For Europe, the Only Way Forward Is Together Can a collection of nation-states whose populations loathe each other hang together? Who knows, but it’s that or hang separately. Claire Berlinski

I share Daniel Johnson’s concern about Europe’s future—although not always for the reasons he cites. In general, I believe he conflates Europe’s domestic pathologies with the effects on Europe of global events, not all of which are of Europe’s making and not all of which are as grave as he stipulates. He writes, for instance, that the November 13 terrorist attacks in Paris mark a culmination so far in “a concerted campaign directed mainly at Europeans.” Those attacks are certainly the ones Europeans noticed, because they were the victims, but they are largely irrelevant to the main “campaign”: a vicious Islamic civil war and a superpower conflict by proxy. In that war’s real theaters, the death toll dwarfs, to say the least, anything directed mainly at Europeans.

As for the other reasons why Europe’s future could well be bleak, I would list several. The United States is now the Sick Man of the Globe, and when a hegemonic power falls into desuetude, disorder is inevitable. The Eurozone crisis and Europe’s moribund economies have exacted a steep price in public trust of Europe’s institutions. The world has not naturally adopted liberal democracy as a form of government (as many had hoped at the end of the cold war), and the rise of illiberal democracies, particularly in Russia and Turkey, is a great danger—both directly in that Russian forces now openly threaten European countries and indirectly in that the authoritarian contagion has spread to Europe’s own southern and eastern flanks.

This is hardly to deny that the catastrophic breakdown of states and social order in much of the Islamic world—leaving a quarter-million dead in Syria alone — is a threat to Europe. But 800,000 asylum-seekers provoking a clash of civilizations on Europe’s soil, plunging it into chaos on the scale of the Middle East? Not so fast.

Welcome to the Banana Republic With a wave of his wand, Obama defies the law. Kenneth R. Timmerman

In case you were just enjoying the weekend with your family and not listening to the news, the world changed over the past 48 hours.

The United States has now officially become a Banana Republic.

In sweeping moves that gave the lie to repeated assertions by Secretary of State John Kerry that there would be no “comprehensive” deal with Iran, the United States on Saturday gave Iran a clean bill of nuclear health, lifted sanctions on more than 400 Iranian government entities and individuals, and swapped U.S. citizens held hostage by Iran for Iranian nationals convicted of violating U.S. export control laws.

There was so much news over the weekend that the media has had a hard time keeping up. But not your government, which has been beavering away so they could trade away our sovereignty, our legal system, and our national security interests at the stroke of a pen.

The Treasury Department has been working for months to draft a package of implementing regulations for Obama’s ill-conceived nuclear deal. The thicket of U.S. sanctions on Iran has become so dense over the years that Treasury had to post a separate web page with a guide to sanctions relief, which was split among eight separate statements.

My favorite was a list of 400 Iranian state entities now removed from U.S. sanctions. I had been tracking many of those companies for years.

Obama’s ‘Novel’ Approach to Reporting on the State of the Union Facts are, indeed, stubborn things. Michael Cutler

On January 13, 2015 President Obama delivered his last State of the Union Address. His assessment of the state of the union was nothing less than astonishing.

As I listening, incredulously, to his address laden with fabrications, boasts and accusations, I found myself thinking back to my days as an INS agent (when I would question individuals who were suspected of committing crimes and being frustrated that they not only lied but that they would often dodge and weave to avoid directly answering my questions).

I recalled interrogating criminals who seemed delusional, providing supposed justification for committing crimes that ignored the facts or reality or reasonableness. They lived in a parallel universe.

One of my fellow agents- with whom I worked regularly for many years, would listen to such an individual we were questioning, turn to me as say, “I wonder what the color of the sky is in this guy’s world- because it sure as hell isn’t blue!”

On Tuesday night, I found myself wondering at the color of the sky in Mr. Obama’s world.

Within minutes of beginning his speech he said:

Our unique strengths as a nation — our optimism and work ethic, our spirit of discovery, our diversity, our commitment to rule of law — these things give us everything we need to ensure prosperity and security for generations to come.

In fact, it’s that spirit that made the progress of these past seven years possible. It’s how we recovered from the worst economic crisis in generations. It’s how we reformed our health care system, and reinvented our energy sector; how we delivered more care and benefits to our troops and veterans, and how we secured the freedom in every state to marry the person we love.

