RUTHFULLY YOURS

At this writing, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is engaged in a dispute with the White House over a subpoena that committee chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) issued to David Simas, director of the White House Office of Political Strategy & Outreach (OPSO), demanding that Mr. Simas appear at a hearing to consider whether OPSO is complying with the Hatch Act. The White House has resisted the subpoena, refusing to produce Mr. Simas for the hearing on the grounds of executive privilege. On July 25, the committee passed a resolution that rejects the White House’s claim that Mr. Simas, as an assistant to the president, is immune from being required to appear before the committee.

It is unclear where this dispute goes from here. The White House undeniably has legitimate separation-of-powers concerns about subjecting an assistant to the president (one of the president’s closest advisers) to process from a co-equal branch of government, even if the White House could be overstepping its bounds under the federal district court’s decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. Miers by declaring that Mr. Simas is absolutely immune from even appearing before the committee.

In the sometimes-heated back and forth about the subpoena, some have questioned the legitimacy of the committee’s inquiry into the activities of OPSO, because there have been no allegations publicly voiced that OPSO has been operating in violation of the law. Nevertheless, there is ample justification for the investigation.

First, this administration has an abysmal record of complying with the Hatch Act, which restricts the partisan political activity of executive-branch employees. In 2010, the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, offered Representative Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania a government position if he would drop his primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter. A former White House counsel preposterously claimed that this was legally justified as advancing the “legitimate interest” of the Democratic-party leadership by avoiding a divisive primary and retaining Sestak’s congressional seat. The president declined to punish then–HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius after the Office of Special Counsel (OSC), which enforces the Hatch Act, found in 2012 that she had violated it by urging the crowd at an official event to reelect President Obama and elect other Democrats. Then–secretary of labor Hilda Solis is on tape soliciting a subordinate to attend a political fundraiser and to encourage others to attend as well — a clear violation of the Hatch Act. Finally, the evidence that the IRS targeted for extra scrutiny groups with conservative-sounding names that applied for tax-exempt status, or delayed their approvals to keep them out of the political arena, indicates Hatch Act violations there as well. Such an atmosphere of noncompliance with the Hatch Act alone raises legitimate questions about whether the White House is adhering to the law in the activities of OPSO.

Second, the circumstances of the rebirth of the White House political office in January, after President Obama closed the Office of Political Affairs three years earlier, provide further justification for the committee’s investigation.

So the God of Books exists after all.A journalist who could treat businessmen fairly is seeing a big boost to his popularity.

That was the thought of many of us when we saw Business Adventures leap to the top of the bestseller lists. For decades now, this volume by the late John Brooks has enjoyed an intense following among business writers. So has the rest of Brooks’s work, especially Once in Golconda, a collection of articles — fables, almost — about the 1920s. Someone, way back when, even called Brooks the “La Fontaine of finance writers.”

Nonetheless, for whatever reason, the rest of the reading public — whether in the 1990s, the Aughts, or the current decade — did not appear to share the journalists’ enthusiasm. In the case of Once in Golconda, some conjectured that it was the title choice that was fatal. Where, or what, in heck is “Golconda”? A mythical kingdom in India, it turned out. Brooks’s 1920s volume, some of us speculated, might have endured had he titled the book “The Roaring Twenties.”

As it turns out, it was not a better title that Brooks needed but a billionaire. For when earlier this summer news got out that Bill Gates rated Business Adventures his top read, and that Warren Buffett had given Gates the book, it became a bestseller all over again, four decades after it first appeared.

Some of the reasons that billionaires like Brooks have already been noted in the past weeks’ rush of Gates-approved Brooksmania. The first is that Brooks approaches start-up entrepreneurs in relatively friendly fashion. As Slate noticed, Brooks, like Michael Lewis after him, admires young businessmen with icon-busting ideas. Lewis profiles the innovations of Billy Beane and his statistical sidekick, Paul DePodesta, in scouting baseball players. Brooks likes young risk-takers too: His account of a young energy engineer and his firms’ efforts to escape the ambiguities of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s insider-trading rules will make any young entrepreneur breathless. Brooks captures failure of youthful projects as well. The most beautiful article ever written about a product fiasco is Brooks’s account of the folly of the Edsel automobile at the Ford Motor Company. The final line is one not of despair but of triumph: Brooks’s conclusion in “The Fate of the Edsel” is that “failure can have a certain grandeur success never knows.”

