VACATION UNTIL AUGUST 16TH
Aug 6, 1945 – Aug 9, 1945
During the final stage of World War II, the United States dropped nuclear weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, respectively.
Thus began the end of World War 11…..rsk
The American and British media have been inundated lately with denunciations of “illiberalism.” That word was once used to describe a private shortcoming such as a person who was narrow-minded or ungenerous. But in the wake of Donald Trump’s election and Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, “illiberalism” is being treated as a key political concept. In the writings of Fareed Zakaria, David Brooks, James Kirchick, the Economist and the Atlantic, among others, it is now assumed that the line dividing “liberal” from “illiberal” is the most important in politics.
Who are these “illiberals” everyone is talking about? Respected analysts have ascribed illiberalism to the Nazis and the Soviets; to Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un ; to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Abdel Fattah Al Sisi ; to the Shiite regime in Iran and the military regime in Myanmar; to the democratic governments of India, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic; to Donald Trump, Theresa May and Brexit; to the nationalist parties in Scotland and Catalonia; to Marine Le Pen, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn and the lefty activists demanding political correctness on campus; to Venezuela, Pakistan, Kenya and Thailand.
Not everyone raising the hue and cry about illiberalism has exactly this same list in mind. But the talk follows a consistent pattern: A given commentator will name some violent, repressive regimes (Iran, North Korea, Russia). Then he will explain that their “illiberalism” is reminiscent of various nonviolent, democratically chosen public figures or policies (Mr. Trump, Brexit, Polish immigration rules) that he happens to oppose.
At first glance, it looks like taint by association. If you hate Mr. Trump or Brexit enough, you may be in the market for a way to delegitimize their supporters, 40% or 50% of the voting public. Making it out as though Mr. Trump is a kind of Putin, Erdogan or Kim Jong Un—not Hitler exactly, but at least Hitler lite—may feel like progress.
The catchall label has been applied to Theresa May, Bernie Sanders, Vladimir Putin, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Donald Trump and Xi Jinping
But that isn’t enough of an explanation. A battalion of our best-known journalists and intellectuals are straining to persuade readers that there exists some real-world phenomenon called “illiberalism,” and that it is, moreover, a grave threat. This isn’t routine political partisanship. They really feel as if they are living through a nightmare in which battling “illiberalism” has taken on a staggering significance.
It’s vital to understand this phenomenon, not because “illiberalism” really identifies a coherent idea—it doesn’t—but because the new politics these writers are urging, the politics of liberalism vs. illiberalism, is itself an important, troubling development.
Start with the exaggerated sense of power many Americans and Europeans experienced after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Anything seemed possible, and a remarkable number of normally tough-minded people began telling one another fanciful stories about what would happen next. A series of American presidents giddily described the prosperity and goodwill that were about to arise.
George H.W. Bush declared in 1990 that after 100 generations of searching for peace, a new world order was about to be born, “a world quite different from the one we’ve known, a world where the rule of law supplants the rule of the jungle.” Utopian political tracts by Francis Fukuyama (“The End of History and the Last Man,” 1992), Thomas Friedman (“The Lexus and the Olive Tree,” 1999), and Shimon Peres (“The New Middle East,” 1993), described the imminent arrival of the universal rule of law, human rights, individual liberties, free markets and open borders. These speeches and books raised expectations into the stratosphere, asserting that decent men and women everywhere would embrace the liberal order, since the alternatives had been discredited.
Even at the height of all this, one caveat was consistently repeated: A rogue’s gallery of holdouts would continue to resist until the mopping-up operations were complete. Mr. Fukuyama referred to these irrationalists, clinging to nationalism, tribalism and religion, as “megalothymic.” It wasn’t a very catchy brand name. The term that stuck instead came from “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy,” an insightful 1997 essay in Foreign Affairs by Mr. Zakaria, which argued that resistance to the new order was far more widespread than had been recognized.
In this context, “liberalism” was understood as the belief that it was possible and desirable to establish a world-wide regime of law, enforced by American power, to ensure human rights and individual liberties. “Illiberalism” became a catchall term that lumped together anyone opposed to the project—as Marxists used the word “reactionary” to describe anyone opposed to the coming communist world order.
In China The Cultural Revolution, that took place from 1966 until 1976 had a stated goal : to purge capitalism and traditional culture from Chinese society. They instituted brutal labor re-education camps.