Under his administration’s executive orders that undermined our immigration laws, hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were provided with employment authorization- often displacing American workers and undermining our national security by providing these illegal aliens with official identity documents without interviewing them or conducting field investigations.

Spike Lee’s ‘Chi-Raq’ Tells Black Community to ‘Wake Up’ His latest movie addresses Chicago gun violence. Mark Tapson

From the opening image of Spike Lee’s new movie Chi-Raq – a red, white, and blue map of the United States composed entirely of the silhouettes of a variety of guns – it is clear that the filmmaker intends to take on the volatile issue of blacks and gun violence in war-torn Chicago, nicknamed Chi-Raq by its black inhabitants after the Middle Eastern war zone. Lee has a habit of provoking racial controversy, and that is no less true of this darkly humorous satire (“not a comedy,” he insists) set in the murder capital of the United States. True to the director’s form, Chi-Raq provokes and dissatisfies those on both sides of the debate.

Spike Lee has attacked both white and black fellow filmmakers in the past for reasons related to race. As noted in his profile at the Freedom Center’s Discover the Networks resource site, Lee excoriated Tyler Perry for the stereotyped depictions of black characters in his hugely popular comedies, and Woody Allen for not featuring enough black characters in his movies set in Manhattan. From his perspective that racism is deeply entrenched in American culture, the enormously wealthy Lee has railed against such issues as interracial couples, Charlton Heston and the NRA, NASCAR, the war in Iraq, the shooting of Michael Brown, and the gentrification of New York. He suspects the government of having engineered the AIDS epidemic and the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He has supported Barack Obama and convicted cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal. He has stated that blacks can’t be racist, because they don’t have the political power to impose racism.

But interestingly, Chi-Raq doesn’t take an entirely expected position about blacks and gun violence. Lee could have made a movie about a white cop shooting an unarmed black man, which is the supposed epidemic ravaging the black American community; instead, he made a film that lays the responsibility for the high rate of black deaths annually from gun violence largely on the black community itself. Unlike the Black Lives Matter movement, Lee is willing to face the harsh reality of young black males perpetrating violence against other blacks.

The Democratic Party’s Choice: Lenin or Nurse Ratched But either way, the Democratic Party is the Obama Party.Daniel Greenfield ****

Two haggard old Democrats took to the stage at a debate hosted by Google, NBC and the non-convicted members of the Congressional Black Caucus to argue over whether America should be run by Vladimir Lenin or Nurse Ratched.

If looks could kill, the glazed hatred in the eyes of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would have slain more Democrats than heroin and cocaine. Hillary Clinton’s impossibly immobile yellow helmet of hair and impossibly immobile thin-lipped red smile framed two dead eyes filled with an implacable hatred for all human life on earth and especially in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders ranted at the camera, lips wet with saliva, hair wild, eyes unhinged behind dirty bifocals, spotlights glinting off his polished skull.

There were more three-point plans and comprehensive plans and the “most comprehensive plans” on stage at any one time since the fall of the USSR. Everyone had the most comprehensive plan for everything which was endorsed by all the experts which couldn’t possibly fail. Just like all their failed plans before which also couldn’t possibly fail, but somehow had.

Hillary Clinton offered an awkward opening statement comparing herself to Martin Luther King. Bernie Sanders delivered the same rambling soundbite about the 1 percent and a rigged economy that is his only platform. A rigged economy however is just another way of describing Socialism.

Martin O’Malley claimed that he was Martin O’Malley, but no one seemed interested. So he tried to claim that he was Barack Obama and no one believed him.

A Gruesome Christmas under Islam by Raymond Ibrahim

Muslim governmental officials — not “ISIS” — in nations such as Brunei, Somalia, and Tajikistan continue openly and formally to express their hostility for Christmas and Christianity. And extremist Muslims — not “ISIS” — continue to terrorize and slaughter Christians on Christmas in nations as diverse as Bangladesh, Belgium, the Congo, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Nigeria, Philippines, Syria, the West Bank, and even the United States.

