Michael Warren Davis Man, Superman and Donald Trump

As of the Indiana primary and Ted Cruz’s bruised exit, the vulgarian protectionist is the last Republican standing and all but certain to carry his party’s banner into November. If Hillary Clinton thinks it will be a cakewalk, she hasn’t paid attention to the man who makes his own rules
Whenever someone asked for my opinion on Ted Cruz, I couldn’t help but start on a litany of negatives. “Well, his voice is really annoying. So is his nose. Or maybe it’s his cheeks? I can’t really tell. Something about his general face region just seems a bit off. He was a great debater in high school, but doesn’t really seem to have evolved much on that front since. His father, and radio talker Glenn Beck too, said he was appointed by God to be the next president, which is weird. Even his kids don’t want to hug him. And he eats boogers.”

A few hours later: “Then again, I agree with basically everything he says.”

You could probably leave it there. On paper, Ted Cruz is everything the “Outsider” movement could have asked for in a candidate. He’s a strict constitutionalist, a social ultra-conservative, an immigration hardliner, a foreign policy moderate, and he’s the leader of the conservative anti-establishment faction in the senate. True, he’s not a protectionist; but I don’t think the Outsiderists went into this contest as protectionists, either. The chicken came before the egg in this particular instance: they became anti-free trade because Trump is anti-free trade. Had Cruz gotten the momentum instead of Trump, the North America Free Trade Agreement would not have come up once in the entire primary season.

But he didn’t get the momentum. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that he comes off as hobbledehoy-ish. We say of George W. Bush, “He’s the kind of guy you’d have a beer with.” That was his charm, and it helped Republicans overlook his lackluster ideological credentials. (He’s conservative, William F. Buckley wrote, but he’s not a conservative.) Cruz is the opposite. His ideological credentials are impeccable, but he seems like the kind of guy who was carded at the bar well into his thirties. “I’ll have one alcoholic beverage, please, my good publican.”

The Cop on the Global Beat It’s true: Iraq wasn’t transformed into Denmark. But it’s also not true, as the author argues, that Bush achieved none of his goals there. By Douglas J. Feith

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-cop-on-the-global-beat-1462400073

“Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” By Michael Mandelbaum

Overstatement is the bane of scholarship about government. When political scientists study history, they want to do more than simply record and understand what happened: They aim to discover rules of behavior, based on the belief that political science is actually science.

In the 19th century, various theorists claimed to have discovered history’s key. Karl Marx famously said it was class conflict. Others said it was race. These ideas threw some useful light on history, but they were oversold. In the 20th century, the realpolitik school of foreign affairs stressed that nations act to increase their military and economic power. That’s a valuable insight as far as it goes, but the “realists” often overstate their case by belittling the role of ideology in world affairs. Likewise, the generally correct observation that democratic nations tend not to fight wars against one another is often embellished by democratic-peace theorists into a categorical proposition that such nations never clash.

Now, along comes an eminent foreign policy scholar, Michael Mandelbaum of Johns Hopkins University, with a thesis about how nation-building missions became America’s chief post-Cold War foreign activity, despite failure after failure. As a generalization, there’s much merit in the thesis. But the author carries it too far.

Mr. Mandelbaum’s book, “Mission Failure: America and the World in the Post-Cold War Era” is, first, a story—a well-told, lucid, thoughtful survey of world affairs. I take issue with points throughout, but any student of the last quarter century would be well served to read this volume. CONTINUE AT SITE

Labour’s Radical ‘Moderate’ The party’s mayoral candidate in London gladly shared a stage with extremists.By Sohrab Ahmari

Londoners head to the polls on Thursday to decide who should succeed Boris Johnson as their next mayor. With the Paris and Brussels attacks fresh on voters’ minds, Islamism and terror have emerged as central themes of the campaign. And Sadiq Khan, the Labour candidate, is struggling to distance himself from his party’s growing radicalism.

The former lawyer has vowed to be “the British Muslim who takes the fight to extremists.” Yet the Labour Party under leader Jeremy Corbyn has veered sharply to the left on these matters, and Mr. Khan has been an enabler of that transformation.

