant appearance while telling viewers more than he knew or could know. The commentary was thematic and highly speculative; it seemed preoccupied with network producers’ insatiable appetite for “impact.”
Braestrup criticized print media with equal vigor. The great bulk of wire-service output used by U.S. newspapers did not come from eyewitness accounts. Rather, he wrote, it was passed on from second- or third-hand sources reprocessed several times over.
He was stridently critical of “interpretive reporting,” in which editors allowed reporters to write under the rubric of “news analysis” and “commentary.” This, he asserts, produced “pervasive distortions” and a “disaster image.” The misinformation, fixed in the minds of the American people, played a role in shifting public opinion against the war.
“At Tet,” Braestrup assessed, “the press shouted that the patient was dying, then weeks later began to whisper that he somehow seemed to be recovering—whispers apparently not heard amid the clamorous domestic reaction to the initial shouts.”
Braestrup suggested that the press committed journalistic malpractice by taking sides against the Johnson administration and not correcting the record once the fog of the battle had lifted. These hasty assumptions and judgments, he documented, “were simply allowed to stand.”
Braestrup’s exhaustive analysis remains controversial. His friend and colleague at the Washington Post, the late Don Oberdorfer, attributed the erosion of public support to the credibility of the Johnson administration. The president’s office regularly issued rosy pronouncements at odds with the tactical ebb and flow on the battlefield.
But even to this day it’s difficult to find fault with Braestrup’s concluding insight: The professional obligation of journalists in a free society is to stay calm and get the story straight. It is not, as Walter Lippmann admonished, to conflate “truth” with the assembly and processing of a commodity called “news.”
Mr. Luti is a retired career naval officer and former special assistant to President George W. Bush for defense policy and strategy.
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