In America anxious seniors are now worried about SAT scores, interviews and essays that have to demonstrate their passions for justice and human rights and a green planet and diversity. The chief question they ask is not about the price of tuition and room and board or the required courses. They want to know if they will be happy.
In late summer of 2018 they will take their trunks with their Che Guevara T shirts, torn designer jeans and grungy sneakers and ingrained ignorance off to campus. And once settled into their cushy dorms, their re-education will commence.
Unless they major only in science, they will learn to despise capitalism, national cultural norms, shed all gender pronouns and identity, atone for their privileges by joining all the inviting “anti” groups that rail, riot and demand recognition, avoid reading old white authors, approach every aggression and barbarism with moral relativity, read alt-history, especially about the Middle East and Palestine.
All this for an average of $50,000 a year…..rsk
P.S. They will also learn that Mao Zedong of the aforementioned re-education labor camps was a progressive.
When Donald Trump announced his plan to ban transgendered people from military service, #TransRightsAreHumanRights quickly began trending on Twitter. While tweets including the hashtag ranged from support for the LGBT community to attacks on Trump, they all carried with them the assumption that trans — and all — people have a “right” to serve in the military. Whether you support President Trump’s policy or not, Americans must reconsider the claim that everyone has a right to military service.
The political theory of the social compact — under which the Founders built America — says natural rights, i.e., true rights, are synonymous with personhood and belong to you simply because you exist. In a word, they are unalienable.
That military service is alienable, through restrictions on membership necessary for our military to fulfill its purpose, automatically rules it out as a right. In other words, the military blocking a 16-year-old’s ability to enlist does not divorce him from or even endanger his personhood. Children under the age of 17 or the mentally and physically disabled, for example, are excluded because their lack of mental maturity or physical capacity threatens combat readiness and effectiveness.
The justifying condition of exclusion for the sake of the group’s ability to perform and survive as a whole classifies military service as an opportunity, at most. Thus, should the Department of Defense and the president determine that 16-year-olds are fit for effective combat service, they wouldn’t be granting a right but opening an opportunity.
That being the case, when the Obama administration’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, and defense secretary, Leon Panetta, opened more than 14,000 military positions to women, they did so based on new qualifications of combat readiness not on women having an inherent “right” to service:
We are fully committed to removing as many barriers as possible to joining, advancing, and succeeding in the U.S. Armed Forces. Success in our military based solely on ability, qualifications, and performance is consistent with our values and enhances military readiness.
When Ashton Carter, Obama’s fourth defense secretary and the only one without military service, opened all military positions to women, he did so for the same reason:
Remember the movie “Rashomon” where four people recount totally different versions of the same incident? Now we have “Russiamon” where depending on who and what you read and who and what you watch we get totally different versions.
Which collusion colluded the most?
A.Did Hillary collude with the Russians by selling them high grade uranium?
B.Did Jared and Donald Trump Jr. collude by listening to a a “high level” lowlife from Russia?
C.Did Debbie Wasserman Schultz collude with Russia through an aide?
D. Was Melania Trump confessing collusion by wearing a bright red suit in France? Red is the color symbol for Communism.
As I said, depends what you watch and what you read…..
President Trump lashed out again Wednesday at Jeff Sessions, and his fury over the Attorney General’s recusal from the Russia campaign-meddling probe may take the President down a self-destructive path. So this is a good moment to explain why Mr. Sessions felt obliged to recuse himself and why it was proper to do so.
Mr. Trump seems to think Mr. Sessions recused himself in March due to a failure of political nerve after news broke that he had met with the Russian ambassador during the 2016 campaign. Mr. Sessions did recuse himself shortly after that story broke, and the AG didn’t help by forgetting to report those meetings during his confirmation hearing.
But Mr. Sessions and his advisers had been considering recusal long before that story broke—and for reasons rooted in law and Justice Department policy.
After Watergate in 1978, Congress passed a law requiring “the disqualification of any officer or employee of the Department of Justice, including a United States attorney or a member of such attorney’s staff, from participation in a particular investigation or prosecution if such participation may result in a personal, financial, or political conflict of interest, or the appearance thereof.”
