RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-war-powers-act-11578615012?mod=opinion_lead_pos2

Fans of the movie “Animal House” will recall the scene when the brothers of Delta House declare that it’s time for a “really futile and stupid gesture.” House Democrats chose to do something similar with their vote Thursday to block President Trump from using military force against Iran.

“Last week, the Trump Administration conducted a provocative and disproportionate military airstrike targeting high-level Iranian military officials,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Wednesday in announcing the floor vote. “Today, to honor our duty to keep the American people safe, the House will move forward with a War Powers Resolution to limit the President’s military actions regarding Iran.”

The five-page resolution declares that Mr. Trump must first get the permission of Congress if he wants to take up arms against Iran. But get this: The resolution is nonbinding, which means it won’t even go to the President’s desk. “This is a statement of the Congress of the United States. I will not have that statement be diminished by whether the President will veto it or not,” Mrs. Pelosi explained.

Mrs. Pelosi prefers to diminish the House statement by making it irrelevant by her own design. Democrats don’t even have the courage to vote on a binding resolution under the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which says Congress must authorize the use of force within 60 days after hostilities begin. Democrats want to go on record against war with Iran as long as their vote doesn’t mean anything. They’re conscientious objectors to their own conscientious objections.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/pelosis-impeachment-blunder/

Her leverage play turns out to have been an embarrassing mistake.

We are in the midst of an imaginary impeachment standoff between House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. “Both have drawn firm lines in the sand. Someone’s got to give,” one reporter recently declared.

There is, of course, nothing to “give.” Pelosi has no standing to dictate the terms of a Senate trial; no constitutional right or political leverage. Why she has put herself in a position that will ultimately end, one way or another, with her surrendering to McConnell is perplexing.

A new piece in Time magazine does shed some light on the thought process behind Pelosi’s decision to refuse to hand over articles of impeachment to a Senate whose majority doesn’t want them. One of the most interesting nuggets in the piece isn’t that Pelosi — portrayed as courageous risk-taker — had gotten the bright idea from CNN; it’s that she specifically got it from noted felon John Dean, Nixon’s former White House lawyer. Now, Dean is often portrayed as a patriotic, whistleblowing impeachment expert — which is true insofar as he planned the Watergate coverup, and then informed on everyone whom he conspired with after they were caught. His real expertise is cashing in on criminality for the past 50 years (I wrote about Dean’s slimy past here).

Surely Pelosi, blessed with preternatural political instincts, wouldn’t rely on Dean’s advice? Surely Pelosi wasn’t browbeaten into doing this by podcast bros and talking heads on America’s least popular major cable-news network?

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/anti-semitism/tom-cotton-on-anti-semitism/?utm_medium=push_notificaions&utm_source=onesignal&utm_campaign=automated

On January 9, Tom Cotton of Arkansas made a speech on the floor of the United States Senate about the shocking rise of anti-Semitic crimes in and around New York City. Everyone should read it. Here it is:

This holiday season, the ancient hatred of anti-Semitism cast a shadow over New York City during Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights. The New York Police Department recorded at least nine separate attacks against Jews—more than one attack for each day of Hanukkah. New attacks are reported seemingly on a daily basis.

In Crown Heights, site of the deadly anti-Semitic riots incited by Al Sharpton in 1991, a group of men beat up an Orthodox Jew and attacked another with a chair.

In Williamsburg, another group terrorized an elderly Jewish man on the street. “Jew, Hitler burned you,” one of the criminals reportedly said. “I’ll shoot you.”

And just outside the city, in Rockland County, a man with a machete stormed a Hanukkah celebration in a rabbi’s home and injured five worshippers, leaving two in critical condition. The family of one victim, Josef Neumann, says he may never wake up from his coma.

These heinous attacks are part of a growing storm of anti-Semitism that has made Jewish Americans fearful to worship and walk the streets in their own communities. They come in the wake of the deadly rampage at a kosher market in Jersey City that left four innocent people dead, including a police detective. And of course, they come in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in our nation’s history: the massacre of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh by a white supremacist.

According to the FBI, our country suffered a 37 percent increase in anti-Semitic crimes between 2014 and 2018. According to the New York Police Department, the city suffered a 26 percent increase in anti-Semitic crimes in the past year alone. That increase is alarming enough. So is the fact that most hate crimes reported in New York are crimes against Jews. And while some of the increase is due to better reporting, much of it is not. Jewish Americans bear witness to this harsh reality.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/ilhan_omars_antics_now_include_claiming_she_cant_hear_war_talk_because_of_ptsd.html

President Trump’s decision to kill the terrorist Qassem Soleimani reveals how alienated Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is from America.  Normally, a young woman who was welcomed into this country as a refugee and then ascended to one of the highest offices in the land might show some gratitude for its stand against the same kind of fanaticism that drove her out of her homeland.  Not Omar, though.  She has nothing but disdain.

Omar’s latest anti-American behavior occurred during a press conference on Wednesday, when Omar and Rashida Tlaib were seen laughing and joking as Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) somberly discussed American casualties in the Iraq War.  It was disconcerting to watch Lee state, “We left four thousand plus, maybe even forty four hundred dead, and over sixty thousand who came back injured in some form, and the war never ended” while Omar giggled, then turned to Tlaib, and shared a joke with her:

When it was Omar’s turn at the microphone during the same press conference, she asserted that her responses to President Trump’s strike against Soleimani had triggered her PTSD:

I feel ill a little bit because of everything that is taking place. And I think every time I about … I hear of conversations around war, I find myself being stricken with PTSD. And I find peace knowing that I serve with great activists for peace and people who have shown courage against war.

https://spectator.us/elimination-qasem-soleimani-farewell-letter/

In July 55 BC, in the midst of his campaigns to civilize Gaul, Julius Caesar was troubled by the Germans. They would cross the Rhine, wreak havoc, and then disappear back across the mighty river, whose depth and swift currents made the Germans regard it as an impregnable barrier.

