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June 2017

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Helmut Kohl His vision shaped post-Cold War Europe for the better.

By on June 17th, 2017

Among the many leaders who shaped modern Europe, few have been as consequential as Helmut Kohl, who died Friday at age 87. He saw his country through the death of the Cold War and the birth of a reunited Germany at the center of a more deeply integrated European Union.

Born in 1930, Kohl came of age amid the furies of a nihilistic German nationalism and then amid the wreckage of its defeat. He was compelled to join the Hitler Youth, as were all boys in that era, but was part of the first generation of Germany’s postwar leaders too young to have fought in the conflict. His parents instilled in him a devout Catholicism that shaped his later political outlook.

He entered politics in the Christian Democratic Union, which with its Bavarian sister party the CSU became Germany’s main center-right party. He rose to the Chancellorship of West Germany in 1982, a position he would hold for a postwar record of 16 years.

He took power after years of Social-Democratic Ostpolitik, or engagement with East Germany, and when the anticommunism of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II still faced considerable skepticism among putative foreign-policy experts. One of Kohl’s early contributions was to defend plans to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany against fierce protests across Europe.

Kohl also built on the work of his predecessors in reconciling Germany with the rest of Europe. His friendship with French President François Mitterrand was legendary, and that proved crucial in persuading other European leaders to accept a reunified Germany after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

That reunification—and the creation of the euro, which Kohl accepted as its price—remains controversial. Economists are right that the euro and many economic-policy decisions governing reunification created challenges that still dog the EU. Kohl was right that peaceful German integration was worth the price.

Europe’s first tasks after 1989 were political, not economic: to welcome the formerly subjugated people of Eastern Europe back into Western civilization, and to find a way for Germany to be a nation again without being a threat. Kohl, driven by his commitment to European unity, aided both projects with his policy of rapid reunification and the euro. The result was a Continent that weathered the collapse of a malign neighboring superpower while remaining at peace with itself.

Historians will remember that achievement more than the commonplace political scandals that engulfed Kohl later in his long career. Rarely does a leader change his nation as dramatically for the better as Helmut Kohl did.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Robert Mueller’s Mission The special counsel needs to rise above his Comey loyalties.

By on June 17th, 2017

“We relate all this because it shows how Mr. Mueller let his prosecutorial willfulness interfere with proper constitutional and executive-branch procedure. This showed bad judgment. He shares this habit with Mr. Comey.”

That didn’t take long. Barely a week after James Comey admitted leaking a memo to tee up a special counsel against Donald Trump, multiple news reports based on leaks confirm that special counsel Robert Mueller is investigating the President for obstruction of justice. You don’t have to be a Trump partisan to have concerns about where all of this headed.

President Trump has reportedly stepped back this week from his temptation to fire Mr. Mueller, and that’s the right decision. The chief executive has the constitutional power to fire a special counsel through the chain of command at the Justice Department, but doing so would be a political debacle by suggesting he has something to hide.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who appointed Mr. Mueller, would surely resign, and other officials might resign as well until someone at Justice fulfilled Mr. Trump’s orders. The President’s opponents would think it’s Christmas. The dismissal would put the President’s political allies in a terrible spot and further distract from what are make-or-break months for his agenda on Capitol Hill. His tweets attacking the probe are also counterproductive, but by now we know he won’t stop.
There are nonetheless good reasons to raise questions about Mr. Mueller’s investigation, and those concerns are growing as we learn more about his close ties to Mr. Comey, some of his previous behavior, and the people he has hired for his special counsel staff. The country needs a fair investigation of the facts, not a vendetta to take down Mr. Trump or vindicate the tribe of career prosecutors and FBI agents to which Messrs. Mueller and Comey belong.

Start with the fact that Mr. Comey told the Senate last week that he asked a buddy to leak his memo about Mr. Trump specifically “because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel.” Did Mr. Comey then suggest Mr. Mueller’s name to Mr. Rosenstein? He certainly praised Mr. Mueller to the skies at his Senate hearing.

The two former FBI directors are long-time friends who share a similar personal righteousness. Mr. Mueller, then running the FBI, joined Mr. Comey, then Deputy Attorney General, in threatening to resign in 2004 over George W. Bush’s antiterror wiretaps.

Less well known is how Mr. Mueller resisted direction from the White House in 2006 after he sent agents with a warrant to search then Democratic Rep. William Jefferson’s congressional office on a Saturday night without seeking legislative-branch permission. The unprecedented raid failed to distinguish between documents relevant to corruption and those that were part of legislative deliberation. GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert rightly objected to this as an executive violation of the separation of powers and took his concerns to Mr. Bush.

