RUTHFULLY YOURS

A week after Josh Meyer’s Politico expose,“The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off the Hook,” former Obama officials are still berating Meyer for his 13,000-word article detailing how the Obama administration killed a nearly decade-long DEA effort to stem a global Hezbollah cocaine-smuggling-and-organized-crime ring to help secure its nuclear deal with Iran. “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” former Defense Department analyst David Asher explained in the article. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

Asher helped establish and oversee the project, codenamed Cassandra, that looked into Hezbollah’s wide-range of illicit activities across the globe, including weapons procurement, drug trafficking, and money laundering. Senior Obama officials, according to Asher, ignored the legal and financial instruments that he and others had provided to target a terrorist organization with American blood on its hands and was still plotting against the United States.

In response, a Twitter mob of mid-level bureaucrats and former intelligence officers orchestrated in the usual fashion attacked Asher in tandem with the media echo chamber used to sell the Iran Deal, with former political operatives from the Obama White House supplying the usual talking points to their hatchet-men. Meyer’s “on the record sources have undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” tweeted former Obama speechwriter Tommy Vietor, who has remade himself as a podcast host. Meyer’s “entire piece,” tweeted Obama lieutenant and former CIA officer Ned Price, “is based on pure speculation by these ‘1 or 2 sources’ w undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias.”

The catchphrase, “undisclosed anti-Iran deal bias,” is an extended replay version of the catchy slogans Team Obama used to market the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Opponents and critics of the nuclear deal were “warmongers” beholden to “donors” with “agendas” whose concerns were shaped by their loyalties not to America but rather to the Jewish state. Now, the echo chamber insisted, Meyer’s sources aren’t to be trusted because they were against the Iran deal, or have associated with think tanks that opposed the Iran Deal—which means that they are secret neocon slaves of Israel, of course.

Hillary Clinton was supposed to break the glass ceiling, which she said has kept a woman from becoming president, but the Heritage Foundation, a conservative public policy think tank based in Washington, D.C., has actually done it.

Their new president is Kay Coles James, a female, an African-American and a conservative, who fits no one’s mold. While her background is formidable — former director of the Office of Personnel Management, Virginia secretary of Health and Human Resources, and dean of Regent University’s School of Government among other accomplishments — her vision is even more compelling.

Perhaps that is because she agrees with me on the issue of liberating poor and minority children from failing public schools and building a foundation that will give them a better future.

In a telephone interview, James tells me school choice for these kids is one of her “top priorities.” The left has tried and failed to improve the lives of African-Americans through government programs. As Donald Trump said during the 2016 presidential campaign, why not try a different approach? President Trump has also placed welfare reform as a top priority in 2018. The last time it was tried, under Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, it succeeded. As president of Heritage, James can give Trump the intellectual and factual resources to make further reforms and achieve this and other goals.

Winning an argument is preferable to destroying one’s opponent. It can also produce better results.

A return to the intellectual heft of William F. Buckley Jr. and outgoing Heritage president Edwin Feulner is much needed in a conservative movement that has been hijacked by nastiness and anger. Winning an argument is preferable to destroying one’s opponent. It can also produce better results. James’ inaugural address” hit just the right tone: “Heritage has always promoted economic growth and opportunity — and why it has never wavered in opposing those who would burden our freedoms and future with the suffocating force of mindless regulations and punitive taxes.”

Who opposes growth and opportunity? The debate has been over how to get there. History shows which ideas worked and which failed.

“Success in politics is about issues, ideas and the vision we have for our country in the world,” James said. George H.W. Bush dismissed “the vision thing,” but “Without a vision the people perish.” (Proverbs 29:18)

America has always enjoyed two antithetical traditions in its political and military heroes.

The preferred style is the reticent, sober, and competent executive planner as president or general, from Herbert Hoover to Gerald Ford to Jimmy Carter.

George Marshall remains the epitome of understated and quiet competence.