To teach them that it wasn’t, Caesar had his engineers construct a bridge across the Rhine. As Caesar recounts in Book IV of his commentaries on the Gallic War, they did this in an astonishing 10 days. Caesar and his troops crossed over, stayed for a few days in German territory, ‘burned all their villages and other buildings, and cut down the grain in their fields’. They then crossed back over and destroyed the bridge.

The point, which was not lost on the Germans, was that the Romans could go anywhere they wanted, whenever they wanted, and there was nothing the Germans could do about it.

Last week, Donald Trump demonstrated something similar to the Iranian mullahs when he introduced Qasem Soleimani to the payload of a couple of MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Americans, they now know, can go anywhere, anytime, and can pick off anyone they like with pinpoint precision. At 1:00 a.m. Baghdad time on January 3, Soleimani is sharing a latte with his pal Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, presumably dreaming about the American diplomats they are going to kill. 1:01 a.m., poof! No more bad guys.

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/01/09/the-dems-impeachment-losing-streak-continues/

Has any political ploy failed as spectacularly as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s decision to delay sending the articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump over to the Senate. Even Democrats are now telling her the jig is up.

Pelosi had hoped to use the delay as leverage to get the Senate to agree to the Democrats’ demand for witnesses at the trial. It was a foolhardy plan that, had the leadership not been in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome, it never would have attempted.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell always had the upper hand. His position was that the Senate trial would be conducted under the same rules that the Senate approved for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Namely, the House managers and the White House lawyers would make their presentations and answer questions from senators. Then, the Senate would vote on whether it needed to hear from any witnesses. The Senate, by the way, unanimously approved those rules in 1999.

In the Clinton trial, after the presentations and Q&A, senators voted to 56-44 to depose three witnesses. They later decided – by a 70-30 margin – that they didn’t need to call those witnesses to testify on the Senate floor because excerpts from their depositions would suffice.

On Tuesday, McConnell announced that he had the votes needed to proceed with the Clinton-era impeachment rules. And soon after, Senate Democrats, in a rare show of bipartisanship, started pressuring Pelosi to stop her pointless delay.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/our-foreign-policy-iran-cringe-bruce-thornton/

The progressives’ reactions to President Trump’s elimination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s blood-soaked chief of their foreign adventurism, covered the whole range of clichés we can predict whenever this country acts vigorously to defend its interests and security. Iran, however, is a special case. For forty years, with a few exceptions our leaders have preemptively cringed in the face of Iranian aggression, conjuring up the specter of a widescale war in order to justify inaction. This bad habit has led to appeasing policies that have emboldened the mullahs into ever-increasing aggression in the region from Iraq to Syria to Yemen.

We will pass over the tedious virtue-signaling and juvenile comments of celebrities, antiwar activists with their trite jingles, and Democrat Media, Inc. As Churchill said of the Bolsheviks, the activists and media “hop and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins” of our political culture. But the responses of some Democrats reveal just of how fossilized their foreign policy thinking is.

The Democrats questioned the legality of the killing, or claimed it was a wag-the-dog distraction from impeachment. But fear-mongering is their favorite motif. Joe Biden, who opposed killing Osama bin Laden, claimed “we could be on the brink of a major conflict across the Middle East.” His fellow primary candidate, Elizabeth Warren, read from the same script: Taking out Soleimani was “reckless,” and “our priority must be to avoid another costly war.” Ben Rhodes, an Obama minion, linked Soleimani’s killing to Trump’s withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, which “averted a war,” a claim redolent of Neville Chamberlain’s “peace in our time.” He claims Trump’s withdrawal from the deal “started this dangerous cycle of escalation that we are still on.” And don’t forget the buffoonish AOC, who fretted, “The President engaged in what is widely being recognized as an act of war against Iran, one that now risks the lives of millions of innocent people.”

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/war-powers-resolution-vote-trump-andrew-mccarthy

By this time in our history, one supposes, there could not be a presidentially-ordered use of military force without the inevitable opposition party blather about how the commander-in-chief is violating the War Powers Act (WPA). And so it is that Senator Tim Kaine, D-Va., has introduced a resolution that would purport to direct President Trump to cease hostilities with Iran in the absence of a congressional authorization.

Though inevitable, the exercise is pointless.

The WPA (often called the War Powers Resolution) was enacted over a weakened President Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 by the Democrat-dominated Congress of the late Vietnam War era. It was an effort to limit the president’s power to commit American forces to battle without a declaration of war or other congressional authorization.

From the time of its passage until the Obama administration, all presidents regarded it as an unconstitutional infringement on the president’s Article II powers.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tehrans-retaliation-trumps-reply-11578528961?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Maybe the Apocalypse isn’t upon us after all. The lesson after Iran’s missile strike on U.S. bases in Iraq early Wednesday is that deterrence seems to be working.

More than a dozen ballistic missiles hit two U.S. bases in northern and western Iraq, but no Americans or Iraqis were killed in the attack. Iraq says Iran gave advance warning, so U.S. and Iraqi troops had time to disperse or seek shelter. Iran has made advances in missile targeting, as we learned in the attack on Saudi oil facilities. Yet this time the missiles seemed not to have been precise.

All of this suggests that Iran tried to make a show of hitting back at the U.S. for the killing of terror chief Qasem Soleimani while trying to avoid killing Americans. The latter seems to be the red line that President Trump has drawn for an American military response, and Iran knows the U.S. could eliminate much of its military and industrial capacity even from a standoff distance.