https://www.youtube.com/watch?
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Some interesting Op Eds:
We're in an Economic War With China Stephen Bannon, Washington Post
Trump Gets Stronger as Dem Field Grows More Dismal Conrad Black, New York Sun
The NH Primary Will Make or Break Sanders Campaign Ella Nilsen, Vox
Trump is right not to blame our adversaries because we are patsies. (See 1 below.)
Don't forget, when I go away increased volatility generally occurs.
Don't forget, when I go away increased volatility generally occurs.
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Hanson on anti-Semitism. (See 2 below.)
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Nadler the Naysayer? (See 3 below.)
Hanson on anti-Semitism. (See 2 below.)
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Nadler the Naysayer? (See 3 below.)
Mr. Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping both want a deal but neither wants to be seen as conceding too much. Mr. Trump needs a deal to remove the trade uncertainty that dozens of CEOs say has slowed business investment. The President’s Sunday claim onTwitter that his tariffs are one reason for the strong U.S. economy is the opposite of reality. The economy is growing despite the tariffs, and U.S. manufacturing jobs have declined this year in part because of China’s slowdown.
Mr. Trump needs a strong economy as he seeks re-election, and a good China deal would double as a foreign-policy success. With change in North Korea and Venezuela looking doubtful, a China trade agreement may be his only foreign breakthrough. It would also fulfill a major 2016 campaign promise.
Mr. Xi arguably needs a deal even more than Mr. Trump. U.S. tariffs have hurt Chinese exports but China also suffers from a domestic debt overhang and misallocation of capital. Liu He, Mr. Xi’s chief economics adviser, understands that China needs more economic liberalization. A trade deal can help rebut nationalists in Beijing who want to maintain the mercantilist status quo.
A collapse of the talks risks a sharper Chinese economic decline and even political instability. Mr. Xi has sold his presidency on a return to Chinese greatness, but the trade brawl is already causing some global businesses to move production from China to other countries. Mr. Xi may want to dominate the world but meantime he needs an economy that provides jobs for millions of new workers each year.
The rub of the talks is that Mr. Xi has to concede more than Mr. Trump does—without being embarrassed in the process. China already has largely free access to the U.S. market and rule of law. China’s main demand is that Mr. Trump lift his tariffs, which is reasonable if China agrees to cease its multiple trade violations. This includes protections for IP, a reduction in tariff rates toward U.S. levels, a reduction in subsidies for state-owned companies, more liberal rules for joint ventures, and an end to cyber theft.
The U.S. also wants enforcement provisions written into the agreement in case China cheats, as it often has before. This includes the right to impose tariffs without a compensating right of China to retaliate. This also seems to be one of the main sticking points.
With an eye on his re-election, Mr. Trump wants a deal that is strong enough to blunt the inevitable criticism from Democrats that he didn’t deliver enough. This would take chutzpah since Democrats have been attacking Mr. Trump’s tariffs. But Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders are sore that Mr. Trump outflanked them as protectionists, and they’ll attack any deal he strikes. Mr. Trump should win that argument as long as the deal’s details are credible to trade experts and American businesses.
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The Trump Administration kept up its brinksmanship on Monday, as White House trade negotiator Robert Lighthizer said China is “reneging” on its previous commitments and the new tariffs will hit on Friday. We have entered the storm before the calm if both sides can see through past the threats to their mutual trading self-interest.
The Chinese shouldn’t underestimate how much U.S. opinion has hardened toward their practices across the ideological spectrum. A deal with Mr. Trump may be the best chance the Chinese have to avoid a protectionist eruption against them in Congress.
As for Mr. Trump, repealing his tariffs in return for major Chinese policy changes is well worth the trade. He’ll have won concessions without giving up anything other than the tariffs he said he imposed only as leverage. The alternative could be ugly. China will suffer from an all-out trade war, but so will the U.S. and the Trump Presidency.
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2) Why Progressive Anti-
Semitism — and Why
Now?
