Time for some humor: Sister Strikes Again!: Late Nite Catechism 2 - YouTube
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Melanie Phillips and Niki Haley two of my favorites. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
And:
Elections are supposed to drain the polarization. Because of the hatred against Trump and his desire to drain, the swamp polarization intensified.
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Trump should never have let Bolton leave. He is a hawk but Trump needed to hear his views. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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If liberals who hate Trump but claim they love America are not blowing smoke they should support Judicial Watch. All contributions are tax deductible.
JW is run by Tom Fitton and focuses on bi-partisan investigating and exposing Deep State conspiracy, unlawful sanctuary policies, keeping local and national elections honest and open, pursuing the likes of Soros and filing law suits of a broader nature in pursuit of corruption at all levels of government.
They fight for maintaining the rule of law which has been one of the bedrock foundations of our republic. I am a modest contributor.
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Advice to McConnell as the Pelosi - Schiff head sham continues.
If voters were subject to the unfairness of Schiff's closed door Gulag process, I seriously doubt they are buying what the Democrats have chosen to do. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Warren remains evasive because she cannot answer how she will finance her medical care for all fiasco without raising taxes by an enormous amount which, of course, will cripple the middle class, wreck the market and get us back on track with Obama's dead in the swamp economy.
We are waiting Pocahontas!
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Dick
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1)
By Melanie Phillips
"It is the official policy of the United States of America to support a two-state solution, and if Israel is moving in the opposite direction then everything is on the table," she said. To ensure that no one failed to understand her threat, she repeated her final phrase.
Her comment furnished more evidence that Warren resembles British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in her far-left and Israel-bashing views. This threatens to harm not only the sole democratic U.S. ally in the Middle East, but also the interests and security of America itself.
Nevertheless, opposing Israeli settlements and taking the side of the Palestinian Arabs is unlikely to damage Warren's prospects in broader progressive circles because these are views that they generally share.
This is not merely a divisive policy stance. It also displays a fundamental misconception about the Arab war against Israel that is shared widely within the Jewish as well as non-Jewish world.
At the most obvious level, bashing the settlements is historically and legally wrong.
Israel is entitled to retain and settle these territories twice over. The 1922 Palestine Mandate, whose terms have never been abrogated, gave the Jews alone the right to settle in what is now Israel, the "West Bank" and Gaza. In addition, international law upholds Israel's right to retain land taken, as it was in 1967, in a war of defense against those who still continue to use it as a landing stage for attacks.
Moreover, the belief that the settlements prevent the creation of a Palestine state that would end the Middle East conflict is transparently false and historically illiterate.
The Palestinian Arabs think all Israel is a "settlement" of squatters with no rights to the land, and they want all of Israel gone. They make this plain in their deeds, their propaganda, and their maps and flags.
Proof that the settlements are not the issue is furnished by the simple fact that the attempt to prevent and then exterminate the Jewish homeland started decades before the 1967 Six-Day War introduced the claim of "occupation." And the Palestinian Arabs have repeatedly been offered a state of their own, to which they have responded only by terrorism and war.
Nevertheless, "progressives" insist that Israel has deprived the Palestinian Arabs of a state. They believe that the Palestinians' quarrel is with Israelis. They refuse to believe this is based in turn on a murderous hatred of Jews.
They'll probably therefore blank out from their field of vision what has happened to a 50-year-old Palestinian Arab supermarket worker from Hebron. According to a report on Ynet, this man recently converted to Judaism through an ultra-Orthodox religious court in Bnei Brak.
Before his conversion could be recognized by the Israeli rabbinate, he was arrested by Palestinian Authority forces.
On the eve of Yom Kippur, the man traveled to an area under P.A. control to meet one of his nine children, who along with their mother are all Muslim. During this reunion, he was dragged into a car by four men and dumped at a police station in Hebron. He has remained in custody ever since, and is said to have been beaten and tortured.
The official reason for his arrest is a complaint by the man's brother that several months ago, the supermarket worker had assaulted him. The man denies these allegations, claiming that his brothers had beaten him up and told him he would be disinherited following his conversion to Judaism.
According to his lawyer, who is associated with the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel pro-settler group and who specializes in assisting Palestinians who co-operate with Israel, his brothers are trying to distance themselves from him and his conversion to protect themselves from P.A. reprisals.
So a pro-settler group is assisting a Palestinian Arab who is being ill-treated by other Palestinians simply because he wants to become a Jew, while the likes of Elizabeth Warren condemn the settler movement for thwarting a solution to the Middle East conflict.
What this story shows is that beneath the ostensible conflict over rival forms of statehood lies a religiously based hatred of Jews or Judaism. The Palestinian convert was not involved in any political activity; he merely wanted to become a Jew.
And what self-styled progressives cannot bring themselves to acknowledge is that the Arab war against Israel is founded on a racist war against the Jews.
That's why any Arab who sells his house to an Israeli Jew faces punishment and, in principle at least, a sentence of execution
The likes of Warren and other so-called "progressives" ignore such inconvenient truths. They also ignore the grotesque anti-Semitism that pours out of the P.A. in its videos, educational materials and cartoon propaganda.
