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CAROLINE GLICK: OBAMA’S DENOUMENT

Posted By on September 25th, 2016

The Memorandum of Understanding that President Barack Obama concluded last week with Israel regarding US military aid to Israel for the next decade is classic Obama.

Since he entered office nearly eight years ago, Obama’s foreign policy has always sought to kill two birds with one stone. On the one hand, his policies are geared toward fundamentally transforming the US’s global posture. On the other, they work to weaken if not entirely neutralize his congressional opponents at home.

The second goal is no mean task. After all, the US Constitution empowers Congress with the foreign policy powers aimed at checking and balancing the president’s.

For instance, to ensure that no president could adopt foreign policies that harm US national interests or undercut the will of the people, the Constitution required that all treaties be approved by two-thirds of the Senate before they can take effect.

Were it not for Obama’s double tracked foreign policy, that constitutional provision should have blocked Obama’s radical and dangerous nuclear deal with Iran. Understanding that he lacked not merely the support of two-thirds of the Senate but of even a bare majority of senators for his deal, Obama decided to sideline the Senate.

To this end, Obama speciously claimed that the deal was not significant enough to be considered a treaty. The Iran deal of course is a more radical course change than the US’s approval of the UN Charter and the NATO Treaty. The nuclear deal radically changes not only the US’s policy toward Iran and toward every nation, friend and foe, in the Middle East. As former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz argued during the nuclear negotiations, it upends 70 years of US nuclear policy, undermining the foundations of the US’s nonproliferation policies.

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The Real Middle East Story Walter Russell Mead

Posted By on September 25th, 2016

Precisely because he has a colder view of international affairs than Obama, Netanyahu’s leadership has made Israel stronger than ever.

Peter Baker notices something important in his dispatch this morning: at this year’s UNGA, the Israel/Palestine issue is no longer the center of attention. From The New York Times:

They took the stage, one after the other, two aging actors in a long-running drama that has begun to lose its audience. As the Israeli and Palestinian leaders recited their lines in the grand hall of the United Nations General Assembly on Thursday, many in the orchestra seats recognized the script.

“Heinous crimes,” charged Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian president. “Historic catastrophe.”

“Fanaticism,” countered Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. “Inhumanity.”

Mr. Abbas and Mr. Netanyahu have been at this for so long that between them they have addressed the world body 19 times, every year cajoling, lecturing, warning and guilt-tripping the international community into seeing their side of the bloody struggle between their two peoples. Their speeches are filled with grievance and bristling with resentment, as they summon the ghosts of history from hundreds and even thousands of years ago to make their case.

While each year finds some new twist, often nuanced, sometimes incendiary, the argument has been running long enough that the world has begun to move on. Where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict once dominated the annual meeting of the United Nations, this year it has become a side show as Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas compete for attention against seemingly more urgent crises like the civil war in Syria and the threat from the Islamic State.

Baker (and presumably many of his readers) don’t go on to the next, obvious question: What does this tell us about the relative success or failure of the leaders involved? The piece presents both Netanyahu and Abbas as irrelevant. They used to command the world stage, but now nobody is interested in their interminable quarrel.
What the piece doesn’t say is that this situation is exactly what Israel wants, and is a terrible defeat for the Palestinians. Abbas is the one whose strategy depends on keeping the Palestinian issue front and center in world politics; Bibi wants the issue to fade quietly away. What we saw at the UN this week is that however much Abbas and the Palestinians’ many sympathizers might protest, events are moving in Bibi’s direction.There is perhaps only one thing harder for the American mind to process than the fact that President Obama has been a terrible foreign policy president, and that is that Bibi Netanyahu is an extraordinarily successful Israeli Prime Minister. In Asia, in Africa, in Latin America, Israel’s diplomacy is moving from strength to strength. Virtually every Arab and Middle Eastern leader thinks that Bibi is smarter and stronger than President Obama, and as American prestige across the Middle East has waned under Obama, Israel’s prestige — even among people who hate it — has grown. Bibi’s reset with Russia, unlike Obama’s, actually worked. His pivot to Asia has been more successful than Obama’s. He has had far more success building bridges to Sunni Muslims than President Obama, and both Russia and Iran take Bibi and his red lines much more seriously than they take Obama’s expostulations and pious hopes.The reason that Bibi has been more successful than Obama is that Bibi understands how the world works better than Obama does. Bibi believes that in the harsh world of international politics, power wisely used matters more than good intentions eloquently phrased. Obama sought to build bridges to Sunni Muslims by making eloquent speeches in Cairo and Istanbul while ignoring the power political realities that Sunni states cared most about — like the rise of Iran and the Sunni cause in Syria. Bibi read the Sunnis more clearly than Obama did; the value of Israeli power to a Sunni world worried about Iran has led to something close to a revolution in Israel’s regional position. Again, Obama thought that reaching out to the Muslim Brotherhood (including its Palestinian affiliate, Hamas) would help American diplomacy and Middle Eastern democracy.