The alternate and more controversial sorts are the loud, often reckless, and profane pile drivers. Think Andrew Jackson of Teddy Roosevelt. Both types have been appreciated, and at given times and in particular landscapes both profiles have proven uniquely invaluable.

Grant/Sherman
Both Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman were military geniuses. Grant was quiet and reflective — at least in his public persona, which gave scant hint that he struggled with alcohol and often displayed poor judgement about those who surrounded him.

Sherman was loud. He was often petty, and certainly ready in a heartbeat to engage in frequent feuds, many of them cul de sacs and counter-productive.

Sherman threatened to imprison or even hang critical journalists and waged a bitter feud with the secretary of war, Edwin Stanton.

Too few, then or now, have appreciated that the uncouth Sherman, in fact, displayed both a prescient genius and an uncanny understanding of human nature. Whereas Grant could brilliantly envision how his armies might beat the enemy along a battle line or capture a key fortress or open a river, Sherman’s insight encompassed whole regions and theaters, in calibrating how both economics and sociology might mesh with military strategy to crush an entire people.

For all of Grant’s purported drinking and naïveté about the scoundrels around him, his outward professional bearing, his understated appearance of steadiness and discretion, enhanced his well-earned reputation for masterful control in times of crises.

The volatile and loquacious nature of Sherman, in contrast, often hid and diminished appreciation of his talents — in some ways greater than Grant’s. To the stranger, Grant would have seemed the less likely to have had too much to drink and smoked too many daily cigars, Sherman the more prone to all sorts of such addictions.

Truman/Eisenhower
Harry Truman talked too much. He swore. He drank. He played poker. He was petty to the point of stooping to spar with a music critic who dismissed his daughter’s solo performances. His profanity was an open secret, as well as his temper. His advisers constantly cautioned him to tone it down.

As a Missourian who had once gone bankrupt and recouped with a political career though the help of the corrupt Prendergast machine, Truman carried a chip on his shoulder throughout his political career on the East Coast.

In some sense, Truman was an accidental president — a workmanlike senator appointed as running mate in the 1944 reelection campaign to the sure fourth-termer FDR — out of justified fears that an ailing Roosevelt would soon die in office and his socialist vice president, Henry Wallace, would soon become wartime president.

“Give Them Hell” Harry’s fiery and often grating personality and infamous feud with General Douglas MacArthur helped to explain why he left office with the then-lowest presidential ratings in modern history. His Internal Revenue Bureau (the precursor of the IRS) was scandal-ridden, and many of his aides were buffoonish.

On December 13, former vice president, Joe Biden, appeared on CBS with the hosts of “This Morning” where he peddled his new book and showered his former boss with praise. During the course of the interview, he was asked about his relationship with Obama and responded with the following; “I’ve served with eight presidents and I’ve gotten to know four of them very well. I’ve never met any president that has more character, more integrity, and more backbone than this guy does.” Then he went completely off the rails when he absurdly added; “And eight years, not a hint — not a hint — of a scandal.”

What was perhaps even more outrageous than the statement itself was the fact that none of This Morning’s hosts challenged the veracity of that statement and allowed it to pass without a scintilla of scrutiny, exposing yet again an extreme bias existing within elements of the establishment media. In fact, the Obama administration was among the most corrupt and scandal-ridden in recent memory. Biden’s comment merits further examination so let’s buckle up and take a stroll down memory lane.

Solyndra Scandal – The Obama administration provided this failing solar company with a $535 million stimulus-funded loan, courtesy of the American taxpayer. Taxpayer money kept pouring in despite the fact that the Office of Management and Budget warned that Solyndra was not a profitable or viable company. But it gets worse. The family foundation of billionaire George Kaiser, an Obama fundraiser, was one of Solyndra’s main investors. Can you say quid pro quo?

Veterans Affairs Scandal – Over 40 veterans needlessly died while waiting to be seen by doctors at a Phoenix VA facility. Another 1,700 veterans were forced to wait for months before being seen by medical personnel. An audit of the VA confirmed that VA officials systematically altered records and appointment schedules in a deliberate and methodical VA scheme to manipulate data to meet fabricated goals.