The New York Times International Edition recently published an anti-Semitic cartoon of a dachshund with the face of Benjamin Netanyahu. The composite animal was leading a hunched Donald Trump who had on dark sunglasses, as if blind, and a yarmulke.
Almost immediately, everyone pointed out that the theme of doglike Jews pulling along their clueless befuddled blinded “Aryan” masters was a favorite in Hitler’s Germany. The theme, style, and imagery of the cartoon might have trumped what was often published in Der Stürmer, the Nazi megaphone of propagandist Julius Streicher. The latter was hanged after the Nuremberg Trials for two decades of fomenting the Jew hatred that helped lead to the Holocaust.
Stranger still, at first the New York Times merely explained how the sick cartoon got published in its international edition, but without an apology for its publication. Its subsequent second-try mea culpa was rendered a pathetic joke when, a few days later, the paper published yet another incoherent anti-Semitic cartoon of a Benjamin Netanyahu, this time as some sort of blind Moses with selfie stick in one hand and a stone tablet with the Star of David in the other, as he descends from Mount Sinai.
It has been noted that the Times has had a long history of anti-Semitism, dating to before World War II, and, after that, of serial anti-Israel venom. Certainly, if the cartoon had similarly portrayed any other ethnic or religious group (except heterosexual white Christians), the Times would immediately have fired anyone remotely involved in running such trash. Was it any surprise that the Times recently referenced Jesus as a Palestinian rather than Jewish?
The Times in general sees bias such as anti-Semitism and racism in terms of political warfare: The hatred is always a cry of the heart of marginalized people, and always directed at the supposedly deserving. Note that not long ago the Times vigorously defended its hiring of Sarah Jeong, the racist blogger who had a long history of anti-male and anti-white hate speech that included such social-media posts as “Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men” and “Dumbass f****** white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants” and “White people have stopped breeding. You’ll all go extinct soon. That was my plan all along.” In other words, the Times seems to have no innate problem with its progressive employees expressing racist and anti-Semitic tropes, as long as their targets are deemed politically incorrect.
Recently at UC Berkeley, in a now familiar routine, during a student-government meeting, protesters slurred Jewish students with conspiratorial charges that the Israeli military has trained American police how better to kill blacks. Campuses now routinely ignore student anti-Semitic smears; indeed, universities and colleges are becoming the incubators of progressive hatred of Jews.
The strange thing about the now predictable anti-Jewish and anti-Israel social-media outbursts of Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.) was not that Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) and Representative Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.) defended Omar’s slurs. (Tlaib herself recently demanded cutting off aid to Israel, claiming it did not reflect American values.) Rather, what’s striking is that the Democratic party in general could not even muster a vote condemning the anti-Semitic and anti-Israel statements of one of their own House members.
The examples of progressive hatred of Jews could be multiplied endlessly, but the key question is: Why in this generation and why on the Democratic left?
There, are of course, always white nationalists who voice reactionary anti-Semitism, but most are pathetic fringe groups easily identified and ostracized. For all the invective lodged against Donald Trump, no president has proved more sensitive to Jewish issues and more committed to the survival of Israel. The anti-Semitic extreme alt-right has received no sanction from the Republican party, and it remains a tiny, mostly irrelevant group of losers. In contrast, progressive Jew-hatred is expressed at the nation’s premier institutions, such as UC Berkeley, the New York Times, and the U.S. Congress. Again, why?
The far Left is intertwined with Islamist activists. Both share a hatred of the U.S. and see the Middle East as a postcolonial victim of Western imperialism. Students and urban youth bond with radical Islamists in their shared dislike of the Western countries (such as Israel) in general and the United States in particular.
Radical Muslims and the Left disguise their hatred of Jews by claiming that they are only championing downtrodden Palestinians. Few bother to ask them why a tiny democracy in a sea of autocracy is always singled out any time global attention turns to the question of refugees, disputed territories, or treatment of supposed religious minorities. In other words, the hater of Jews always says, “I have no problem with the Jewish people, but I do not like the imperialist and colonial policies of the Jewish state of Israel.”