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Northwestern Univ. President Calls Those Who Decry Safe Spaces, Trigger Warnings ‘Lunatics’ By Debra Heine

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

The president of Northwestern University told students on Monday that anyone who opposes “trigger warnings” or who ridicules the pain of those “microaggressed” is an “idiot” and a “lunatic.”

In his convocation address on Monday, NU President Morton Schapiro took a firm stance against censorship, but said he disagreed with University of Chicago Dean of Students John Ellison, who recently told first-year students they should not expect “safe spaces” in which to escape from ideas that make them uncomfortable.
“Schapiro does not take kindly to uncomfortable ideas,” notes the Weekly Standard’s Alice B. Lloyd:

Author of many a pro-“safe space” op-ed, he suggests he’ll also use his day job as a platform to promote the code of campus political correctness, now that the semester’s begun.

“The people who decry safe spaces do it from their segregated housing places, from their jobs without diversity — they do it from their country clubs,” Schapiro said. “It just drives me nuts.”

[…]Calling people who deny the existence of microaggressions “idiots,” Schapiro said he clearly remembers every microaggression he has experienced.

Microaggressions “cut you to the core” and aren’t easily forgotten, he said.

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Germany Can Do Better than Angela Merkel Despite her reputation for competence, Merkel has led her country (and Europe) into one crisis after another. By John O’Sullivan

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

‘The graveyards are full of indispensable men,” said De Gaulle, or his predecessor Georges Clemenceau, or New York publisher Elbert Hubbard, or one of several other less famous people with a good turn of phrase, according to the scrupulously careful online Quote Investigator. Be that as it may, it’s looking increasingly likely that the (political) graveyard will soon be welcoming an “indispensable” woman, recently sanctified as such on the cover of The Economist, namely German chancellor Angela Merkel. Her Christian Democrat party fell to third place in Berlin’s local elections last week and may not stay long in the city’s governing coalition. Two thirds of German voters now want her gone. And the names of successors are being freely canvassed.

This decline and the associated rise of the right-wing Alternative for Germany party are being blamed on Merkel’s unqualified invitation to Syrian refugees to come to Germany last year. More than 1 million migrants have done so in the intervening twelve months — many of them neither Syrian nor refugees — and they have led to a large rise in violent and “hate” crimes, some committed by them, some by those protesting their arrival. These things are frightening not only the voters, but also nervous members of Merkel’s own parliamentary party devoted to their own careers before hers. For them, the writing is on the Berlin Wall.

Even those drafting her advance obituaries, however, seem to regard her tenure as chancellor as having been an overall success marked by prudence and achievement. She is generally still seen as “a safe pair of hands” — and indeed the best election poster for the CDU last time was a simple picture of a pair of hands. You can make that case — I’ll do so in a moment as a kind of exercise — but only on grounds that would alarm her admirers and threaten her reputation. By any respectable criterion, she is a klutz on a heroic scale.

