RUTHFULLY YOURS

It’s conventional wisdom that Donald Trump is a very different sort of Republican than Ronald Reagan, but in his speech to Congress Tuesday the 45th President made clear that he intends to walk in the 40th President’s footsteps in one crucial respect. That’s his call for a dramatic increase in defense spending—as necessary today as it was when the Gipper took office 36 years ago.

This year’s Pentagon budget is $619 billion, of which $68 billion is for “overseas contingencies” in Iraq and elsewhere. That sounds like a big number—until you consider the broader trends, budgetary and strategic. Defense spending reached a post-9/11 peak of $757 billion in 2010, but then began to come down sharply as part of Barack Obama’s imaginary peace dividend following his withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq.

The first big chop, in 2011, involved a 10-year, $487 billion cut that capped successful weapons programs such as the F-22 fighter on the short-sighted assumption that American pilots were unlikely to get into dogfights with their Russian or Chinese counterparts. Such acquisitions cuts are doubly wasteful, since they squander the fruits of billions in research and development costs while postponing the replacement of legacy aircraft that become increasingly expensive to fly and maintain.

Then came budget sequestration in 2013, which led to an additional $37 billion cut that year alone. The cuts hit operations and maintenance especially hard, with a 30% reduction in day-to-day operating funds so the military could maintain spending on wartime operations. The Pentagon continued to labor under dwindling budgets until last year, when it bottomed out at $596 billion, even as U.S. forces still fight in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The result is a military that is heading toward the demoralized and underequipped “hollow force” of the late 1970s. Some 62% of the Navy’s mainstay F-18 fighters—and 74% of the Marines’—are grounded for lack of parts or maintenance or otherwise deemed unfit for combat.

Reprinted from City-Journal.org.

President Donald Trump and Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired a double-shot of reality yesterday at the Black Lives Matter narrative about policing. Trump laid down broad markers for a change in law enforcement policy and tone from the White House during an address to a joint session of Congress. Sessions fleshed out more crime-policy details earlier that day in a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General. Together, both speeches provide hope for a significant turnaround in the nation’s rising violent-crime rate.

Trump’s promise to restore law and order was a centerpiece of his campaign. That theme drove the mainstream media and liberal politicians to a state of near apoplexy. Every time Trump brought attention to the increasing loss of black life in the Black Lives Matter era, the media responded that there was nothing to be concerned about, because crime rates were still below their early 1990s levels. President Barack Obama dismissed the rising inner-city carnage as a mere “blip” in a few cities. That “blip” in 2015, however, was the largest single-year increase in homicide—11 percent—in nearly half a century, as Trump pointed out last night. The victims were overwhelmingly black. Over 900 more black males were killed in 2015 compared with 2014. And the increase in street crime has not abated. The Brennan Center for Justice estimates that murders in the 30 largest U.S. cities were 14 percent higher in 2016 compared with 2015, a stunning increase coming on top of 2015’s already-massive homicide rise. While it is true that a two-decade-long violent-crime decline has not been wiped out in two years, if current trends continue, we could find ourselves back to the city-destroying anarchy of the early 1990s soon enough.

Last night, Trump refused to back down on his central civil rights concern: that “every American child should be able to grow up in a safe community.” The media have—astonishingly—called him a racist and Hitler for making that assertion. On the left, it is only acceptable to speak about the loss of a black life if a police officer is responsible. But police shootings, overwhelmingly triggered by violently resisting suspects, cause a minute fraction of black homicide deaths. It is criminals, not the police, who are responsible for the tragic fact that blacks die of homicide at six times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined. Nevertheless, the false narrative that we are living through an epidemic of racially biased police shootings has led officers in high-crime areas to disengage from discretionary proactive policing, with the result being greatly emboldened criminals.

Trump last night set out to change that narrative. To ensure that inner-city children enjoy the same safety that other Americans take for granted, “we must work with—not against—the men and women of law enforcement,” Trump said. He continued:

We must build bridges of cooperation and trust—not drive the wedge of disunity and division.

Last month, President Trump stood in front of the CIA Memorial Wall and declared that Islamic terrorism “has to be eradicated just off the face of the Earth.” It is front of this wall where, as Vice President Pence said, “we remember 117 who paid the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom”, that real change in how we treat those who fight terrorism must begin.

The vast majority of the men and women added to that wall in the last few decades were killed by Islamic terrorists. They include Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods who were murdered in Benghazi. And who were abandoned by their government, by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, before their deaths.

The media made much of the resignation of Edward Price. Price had started out as an analyst under Bush. Under Obama, he shot up to spokesman, senior director and special assistant to the president. In this capacity, he insisted that the CIA should research Global Warming and sold the Iran nuke sellout.

Price’s resignation was meaningless. He was an Obama loyalist embedded in a senior national security position to push propaganda. And now there was no future under Trump for his old line of work.

But the media wept crocodile tears for the “career CIA official” whose work involved endangering national security and manipulating the media. It has shown distinctly less interest in the plight of a CIA agent who actually took risks on the ground to secure the capture of Islamic terrorists.

While the media portrays the White House as being at war with the CIA, the Trump administration prevented the extradition and imprisonment of Sabrina De Sousa. De Sousa was in the airport about to be extradited to Italy, but an agreement was reached to release her instead.

“I can confirm that this wouldn’t have happened without extraordinary help from the Trump administration,” Former Rep. Pete Hoekstra said.

De Sousa had been working a secretary in the United States Embassy in Rome. She is allegedly one of a number of CIA people accused by Italy of having helped capture a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s murderous organization, al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya or the Islamic Group, led by the Blind Sheikh who was involved in the World Trade Center bombing and plots to bomb landmarks across New York City.