For days Labour’s “anti-Semitism row” has dominated U.K. headlines. The proximate cause was a series of TV interviews by Ken Livingstone, the Labour mayor of London from 2000 to 2008. Coming to the defense of a Labour MP accused of anti-Semitism, Mr. Livingstone claimed that Hitler had been a Zionist. “A real anti-Semite,” he said, is someone who hates all Jews, not just those in Israel.

Mr. Khan quickly distanced himself from Mr. Livingstone, who has since been suspended from the party. “Sadiq has said repeatedly that he is disgusted at the growing problems of anti-Semitism within the Labour Party,” a spokesman told me. He added that Mr. Khan opposes the so-called boycott, divest and sanction movement targeting the Jewish state, adding that “we must not turn our face against Israel.”

The party’s mainstream blames Mr. Corbyn for this state of affairs. They’re right—up to a point. Mr. Corbyn came from the party’s red-flag-waving fringes. Labour reflects Mr. Corbyn’s ideological preferences now that he has moved to the center of party power. But other, more respectable Labour figures paved his path. Sadiq Khan was one of those figures, rising to prominence toward the end of former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s tenure as a voice of the party’s anti-antiterror wing.

Mr. Khan in 2004 shared a platform at a pro-Palestinian conference with Daud Abdullah of the Muslim Council of Britain, which at the time boycotted Holocaust Memorial Day. Another speaker was Ibrahim Hewitt of Interpal, which in 2003 was added to the U.S. Treasury’s list of Specially Designated Global Terrorist organizations for funneling funds to Hamas, an allegation the U.K. pro-Palestinian charity denies. CONTINUE AT SITE

The Trump Reality He may be the highest variable nominee in American history.

With his victory in the conservative heartland of Indiana, Donald Trump is the likely Republican nominee for President. A plurality of GOP voters has rejected the strongest presidential field in memory to elevate a businessman of few fixed convictions and little policy knowledge who has the highest disapproval ratings in the history of presidential polling. Now what?
***Mr. Trump wasn’t our first choice, or even the 15th, but the reality is that more GOP voters preferred him to the alternatives. Dozens of miscalculations made his hostile takeover possible, not least decisions by other candidates in the early primary states to attack each other instead of Mr. Trump. Ted Cruz and his allies also prepared the ground by stoking rage against “the establishment” and immigrants, only to have Mr. Trump hijack their stage-managed rebellion as a more convincing restrictionist. (See nearby.)

Yet GOP voters made the ultimate decision, and that deserves some respect unless we’re going to give up on democracy. The GOP electorate had its chance to reconsider Mr. Trump after his Wisconsin defeat a month ago. Instead the voters rallied behind him for seven straight wins with a majority in each state.

The most hopeful way to look at this is that GOP voters see Mr. Trump as the vehicle for American revival. They are at heart nationalists who see the U.S. in retreat abroad and the economy failing to raise wages at home, and they are revolting against both. Unlike the Japanese or the French, they aren’t going to accept decline without a fight.

In that sense they hope Mr. Trump will be another Ronald Reagan, who can storm Washington and overturn the status quo. This may be one reason so many of Mr. Trump’s voters are older Americans who recall the failures of the 1970s and the Reagan revival that followed.

The problem is that Mr. Trump is no Gipper, who had spent 40 years developing a philosophy of limited government and the U.S. national interest. As his letters show, he had superb instincts about the major issues of his day and was a brilliant political strategist. Mr. Trump is a clever political tactician, but his policy and rhetorical jaunts don’t lead to anything coherent we can detect beyond his desire to “do great deals.”

The Condescending Patriarchy By Marilyn Penn

Although feminists have claimed to seek equality – in education, employment, sexual and civil rights – a curious acceptance of patriarchal condescension still meets with their approval and demands. They won the battle to bare their breasts in public since men are entitled to do the same (see the painted topless ladies of Times Square), but when it comes to accepting equal responsibility for the consequences of drunken excess, they plead special protection. On campuses throughout America, women who claim to have been sexually molested while they were blotto are considered victims of a crime, not cooperating partners. Men, on the other hand, are never excused for molesting a woman (anything from a grope to rape) because they were drunk. Title IX and university administrations give women a pass and they willingly accept it.