A second reason Brooks enraptures is that he captures challenges ubiquitous in business but a bit obscure for popular television or even Morning Joe: intellectual property and noncompete agreements, for example. One of his best is “One Free Bite,” the story of a young scientist named Donald Wohlgemuth who walked over from B. F. Goodrich to a competitor, International Latex, and then discovered, to his shock, that Goodrich objected. Brooks traces the story of how Goodrich dragged the young man into court to stop him sharing secrets of the space suit they were designing for Mercury astronauts.

Against Premature Impeachment

The point is to revive it as a credible threat — and restrain presidential lawlessness.

It has been nearly two months since the publication of my book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment, helped intensify the national focus on presidential lawlessness — or, if you prefer, infected the nation with “impeachment fever.” The latter is the breathless diagnosis offered by Media Matters in what otherwise is a surprisingly accurate description of what I’ve written. No surprise, then, that I took note of the very interesting question posed by National Review editor Rich Lowry in the title of a recent Corner post: “Does Obama WANT to Get Impeached?”

The context was the president’s plan to proceed with an outrageously lawless, unilaterally decreed amnesty for millions of illegal aliens. Obviously, this kind of massive malfeasance will provoke calls for impeachment — meaning, more calls than we already have. Rich incisively wonders whether that’s exactly what this flailing, cynical White House wants. Obama is brazenly intensifying what progressive law professor Jonathan Turley has acknowledged is “the worst constitutional crisis of [his] lifetime.” With midterm elections on the horizon, is the president calculating that inducing more Republican talk of impeachment will rally the Democratic base and, as Rich puts it, “drive the middle away from the GOP”?

As he decoded the administration’s thinking, Rich inserted a caveat. To me, it is the money line in his analysis: Obama and his advisers are “assuming the politics of impeachment are bad for Republicans.” It is a foolish assumption.

Building the Political Case
When Faithless Execution was released, it was only natural that some commentators homed in on the subtitle’s invocation of “impeachment.” The salient part, however, has always been “building the political case.” The book’s major theme is that impeachment is a political remedy requiring broad public consensus, not a legal one triggered once impeachable offenses are provable.

Contrary to some less than informed opinion, “high crimes and misdemeanors” — the legal standard for impeachment — refers not to indictable criminal offenses but to profound breaches of the public trust by high-ranking officials. Once the standard is understood, it becomes easy to see that the president and his underlings have committed numerous, readily provable impeachable offenses. Yet, even if a president commits a hundred high crimes and misdemeanors, impeachment is a non-starter unless the public is convinced that the president should be removed from power. The real question is political: Are his lawlessness and unfitness so thoroughgoing that we can no longer trust him with the awesome power of the chief executive?

The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler not only invents points the Cheneys did not make, he then casually dismisses “uncomfortable points” they did make. How many Pinocchios is that worth?

Kessler evidently assumes that when intelligence assessments differ, the correct version is only that which differs from the points made by the Cheneys but not by their critics.

Most senior Democratic members of the Senate at the time voted — twice — for giving the President the authority to take down Saddam Hussein. How else can Democrats say they made a mistake voting for the war if they cannot now make the case that they were “fooled”?

The U.S. took down Saddam Hussein’s regime because on balance the threat-intelligence could not be ignored.

A recent article in the Weekly Standard by former Vice President Dick Cheney and his daughter, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Liz Cheney, noted that there was sufficient evidence prior to the 2003 liberation of Iraq that Saddam Hussein might coordinate terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its interests.

“It is undisputed,” they wrote, “and has been confirmed repeatedly in Iraqi government documents captured after the invasion, that Saddam had deep, longstanding, far-reaching relationships with terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda and its affiliates. It is undisputed that Saddam’s Iraq was a state based on terror, overseeing a coordinated program to support global jihadist terrorist organizations. Ansar al Islam, an al Qaeda-linked organization, operated training camps in northern Iraq before the invasion. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the future leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, funneled weapons and fighters into these camps, before the invasion… We also know, again confirmed in documents captured after the war, that Saddam provided funding, training, and other support to many terrorist organizations and individuals over decades, including to Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who leads al Qaeda today.”

The Washington Times reported on Tuesday that:

Talk of impeachment was cooked up by a White House desperate for something to rally Democrats ahead of November’s elections, House Speaker John A. Boehner said Tuesday, flatly ruling out any action on the controversial suggestion.

“We have no plans to impeach the president. We have no future plans,” Mr. Beohner said. “Listen, it’s all a scam started by Democrats at the White House.”

But PJM’s own Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, has a very different take, both in terms of Mr. Obama, and of the general concept of impeachment itself.