But if so, why not extend such universal empathy for refugees to the last of the East Prussian Germans, or those who are left of the Volga Russians, or the octogenarians still alive from the nearly 1 million Jews who were ethnically cleansed from their ancestral homes in Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and throughout the Islamic world? Why pick only on tiny Israel?
If the rub is disputed land, why not agitate for the northern Cypriot Greeks who suffered (and do suffer) terribly from the occupation of Turkish overseers, or the Tibetans, whose lands were simply expropriated by Chinese Communists?
If the youth of today are anxious about the treatment of religious minorities, why not at least confess that 1 million Arab speakers in Israel cherish freedoms found nowhere else in the Middle East? They also are certainly freer and more secure than Muslim minorities in either India or China. So there is no reason to fixate on a tiny constitutional society — except that it is a Jewish state.
Anti-Semitism, to be frank, is deeply embedded also among the elite black progressive community. Numerous contemporary African-American national leaders — Jesse Jackson (“Hymietown”), Al Sharpton (“If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house”), the Reverend Jeremiah Wright (“Them Jews aren’t going to let him [Obama] talk to me.”) — have at some point trafficked in anti-Semitism.
The Jew-hating Louis Farrakhan is no outlier. He has been prominent in the progressive Women’s March, has had his picture taken with a then-smiling Senator Barack Obama (the photo was repressed until after Obama left the presidency), and he was once close to former Democratic National Party vice chairman Keith Ellison. Representative Hank Johnson (D., Ga.), like Farrakhan, has compared West Bank Jews to “termites” — another sick metaphor and, like those used in cartoons appearing in the New York Times, one with a disgusting pedigree from the Third Reich.
In such old-new binaries, Jews and Israelis are now recast as “privileged whites.” So their frequent attackers expect immunity from condemnation; they seek refuge as marginalized people for whom charges of bias or privilege do not so readily apply.
There is also the insidious suggestion by those on the left who traffic in anti-Semitic language and symbolism that most American Jews are assumed to be loyal Democrats. In passive-aggressive style, the new anti-Semites enjoy poking fellow party members on the left, in the expectation that they can do so without warranting the odium that like-minded Nazis and Klansmen would earn.
Like teenagers who rant against their parents on the expectation that, as members of the same family, they are exempt from rebuke, the progressive anti-Semites expect fellow Democrats to contextualize their animus, tolerate it, and even excuse it for the greater good of party and ideological unity.
Add in that a new generation of younger Jewish Americans is not inclined to push back against left-wing anti-Semitism. These fourth- and fifth-generation American citizens are often increasingly secular; they don’t have much knowledge about or interest in the history and nature of Israel, and they’re keen to avoid conflict with fellow hipster students and urban progressives. Like the former and now largely inert Greek-American “lobby,” the next generation of Jewish Americans is less interested in traditional Jewish concerns and likely to defer to fellow progressives in matters of “woke” issues such as the alleged “colonialism” of Israel.
Anti-Semitism is only going to intensify. Both in America and Europe, it is naturally at home among the multicultural Left. The media, popular culture, universities, and left-wing political parties either cannot or will not stop it.
Trump’s unwavering support for Israel and keen support of Jews also encourages leftists, in Pavlovian fashion, to attack anything that Trump favors. Prominent progressive Jews lack either the ability or the inclination to call out members of their own political persuasion — a fact that only encourages even more overt anti-Semitism.
So here is the near future: Every time the New York Times runs another anti-Semitic cartoon (and it will), each time a left-wing member of Congress questions the patriotism or morality of American Jews (and one will), and on every occasion Jewish students are harassed on campus (and they will be), we go another mile down the road to the well-known historical disaster that is looming ahead.
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3) Jerry Nadler’s Contempt
The House Judiciary chairman is more interested in spectacle than information.
By
Poor Jerry Nadler.