The President asked his chief of staff, Joshua Bolten, to ask Mr. Mueller to return the Jefferson documents that he could seek again through regular channels, but the FBI chief refused. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was also unable to move the FBI director. When Mr. Bolten asked again, Mr. Mueller said he wouldn’t tolerate political interference in a criminal probe, as if the Republican Mr. Bush was trying to protect a corrupt Democrat. Mr. Mueller threatened to resign, and the dispute was settled only after Mr. Bush ordered the seized documents sealed for 45 days until Congress and Mr. Mueller could work out a compromise.

The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals later ruled that the FBI raid had violated the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause and Mr. Jefferson’s “non-disclosure privilege” as a Member of Congress, though the court let Justice keep the documents citing Supreme Court precedent on the exclusionary rule for collecting evidence.

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BOOKS Comments turned off

DAVID FROMKIN: AUTHOR OF “A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE” IS REMEMBERED BY ROGER KIMBALL

By on June 17th, 2017

The Great War’s Great Historian Appreciated the Good LifeDavid Fromkin’s ‘A Peace to End All Peace’ was a masterpiece. But I wish I’d eaten at his restaurant.

The historian David Fromkin died last Sunday, a couple of months shy of his 85th birthday. I first met him over lunch in 1986, when he was working on the book that would be his magnum opus, “A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.” That book, about how France and Britain endeavored to impose a new political dispensation on the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I, was published in 1989, to near universal commendation.

All of Fromkin’s signature virtues were on display in “A Peace to End All Peace.” It was the product of prodigious but lightly worn research. It was politically canny about the realities of power (Fromkin had been a student of Hans Morgenthau at the University of Chicago). And it was beautifully written. It is worth stressing this last point. He commanded a light, allegro prose, spare but deeply evocative, clear as an Alpine spring.

“A Peace to End All Peace” was also shot through with a recurring leitmotif typical of Fromkin, at once nostalgic and admonitory. The nostalgia focused on the lost sense of innocence and amplitude that marked the decade before the outbreak of war in the summer of 1914—“Europe’s Last Summer,” as he put it in the title of his 2004 book about who started the Great War. (Spoiler: there were really two wars. One was started by the Hapsburg Empire when it attacked Serbia, the other by the Germans.)

The innocence had to do with the political easiness of the time. The opening decade of the 20th century was a time of apogees and consummations. There was a shared sense, Fromkin wrote in his book “The Independence of Nations” (1981), that Europe, finally, at last, had become civilized. Sweetness and light reigned, and would reign, forever. He quotes the historian A.J.P. Taylor: “Until August 1914, a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state. . . . He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card.” For the most part, there were no passports. One didn’t even need a business card when traveling. A personal card would do. This was an age before the income tax, before exchange controls and customs barriers. In many ways, Fromkin notes, there was more globalization than there is now.

There was also immensely more security—or so it seemed. In several of his books, Fromkin quotes a melancholy passage from the Austrian author Stefan Zweig about the decade before the Great War: “The Golden Age of Security,” he called it, “Everything in our almost thousand-year-old Austrian monarchy seemed based on permanency.”

Except, of course, that it wasn’t. The admonitory current that flows through Fromkin’s writing has to do with the real permanencies in life: the intransigence of competing cultures, the unyielding imperatives of power, the awful awakenings of shattered illusions. It is appropriate that one of his abiding passions was ancient Greek civilization—he was involved in several archaeological digs in the islands off the Turkish coast—for the old teaching that nemesis was the inevitable result of hubris was a recurring theme in his work.

In politics, Fromkin was a species of Democrat that scarcely exists today. He was an unapologetic American patriot of decidedly cosmopolitan tastes. He adulated FDR and clear-eyed, disabused politicians like Scoop Jackson and Pat Moynihan. He admired much about Bill Clinton, was repelled by Mr. Clinton’s wife, and regarded Barack Obama with a mixture of curiosity and revulsion (though he undoubtedly voted for him). Unlike so many politicians of both parties today, he had the supreme political wisdom to understand that when politics becomes all-important it has failed in its primary duty: to safeguard and promote the good life.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Scalise Remains in Critical Condition but Prognosis Has Improved Doctor says lawmaker was near death when he arrived at hospital after shooting

By on June 17th, 2017

By Natalie Andrews and Kristina Peterson
https://www.wsj.com/articles/scalise-remains-in-critical-condition-but-prognosis-has-improved-1497645790

WASHINGTON—Rep. Steve Scalise (R., La.) remained in critical condition on Friday but his prognosis has improved, a hospital official said, two days after a gunman shot the third-ranking House Republican at a baseball practice.

Jack Sava, the director of the surgery team at MedStar Washington Hospital Center, told reporters Friday that Mr. Scalise had been near death after he was shot in the hip Wednesday, as the bullet caused extensive damage and bleeding.

Dr. Sava said that the lawmaker arrived at the hospital unconscious and “in critical condition with an imminent risk of death,” but that his condition has improved significantly in the past 36 hours.
Mr. Scalise has undergone numerous surgeries and is expected to continue recovering, with the length of his hospital stay unknown. “My understanding is that he will be able to walk and hopefully run,” Dr. Sava told reporters in a briefing on Friday afternoon.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

DANIEL GREENFIELD: THE CLIMATE CONFEDERACY

By on June 17th, 2017

After President Trump rejected the Paris Climate treaty, which had never been ratified by the Senate, the European Union announced that it would work with a climate confederacy of secessionist states. Scotland and Norway’s environmental ministers have mentioned a focus on individual American states. And the secessionist governments of California, New York and Washington have announced that they will unilaterally and illegally enter into a foreign treaty rejected by the President of the United States.

The Constitution is very clear about this. “No state shall enter into any treaty.” Governor Cuomo of New York has been equally clear. “New York State is committed to meeting the standards set forth in the Paris Accord regardless of Washington’s irresponsible actions.”

Cuomo’s statement conveniently comes in French, Chinese and Russian translations.

“It is a little bold to talk about the China-California partnership as though we were a separate nation, but we are a separate nation,” Governor Brown of California announced.

In an interview with the Huffington Post, the radical leftist described California as “a real nation-state”.

Brown was taking a swing through China to reassure the Communist dictatorship of California’s loyalty to an illegal treaty at the same time as EU boss Juncker was bashing America and kissing up to Premier Li Keqiang at the EU-China summit. It’s one thing when the EU and China form a united front against America. It’s quite another when California and China form a united front against America.

The Climate Alliance of California, New York, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Colorado, Hawaii, Virginia and Rhode Island looks a lot like the Confederacy’s Montgomery Convention. Both serve as meeting points for a secessionist alliance of states to air their grievances against the Federal government over an issue in which they are out of step with the nation.

“We’re a powerful state government. We have nine other states that agree with us,” Brown boasted.

Two more and Jim Jones’ old pal could have his own confederacy.

All the bragging and boasting about how much wealth and power the secessionist states of the climate confederacy represent sounds very familiar. But that wealth and power is based around small enclaves, the Bay Area and a few dozen blocks in Manhattan, which wield disproportionate influence.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Top MIT Scientist: Dr. Richard Lindzen -“Global Warming Science Is ‘Propaganda’”

By on June 17th, 2017

A leading MIT scientist claims that global warming science is based on pure propaganda, and that the “97 percent consensus” statistic is false.

According to Dr. Richard Lindzen, most scientists do not agree that CO2 emissions are the cause for climate change.

Dailycaller.com reports: “It was the narrative from the beginning,” Lindzen, a climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), told RealClear Radio Hour host Bill Frezza Friday. “In 1998, [NASA’s James] Hansen made some vague remarks. Newsweek ran a cover that says all scientists agree. Now they never really tell you what they agree on.”

“It is propaganda,” Lindzen said. “So all scientists agree it’s probably warmer now than it was at the end of the Little Ice Age. Almost all Scientists agree that if you add CO2, you will have some warming. Maybe very little warming.”

“But it is propaganda to translate that into it is dangerous and we must reduce CO2,” he added.

Lindzen if referring to the often cited statistic among environmentalists and liberal politicians that 97 percent of climate scientists agree human activities are causing the planet to warm. This sort of argument has been around for decades, but recent use of the statistic can be traced to a 2013 report by Australian researcher John Cook.

Cook’s paper found of the scientific study “abstracts expressing a position on [manmade global warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global warming.” But Cook’s assertion has been heavily criticized by researchers carefully examining his methodology.

A paper by five leading climatologists published in the journal Science and Education found only 41 out of the 11,944 published climate studies examined in Cook’s study explicitly stated mankind has caused most of the warming since 1950 — meaning the actual consensus is 0.3 percent.

“It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper claiming a 97% climate consensus when on the authors’ own analysis the true consensus was well below 1%,” said Dr. David Legates, a geology professor at the University of Delaware and the study’s lead author.

A 2013 study by Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation found that Cook had to cast a wide net to cram scientists into his so-called consensus. To be part of Cook’s consensus, a scientific study only needed to agree carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet “to some unspecified extent” — both of which are uncontroversial points.

“Almost everybody involved in the climate debate, including the majority of sceptics, accepts these propositions, so little can be learned from the Cook et al. paper,” wrote Montford. “The extent to which the warming in the last two decades of the twentieth century was man-made and the likely extent of any future warming remain highly contentious scientific issues.”

Despite the dubious nature of the consensus, liberal politicians used the figure to bolster their calls for policies to fight global warming. President Barack Obama even cited the Cook paper while announcing sweeping climate regulations.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

THE COMEY GAP: MARK LANGFAN

By on June 17th, 2017

Everybody over 56 years old likely remembers the 18 ½ minute gap in Richard Nixon’s White House Watergate tapes after Nixon had ordered erasures to hide things he said concerning Watergate. In the current Comey craze of testimony, there’s a 105 ½ hour gap in James Comey’s testimony that proves that critical parts of Comey’s testimony is at best materially false, and, at worst, highly perjurious with the intent of committing crimes against the United States.

That 105 ½ hour gap is the time between when President Trump on Friday morning “tweeted” that “James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” and when Comey alleged in his recent Senate Intelligence Committee testimony that he “woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation.”

Between 9:32 Friday morning and let’s guess 3 am that next Monday night, there are approximately 105 and ½ hours. In short, Comey’s Senate testimony states that it took James B. Comey, Former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the United States of America, 105 ½ hours after President Trump’s “tapes” tweet to realize “that there might be corroboration” of his memos. This is so ludicrous that it exposes his entire testimony as a web of perjury.

As a preface, this essay is not going to vet the already reported grave chronology inconsistency in Comey’s “memo” testimony.

Instead, first, let’s examine the exact documentary record regarding this 105 ½ hour gap.

President Trump’s tweet at 8:26 AM on 12 May 2017 read:

“James Comey better hope that there are no “tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!”

Next, James B. Comey, Jr.’s Senate Intelligence Committee testimony under Republican Senator Susan Collins read as follows:

“COLLINS: And finally, did you show copies of your memos to anyone outside of the Department of Justice?

COMEY: Yes.

COLLINS: And to whom did you show copies?

COMEY: I asked – the president tweeted on Friday, after I got fired, that I better hope there’s no tapes. I woke up in the middle of the night on Monday night, because it didn’t dawn on me originally that there might be corroboration for our conversation. There might be a tape.

And my judgment was, I needed to get that out into the public square. And so I asked a friend of mine to share the content of the memo with a reporter. Didn’t do it myself, for a variety of reasons. But I asked him to, because I thought that might prompt the appointment of a special counsel. And so I asked a close friend of mine to do it.

COLLINS: And was that Mr. Wittes?

COMEY: No, no.

COLLINS: Who was that?

COMEY: A good friend of mine who’s a professor at Columbia Law School.

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The lawyers’ civil war Trump is under siege by shock troops from the left and right – an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny David Goldman

By on June 17th, 2017

US President Donald Trump and former FBI Director James Comey: Did Trump fire Comey because he showed insufficient zeal in uncovering the pattern of press leaks. Photo: Reuters file

The distinguished political scientist Angelo Codevilla coined the ominous term “cold civil war” to describe America’s precarious condition, adding, “Statesmanship’s first task is to prevent it from turning hot.” The attempted massacre June this week June 14 of Republican Congressmen and their staff by a deranged partisan of Sen. Bernie Sanders turned up the heat a notch, but it would be mistaken to attribute much importance to this dreadful outburst of left-wing rage. The augury of American fracture will not be street violence, but a constitutional crisis implicating virtually the whole of America’s governing caste. The shock troops in the cold civil war are not gunmen but lawyers.

A considerable portion of America’s permanent bureaucracy, including elements of its intelligence community, is engaged in an illegal and unconstitutional mutiny against the elected commander-in-chief, President Donald Trump. Most of the Democratic Party and a fair sampling of the Republican Establishment wants to force Trump out of office, and to this end undertook an entrapment scheme to entice the president and his staff into actions which might be construed after the fact as obstruction of justice. By means yet undisclosed, the mutineers forced Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn from office and now seek to bring down the president for allegedly obstructing an investigation of Gen. Flynn that arose in the first place from the entrapment scheme.

One of the Republican Party’s most distinguished statesmen recently told a closed gathering that a “cold coup” is underway against the president. I do not know and have not sought to learn the substance of the allegations; Gen. Flynn has no choice as a matter of self-preservation but to hold his peace and presently cannot defend himself in public.

By no coincidence is Gen. Flynn the central character in this scenario. As I wrote in February, the CIA really is out to get him:

Flynn’s Defense Intelligence Agency produced a now-notorious 2012 report warning that chaos in Syria’s civil war enabled the rise of a new Caliphate movement, namely ISIS. For full background, see Brad Hoff’s July 2016 essay in Foreign Policy Journal: Flynn humiliated the bungling CIA and exposed the incompetence and deception of the Obama administration, and got fired for it. If anyone doubts the depth of CIA incompetence in Syria, I recommend an account that appeared this month in the London Financial Times.

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