Similarly, the media has traditionally withheld the names of women who claim to be victims of rape or molestation while they publish the names of men who are accused but have not been tried. Now,, in the strangest extension of this macho protectiveness, both Lincoln Center and the NY Times have admitted that Jed Bernstein, the former president of Lincoln Center, was forced to resign because he had a consensual affair with a woman on his staff, violating the company policy of no dating of subordinates. Mr. Bernstein had promoted this 30-something woman but so had his predecessor – twice. Both Mr. Bernstein and his subordinate were single and the affair was over by the time the relationship came to the attention of the Center’s higher-ups. Nevertheless, Lincoln Center did not divulge the name of the employee in order to “protect” her. Since she consented to flouting company policy, why was she not named and asked to resign as well? Is the assumption that an adult woman capable of performing in a high-powered job is nevertheless helpless to withstand the seduction of her much older employer? Does this sit well with Gloria Steinem? It’s not what Hillary thought of that 21 year old “narcissistic loony toon” who nearly brought down the president.

Richard Baehr: Trump Pivots Again

Donald Trump is a businessman, television star, and a newcomer to campaigning for public office. Running for president as your first elected office is highly unusual. A few have tried before, but in the last hundred plus years, only Dwight Eisenhower, a highly decorated World War II general, has succeeded. There were 17 Republican candidates who made it to the debate stage this year, and only Trump and Ben Carson had never run for office before. Carly Fiorina, despite having never held office, did run for the U.S. Senate in California.

Trump, with his victory in Indiana, appears at this point destined to be the winner of the GOP nominating process. His campaign over the past year has been an unusual one, to say the least, and could not have been more different than that of his all but certain opponent in the general election, Hillary Clinton. Clinton, a product of more than 40 years of obsessive political campaigning for herself and her husband on both the state and national level, is one of the most scripted candidates ever to run for president. Clinton holds morning conference calls with as many as dozens of campaign aides to review her talking points for the day. If there was ever a consensus candidate whose themes have been tested with her handlers, and poll tested by her large campaign staff, it is Clinton. Clinton spent most of her two years after leaving the State Department mapping out her future campaign, warehousing future campaign team members at the Clinton Foundation and speaking before likely future campaign contributors and supporters. The lives of both Clintons has been all about politics at every stage.

Clinton’s goal for both the primary and the fall campaign, which she has viewed as a sure victory, has been to stay on message. Despite this, her message has been impacted by the leftist populism of her primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, Vermont’s junior senator, who has proved profoundly resilient and therefore extremely annoying to Clinton. Sanders has pushed Clinton leftward, at times even to Sanders’ left (gun control), and she has on occasion made some unusually foolish remarks for someone so experienced in the business of politics. One of these remarks was her promise to put out of business a lot of coal companies and coal miners. Today, she was forced to eat crow and explain to some West Virginians that she can not really explain what prompted her to say something like that:

“I don’t know how to explain it other than what I said was totally out of context from what I meant, because I’ve been talking about helping coal country for a very long time,” Clinton said. “And it was a misstatement, because what I was saying is that the way things are going now, we will continue to lose jobs.”

Neutering U.S. combat air forces Shrunken budgets and bad planning threaten national security By Jed Babbin

Willfully ignoring the effects of 15 years of combat, President Obama, Congress and Pentagon leaders are causing the readiness of our combat aircraft to sink to so low a level that it clearly endangers national security. It’s a matter of shrunken budgets and awful planning.

Readiness — the ability of a force to accomplish its assigned combat mission — is measured somewhat differently among the services. But when it comes to aircraft the criteria are immutable. They’re objective measures that are based on metallurgical science and the laws of physics.

Our military went into combat a month after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks when we attacked al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the nearly 15 years since, our air forces have flown almost constantly, attacking the terrorist forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The burden on them has worn out too many aircraft to the degree that they can no longer be flown in combat.

As reported by Fox News, only a small minority of Marine Corps aircraft — about 30 percent of the Marines’ F/A-18s — are ready to fly and only 42 of their 147 heavy-lift CH-53E helicopters are airworthy. They — like the F/A-18s — are just plain worn out.

Retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Mike Groothousen flew A-7 attack aircraft and F-18 strike fighters. He was captain (in combat) of the nuclear carrier USS Harry S. Truman and had four other aviation and surface commands in his career.