The Justice Department implemented this language with rule 28 CFR Sec. 45.2. This bars employees from probes if they have a personal or political relationship with “any person or organization substantially involved in the conduct that is the subject of the investigation or prosecution” or which they know “has a specific and substantial interest that would be directly affected by the outcome of the investigation or prosecution.”
This language didn’t apply to Mr. Sessions during his confirmation process because he didn’t know the contours of the FBI and Justice investigation. But the AG soon learned after he arrived at Main Justice in February that the investigation included individuals associated with the Trump presidential campaign.
Mr. Sessions had worked on the campaign, and he clearly had personal and political relationships with probable subjects of the investigation. These included former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, former campaign manager Paul Manafort, and potentially others.
James Comey publicly confirmed this on March 20 when he told the House Intelligence Committee that the FBI “as part of our counterintelligence mission, is investigating the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 presidential election and that includes investigating the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination.”
Some legal sages say this means Mr. Sessions did not have to recuse himself because this was a “counterintelligence,” not a criminal, probe. But you have to be credulous to think Mr. Comey would ignore potential crimes if he found them in the course of counterintelligence work. Mr. Sessions might have become a subject of the probe because of his meetings with the Russian ambassador.
The AG had no way of knowing where the investigation would lead, and the ethical considerations were serious as the post-Watergate statute makes clear. During his confirmation hearing in January, Mr. Sessions had promised that “if a specific matter arose where I believed my impartiality might reasonably be questioned, I would consult with Department ethics officials regarding the most appropriate way to proceed.”
Mr. Sessions fulfilled that promise, and on March 2 he announced that he’d recuse himself “from any existing or future investigations of any matters related in any way to the campaigns for President of the United States” based on the advice of senior career Justice officials. Imagine the media storm if word leaked that Mr. Sessions had ignored his department’s ethics officials.
Mr. Sessions’s recusal helped Mr. Trump for a time by eliminating an easy conflict-of-interest target for Democrats. The calls for a special prosecutor died down. They only erupted again in May after Mr. Trump fired Mr. Comey and tweeted his phony threat that there might be White House tapes.
At the core of the Qatar dispute is the question of Qatar’s support for extremism. While many Gulf states have histories of donating to or promoting radical Islamism, many have made real reforms. Saudi Arabia, for example, became much more serious about the need to curtail support for radical groups after the Kingdom started suffering blowback with terrorists targeting foreigners living in Saudi Arabia and senior Saudi officials. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, meanwhile, has cracked down not only on the Muslim Brotherhood but has also moved to sever the life-line Egypt often provided Hamas leaders in Gaza. Qatar, however, continues to set itself above the rest in its support for Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/will-mattis-betray-the-gulf-allies-qatar/
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and other moderate Arab states are rightly confused, if not frustrated, by the muddled U.S. response so far. After all, diplomats and official from these states say, both Democratic and Republican administrations in the United States have both long beseeched them to take a no-nonsense approach to extremism and to operate in a coordinated fashion against regional threats.
When they finally do, the White House flip-flops and the State Department urges compromise and negotiation. Evenhandedness is not a virtue when one side is right and the other wrong. To negotiate with regard to the acceptance of terrorist groups is, however, a very dangerous precedent. If the United States re-engaged in Afghanistan to eliminate al-Qaeda’s bases there or began operations in Syria to counter the Islamic State, Washington would greatly resent outside powers demanding that the United States compromise with either.
In the wake of the Qatar crisis, now in its second month, Turkey set up a military base in Qatar, much to the outrage of the states seeking to pressure Qatar into compliance. That base’s closure remains a key demand among moderate Arab countries.
Now word comes that the U.S. military is planning to conduct military exercises in Qatar with the Qatari and Turkish militaries. Daily Sabah, a once independent paper which was seized by Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government and transferred to his son-in-law, quoted Qatari Defense Minister Khalid bin Mohammed al-Attiyah as saying, “Qatar, Turkey and the U.S. regularly conduct military drills in Qatar. In the near future, a joint drill will begin by the three countries.”
http://www.breitbart.com/london/2017/07/25/watch-israeli-flags-burnt-and-hezbollah-terror-banners-flown-in-london/ The demonstration was sparked by new security measures on Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which have now been removed. Protesters also waved Palestinian and Turkish flags, a well as pictures of the al-Aksa mosque. Cries of “Allahu-akbar” can be heard in amateur footage of the protest. Israeli flags were snatched from members of a small counter […]