Consider the following examples:

Merkel’s energy policy was based upon a combination of nuclear power and “renewables” in order to close down power stations dependent on fossil fuels, and help Germany lead the European Union and the world toward a carbon-free future. She had been a strong defender of nuclear energy against SPD chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s attempts to phase it out. Within a few weeks of the Japanese nuclear disaster at Fukushima, though, she panicked, reversed herself, and closed down Germany’s entire nuclear program. Her Energiewende since then has led to a massive increase in power bills for consumers and industry, the movement abroad of German companies heavily reliant on energy, and, more recently, a phasing out of the phasing out of coal-fired power stations. Merkel and the nuclear companies are still haggling over how much the German government will pay for the estimated €23 billion cost of shutting down their plants. Meanwhile, no one believes that Germany and Europe will meet their official goal of reducing carbon emissions 80-95 percent from their 1990 levels by the year 2050.
The refugee crisis is all too plainly a vast mistake, as Merkel herself has admitted. But some of its side-effects have produced other crises almost as severe. Example one: though Merkel welcomed “Syrian refugees” without consulting even her colleagues in the German government, she immediately demanded that other European states within the then-borderless Schengen Zone should accept them as well. That demand was resisted (and still is) by other governments, and there’s been a long-running “existential” (Jean-Claude Juncker’s word, not mine) crisis in the EU ever since. Example two: Merkel reduced the flow of Middle Eastern migrants into the EU through a deal with Turkish strongman Recep Tayyik Erdogan to control the border. But the price was high: the EU’s silence over Erdogan’s arbitrary arrest of thousands of soldiers, police, lawyers, and journalists, and visa-free entry into the EU for 80 million Turks, which could mean another migrant crisis down the road. There’s no guarantee that Erdogan — who’s skilled at selling the same horse twice — won’t ask for additional concessions from a desperate Merkel and EU, either.
Whether Brexit is a good idea for Britain —

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Don’t Ignore California’s Vital Senate Race Better the Blue Dog Democrat than the contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat. By Josh Gelernter

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

Loretta Sanchez on the Issues

Rated +1 by AAI, indicating a mixed Arab/Palestine voting record. (May 2012)
This November, Republicans will do their best to keep the Senate in Republican hands, and that won’t be easy. Republicans currently have a Senate majority of four, but they will be fending off strong Democrat challenges in ten states they currently represent. The Democrats have only two seats at risk of turning Republican — Nevada and Colorado — and polls show that Colorado is almost out of reach.

On November , the Republicans will probably lose seats in Wisconsin and Illinois, and at the moment there’s no better than a 50–50 chance that they’ll hold Indiana, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Even so, it’s possible that the most important Senate race is California’s. Let me explain.

California chooses Senate candidates with a “jungle primary:” Every primary candidates, no matter his party, appears on one ballot, and the top two finishers advance to the general-election ballot in November. Predictably, the top two finishers were Democrats, so no matter what happens on Election Day, the Senate seat of Barbara Boxer, who is retiring, is going to remain in Democratic hands. Consequently, the race has gotten very little attention, and next to none nationally. It should be getting attention, though — a lot of attention. Because it’s not just a race between two Democrats; it’s a race between a relatively moderate Democrat and a contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat.

The relatively moderate Democrat is Loretta Sanchez, the representative from California’s 46th congressional district, in Orange county. She has called her self a “Blue Dog Democrat”; she is somewhat fiscally conservative, more reasonable about gun rights than the average Democrat, has taken a harder line on terrorism than the average Democrat, and — representing one of the largest Vietnamese expat communities in the country — has vocally opposed closer relations with Vietnam’s Communist government.

The contemptible, corrupt, repulsive Democrat she’s running against is Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general. After covertly shot video of Planned Parenthood employees appeared to implicate Planned Parenthood in federal crimes relating to the collection and sale of fetal tissue for research, Harris launched an investigation not into Planned Parenthood, or any of those employees, but into the journalist-activist who made the videos, David Daleiden.