The website Palestinian Media Watch has exposed many examples of this murderous incitement. In 2016, for example, the P.A. revived the medieval blood libel that the Jews were poisoning the wells, claiming that an Israeli rabbi had "issued a ruling" that permitted "settlers" to "poison the drinking water and the natural wells in the [Palestinian] villages and towns throughout the West Bank."
P.A. leader Mahmoud Abbas then repeated this calumny to the European Union, claiming that Israel had poisoned Palestinian water sources in order to "mass murder" Palestinians.
In 2015, a teacher at the Al-Aqsa mosque taught another medieval blood libel that Jews use the blood of non-Jewish children to make Passover matzah.
In July, a post on Fatah's official Facebook page said that Jews "allied with Nazi Germany to burn Jews for profit." In February, another post presented as authentic a claim that during World War II, Jews eagerly agreed to bury Russian civilians alive in order to save their own skins; and that seeing this, a Nazi soldier proclaimed to the Russians: "I just wanted you to know who the Jews are and why we are killing them."
The P.A. regularly presents the Jews as the source of all evil in the world and plotting against all humanity. Abbas has said that the Jews suffered the Holocaust because of their "social roles" connected to "usury and banks."
The Islamic basis of opposing the Jewish homeland in the land of Israel goes back to the rise of Islamic extremism during the Palestine Mandate, which was based on a theological hatred of Jews.
Today, the P.A. regularly describes the peaceful visits by Jews to Temple Mount as "violent invasions by extremist Jewish settlers into the Al-Aqsa mosque," and uses this incitement as a pretext for violence.
And, of course, by "settlers" they don't mean Israelis living in the disputed territories. They mean Jews.
Yet this obscene agenda of incendiary Jew-hatred has become the signature cause of "progressives," who tell themselves, in their moral imbecility, that targeting Israeli settlements proves their own virtue by supporting a righteous cause.
This has not just contributed to the explosion of eye-watering Jew-baiting and Israel-bashing on the left. It has also helped destroy the West's entire moral compass, and the part it has played as a result in our current civilizational turmoil is therefore immeasurable
1a) Ex-UN Envoy Nikki Haley Blasts Democratic Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders for Plan to Condition US Military Aid to Israel on Humanitarian Relief for Hamas-Ruled Gaza
Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley blasted Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders for his pledge on Monday to force Israel to allocate part of its US military assistance toward humanitarian relief in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
Abraham H. Miller is an emeritus professor of political science, University of Cincinnati, and a distinguished fellow with the Hyam Salomon Center.1a) Ex-UN Envoy Nikki Haley Blasts Democratic Presidential Candidate Bernie Sanders for Plan to Condition US Military Aid to Israel on Humanitarian Relief for Hamas-Ruled Gaza
Former US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley blasted Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders for his pledge on Monday to force Israel to allocate part of its US military assistance toward humanitarian relief in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.
At the national conference of the left-wing J Street lobby group in Washington, DC, Sanders said after being asked about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “I would use the leverage of $3.8 billion,” referring to the military aid package.
“My solution is, to Israel, if you want military aid, you’re going to have to fundamentally change your relationship to the people of Gaza,” Sanders stated. “I would say that some of the $3.8 billion should go right now to humanitarian aid in Gaza.”
In response, Haley — widely considered to be a potential future Republican presidential candidate in the post-Donald Trump era — tweeted, “Just when you thought Bernie Sanders couldn’t get any more radical, he outdid himself. He wants to take money we give to Israel to defend itself from terrorists, and give it to Gaza, which is run by terrorists?? Unreal.”
“Why isn’t every other Dem pres candidate saying he’s wrong?” she asked.
Israeli Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein — a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party — also chimed in, tweeting, “@BernieSanders, stop talking nonsense.”
Taking umbrage at Sanders’ remark that “[w]hat is going on in Gaza right now, for example, is absolutely inhumane,” Edelstein said, “Just yesterday, I met with representatives of the EU during their visit to the Knesset, and I told them about the absurd claims regarding the economic situation in the Gaza Strip.”
“It’s time to put an end to these claims,” Edelstein declared, asserting that Gaza has “all the necessary means — they use the money earmarked for the public benefit in order to attack the State of Israel.”
1b)
1b)
Jews Will Not Abandon the Democrats,
as the Democrats have Abandoned
Them
The quip among Jewish Republicans about President Obama’s trafficking with anti-Semites was that he was so popular with American Jews that had he nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost no more than 30% of the Jewish vote.
The affinity for American Jews for the Democrat Party has long been a political curiosity. The distinguished essayist Milton Himmelfarb observed that in America, Jews had attained the socioeconomic status of Episcopalians, but for some reason they continued to vote like Puerto Ricans.
Nothing seems to dissolve the sinew that ties Jews to the Democrats. President Obama’s association with the anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright brought a collective yawn. Photos of Barrack Obama embracing the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, who compared Jews to termites, did not concern them.
The anti-Semitic diatribes of the so-called “Squad” have been dismissed as a minority voice among the Democrats that would be easily controlled by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The House resolution condemning boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel was showcased for having been passed, while ignoring that of the 17 votes against it, 16 came from Democrats.
The positions on Israel of Democratic presidential hopefuls Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should send chills up the spine of the Jewish community, but they do not. Warren and Sanders would cut off aid to Israel and unless Israel returns to what Abba Eban appropriately called the Auschwitz Borders.