Operation Chokepoint Scandal – The Obama DOJ utilized the power of big government to pressure banks to cease doing business with industries with which the administration had ideological differences. Gun manufacturers and gun stores were prime targets even though they had not violated any laws. Eventually, the FDIC admitted to misconduct, bowed to pressure and significantly curtailed the discriminatory regulations after affected businesses threatened legal action.

Gibson Guitar Scandal – Armed federal agents executed four search warrants on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., seizing guitars, electronic files and other inventory including wood that was purchased in India and Madagascar. The DOJ alleged that Gibson’s had violated an obscure law known as the Lacey Act which made it a crime to violate the environmental laws of another country. Gibson produced an affidavit from government officials in Madagascar stating that Gibson had violated none of that nation’s laws. Gibson also alleged that the DOJ was misinterpreting Indian law. Gibson’s CEO was a major donor to the GOP but his competitors, who purchased the same materials and were not GOP donors, were untouched by Obama’s DOJ. As part of a settlement to drop criminal charges, Gibson was required to pay a $250,000 fine and was required to donate $50,000 to an environmental group. Gibson was eventually able to retrieve its inventory from the clutches of the DOJ.

President Trump’s first year ended with the biggest tax reform since 1986, the most consequential of a list of achievements that have made a good start at rolling back Barack Obama’s runaway expansion of the Leviathan state. At the same time, the hysterical “resistance” of the Dems and progressives, abetted by Republican NeverTrumpers, continues its bizarre attacks on the president, feeding off his blunt twitter commentary and obsessing over his brash style rather than focusing on his notable actions.

As year two of the improbable Trump presidency begins, this conflict remains central to our political drama. But what does it portend for Trump’s program and the critical midterm elections?

Lost in the anti-Trump media frenzy has been, according to the White House, 81 significant rollbacks of the progressive assault on the Constitutional order. The most important was the appointment of originalist Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. That win, along with 12 Appeals Court appointments of similarly minded judges, will shape our government for decades, and survive any future swing back to the Dems. Tax reform will also likely survive, since the left almost never repeals tax cuts to the middle class. Cutting the regulations that metastasized under Obama has saved $8 billion so far, and encouraged the economy’s “animal spirits,” leading to three quarters of more than 3% growth in GDP, 1.7 million new jobs, a stock market up 28%, unemployment at its lowest since December 2000, and economic confidence at a 17-year high.

Throw in opening up more than a million acres to oil exploration and drilling, hastening Obamacare’s demise by eliminating the individual mandate, discarding the economically toxic Paris Climate Accords, reining in the job-killing EPA, getting serious about border enforcement, deporting thousands of illegal aliens, paring back our suicidal open-door immigration policies, and challenging political correctness almost daily, and Trump’s record on the domestic front points to a good start on growing the economy and getting the dead hand of big government out of the country’s business.

On foreign policy, Trump has begun to repair the damage to our international prestige wrought by Obama’s subjection of our country to the one-world, naïve internationalism favored by progressives, who want to diminish America’s global clout and reduce the U.S. to a “partner,” as Obama said in Cairo, “mindful of his own imperfections.” He increased sanctions on Iran and refused to recertify Obama’s disastrous agreement with the nuke-hungry mullahs; bombed a Syrian airfield and destroyed a fifth of Assad’s jet fighters; took the gloves off our military and ended ISIS’s “caliphate”; rolled back Obama’s cringing concessions to Cuba; put Russia on notice by recommitting to the Magnitsky Act and increasing sanctions on regime oligarchs; began work on strengthening military readiness and antimissile defence; gave a rousing defense of Western Civilization in Poland; visited world capitals to project America’s renewed confidence and willingness to defend its security and interests; unleashed U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley to scold and scorn the anti-American pygmy states infesting that “cockpit in the Tower of Babel,” to borrow Churchill’s phrase; and announced that the U.S recognizes Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and promised to move our embassy from Tel Aviv to Israel’s capital. Under Trump, America seems to be getting its international mojo back.