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Israel and U.S relationship a success. (See 1 below.)
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What's the status of Russia? (See 2 below.)
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The faces of the Democrat Party defines who and what they are and they are radical leftists.
Obama was successful in transforming them. Now The Democrat party , which, like their Republican counterparts, has always enjoyed a level of corruption, has become a threat to the office of future presidents. (See 3 and 3a below.)
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Out the door.
For two weeks no more.
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Dick
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1) The Israel-U.S. Model Has Been a Resounding
Success
By Victor Davis Hanson
Whether by accident or by deliberate osmosis, Israel and the U.S. have adopted similar solutions to their
existential problems.
Before 2002, during the various Palestinian intifadas, Israel suffered hundreds of deaths and thousands
of injuries from suicide bombers freely crossing from the West Bank and Gaza into Israel.
In response, Israel planned a vast border barrier. The international community was outraged. The Israeli
left called the idea nothing short of "apartheid."
However, after the completion of the 440-mile border barrier -- part concrete well, part wire fencing --
suicide bombings and terrorist incursions into Israel declined to almost nil.
The wall was not entirely responsible for enhanced Israeli security. But it freed up border manpower to
patrol more vigorously. The barrier also was integrated with electronic surveillance and tougher laws
against illegal immigration.
The wall also brought strategic and political clarity. Those who damned Israel but freely crossed its
borders sounded incoherent when they became furious that the barrier prevented access to the hated
Zionist entity.
The Trump administration is currently seeking funds to create new border walls and replace old, porous
fencing in order to stem illegal immigration on the southern border.
The strategy seems similar: The wall will free up manpower for better border policing. It likewise
provides a certain political clarity. The United States is often criticized by Mexico and other Latin
American countries. It is now being taken to task for the effort to make it more difficult to illegally
enter such a supposedly unwelcome and hostile landscape.
For years, Israel's great weakness was its dependence on imported energy, while its neighboring
enemies grew rich exporting oil and natural gas. Yet in the last decade, Israel has ramped up production
to take advantage of its vast natural gas reserves -- to the point that it is not just self-sufficient in fossil
fuels but soon will become a major exporter.
Now, Israel cannot be threatened economically by either Iran or various Persian Gulf monarchies. Its
economy is stronger than ever. Europeans suddenly are more accommodating, given that Israel may
well become a natural gas exporter to a fuel-hungry Europe.
Like Israel, but unlike Europe, the U.S. was eager to frack and horizontally drill to tap vast new fossil
fuel reserves. The change in U.S. strategic energy independence is similarly astounding.
America is now the largest producer of natural gas and oil in the world. Its output has increased world
supply, dropped prices and hurt America's oil-exporting enemies.
The relative power of Russia and Middle Eastern nations, such as Iran, over U.S. decision-making has
radically diminished -- along with the need to station huge numbers of American troops in the volatile
Middle East.
As in Israel, opponents either argued that more drilling would ruin the environment or that it would not
work. They seem to be wrong on both counts.
Israel's foreign policy could be called Jacksonian. Israel allies with friends, neutrals and former enemies
they share particular strategic goals.
In the topsy-turvy Middle East, Israel is now sometimes a strategic partner with formerly hostile regimes
in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies. They all share greater fears of theocratic
Iran and its terrorist appendages in Lebanon, Syria and Yemen.
Apparently, much of the Arab world is no longer as interested in the Palestinian desire to destroy Israel.
Many Palestinian groups are allied with a despised Iran, while many Arabs believe that Israel's strength
can sometimes be strategically useful.
Current American realism is similar. The U.S. is neither isolationist nor an interventionist nation-builder.
Its foreign-policy goals are to enhance its military, expand its already powerful economy, limit its
strategic exposure, and bank its resulting hard and soft power to use only as a deterrent force against
those who kill Americans or endanger U.S. interests.
Instead of cajoling allies to join us in expeditionary wars abroad, the U.S. increasingly appears reluctant
to intervene, especially in the Middle East. As a result, former critics are now becoming suppliants
requesting U.S. assistance.
As with Israel, the U.S. is less eager to apply political litmus tests to its occasional allies. It also seeks
to avoid quagmires where its overwhelming conventional firepower can be neutralized by terrorists and
urban guerrillas.
The promoters of these unconventional policies, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and U.S.
President Donald Trump, are both despised by their respective establishments and under constant threat
of removal by their livid political opponents.
Yet they both have transformed their respective countries. Their policies remind us that it is sometimes
preferable to be respected rather than just be liked -- and that when a nation is strong and does not beg
for help, it often finds more than it needs.
(C) 2020 TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His
latest book is The Savior Generals from BloomsburyBooks.
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2)
An Easy Puzzle
Winston Churchill famously described Russia as a “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an
enigma.” The New York Times recently alluded to that quip in a review of books that aim
to explain modern Russia to Western readers.