On college campuses, Jews are forbidden access to the marketplace of ideas unless they parrot leftist newspeak. The Arab/Israeli conflict is described in mythical terms of colonialism, ignoring that the Arabs ethnically cleansed Jews from Jerusalem and the territories, and by the end of the 19th century, Jerusalem was a Jewish, not a Muslim city.
The faux colonial model is the product of leftist intellectuals, an oxymoron because scholarship and ideology are inherent contradictions. It is leftists that perpetuate the banality of the activist scholar so eagerly embraced in what once passed for higher education.
Much of the Jewish community either buys into this or ignores it. Given a choice between preserving their Jewish identity or embracing the ideology of the left, many Jews would prefer to be Democrats than Jews.
President Franklin Roosevelt’s abandonment of Europe’s Jews is rationalized as a three-term, popular president’s inability to control his own Department of State. Roosevelt was a racist and an anti-Semite. He incarcerated loyal Japanese who subsequently proved their patriotism and courage on Europe’s battlefields. His incarceration order was a function of his own phobia of Asians and was protested even by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Roosevelt abandoned the Jews for similar reasons.
Jews have bought into the Democrats’ obsession with President Donald Trump as a racist and anti-Semite. Trump, whose daughter is an observant Jew and who has Jewish grandchildren, is labeled an anti-Semite. In contrast, hatemonger Al Sharpton is honored in a New York synagogue during the recent high holidays, and Congressman Hank Johnson’s allusion to Jews as termites, invoking a medieval and Nazi stigma resurrected by the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, barely causes concern.
The future of Jews in the Democratic party is already written in the workings of the British Labour Party, which is infused with a virulent anti-Semitism enhanced by its leader, Jeremy Corbyn. Dame Louise Ellman, who has been a vocal critic of Corbyn’s venomous anti-Semitism, faced an ouster vote, which the local party members scheduled for Yom Kippur eve, the holiest night of the Jewish calendar. The timing was hardly coincidental. Ellman eventually quit.
It is facile to dismiss the current anti-Semitism within the Democrat Party as the rantings of a few peripheral members. The Democrat Party is moving left. It is increasingly oriented toward making decisions based on the ideology of intersectionality, meaning that professed victims of the white patriarchal oppressor must share a common political outlook.
Ironically, within this ideology, Jews, historically the most oppressed people enduring the world’s oldest hatred, are part of the privileged classes, and Muslims, no matter how many countries they control or how they oppress women and their own people, are victims.
It will not end well for the Jews. The British Labour Party is transmitting that message. Will Jews recognize their political self-interest before it is too late? Those of us who think that if Barack Obama had nuked Tel Aviv, he would have lost far less than 30% of the Jewish vote, think otherwise.
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2)The Purge of John Bolton
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,327
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: In Syria, President Trump, like Obama before him, seems oblivious to the reality that when the US withdraws, its enemies advance and fill the vacuum. Ousted NSA John Bolton has said that America is constraining its range of action through foolhardy entanglements with international institutions and naive bilateral agreements that promise too much to America’s enemies in exchange for too little. He maintains, correctly, that Americans support leaders who are not appeasers but defenders of American values, vital national interests, and human rights.
Something unprecedented happened last month. A National Security Advisor, Ambassador John R. Bolton, was forced out by a cabal of TV commentators and foes of Bolton and President Donald Trump. Perhaps for the first time, the departing NSA then publicly repudiated the president for his foreign policies. Prominent American attorney Alan Dershowitz described Bolton’s purge as a ”national catastrophe.”
Bolton’s purge has serious national security implications for the future of the US. Kudos to him for sacrificing his job if he felt the president was marching in the wrong direction. Bolton’s pain may well have been caused by his no longer being able to endure Trump’s “Obama moments.”
Strategic patience vs. strategic savvy
“Obama moments” involved “leading from behind” in what was essentially an absence of strategy. His policies “produced only failed states, Islamist-fed chaos, growing terrorist attacks in Europe, and catastrophic debt.” To that list, add a lack of resolve and a tendency to make imperfect compromises and concessions to foreign foes. Obama’s aides coined the phrase “strategic patience” to describe this doctrine.
By contrast, at the start of 2017, under the guidance of Defense Secretary James Mattis and NSA H.R. McMaster, President Trump started his term with several “bangs.”
First, he punished Syrian dictator Bashar Assad with a successful attack on a Syrian airfield for his presumed use of chemical warfare on his own civilians. This assault by Trump had tremendous significance. Perhaps the most memorable “Obama moment” was Obama’s 2013 back-pedaling from his own red line against chemical warfare. He called back destroyers headed for Syria’s shores and instead made a deal with Vladimir Putin to remove all chemical weapons from Syria.
After the aerial assault, Trump dropped a MOAB (Massive Ordinance Air Blast, or “Mother of All Bombs”) on the Taliban in Afghanistan. This decisive move was followed by the dramatic use near North Korea’s coast of a large armada of naval ships, coupled with moves against the North Korean dictator by the US Army and Air Force as well as Trump’s own rhetorical pressure.
A new captain was steering the ship of state, and his team did not put off problems in the manner of previous US administrations. The new team met problems head-on, sending a clear message on the need to stop a maniacal North Korean leader from further developing his nuclear weapons and delivery systems which, as in Guam, were already capable of reaching American shores.
Signaling the end of “strategic patience,” these moves seemed to debut an emerging Trump doctrine that could be dubbed “strategic savvy” – clever diplomacy, resolve, courage, and the judicious use of economic instruments as well as military force. Bolton, then a TV commentator and Chairman of the Gatestone Institute, a role he has since resumed, was possibly impressed by the president’s “pro-American”-ness, as indicated in an interview published in March 2019:
I would describe myself as pro-American. The greatest hope for freedom for mankind in history is the United States, and therefore protecting American national interests is the single best strategy for the world.
Bolton added that America has slowly constrained its range of action through foolhardy entanglements with international institutions such as the UN and naive bilateral agreements that promised too much to America’s enemies in exchange for too little.
The reason for Bolton’s September 2019 falling-out with the president seems to have been his growing objection to Trump’s gradual return to the unworkable Obama policies of strategic patience and retreat.
Trump’s Obama moments in Syria
In some areas of foreign policy, such as strong support for America’s ally Israel, Trump and Bolton agreed, as they did on arming Ukraine with Javelin missiles and keeping Iran at bay.
In Syria, however, Trump, like Obama before him, seems to have failed to grasp that when the US withdraws, its enemies advance and fill the vacuum. Secretary of Defense Mattis resigned apparently in objection to this retreat. Bolton would do the same months later, evidently over the president’s invitation to the Taliban to come to Camp David while excluding the US-allied Afghan government –on the week of the commemoration of the 9/11 attacks on the US. Like Mattis, Bolton sacrificed his job because of foreseeable negative consequences to US national interests.
America’s Kurdish allies have now been left by Trump to be slaughtered by Turkey. The US troop withdrawal also has a detrimental impact on Ukraine, as it, along with other countries, is negatively reassessing US reliability.
At the time of the withdrawal, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what appeared to have been a feint in the direction of the Ukrainian port city of Mariupol, as he did once before in 2015. His real objective seems to have been a new and bloody joint attack together with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps against rebels in the Syrian province of Idlib. The Russo-Syrian offensive appears to have intensified after it became clear that Trump’s response to the new carnage was not going to exceed an angry tweet.
North Korea: Back to strategic patience
After demonstrating strategic savvy with Kim Jong-un in 2017-18, Trump reverted to strategic patience. After the show of strength came the summits.
Trump seems to have believed he could talk Kim into cooperation as though he were a real estate client. Thus, he praised the bloody, merciless, Stalin-like Kim as having “a great personality,” rejoiced at the “good chemistry” between them, and uttered other unpresidential comments that were likely embarrassing to Bolton.
As Bolton warned, “Under current circumstances, he [Kim] will never give up the nuclear weapons voluntarily.”
North Korean officials have made it a longstanding practice to wine, dine, entertain, and hoodwink American negotiators as they build their nuclear arsenal. Under President George W. Bush, for example, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was so eager to have an agreement with the present dictator’s father that she engaged in what then-VP Dick Cheney called “concession after concession.” In a particularly desperate move, Rice even took North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
Trump is following a similar playbook. Over Bolton’s objections, he agreed to Pyongyang’s major demand – the cancellation of US-South Korean military exercises, with no North Korean reciprocity.
Turning point in Iran
A major turning point came when the Iranians attacked allied shipping in the Persian Gulf and shot down a US drone. Trump’s decision not to respond militarily – and his pulling back of US planes that were ready to bomb targets in Iran – reminds one of the fecklessness of Obama. His failure to retaliate against either the attacks on allied shipping or the Iranian strike on a Saudi oil-producing enterprise can only encourage future Iranian military actions against allied assets in the Persian Gulf.
Trump seems to be signaling that he thinks all differences can be resolved through negotiations. However, all US presidents since Nixon would likely have punished Iran for using military force – with perhaps the lone exception of Obama.
Trump would like to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Iran’s leaders, but – like the North Koreans – they will not stop their bomb-making. Period. So keep the sanctions, let the regime crumble, and use force if and when necessary. One of Trump’s greatest achievements was when he scrapped the disastrous, unsigned “Nuclear Deal” with Iran (the JCPOA), which actually paved the way for Iran to have as many legitimate nuclear weapons as it liked.
A troika of tyranny: Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua
Bolton has dubbed Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua a “troika of tyranny” in the US’s strategic backyard. Venezuela, once a wealthy OPEC country flush with oil, has devolved in 20 or so years into a failed state whose people live under unbearable conditions of starvation and want – a sinkhole of drugs, crime, and Hezbollah terrorists.
Vladimir Putin, with the help of Cuba, has flouted America’s Monroe Doctrine by giving military aid to Venezuela’s “socialist” regime and propping up the regime of its illegitimate president, Nicolás Maduro. But not even the arrival of Russian and Chinese “advisers” and the delivery of military aid to the country appears to have moved Trump. Significant action to oust Maduro has yet to occur. Tweets and empty threats have not worked, unsurprisingly.
Trump’s “Obama moment” emboldened Erdoğan
The crescendo of the Russian-Syrian offensive in the summer of 2019 can now be seen in the tens of thousands of Syrian civilians fleeing their country and trying to reach Europe through Turkey. The new Syrian exodus is providing Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan with an excuse to issue repeated threats that he will flood Europe with 3.6 million refugees from Turkish camps.