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Our Dangerous Drift from Reason Media distortion of ‘officer involved’ police shootings has consequences. By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

In a time when “narrative” has supplanted factual reporting, Fox’s Bret Baier’s evening news program is usually an oasis in the desert. So I winced when he asserted, amid Thursday’s report on the deadly Charlotte rioting — euphemized by the media as “unrest” and “protest” – that blacks are significantly more likely than whites to be killed by police.

It echoed the distortion peddled by the Chicago Tribune in July, when “officer involved” shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana led not merely to “unrest” but to a massacre of cops in Dallas. African Americans, the paper claims, are two and a half times more likely than Caucasian Americans to be killed by police.

Are they really? The Trib says so, but only after adjustments are made for the marked population difference between the two races. But wait a second: If there is so plainly a bounty on black men – if the chances that a young African American will be killed in a police encounter are so uniquely high that our cities are in upheaval, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division is on permanent alert, and black parents nationwide feel compelled to have “the talk” with their kids – then why is statistical fiddling necessary to portray this crisis?

Because there isn’t a crisis – unless we’re talking about one that is wholly manufactured.

The exceedingly inconvenient fact of the matter for the “cops are preying on black men” narrative is that far more whites than blacks are killed in confrontations with police. Last year, in fact, it was roughly twice as many.

The social justice warriors can’t have that, of course. So, making like Olympic judges from the old Soviet bloc they so resemble, today’s narrative repairmen knead the numbers to make the story come out right. The spin becomes “fact,” dutifully repeated in press coverage and popular discussion.

In this instance, the hocus-pocus is to factor in that, although there are 160 million more whites than blacks in the country, this 62 percent portion of our population accounts for “only” about half of “police involved” fatalities (49 percent). Blacks, by contrast account for an outsize 24 percent of the deaths despite being only 13 percent of population.

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Review: The American Revolution and The Politics of Liberty by Edward Cline

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

It’s interesting that Barack Obama’s newest press secretary, Josh Earnest, characterized the conflict between ISIS and Obama’s friendly treatment of ISIS (aka ISIL), a brutal, mass murdering terrorist organization, as a “war of narratives.” In short, he denigrated any opposition to ISIS, or any criticism of Obama’s overall pro-Islam policies, as arbitrary say-so. Doubtless Earnest would also characterize the arguments between Britain and the colonies in the 18th century as a “war of narratives.”

Pamela Engel, writing for Business Insider, wrote on September 19th:

Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, told CNN on Monday morning that the US was in a “narrative fight” with ISIS.

Earnest appeared on the network as authorities in New York and New Jersey investigated bombs found throughout the area over the weekend, including one that injured 29 people when it exploded on Saturday night in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

Authorities on Monday morning seemed to be changing their initial assessment that the bombs weren’t connected to one another and did not appear to be related to international terrorism.

“What I can tell you is that we are, when it comes to ISIL, we are in a fight, a narrative fight with them, a narrative battle,” Earnest said, using an alternate name for the terrorist group, which is also known as the Islamic State or Daesh. “And what ISIL wants to do is they want to project that they are an organization that is representing Islam in a fight, in a war against the West and a war against the United States.”

Earnest continued: “That is a bankrupt, false narrative. It is a mythology. And we have made progress in debunking that mythology.”

It is a “bankrupt, false narrative” only in the minds of Earnest and the rest of the Obama administration. Islam is without a doubt at war with the West, but the West refuses to acknowledge that declaration of war. It can’t bring itself to concede that Islam is more a political ideology than it is a “religion.” The Obama meme is that Islam is basically a “religion of peace” (continuing the George W. Bush line) that was “hijacked” by murderous renegades. This is the actual “mythology” that should be debunked.

But the Obama administration and the MSM and all their minions will not be persuaded otherwise. It would scuttle their whole approach to combating Islamic terrorism. They have a vested interest in the Progressive/Left ideology that defines their world view. They are ideologues trapped in a locked room in which they go round and round, chasing their own tails.

Robert H. Webking, author of The American Revolution and the Politics of Liberty, contradicts the received wisdom that the revolutionaries were little more than ideologues who had no philosophical or moral foundation on which to base their opposition to the growing expansion of British power over the lives of the American colonists, and so they declared their independence from Britain more from roiling emotion than from principle. Webking is a professor of political science at the University of Texas at El Paso.

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Why Did the Obama Justice Department Grant Cheryl Mills Immunity? By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

Well, what would Friday be without the latest document dump from the Clinton email investigation? Yesterday afternoon, with the public in distracted anticipation of the coming weekend and Monday’s Clinton-Trump debate showdown, the FBI released another 189 pages of interview reports.

Along with this document dump comes remarkable news: The Obama Justice Department reportedly gave top Clinton aide and confidant Cheryl Mills immunity from prosecution for any incriminating information located on her personal computer.

According to House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R., Utah), the limited immunity was granted in order to persuade Ms. Mills to surrender her laptop computer so the FBI could check whether classified information was stored on it.

This is very strange. There was no need to grant concessions to Mills. The Justice Department could have required the production of the computer by simply issuing a grand jury subpoena. And had there been any concern that Mills would not cooperate, would destroy the computer, or would “misplace” it (as Team Clinton claims to have misplaced so many Hillary devices), investigators could have applied for a search warrant and seized the computer.

In normal cases, the Justice Department does not grant immunity in exchange for evidence when it has lawful power to compel production of that evidence.

Mills is not alone. Apparently her subordinate, longtime Clinton aide Heather Samuelson, was given the same deal.

Unbelievably, Mills and Samuelson, who are lawyers, were also permitted to represent Hillary Clinton in the very same investigation in which, we now learn, they were personally granted immunity from prosecution. That’s apart from the fact that both of them were involved as government officials at the time they engaged in some of the conduct under investigation – a circumstance that, by itself, should have disqualified them from later serving as lawyers for other subjects in the same the investigation.

As readers may recall, I have been trying to draw attention to questions about immunity in the Clinton emails investigation since last spring (see here and here). That was when we first learned that some form of immunity had been given to Brian Pagliano. He is the Clinton family employee who serviced then-Secretary Clinton’s unauthorized private server and, astonishingly, later drew a large State Department salary while continuing to be paid on the side by the Clintons.

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The ‘Act of Production’ Privilege Does Not Explain DOJ’s Immunity Grant to Cheryl Mills By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

As explained in my preceding post, there appears to be no good rationale for the Justice Department’s decision to grant Cheryl Mills immunity from prosecution for any incriminating data on her computer in exchange for her agreement to surrender the computer. The Justice Department could simply have issued a grand jury subpoena requiring Mills to hand over the computer. Nevertheless, this being a legal discussion, I wouldn’t disappoint you by saying there are no caveats.

I should thus address what’s known as “act of production” privilege. It is derived from the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, reflecting the salient difference between (a) a physical object, and (b) the potentially incriminating testimonial implications of surrendering that object to investigators.

The easiest way to think about this is to consider the difference between arrest and interrogation. If, as an investigator, I arrest you for armed bank robbery, I am entitled to get any evidentiary benefit your physical person gives my case. For example, I can put you in a line-up to enable eyewitnesses to identify you as the robber, or I can search your pockets for the money and the gun. But the Constitution bars me from coercing you to make any statements that would help me prove your guilt. Under the Fifth Amendment, you have the right to remain silent.

These same principles operate with respect to physical evidence that is in your possession, even if it is not located on your physical person.

There are some situations in which complying with a subpoena can be the functional equivalent of admitting guilt. Let’s say I’m a prosecutor in a drug investigation. I issue a subpoena demanding that X produce any ledger of illegal narcotics transactions in X’s possession. Turns out that X does possess such a document, but his lawyer realizes that, if X hands the document over to me, this would be an implicit confession that (a) the document is, in fact, a ledger of illegal drug deals, and (b) X has been in possession of it. So, if X were to comply with the subpoena, which the law requires him to do, I would obtain not only the physical ledger, the contents of which I can use in a drug conspiracy prosecution against X; I would also get a windfall: what amounts to testimonial admissions by X that would help me prove his knowing participation in the drug conspiracy.