Considering the leftist slant and general incompetence of Italy’s legal system, it is not clear if Sabrina De Sousa was even involved in the operation. Furthermore the United States government’s position is that De Sousa’s job at our embassy made her arrest a violation of international agreements. Italy convicted 26 Americans in absentia. These convictions are worthless here, but Sabrina De Sousa found herself under arrest while flying to visit her sick mother.

The Democrats and the media, who of late have strived to portray themselves as the defenders of the intelligence community, have no interest in the case. If anything they are covertly cheering it on.

Ever since 9/11, they declared war on the CIA personnel who were capturing and interrogating the terrorists. They have targeted them and exposed them to aid the Islamic terrorists at war with us. The left bemoans the Obama loyalists elevated to top national security posts while writing off the lives of the men and women on the ground. That is what happened in Benghazi and across the War on Terror.

The Democrats have recently learned to love the CIA, as they attempt to exploit anti-American leftists planted in the Agency in their war against the democratically elected President of the United States.

But their sudden respect for the CIA is a very recent one.

Early in Obama’s term in office, Democrats tried to threaten CIA interrogators with 15 years in prison if they interrogated Muslim terrorists too harshly. A year earlier, Attorney General Eric Holder had named a prosecutor to investigate the CIA’s interrogation of Islamic terrorists. The investigation, with its efforts to bring criminal charges, dragged on through much of Obama’s first term, without yielding anything.

But the Democrats were still determined to punish the men and women who had kept us safe. The release of the partisan Senate report two years later, not only endangered American lives and smeared the CIA wholesale, but allowed the families of terrorists to target assorted personnel, including the psychologists who had worked with the CIA on the interrogation program, for lawfare campaigns.

Obama’s own CIA director had charged Democrat Senate committee members with stealing sensitive documents. The names of these psychologists had been leaked through a Senate report which had used the names and pseudonyms of CIA officials. Even the pseudonyms could be used to identify CIA people.

Among their top targets was the CIA official who was the inspiration for Zero Dark Thirty’s Maya whose real life counterpart headed the Global Jihad Unit. Despite every effort by the CIA, the media insisted on publishing her name. Taking the lead in this illegal act was the Washington Post. “Maya’s” name still appears on the website a top Senator Democrat who had called for a special investigation into the Valerie Plame affair. Indeed the media had recreated a real life version of the Plame affair except this time, unlike Plame, their target was actually hunting Islamic terrorists in trouble spots.

And, equally predictably, no one in the media or among the Democrats went to jail for it.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants to fill the most senior posts at the Defense Department with people sympathetic to Islamists, or almost as bad, people sympathetic to Barack Obama.

Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants to tap the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, Anne Patterson, as his undersecretary of defense for policy, but the Pentagon chief is running into resistance from White House officials, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.

As ambassador to Egypt between 2011 and 2013, Patterson worked closely with former Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist government. She came under fire for cultivating too close a relationship with the regime and for discouraging protests against it—and White House officials are voicing concerns about those decisions now.

For Mattis’s part, he has “put her name forward and he doesn’t quite understand why people have an objection,” the person said.

How can he not understand? She was an enabler of the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s a radical Islamist group. And in her incompetence, the embassy she ran played a prelude role to the carnage in Benghazi.

Transition officials swatted down Michele Flournoy, who served as undersecretary of defense for policy in the Obama administration and who was Mattis’s top choice to be his deputy; she eventually took herself out of the running for the position.

Why would he pick someone close to Obama for such a crucial role? It’s totally inconceivable.

Apperently, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis wants people sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and whatever brotherhood Barack Obama belongs to at the most senior levels of government. If these people reflect Mattis’s philosophy, we have the wrong man at the Defense Department. Mattis is also opposed to waterboarding terrorists and enhanced interrogation techniques.

Can somebody in the comments section please explain to me why Donald Trump picked this bozo for Secretary of Defense?

There is a lot of parsing of Jeff Session’s answer to Al Franken at his confirmation hearings. Here’s my contribution.

First, this is the exchange:

FRANKEN: OK. CNN has just published a story and I’m telling you this about a news story that’s just been published. I’m not expecting you to know whether or not it’s true or not. But CNN just published a story alleging that the intelligence community provided documents to the president-elect last week that included information that quote, “Russian operatives claimed to have compromising personal and financial information about Mr. Trump.” These documents also allegedly say quote, “There was a continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump’s surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government.”

Now, again, I’m telling you this as it’s coming out, so you know. But if it’s true, it’s obviously extremely serious and if there is any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government in the course of this campaign, what will you do?

SESSIONS: Senator Franken, I’m not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn’t have – did not have communications with the Russians, and I’m unable to comment on it.

What I find remarkable is that Franken didn’t ask Sessions about any contacts he himself might have had with the Russians. He asked him what he would do if Trump officials had such contacts. So, Sessions wasn’t being pressed about his own contacts and deny having any, he volunteered that he didn’t “have communications with the Russians.” If Sessions was deliberately lying here, he went out of his way to lie under oath for no discernible reason. Who does that? Especially if, assuming for the sake of argument that Sessions had a cognizance of guilt, there were about a thousand different ways to dance around Franken’s question without creating this vulnerability.

There is also the phrase Sessions used, “communications with the Russians,” which it seems is pretty clearly meant to denote the sort of nefarious coordination that Franken is getting out. All of this suggests that the most reasonable reading is that Sessions wasn’t thinking of his two contacts with the Russian ambassador — one of which was very informal in a large group — in this context. (I’m not an expert on Russian intelligence operations, but it is hard to believe that the Kremlin sends its ambassador to the U.S. to brief U.S. senators about them and coordinate how to carry them out.)

The Sessions answers have created a big political headache for him and obviously he should have been more careful. But like so much else since the election, the hysteria doesn’t come close to matching the underlying facts.