Islam by a Thousand Cuts :Edward Cline

Lingchi língchí; ling-ch’ih, alternately transliterated ling chi or leng t’che), translated variously as death by a thousand cuts, (shā qiān dāo/qiāndāo wànguǎ), the slow process, the lingering death, or slow slicing, was a form of torture and execution used in China from roughly AD 900 until it was banned in 1905. It was also used in Vietnam In this form of execution; a knife was used to methodically remove portions of the body over an extended period of time, eventually resulting in death.

Death, in the context of this column, means Islam. Islam is a death worshipping cult. Death is the end of Islam for anyone who encounters it, Muslim or non-Muslim. One exists and lives for the sole purpose of dying to meet Allah in Paradise. Allah owns your life and it is your duty to obey his every command and whim, even if it means….death.

“Death to America!” is the familiar chant of Muslim demonstrators, from New York City to London to Berlin and Cologne, from Cairo to Gaza to Damascus, from Kuala Lumpur to Sydney and Kabul. Death is what is intended by the Muslim Brotherhood. It states that quite explicitly in the 1991 Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal of the Brotherhood in North America. Here is what it says:

In order for Islam and its Movement to become “a part of the homeland” in which it lives, “stable” in its land, “rooted” in the spirits and minds of its people, “enabled” in the live [sic] of its society and has firmly-established “organizations” on which the Islamic structure is built and with which the testimony of civilization is achieved, the Movement must plan and struggle to obtain “the keys” and the tools of this process in carry [sic] out this grand mission as a “Civilization Jihadist” responsibility which lies on the shoulders of Muslims and – on top of them – the Muslim Brotherhood in this country.

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process” with all the word means. The Ikhwan must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and “sabotaging” its miserable house by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. Without this level of understanding, we are not up to this challenge and have not prepared ourselves for Jihad yet. It is a Muslim’s destiny to perform Jihad and work wherever he is and wherever he lands until the final hour comes, and there is no escape from that destiny except for those who chose to slack. But, would the slackers and the Mujahedeen be equal.

So, how is Islam “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within”? By working every little gambit to dissolve Western institutions, principles, traditions, and norms, and replace them with Islamic ones, first as “co-equals,” and eventually as the dominant ones

By applying a thousand little, barely noticed and hardly earth-shattering concessions by the West to Islamic demands for “respect” or the enforcement of Islamic religious observation or deference to Muslim sensibilities and prejudices, the Brotherhood agenda is on schedule. There will always be the spectacular, headline-grabbing massacres to remind us that Islam declared war on the West long, long ago and that the bombings and beheadings and stabbings are not forgotten as the end-all of life for infidels and those who do not submit to Islam. Islam means, after all, submission.

The Mixed Legacy of Nuremberg by Alan M. Dershowitz

This year commemorates the 80th anniversary of the notorious Nuremberg Laws, the Nazi racist enactments that formed the legal basis for the Holocaust. Ironically, it also marks the 70th anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, which provided the legal basis for prosecuting the Nazi war criminals who murdered millions of Jews and others following the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws.

There is little dispute about the evil of the Nuremberg Laws. As Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was America’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials, put it: “The most odious of all oppressions are those which mask as justice.”

There is some dispute, however, about the Nuremberg trials themselves. Did they represent objective justice or, as Hermann Göring characterized it, merely “victor’s justice?” Were the rules under which the Nazi leaders were tried and convicted ex post facto laws, enacted after the crimes were committed in an effort to secure legal justice for the most immoral of crimes? Did the prosecution and conviction of a relatively small number of Nazi leaders exculpate too many hands-on perpetrators? Do the principles that emerged from the Nuremberg Trials have continued relevance in today’s world?

Following the Holocaust, the world took a collective oath encapsulated in the powerful phrase “never again”, but following the Nuremberg Trials, mass murders, war crimes and even genocides have been permitted to occur again and again and again and again. Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia and now Syria. Why has the promise of “never again” been so frequently been broken? Why have the Nuremberg principles not been effectively applied to prevent and punish these unspeakable crimes? Will the International Criminal Court, established in 2002, be capable of enforcing the Nuremberg principles and deterring future genocides by punishing past ones?

Whether the captured Nazi leaders — those who did not commit suicide or escape — should have been placed on trial, rather than summarily shot, was the subject of much controversy. Even before the end of the war, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau had proposed that a list of major war criminals be drawn up, and as soon as they were captured and identified, they would be shot. President Roosevelt was initially sympathetic to such rough justice, but eventually both he and President Truman were persuaded by Secretary of War Henry Stimson that summary execution was inconsistent with the American commitment to due process and the rule of law.