During our interview, Andrew will discuss his latest book, Faithless Execution: Building the Political Case for Obama’s Impeachment. Andrew tells me, “As Madison put it, impeachment was indispensable in the minds of the framers, as a mechanism for Congress to be able to prevent one of the things that they were extremely worried about during the drafting of the Constitution. Which was the possibility that this incredibly powerful new office that they were creating, the President of the United States, where all of the executive power would be reposed in one official. [The founders worried] that that official could become like a monarch; could become basically what the Revolution had fought against in the first place.”

And there’s little doubt that President Obama thinks of himself of having king-like powers, far removed from the controls of Congress.

During our interview, Andrew will discuss:

● How the Founding Fathers thought of impeachment.
● Is he worried about Democrats fundraising off his new book?
● What does McCarthy think of John Boehner’s plan to sue Obama?
● His thoughts on Congress’s investigations of Benghazi and the IRS scandal.
● If McCarthy was drafting the articles of impeachment for Barack Obama, what would they include?

Word came Tuesday that now a third UNRWA school in Gaza was housing rockets for Hamas. (How the missiles were never noticed before was unclear — maybe they were stacked beneath the erasers and paper clips or hidden under student spitballs.) From the Jerusalem Post [1]:

Christopher Gunness, spokesman for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, did not name who was responsible for putting weapons in the school, but quickly criticized whoever was at fault.
“We condemn the group or groups who endangered civilians by placing these munitions in our school. This is yet another flagrant violation of the neutrality of our premises,” Gunness said in a statement. “We call on all the warring parties to respect the inviolability of UN property.”

Gunness added that a UN munitions expert was called in to dispose of the weapons, but could not get to the site due to fighting on the ground.

Further, Breitbart.com [2] is reporting:

This week, UNRWA supplies and building materials had been found [3] in Hamas’s tunnel infrastructure, which has been used to smuggle weapons and carry out attacks on the State of Israel.

How’d that get there? More of that pesky teenage pilfering when teacher turned his back? Or was it something a bit more intentional? No wonder The Algemeiner is asking: Are UN Agencies Fighting for Human Rights or Supporting Terrorism? [4] It notes:

None of this is new and seemed only to be surprising to UNRWA itself. The group has a long-documented history of terrorist ties, something UNRWA’s former Commissioner General Peter Hansen openly admitted in 2004 to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation stating, “I am sure that there are Hamas members on the UNRWA payroll … and I don’t see that as a crime.”

Americans need to be alarmed by what Obama’s actions on behalf of Hamas reveal about the general direction of American Middle East policy under his leadership.

When US President Barack Obama phoned Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Sunday night, in the middle of a security cabinet meeting, he ended any remaining doubt regarding his policy toward Israel and Hamas.

Obama called Netanyahu while the premier was conferring with his senior ministers about how to proceed in Gaza. Some ministers counseled that Israel should continue to limit our forces to specific pinpoint operations aimed at destroying the tunnels of death that Hamas has dug throughout Gaza and into Israeli territory.

Others argued that the only way to truly destroy the tunnels, and keep them destroyed, is for Israel to retake control over the Gaza Strip.

No ministers were recommending that Israel end its operations in Gaza completely. The longer our soldiers fight, the more we learn about the vast dimensions of the Hamas’s terror arsenal, and about the Muslim Brotherhood group’s plans and strategy for using it to destabilize, demoralize and ultimately destroy Israeli society.

The IDF’s discovery of Hamas’s Rosh Hashana plot was the last straw for any Israeli leftists still harboring fantasies about picking up our marbles and going home. Hamas’s plan to use its tunnels to send hundreds of terrorists into multiple Israeli border communities simultaneously and carry out a massacre of unprecedented scope, replete with the abduction of hostages to Gaza, was the rude awakening the Left had avoided since it pushed for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza.

In other words, in their discussion Sunday night, Netanyahu and his ministers were without illusions about the gravity of the situation and the imperative of winning – however defined.

Urban legend had it that The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael pronounced herself mystified by Richard Nixon’s re-election: “Everybody I know voted for McGovern.” The actual quote, as we noted in 2011, made clear Kael understood her social circle was not representative of the American electorate.

But the real Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic’s chief ObamaCare apologist, sounds a lot like the mythical Kael in his latest effort to explain away last week’s decision in Halbig v. Burwell:

Most of the health policy wonks I know are baffled by these new legal challenges to Obamacare—the lawsuits that one federal court rejected last week but another one approved, and then got more attention thanks to some 2012 comments by one of the law’s outside architects. If you want to know why we are so puzzled, you should read the article that Sarah Kliff published in Vox over the weekend.

Even the mythical Kael wouldn’t sink so low as to appeal to the authority of Vox!