Observers had little trouble, however, interpreting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s
recent proposed constitutional changes and the subsequent resignations of his prime
minister and the rest of the government. The changes would help Putin stay in power
after he is supposed to leave the presidency in 2024, the Guardian wrote.
Under his plans, the 67-year-old Putin, who has led Russia as either president or prime
minister for two decades, will likely remain Russia’s top politician when a successor takes
the president’s office. Putin could become prime minister with stronger powers than
currently assigned to that office, or the leader of a beefed-up State Council.
The changes might make Putin look strong. They arguably are signs of his weakness,
however. For while Putin has been a masterful operator internationally, Russia is not
doing well.
The country’s stagnating economy – smaller than Italy’s – has dragged down Putin’s
popularity ratings, CNN reported. Street protests last year also reflected frustration with
the status quo. The Russian government, in turn, has cracked down on dissidents,
including artists whom the state might have celebrated in former years. Officials are
working overtime to encourage families to have more children as the birthrate declines,
the BBC added. Putin wanted Russian higher education to improve dramatically. Instead,
a massive plagiarism scandal suggests the Russian academy is subpar, reported the
Washington Post.
“Putin’s Russia is a declining state, camouflaged in external aggression to disguise its
internal fragility,” wrote Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Center for European
Policy Analysis, in an op-ed in the Hill.
In that environment, which included his underlings jockeying for power in the shakeup,
Putin appears to be safeguarding his legacy of shepherding Russia out of the chaotic
period that followed the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as saving his own skin.
“Interest groups are fighting to the death, the level of repression is high, and people are
putting each other in jail for long terms,” political scientist Ekaterina Schulmann told the
Financial Times. “This could transform into a coalition that might be hostile to him, or
the mere uncertainty could contribute to instability if it’s allowed to go on for too long.”
Mishustin is a placeholder, filling a job he likely couldn’t refuse but which, because it’s
temporary, might suit him just fine.
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3) The ‘Corrupt Purposes’
Impeachment
Why the House logic is a danger to all future Presidents.
The Editorial Board
As House managers make their impeachment case, many Americans will dismiss it all as a
partisan effort that hasn’t persuaded the country and will die in the Senate. They have a point. But
the precedents that Democrats are setting could live on, so forgive us if we explain how dangerous
the House’s impeachment logic is to future Presidents and the Constitution’s separation of powers.
Especially pernicious is the new House “corrupt purposes” standard for removing a President from
office. The House managers don’t assert that any specific action by President Trump was an abuse
of power or a violation of law. They don’t deny he can delay aid to a foreign country or ask a
foreign leader to investigate corruption. Presidents do that all the time. Instead they assert in their
first impeachment article that Mr. Trump is guilty of “abuse of power” because he committed
those acts for “corrupt purposes.”
As an aside here, we should repeat that a President doesn’t have to break a specific law to commit
an impeachable offense. Mr. Trump’s lawyers are wrong on this point. Presidents were accused
of breaking specific laws in America’s three previous impeachments. But under the Constitution
a President can commit “high crimes and misdemeanors” if he commits non-criminal acts that
exceed his executive authority or if he refuses to execute the law.
But this means committing specific acts that are impeachable in and of themselves. Examples
might be deploying U.S. troops against political opponents, or suspending habeas corpus without
Congressional assent. (Lincoln received a Congressional pass in wartime.)
House Democrats are going much further and declaring that Mr. Trump’s acts are impeachable
because he did them for “personal political benefit.” He isn’t accused of corruption per se. His
Ukraine interventions are said to be corrupt because he intended them to help him win re-election
this year. In other words, his actions were impeachable only because his motives were self-serving.
Think about this in the context of history and as a precedent. Every President has made foreign-
policy decisions that he thinks may help his re-election. That’s what President Obama did in 2012
when he asked Dmitry Medvedev to tell Vladimir Putin to ease up on missile defense until after
the election. Mitt Romney was criticizing Mr. Obama for being soft on Mr. Putin, and Mr. Obama
wanted a political favor from the dictator to help him win re-election.
Was Mr. Obama’s motive also corrupt and thus impeachable? We can guess what Mr. Romney
thought at the time, but he didn’t say Mr. Obama should be impeached. He tried to defeat him at
the ballot box.
As 21 Republican state attorneys general explained in an important letter to the Senate on
Wednesday, “It cannot be a legitimate basis to impeach a President for acting in a legal manner
that may also be politically advantageous. Such a standard would be cause for the impeachment
of virtually every President, past, present, and future.”
The AGs add that the “House’s corrupt motives theory is dangerous to democracy because it
encourages impeachment whenever the President exercises his constitutional authority in a way
that offends the opposing political party, which is predisposed to view his motives with skepticism
and motivated by its own motives to regain that very office.”
Some sages dismiss this argument as slippery-slope alarmism that won’t come to pass. Their
belief is that Mr. Trump is uniquely a threat to constitutional order and a future Congress wouldn’t
apply the same logic to a more conventional President. Others want to make impeachment more
routine as a check on presidential power.