On Christmas Day in the West Bank, two Muslims were arrested for setting a Christmas tree on fire in a Christian-majority village near Jenin. On the same day in Bethlehem, Muslim rioters greeted the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem with a hail of stones. Authorities subsequently arrested 16 “Salafi radicals” who were planning to carry out terror attacks against tourists celebrating Christmas.

If this was Christmas in Bethlehem — Christ’s birthplace and scene of the Nativity — Christmas in other parts of the world experienced similar abuse.

In the United States, a 46-year-old Christian mother of three was among the 14 people killed in the San Bernardino terrorist attack targeting a Christmas party. Ironically, Bennetta Bet-Badal had fled Iran for the U.S. when she was 18 to escape the persecution of Christians after the 1979 Islamic revolution. After graduating from college with a degree in chemistry and marrying and raising three children, the jihad caught up with her. She was attending a Christmas luncheon and bringing gifts to her co-workers when Muslim terrorists burst in and massacred them.

Belgium resembled Bethlehem: A video appeared showing a number of youths lighting a firebomb under a Christmas tree in Brussels. Seconds later, there is an explosion, and the tree is engulfed in flames. Young men shouting “Allahu Akbar,” [“Allah is Greater”] run away. The person who originally uploaded the video, Mohamed Amine, has since taken his Facebook page down.

A Parable for Germany by David P. Goldman

Dying Germany has only one item on its bucket list, and that is redemption. The Germans cannot seek redemption from the crimes of their grandparents because they do not understand what motivated them to do such terrible things.

For Merkel and most of Germany’s elite, the appearance on Germany’s threshold of millions of Muslim refugees is a final chance at redemption, an opportunity for Germany to redeem itself from the crimes of its past through a transcendent act of selflessness.

Denke ich an Deutschland in der Nacht
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht

If I think of Germany in the night
It kills my sleep.

– Heinrich Heine.

Once there was an old man who in his youth committed a terrible crime, the murder of many innocents. He no longer could remember what drove him to do this; he tried not to think about it, and his memories came to mind unwillingly and infrequently. Rage and guilt had faded long ago into a vague residue of disgust. He worked hard and found some distraction in the monotony of daily tasks. He sought diversion in tasteless entertainment; he followed football, looked at pornography, watched the dubbed version of American comedies, and took vacations at the beach.

He had a child but no grandchildren; his child knew that he once did unforgivable things, but did not want to know what they were, and the old man did not want to tell him. The old crime hung like a black curtain between them.

The old man could feel that he did not have long to live. Ahead of him he saw only days clouded with boredom, illuminated only by the occasional flash of regret. He let the days come and go one at a time until their count might come to an end, for he did not know any other way to live. Because he had no ties to life, he had no way to prepare for death.

One day the old man met a street urchin and on an impulse invited him back to his apartment. He fed the strange boy and gave him a place to sleep. The next morning the old man bought the urchin new clothes, and gave him things — a smartphone, a video-game system, a football jersey. The street kid made himself at home and said little.

Donald Trump & ‘New York Values’ By Roger Kimball

As of this morning, anyway, it was OK to talk about Paris, also the Chicago Way, meaning the sewer of political corruption that has come to define salient aspects of that great city at least since the Democratic machine arrived in force with the first Mayor Daley.

But as every denizen of New York knows by now, it is not OK to talk critically of the “New York Way,” i.e., “New York Values.”

Why?

It’s important to understand that it is not because Ted Cruz criticized Donald Trump for being tainted by “New York Values” last week. Everyone knew what he meant and most conservatives, if they had thought about it at all, would have agreed.

No, the reason that “New York Values” — the scare quotes are necessary — are an issue is because Donald Trump made them an issue at the January 14 debate. In a typical demonstration of rhetorical ju-jitsu, he pretended to be outraged by Cruz’s phrase. He wrapped the mantle of 9/11 around himself and paraded around the stage, and then the talk shows, claiming to be shocked, shocked! that a U.S. senator — who, by the way, was born in Canada — should have sunk so low as to besmirch the bravery and heroism of the New York fire fighters who risked, and often lost, life and limb on 9/11.