Obviously, X does not want to give me the ledger. Yet, X knows that he has been issued a lawful subpoena for this physical evidence. If I later find out that he has withheld the ledger in defiance of the subpoena, I could prosecute him for obstruction of justice and contempt.

To resolve this dilemma between (a) the lawful duty to comply with a subpoena demanding production of physical evidence and (b) the constitutional privilege against admitting guilt, the prosecutor grants a limited form of protection known as “act of production” immunity.

Under this arrangement, X must surrender the ledger, and if there is information in the ledger that incriminates X, the prosecution may use that information against X. But the prosecution forfeits the ability to use against X the fact that X, by surrendering the ledger, effectively admitted both that it was a drug ledger and was in X’s possession.

As you can imagine, this is very routine in law enforcement.

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Dr. Lisa Bardack’s Faustian Bargain By Jay Michaels

Posted By on September 24th, 2016

“Oh what tangled webs we weave, when we first practice to deceive.” Sir Walter Scott

When Dr. Lisa Bardack[*] was asked to become Hillary Clinton’s personal physician in 2001, it had to have been a crowning moment in the career of the Mt. Kisco internist. Dr. Bardack could have anticipated little downside. She already had the responsibility — and legal obligation under HIPAA — to protect the privacy of her patient. She and her staff would have to be especially scrupulous in the case of a senator with presidential ambitions, but this should not have posed a serious problem.

Unfortunately, Hillary Clinton corrupts everyone who serves her. And this year Bardack encountered difficulties she could not have foreseen in 2001:

1. Clinton developed serious medical issues.

2. The candidate was being videoed, not only during campaign stops, speeches, townhalls, and the rare press conference, but before and after events — by individuals with cell phones who were under no obligation to obey orders given to servile journalists to turn off their cameras.

3. The internet not only permitted the mass distribution of these videos and photos, but it enabled those who were curious to check Bardack’s reports against information available on reputable medical sites. It also enabled skeptical physicians to share their doubts with hundreds of thousands of readers.

In July 2015, the Clinton campaign asked Bardack to give the candidate a clean bill of health. She was to disclose, selectively, some of her patient’s medical history. But the letter was not widely analyzed until after the disturbing September 11 video by Zdenek Gazda, the Zapruder of 2016. It was no longer possible to dismiss those asking questions about Hillary’s health as right-wing conspiracy theorists, and the campaign now requested a second letter from Dr. Bardack explaining the event. The physician duly issued a report on September 14. Now her real problems began.

Let’s take a look at the two letters and some of questions doctors have asked about the diagnoses and treatment.

I. The letter of 12 July 2015

Bardack’s summary revealed a couple of major health problems that had not been previously disclosed. We had been told that Clinton suffered an elbow fracture in 2009 and a concussion in 2012. The fact that a woman in her mid-60s would fall twice ought perhaps to have raised some red flags. In particular, unless you’re being tackled or attacked, a concussion can usually be avoided by the body’s reflexes. Arms are extended to break the fall.

But now the public learned that some time in 2009 and in December 2012, the month of the concussion, Clinton had suffered blood clots.

She already had a history of clotting. Running for the Presidential nomination in the fall of 2007, Hillary gave an extended interview on her 60th birthday in which she disclosed that she’d had a life-threatening medical emergency in 1998. The crisis had been kept a secret not only from the public, but from her staff, who were told she had a sprained ankle. Clinton’s foot had swollen and she was in great pain. A White House doctor told her to rush to Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the diagnosis of a blood clot was made. “That was scary,” Hillary said, “because you have to treat it immediately — you don’t want to take the risk that it will break lose and travel to your brain, or your heart or your lungs. That was the most significant health scare I’ve ever had.” Clinton assured the reporter that she was no longer on blood thinners. This was probably the last time Hillary spoke candidly about her health.