This is wishful thinking. Once unleashed, the corrupt motives theory will become a temptation
whenever a President is disliked and down in the polls. The mere threat of common impeachment
will make Presidents much more beholden to Congress.
With this in mind, the Republican AGs advise the Senate to “explicitly reject” the House’s legal
theory. This might take the form of a Senate resolution at the time of acquittal. The crucial point is
to reject impeachment as a regular tool of partisan punishment, reserving it for genuine cases of
presidential abuse.
3a)
A Most Progressive Trump
Impeachment
The years-long Trump posse led by Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff isn’t just about a
telephone call to the president of Ukraine.
By Daniel Henninger
Between them, Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein have been doing politics for about 95 years.
Their instinct for survival is solid.
When the Congressional Progressive Caucus pushed last summer for impeaching Donald Trump,
Speaker Pelosi pushed back. She didn’t think it was a good idea. Then, bending to pressure from
her left—and there’s a thought to conjure with—she changed her mind, and the impeachment
slog began.
This month it fell to her longtime California colleague, Sen. Feinstein, to speak plainly about what
had become of the impeachment project. “The longer it goes on,” Mrs. Feinstein said, “the less
urgent it becomes.”
It’s still going, and one is hard put to identify anyone with a mote of enthusiasm for enduring this
Senate trial, other than the slice of the press who’ve become Trump pilot fish.
On Monday the Washington Post emailed this announcement to its subscribers: “Three years after
taking the oath of office, President Trump has made more than 16,200 false or misleading claims
—a milestone that would have been unthinkable when we first created the Fact Checker’s
database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement he has uttered.” The Post,
like some grim Sisyphus, says it is doing this because “readers demanded that we keep it going.”
In the annals of American journalism, it is indeed a milestone.
So what is going on here? I suppose it is possible that some congressional Democrats, such as the
fanatical Rep. Adam Schiff, think the Senate trial is about what Mr. Trump did with Ukraine and
“our constitutional order.”
But a political opposition can’t put a country through multiple congressional and media inquiries
alleging Trump campaign collusion with Russia alongside Robert Mueller’s massive investigation
into these charges, spend more months pushing obstruction-of-justice accusations, and now after
three years of this political posse ask any serious person to believe the impeachment is only about
Mr. Trump’s Biden-related conversations with the Ukrainian president or Mick Mulvaney’s
refusal to testify.
This is an appropriate moment to start making distinctions among Democrats.
The Democratic Party is now defined by the faces it puts in front of us—Mrs. Pelosi, Mr. Schiff,
Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jerry Nadler, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
That is a party of the left. In reality, the party’s membership—in the House and Senate—is more
representative of the political diversity inside the 50 states. We aren’t all California and New York
yet.
But always maneuvering beneath the surface of any political event are factions, on the right and
left, struggling daily for control of their party and ultimately the presidency—and with it the
power, they think, to impose their beliefs on the American people.
After Mrs. Clinton lost in 2016, taking with her the last embers of Democratic centrism dating
back to Bill’s presidency in the 1990s, the left swept into control of the party with the new energy
of Mr. Sanders’s insurgency.
The implications of this shift are before us. Even the centralizing policies of the Obama
presidency were suddenly insufficient, displaced by Medicare for All, the Green New Deal and
abstruse cultural litmus tests of social “wokeness.”
As relevant to understanding the meaning of the Trump impeachment are the Democratic left’s
ideas about the design and conduct of the established political system.
They describe Donald Trump as a threat to “our democracy.” The House managers’ brief says the
current president is jeopardizing “our democracy.” This isn’t just rhetoric. The “our” word is
loaded with meaning.
On the left, the phrase “our democracy” is synonymous with their mystical notion of something
called the “will of the people.” In this political model, popular in South America, when something
—an opponent or idea—gets in the way of the will of the people, the solution is to suppress,
replace or ban it. Competing with it is considered a waste of time.
We read and hear constantly about Mr. Trump’s “violations.” The real violation was winning
, Michigan and Wisconsin. That tipped the electoral vote against the popular vote. The left’s
solution: Let the popular vote rule.
“Get rid of the Electoral College” is the headline on one of Elizabeth Warren’s plans. “Your power
in our democracy,” says Ms. Warren, “shouldn’t be determined by where you live.”
After winning, Mr. Trump was able to appoint two conservative Supreme Court justices. The
left’s answer: Increase the number of justices. In line with recent pack-the-court arguments by
progressive legal analysts, Pete Buttigieg would expand the court’s membership to 15. Ms.
Warren is “open” to the idea.
When Mrs. Pelosi, Mr. Schiff and the other House impeachment managers invoke the Founding
Fathers, these are crocodile tears for the existing constitutional order. The progressive punch list
the past three years stands: Abolish the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, remove a
presidential impediment from office. That’s their democracy.
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