The congressman from New York has been itching to get Donald Trump almost from the day he was elected president. Alas, just as Mr. Nadler finds himself in a position to do it—as House Judiciary Committee chairman he has jurisdiction over impeachment proceedings—special counsel Robert Mueller dropped a report that found zero evidence of collusion with Russia. With no crime to cover up, what would the president have been obstructing?
But like a crooked sheriff in a low-budget Western, Mr. Nadler is determined to go on with his hanging—even if it’s not the guy originally planned. Which explains what the committee’s ranking member, Georgia’s Doug Collins, characterizes as a “deluge of perverse demands” Mr. Nadler has made on Attorney General William Barr: that he submit to grilling from lawyers instead of congressmen; that he release grand-jury testimony; and that he comply with a 9 a.m. Monday deadline or be held in contempt of Congress.
What’s most telling here is that Mr. Barr hasn’t been stingy with information. In addition to making public a lightly redacted version of the Mueller report (which he didn’t have to release at all), Mr. Barr has also made available to leaders of Congress and the relevant committees a version that covers 98.5% of the report. If Democrats really want to know more, why has not a single one bothered to read it?
So if Mr. Nadler isn’t interested in the Mueller report, or its redactions, what is he interested in? Spectacle.
It isn’t hard to appreciate the chairman’s frustration. Even though Mr. Mueller’s report didn’t deliver what Democrats had hoped it would, Mr. Nadler can’t very well attack the special counsel as a toady of Mr. Trump.
Ditto for the Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz. A year ago Mr. Horowitz issued a report accusing the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s then-Deputy Director Andrew McCabe of lying under oath to federal officers looking into a leak about the Clinton Foundation investigation. In a few weeks, Mr. Horowitz will release the findings of a yearlong investigation into whether high-ranking federal officials abused their powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to spy on the Trump campaign. Some are already suggesting the IG’s report will include recommendations for criminal prosecution. But since Mr. Horowitz was appointed by Barack Obama, good luck painting him as a Trump flunky.
Which leaves Mr. Nadler with Mr. Barr. The Judiciary Committee chairman is right to say that Congress is a coequal branch of government, and the committee is free to make its own rules. But the executive branch is coequal too, which means that for Congress to get what it wants, it must exercise patience and engage in genuine give-and-take.
In this light, compare the Democratic Judiciary Committee’s treatment of a Republican attorney general today with how a Republican committee treated a Democratic attorney general during the Obama years. In 2011 the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform subpoenaed Eric Holder for documents about Operation Fast and Furious, a weapons operation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that ran amok. It took 255 days between the issue of that subpoena and the committee’s vote to deem Mr. Holder in contempt.
In contrast, Mr. Nadler’s panel issued its subpoena April 19. If Judiciary goes ahead Wednesday with its contempt vote, only 19 days will have passed. And if the committee votes for contempt it means that, like it or not, every House Democrat—including those who won formerly Republican districts last year—will have to declare on the House floor whether they endorse Mr. Nadler’s spectacle. Having herself accused Mr. Barr of committing a “crime” before Congress, Speaker Nancy Pelosi would be hard-pressed to block such a vote.
At the moment Mr. Nadler has the Beltway’s attention because the mob smells a hanging. But even if Democrats hold Mr. Barr in contempt, it won’t be the victory Mr. Nadler hopes for. Mr. Holder served nearly three years as attorney general after the House found him in contempt. If Mr. Holder’s example is any clue, a successful contempt vote against Mr. Barr won’t change a thing at Justice, if only because congressional contempt citations are almost impossible to enforce.
Meanwhile, a Justice Department spokesman notes that complying with Mr. Nadler’s subpoenas would require Mr. Barr to break laws against the release of grand-jury information. Mr. Nadler knows this.
Then again, the last thing Mr. Nadler wants is more testimony or more information. That was never the aim. To the contrary, the chairman issued his demands and set his arbitrary deadlines in a manner calculated to all but force Mr. Barr to refuse, allowing Democrats to then shout “coverup.”
Plainly Mr. Nadler can’t get Donald Trump. But instead of calling off the political hanging, he’s going to try to string up the attorney general.
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