Kliff’s argument can be reduced to the following: First, “Congress never debated whether they would limit the subsidies to states that built their own exchanges.” Second, Kliff doesn’t remember hearing anyone raise the question at the time. Third, Kliff can’t find any contemporaneous articles discussing the question. Therefore, Congress “intended” for subsidies to be available “in every state, no matter who built the exchange.” Thus if the law says otherwise, it must be an error.

What about Jonathan Gruber’s contemporaneous statements to the contrary, noted here Friday? Kliff: “Gruber has since told . . . Cohn that his comments were a ‘mistake’ during an ‘off-the-cuff’ remark. I’m inclined to believe Gruber, largely because I’ve interviewed him numerous times about threats to the Affordable Care Act, and this idea (which has huge consequences for Obamacare) never came up.”

As for Cohn’s latest effort, it passes over the Gruber statements altogether, except for that reference to “one of the law’s outside architects.” So we’re supposed to disregard those Gruber statements because (1) if he’d meant them, he’d have said something about it to Kliff, and (2) he’s just some outsider yahoo anyway.

The ‘Gaza generation’ seems worried about Arab deaths only when Jews are involved.

About the crowds on Friday in Paris chanting “Palestine will overcome” and “Israel, assassin”: Where were they a few days earlier when news broke that over the previous weekend Syria’s civil war had produced 720 more dead, adding to the 150,000 others who have not had the honor of demonstrations in France?

Why did the protesters not pour into the streets when, a few days before that, the well-informed Syrian Network for Human Rights revealed that so far this year Damascus’s army, which was supposed to have destroyed its supply of chemical weapons, carried out at least 17 gas attacks around Kafrzyta, Talmanas, Atshan and elsewhere?

Will these people, “outraged” for a day, claim that they did not know, that they saw no images of the others who died, and that today only images have the power to stir them to action? That is not going to work. Because they had seen what was happening in Syria. As reporters later discovered, those same grisly images, or older versions of them, were appropriated, doctored and retweeted by organizers of the anti-Israel demonstrations under the dishonest hashtag GazaUnderAttack.

There has been a lot of talk over the past two weeks about whether it is anti-Semitic to oppose Israel’s attack on Gaza. Radical Leftists and liberal commentators have insisted (perhaps a bit too much?) that there is nothing remotely anti-Semitic about their anger with Israel or their fury on behalf of battered, bruised and bombed Palestinians. And of course they are right that it is entirely possible to oppose Israel’s militarism without harbouring so much as a smidgen of dislike for the Jewish people. Some will oppose the war in Gaza simply because they are against wars in general, especially ones that impact on civilians.

However, it seems pretty clear to me that much of the left in Europe and America is becoming more anti-Semitic, or at least risks falling into the trap of anti-Semitism, sometimes quite thoughtlessly. In the language it uses, in the ideas it promotes, in the way in which it talks about the modern world, including Israel, much of the Left has adopted a style of politics that has anti-Semitic undertones, and sometimes overtones. The key problem has been the Left’s embrace of conspiratorial thinking, its growing conviction that the world is governed by what it views as uncaring “cabals”, “networks”, self-serving lobbyists and gangs of bankers, all of which has tempted it to sometimes turn its attentions towards those people who historically were so often the object and the target of conspiratorial thinking – the Jews.

Yes, one can hate Israel’s attack on Gaza without hating the Jews. But there’s no denying that the hatred being expressed for Israel’s attack on Gaza is different to the opposition to all other acts of militarism in recent times. Just compare the huge 2003 Hyde Park demo against the Iraq War with the recent London demos against Israel’s attack on Gaza. The former had an air of resignation; it expressed a mild, middle-class sense of disappointment with Tony Blair, through safe, soft slogans like “Not In My Name”. The latter, by contrast, have been fiery and furious, with screeching about murder and mayhem and demands that the Israeli ambassador to the UK be booted out. Some attendees have held up placards claiming that Zionists control the British media while others have accused both London and Washington of “grovelling” before an apparently awesomely powerful Israeli Lobby.

This is a recurring theme in anti-Israel sentiment today: the idea that a powerful, sinister lobby of Israel lovers has warped our otherwise respectable leaders here in the West, basically winning control of Western foreign policy. You see it in cartoons depicting Israeli leaders as the puppet masters of politicians like William Hague and Tony Blair. You can hear it in Alexi Sayle’s much-tweeted claim that the “Western powers” kowtow to Israel because they are “frightened of it… frightened of the power that it wields”. You can see it in the arguments of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt in their popular book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which holds an apparently super-powerful pro-Israel lobby in the heart of Washington responsible for the Iraq War and all other kinds of disasters. The claim is often made that Israel has corrupted Western officials, commanding them to carry out its dirty work.