Rudy Giuliani chimed in demanding that Cruz should “apologize to New York,” and other pundits — even ones who repudiated Trump categorically a few months ago — rallied round to claim that because of his remark “Mr. Cruz is disqualified for being president. Disqualified. Disqualified. Hang it up,” etc., etc. It was even suggested that “New York Values” might be a reference to ethnics, you know, code for “Jews.” No-one, I think, actually believed that, but it was a good illustration of the principle that once people start throwing garbage, they’ll throw anything they have at hand.

The firestorm of calumny and loathing that Ted Cruz’s utterance of that dread phrase unleashed underscores the potency of Donald Trump’s rhetorical black magic. His remark that Jeb Bush was “low energy” stuck like a burr and will probably lead to Jeb’s early retirement. His response to Hillary Clinton’s charge that he was “sexist” effectively spayed Bill Clinton, transforming him overnight from an important asset into a blubbering appendage.

Still Polarizing After All These Years By Victor Davis Hanson

I have no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I’ll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.

—Barack Obama, State of the Union address, 2016.

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him. Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

A few hours before delivering that State of the Union, President Obama met with rapper Kendrick Lamar. Obama announced that Lamar’s hit “How Much a Dollar Cost” was his favorite song of 2015. The song comes from the album To Pimp a Butterfly; the album cover shows a crowd of young African-American men massed in front of the White House. In celebratory fashion, all are gripping champagne bottles and hundred-dollar bills; in front of them lies the corpse of a white judge, with two Xs drawn over his closed eyes. So why wouldn’t the president’s advisors at least have advised him that such a gratuitous White House sanction might be incongruous with a visual message of racial hatred? Was Obama seeking cultural authenticity, of the sort he seeks by wearing a T-shirt, with his baseball cap on backwards and thumb up?

To play the old “what if” game that is necessary in the bewildering age of Obama: what if President George W. Bush had invited to the White House a controversial country Western singer, known for using the f- and n- words liberally in his music and celebrating attacks on Bureau of Land Management officers? What if Bush had also declared that the singer’s hit song—perhaps a celebration of the Cliven Bundy protest—was the president’s favorite in 2008, from an album whose grotesque cover had a crowd of NASCAR-looking, white redneck youth bunched up with an African-American official dead at their feet? And what if the next day, Bush told the nation that he regretted not being able to bring the country together? Would there have been media calls for Bush’s impeachment?

Canada, the U.S., and the Donald By David Solway

Canada’s most attention-grabbing personality is the new Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau, whom a swooning electorate has just elevated to the highest office in the land. Possessing no relevant business or political experience and no demonstrable leadership qualities apart from name recognition and good looks, he is a dandiprat version of the fatuous nonentity American elected to lead them into a condition of weakness and insolvency. Many in the U.S. are now suffering Obama remorse and reassessing their folly. Eventually Canada, too, may come to its senses, though I wouldn’t bet on it. An Eloi people roistering in a Morlock world does not augur well for their future.

Our misfortune in Canada is that we have — or can have — no one like the Donald striding across the political tarmac. In effect, Trump would have zero chance in a tepid, characterless country like Canada, at any rate, not since the days of our pirouetting, hippie-wannabe PM Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father — but that was during the psychedelic Sixties. Anyone who requires convincing need only browse our national broadcaster, the CBC, with its panels of hacks, retreads, undistinguished pundits, and its slew of unctuous anchors. Broadly speaking, as Margaret Atwood wrote in Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature, Canadians exhibit a “will to lose,” a mournful conviction of the moral superiority of losing, of achieving what she calls a “satisfactory failure.” Hence, Justin Trudeau.

When one considers the competing qualities of burly machismo and pretty-boy simpering, the preference should be a foregone conclusion. Of course, if it comes down to a match between big hair and thinning hair, the outcome will favor the former. (The hairpiece seems to be a journalistic canard.) Such is the only department where the youthful charisma of Trudeau has it over the mature brio of Trump. The issue, however, is not what is on top of one’s head but what is in it — that is, how one sees the world. In this respect, Trump is head and shoulders above Trudeau. How can we compare a man born into wealth and privilege, a trust-fund baby merely inheriting his father’s glamour, whose signal accomplishments involved a stint as a substitute drama teacher and snowboard instructor and two uncompleted university degrees, with a man who turned his father’s business into one of the world’s great financial empires, generating opportunities for untold others? No contest.