Trump is going to have to deal with the challenge Erdoğan is presenting to the US. Erdoğan is no longer America’s strategic ally, as he made clear when he chose to purchase Russian weaponry incompatible with the requirements of NATO, to which he is theoretically committed.
Learn from Reagan
President Trump would do well to follow the recommendations of military and foreign policy experts who know history, strategy, and geopolitics. He is displaying an unfortunate course correction with policies reminiscent of the worst decisions of the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations.
Above all, Trump would be well advised to work toward reconciliation and the building of a productive relationship with the emerging Bolton wing of the GOP.
Late in Ronald Reagan’s 1983-84 election campaign, when he was besieged by Democrats calling him a warmonger, he refused to project the image of a president seeking peace at any price. He invaded the island of Grenada, which had just deposed a brutal Leninist regime in a bloody coup.
The American people do not necessarily elect candidates exclusively engaged in the search for peace. Bolton is correct: Americans support leaders who are not appeasers but defenders of American values, vital national interests, and human rights – particularly in the country’s own backyard. It is not too late for President Trump. He needs to wake up.
2a)The Battle of Baghdadi
A victory, to be sure, but Islamism goes marching on
The elimination of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is a battle won. But it is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the end of the “endless war.” Islamism, in all its fury and diversity, goes marching on.
Five years ago, Mr. Baghdadi was proclaimed (by his followers) the caliph -- successor to the Prophet Mohammed. Even Osama bin Laden was never so audacious.
The Islamic State in Iraq, a splinter from al Qaeda, had been organized in 2006. Eight years later it re-branded as the Islamic State – replacement for the Ottoman caliphate which collapsed less than a century ago, an historical blink of the eye.
At its zenith, the Islamic State occupied a territory the size of Great Britain, established “provinces” in a dozen other countries, ordered up terrorist attacks in Europe, and attracted volunteers from around the world.
Some young Muslim men came from impoverished lands where opportunities for meaningful employment and marriageable women were scarce. Others came from America and Europe, drawn to what they imagined would be an exciting lifestyle: wielding AK-47s, zipping around in the fighting vehicles known as “technicals,” slave-raiding, and occasionally slitting the throats of infidels and apostates.
Still others, men and women alike, regarded themselves as pious pioneers. They were eager to contribute to what they saw as the restoration of the power and glory that had been stolen from the global Islamic community by the forces of unbelief and their wayward Muslim allies.
The death of Mr. Baghdadi deals a devastating blow to the Islamic State. One obvious reason: His skills and stature will be difficult to replace. One not-so-obvious reason: In the theology to which Mr. Baghdadi subscribed, it is Allah who decides the outcome of battles and wars. That the caliph -- not just a soldier seeking martyrdom – could be taken down by Delta Force operators and Army Rangers suggests to the faithful that his mission lacked divine endorsement.
Still, the Islamic State will attempt to reinvent itself. Military strategist David J. Kilcullen warned this week that it “may prove even harder to defeat in its next incarnation.”
It always surprises me how many government officials, academics and journalists, after all these years, remain confused about Islamists – who they are, what they believe, why they fight.
That was vividly illustrated by the headlines that appeared online Sunday morning over Jody Warwick’s otherwise informative Washington Post obituary of Mr. Baghdadi. The first read: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,’ dies at 48.”
Some Post editors apparently considered that insufficiently respectful of the deceased. The next version read: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”
As “absurdly deferential as this headline is” noted M. Zuhdi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, “it confirms what Islamists – including those appearing in the pages of the Washington Post – strenuously deny: that Mr. Baghdadi was actually a respected ‘scholar’ of the global Islamist establishment.”
Post copy editors gave it another try: “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, extremist leader of Islamic State, dies at 48.” That’s better, though a casual reader might assume he had slipped in the bathtub rather than been chased into a dead-end tunnel by American commandos.
Two questions strike me as worth further consideration. How odd it is to think of Mr. Baghdadi as “austere”? True, in his youth, he was offended “at the sight of men and women dancing in the same room,” as Mr. Warwick duly reports. But when he assumed the mantle of caliph, he “kept a number of personal sex slaves” including Yazidi women, and Kayla Mueller, an American hostage who eventually died in captivity.
As for Mr. Baghdadi’s Islamic scholarship, he had degrees from the University of Baghdad and the Saddam University for Islamic Studies to prove it. How well do you think a non-Muslim arguing that “Islam is a religion of peace” would have fared in a debate against him?
That said, I disagree with those on the far right who argue – as Mr. Baghdadi would have – that less belligerent readings of Islam should be dismissed as inauthentic and even heretical.
Which brings me to a final point that goes against the conventional grain: The ideology which Mr. Baghdadi espoused and the goals for which he fought do not significantly differ from those of al Qaeda, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
True, Muslim Brothers prefer a tie and jacket to a turban and dishdasha. True, too, Iranian followers of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini may be well-educated, cultured, fluent in the language of diplomacy, and comfortable in the company of (friendly and compliant) unbelievers. Also true: The strategies these factions employ are not identical.
However, all believe in the imperative of Islamic supremacy, envisioning a world ruled by and for Muslims, one in which infidels are at least relegated to an inferior status. All believe in “Death to America!” And all are prepared to wage an “endless war” if that’s what it takes to achieve their objectives.
As Mr. Baghdadi’s followers mourn, what may give them hope is the war-weariness and isolationism rising on both the right and left in America.
President Trump deserves credit for eliminating the leader of the Islamic State. But I hope he now realizes that had he withdrawn all American forces from Syria months ago, cutting off the American partnership with the Kurds -- who supplied critical intelligence on Mr. Baghdadi’s whereabouts -- this mission could not have been accomplished.
Awful as the prospect of endless war may be, conceiving a worse alternative should not require much stretching of the imagination.
Clifford D. May is founder and president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) and a columnist for the Washington Times.
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3)
How the Senate Should Handle Impeachment
When Senate Republicans drafted a resolution condemning the House for hearing witness testimony behind closed doors while excluding Republicans in violation of the President’s Due Process rights, beyond the scrutiny of cross examination and the rules of evidence, and then demanded the House conduct a formal vote and provide Due Process protections as well as minority participation, cheers rang out among rank and file Republicans: Senate Republicans finally threw away their tiddlywinks and actually stepped things up by bringing a knife to the Democrats’ gun fight! Not unsurprisingly, the positive yields from punching back versus simply taking it have been immediate with Speaker Nancy Pelosi feeling so backed into a corner that she has been forced to formalize the impeachment process in her own resolution, set to be voted on this week. All this in a matter of hours.
But a knife at a gun fight won’t cut it. It’s time for Senate Republicans to take this one step further and launch a pre-emptive strike that will nuke anything the House does. This is, after all, political war and we are fighting for our very survival.
The Constitution is very clear. “The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments.” Any such trial shall be under “Oath and Affirmation.” If it involves the President, “the Chief Justice shall preside” and conviction requires 2/3 of the members present. That’s about it. The Constitution and existing law have precious little to say about the actual Senate trial, if and how it should take place.
The Senate is a check on the People’s House run amok -- quite literally a last stand against the barbarian mobs frothing at the gate. What we are witnessing today with the Democrats intent on crafting from whole cloth some kind of tenuous basis for Trump’s impeachment, is just that. And so Senate Republicans have to go on offense. They have to be keen, strategic, and creative. Think of it as our D-Day.
The Senate clearly has jurisdiction to conduct a trial and remove the President, but is by no means constitutionally mandated, or even obligated, to conduct a trial. Like any court, the Senate has broad discretion in deciding whether or not to hear a case, and courts have a multitude of reasons to dismiss a case -- among others, a failure to state a claim, no facts at issue, frivolous claims, and on and on.The Senate should change its rules or enact new rules establishing that it will summarily dismiss any impeachment from the House and not hold a trial, when that impeachment is based on any of the following: partisan politics (this can be proven since impeachment has been their clarion call since Election Night 2016); conduct that falls squarely within the executive’s constitutionally-enumerated powers (among others, the executive’s ability to conduct foreign and national security policy, to protect the homeland, and to fully execute the laws of the United States, including investigating and prosecuting corruption carried out by citizens); hearsay evidence and any other evidence that would be inadmissible under the Federal Rules of Evidence; information protected by executive privilege or that is classified; evidence that has been obtained in violation of the accused’s constitutional guarantees or any other laws; or evidence that was illegally obtained.
The Constitution states that the President shall be “removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That requires that a trial take place, but if the Senate determines, in accordance with Senate rules, that there are no grounds for a trial, it’s hard to see a reason why the Senate cannot “throw out” the impeachment. Gutsy? You bet. Likely to rile up the Dems? Don’t care. Effective? Damn right. Changing existing senate rules or enacting new ones might require deploying Harry Reid’s 2013 nuclear option which allows the Senate to close debate with a simple majority (51 votes) versus 60, or the 67 votes required to amend a Senate rule.
Republicans don’t have 60 votes but can easily meet the 51-vote threshold as long as they employ Nancy Pelosi-style tactics to muscle every Republican senator to vote with the pack. They will have to pressure Republicans who threaten to stray with losing committee appointments or chairmanships they might have or want. They must be made to understand that any legislation they might propose will fall on deaf ears and that the NRSC will withhold funding for their re-election bids and support primary challenges instead. If some pansy like Romney or Collins insists on voting his or her conscience, they should be pressed by every other Republican to, at the very least, not show up on vote day (remember: the Constitution requires 2/3 of the members present).
Sure. The Dems and the press will blow up, but the fact is, we have Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi to thank for paving the way, including the broad discretion to act: Pelosi has said she can do what she wants because the Constitution doesn’t speak to any details the House must follow regarding impeachment. The same can be said with respect to the Senate regarding trial and removal.
If Republicans remain reluctant to act because they fear how the liberal public, the Dems, or the media will respond, then they really aren’t living in reality. We’ve already lost the public perception game. We don’t have the media, Hollywood, or the educational system in our court. We don’t have much left as Republicans. Donald Trump and his un yielding devotion to punching back on our behalf is our last best hope. When he goes -- whether through removal due to impeachment or the 2020 election -- the GOP is dead. It could be decades before conservatives have a viable party and by then, the damage will be catastrophic.
For once, before it’s too late, let’s outsmart the smarty pants on the left.
3a) Anatomy of 2020: Weighing Issues, Candidates, and the State of Our Union
Impeachment, and then what?
In the 20th century, no Congress brought impeachment proceedings against a first-term president facing a reelection. Both the Nixon and Clinton efforts were aimed at reelected presidents, perhaps on the theory that there was supposedly no other means of bringing them to account once they had been elected twice.
In contrast, Trump faces reelection in about a year. The prevailing mood may soon be just to let the voters adjudicate his purported sins and for a year allow the Congress to get back to — or begin — governing.
The makeup of the Senate matters. Nixon resigned before House impeachment because he feared that, if he were impeached, there might be enough Republican senators to give the Democratic majority a possible two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict him, given that the media hated his guts and the economy was souring and draining public support.
Bill Clinton knew that impeachment, facts aside, did not matter much, because the Republican Senate majority was never going to find the necessary votes to convict him, the media was on his side, and the economy was still robust.
In Trump’s case, there is little likelihood that a Republican Senate majority will lose control of its membership to render a two-thirds majority guilty vote. The economy is strong, and impeachment will become unpopular when the public knows that it will not, and cannot, remove a president. The Democrats are more likely seeking a symbolic 51 percent conviction vote, and a year of “the walls are closing in” anti-Trump chant in the press.
Polls matter. When the media and Democrats started impeachment stories and investigations, Nixon’s favorability was near 70 percent, after his landslide reelection and second inaugural. After twelve months of Watergate, he ended 1973 at about 30 percent approval. When he left office in August 1973 before impeachment, his approval was at about 24 percent.
Clinton, in contrast, enjoyed about 70 percent favorability when impeachment started and he went down only about 10 points — before rebounding and leaving office impeached but quite popular at 65 percent approval. The therapeutic Clinton lived in a pre-Internet age, and “I feel your pain” still resonated.
Three years’ worth of talk of Trump impeachment waxes and wanes.
His polls accordingly slide to the low forties when “bombshells” and “turning point” frenzies flood the media, and then they inch back up to the middle forties when the bombast passes.
At this point in his presidency, Bill Clinton was gradually climbing back to near 50 percent approval; Barack Obama was right where Trump is now, at about 42-43 percent. It is hard to know whether impeachment helped or hurt Clinton because the economy was booming, he was seen as bipartisan, and the debt was finally declining. Impeachment was either irrelevant to his status or seen as a threat to it. Either way, Clinton was popular right before and after impeachment.
In Trump’s case, it may be that he ends up at about 44 percent favorability after the impeachment circus either fades or is realized, about where he was when the whistleblower hysteria commenced.
Both prior impeachment efforts were transparent, not just because key congressmen such as Peter Rodino and Newt Gingrich followed protocols, but also because both impeachments were built on damning cases from the work of special counsels. They could afford, then, to be transparent and allow the minority to make its case in the manner of most Judicial Committee hearings. In Trump’s case, however, a special-counsel investigation of 22 months’ duration has already cleared the president and not recommended a criminal referral, and there is no legal case for impeachment.
Impeachment Now . . .
For all the bluster, it is hard to see how the Democrats enjoy a winning hand. The catalyst for this version of the latest episode of the serial coup was the late, great “whistleblower” complaint. But by any definition, the anonymous leaker is by no means a whistleblower. He did not go first to the IG, but to Adam Schiff’s staff, a fact Schiff abjectly lied about. The rules prohibiting hearsay complaints were recently and mysteriously changed to facilitate the complaints like those of the current leaker — hearsay that a short time ago would not have been permissible.
The melodrama allegations of quid pro quo deal-making with the Ukrainian president were belied by Trump’s own release of the transcript of his call. The details showed bluster, not high crimes and misdemeanors, and it did not even match the whistleblower’s second- and third-hand versions of the call — a fact emphasized by Schiff’s bizarre made-up rendition, during a congressional hearing, of the transcript, which Schiff branded a “parody.” That the once coveted whistleblower will likely fade back into the bureaucratic abyss — without Democrats wanting him to be seen, heard, or cross-examined — is a testament to just how ridiculous is the latest iteration of impeaching Trump.
The word “Ukraine” now conjures up Joe and Hunter Biden as much as Trump. So its evocation serves as a boomerang, in either hurting or eventually taking out the stubborn Democratic front-runner.
Nancy Pelosi still has not called a vote for either a former inquiry or formal impeachment. She apparently wishes to allow Adam Schiff’s Intelligence Committee — the absurd place to start an impeachment “hearing” — to run wild behind secrecy, redactions, and refusals to call in minority witnesses and allow cross-examinations, in hopes that the carnival drives down Trump’s numbers before the public puts a stop to the freak show. Again, why not — given that the whistleblower could never sustain questions about his prior relationships with Joe Biden, Schiff, and Schiff’s staff, and about liberal lawyers prepping his complaint, and the actual leaking sources of his allegation?
The impeachment modus operandi for a while longer is by now old hat: Schiff calls in a supposed friendly witness and leaks the opening statement to the media, the latter declare it proof of Trump’s guilt, and then he keeps under wraps incriminating cross-examination questioning, if it even occurs, of the witness. The public already knows that such procedures are foreign to the American experience and violate the spirit of the Constitution — the resort of a Star Chamber inquisitor afraid he has no real case and that he’ll look stupid publicly pursuing such a chimera.
Giving Schiff such power was like arming an arsonist with a fuel tanker. Schiff has been serially caught in a number of outright lies and double-dealing. More will follow, because he is ignorant and arrogant — and oblivious to both. “Impeachment” is now a construct to divert from the Trump record, goad Trump into Twitter-frenzies, and drive down his polls to the high thirties — necessary for a serious impeachment bid.
If impeachment does not occur by Christmas, and it may well not, then the news cycle will preempt coverage of Schiff’s fading melodrama, especially if there are referrals for, or actual, indictments of, Obama-era intelligence officials. The extremism voiced on the Democratic stage will not help impeachment. The candidates themselves may come to resent the diversion of media coverage away from their candidacies and chafe if there is no compelling evidence for the impeachment stampede. In any case, far from the Horowitz, Barr, and Durham investigations being diversions from impeachment, the latest round of impeachment frenzy was likely designed to divert from the final unfolding of the greatest political scandal of the last half-century: the Obama-era intelligence agencies’ efforts to derail a campaign and then subvert a presidency.
The Issues
None of the major issues aired on the democratic debates poll at 51 percent or above — not the Green New Deal, reparations, the abolishment of ICE, open borders, Medicare for all, free tuition and cancellation of student debt, a wealth tax, legal infanticide and late-term abortions, and on and on.
Rather than introduce any of these agendas in Congress, Democratic House and Senate members obsess over Trump. Democrats may scream “Now Trump has a record,” and he certainly does. But it is mainly characterized by near-record-low unemployment, massive new gas and oil production, strong growth, and a vibrant stock market.
Trump pushed, as he promised, his four signature agendas, designed to separate him from all 16 of the 2016 primary candidates — being tough on China, unfair trade, and open borders; and having fewer optional overseas military interventions — often against congressional and court opposition.
All caused hysterias, but the public more or less supports calling Beijing to account, securing borders, insisting on reciprocal and symmetrical trade, and it opposes intervening again in the Middle East, given past displeasure with Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, and Syria, and de facto U.S. independence from Middle East oil.
The Candidates
The Democratic field resembles that of 2003 as it was entering Bush’s reelection year of 2004, when unhinged Howard Dean was the front-runner, and blow-dried phony John Edwards seemed the only alternative — until old warhorse John Kerry entered to reassure Democratic donors that they would have a choice between a quasi-socialist and a helium-filled suit. The tripartite choice now is between a 78-year old who is an avowed but increasingly frail socialist; a 70-year-old who has in the past fabricated her identity and is running as a socialist in all but name; and a 76-year-old white guy who has trouble stringing together simple sentences and thoughts, and who failed in two earlier presidential bids due to plagiarism, lies about his bio, and racially insensitive remarks.
How weird to watch a triad of private-jet-flying, SUV-driven, privileged multimillionaire old white people railing against multimillionaires, fossil fuels, and white privilege.
There are no moderate fringe candidates pulling any of them to the center, but rather incompetent, off-putting hard leftists such as the hyperactive Beto O’Rourke, the self-righteous Pete Buttigieg, the whiny Kamala Harris, the incoherent Cory Booker, and a host of other forgettables. If Warren or Sanders is nominated, neither will raise much money — given that Wall Street, Corporate America, and Silicon Valley do not equate their Democratic loyalties with a suicide pact.
If Biden survives, he will raise a great deal of cash, and his future depends on how well he remembers where he is, whom he is surrounded by, and what he is supposed to say.
The State of the Union
No one knows what the state of the union will be in November 2020.
If unemployment stays near the near-record peacetime low of 3.5 percent, the economy still chugs along at 2 to 3 percent growth, and there is a decrease in illegal border crossings and staged caravan melodramas, Trump will be in a good position against any Democratic candidate to repeat his 2016 performance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. A Warren or Sanders McGovern- or Mondale-like candidacy would make his reelection much more likely.
Scandal, Wars, and Depression
What sinks presidencies, either preventing reelection or de facto ending them in stasis and crises are unpopular wars (Vietnam, Iraq), perceived recessions (1980, 1992), or major scandals (Watergate).
Trump may cause furor by pulling back tripwire troops in Syria, but the move will probably continue to poll at over 50 percent with the public. He is unlikely to insert forces in optional engagements. A tit-for-tat missile or bombing response to an Iranian or ISIS attack would likely win approval.
Impeachments and scandals, as the case of Bill Clinton reminds us, are two different things. So far, Donald Trump is the most transparent, investigated, and cross-examined president in history.
The result is not much dirt, but a lot of now-predictable and boring duds — the voting machines, impeachment 1.0, the emoluments clause, Stormy, Michael Avenatti, Michael Cohen, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein Keystone Kops coup, Robert Mueller’s investigation, taxes, and now Ukraine.
The public may find the latest blood sport amusing at first and support an inquiry. But as it drags on and Schiff burns up the Constitution, they will tire and prefer to weigh in during the election — when they will likely opt for a continued resurgent U.S. and a strong economy over socialism and finger-wagging at a sinful America.
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