It was decided, therefore, to convene an international tribunal to sit in judgment over the Nazi leaders. But this proposal was not without considerable difficulties. Justice must be seen to be done, but it must also be done in reality. A show trial, with predictable verdicts and sentences, would be little better than no trial at all. Indeed, Justice Jackson went so far as to suggest, early on, that it would be preferable to shoot Nazi criminals out of hand than to discredit our judicial process by conducting farcical trials.

The challenge of the Nuremberg tribunal, therefore, was to do real justice in the context of a trial by the victors against the vanquished — and specifically those leaders of the vanquished who had been instrumental in the most barbaric genocide and mass slaughter of civilians in history. Moreover, the blood of Hitler’s millions of victims was still fresh at the time of the trials. Indeed, the magnitude of Nazi crimes was being learned by many for the first time during the trial itself. Was a fair trial possible against this emotional backdrop?

Even putting aside the formidable jurisprudential hurdles — the retroactive nature of the newly announced laws and the jurisdictional problems posed by a multinational court — there was a fundamental question of justice posed. Contemporary commentators wondered whether judges appointed by the victorious governments — and politically accountable to those governments — could be expected to listen with an open mind to the prosecution evidence offered by the Allies and to the defense claims submitted on behalf of erstwhile enemies.

Famed Writer Howard Jacobson: European Opposition to Zionism Amounts to ‘Chutzpah With Blood In It’ (VIDEO) Lea Speyer

European opposition to the right of Jewish people to live in Israel amounts to “chutzpah with blood in it,” an award-winning British journalist and novelist declared in a recent BBCinterview.

In conversation with correspondent Chris Cook for a “Newsnight” film on anti-Zionism, antisemitism and Israel — which aired April 29 — Jacobson condemned the continued audacity of certain Europeans in telling Jews they have no claims or rights to Israel.

Jacobson said:

When I hear people in European cultures attacking Zionism, I think, ‘What a nerve.’ We [Europe] kick you out, we say, ‘Go to hell and we don’t care where you go.’ And you’re lucky if you’re kicked out. You’re lucky if you get out. And then we [Jews] go somewhere. We go to what for a long time was considered home and what in the Jewish imagination has been home for a few thousands years. And this begs many questions I accept about the indigenous population [in Israel]. I accept all that. But the idea that we [Europe] would then say to the Jews, ‘Get the hell out of here,’ and now we’re going to tell you where you can go? I mean there’s a Jewish word for that. That’s chutzpah. That’s chutzpah with blood in it.

During the interview, Jacobson explained his understanding of Zionism and said that the Left in Britain must reeducate itself on core Zionist ideology. “Zionism was a liberation movement. It wasn’t a movement of oppression. It wasn’t a movement of colonialism,” he said. “It was the beginning of a Europe-wide movement of liberation of the Jews from themselves…and some of the [European] countries.” This movement of liberation among Jews began “long before the Holocaust” and “the Holocaust just then confirmed the need for that,” Jacobson said.

Commenting on the antisemitism scandal currently plaguing Britain’s Labour party — specifically comments made by Labour MP Naz Shah calling for Israel to be relocated to America — Jacobson said he would like to hear more officials renounce antisemitic views and reeducate themselves. Remarks like those of Shah, Jacobson said, remind Jews of the importance of Zionism.

“The reason why Jews get so upset when they hear Zionism denounced is because for a Jew, for most Jews, it still is a liberation movement and not only in the mind,” he stated. Reflecting on 1930s Europe, Jacobson said, “Where were Jews going to go? They were being kicked out everywhere… ‘Go to your own country,’ they were told. Okay. And now they’re in their own country and now get out of that. And now Naz Shah says, ‘Get out of your own country and go to America.’ Not only do we remember Zionism for the liberation movement it was, it’s a liberation movement still.”

While Jacobson readily admitted he wasn’t brought up a Zionist, he said, “I was just brought up to believe whatever you think about Israel, don’t forget you might need it one day. There isn’t a Jew living — no, there are very few Jews living — that won’t feel in some way or another that they might need it one day.”

Watch highlights of Jacobson’s interview below: