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Sheep during Reset, Lions Now? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/sheep-during-reset-lions-now/

I have written frequently about the dangers Vladimir Putin poses to U.S. interests. Yet when we prune all the rhetoric away, we are still left with two antithetical Obama–Trump administration policies.

The Obama reset, in reaction to the Bush pushback against Putin’s aggression in South Ossetia, inaugurated a bewildering policy of appeasement — summed up in a 2012 debate by Obama’s weird attack on Mitt Romney who warned of Russian threats (“the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because the Cold War’s been over for 20 years”).

The list of Obama’s Russian appeasement is long: watering down sanctions, not arming the Ukrainians, inviting Putin into the Middle East after a near 40-year hiatus, defense cuts, dismantling plans to cooperate with Eastern Europeans to install missile defense, the Obama/Medvedev hot mic incident, whose terms (reelection “space” for Obama in a exchange for “flexibility” on Eastern European missile defense) were carried out, high-level U.S. intelligence and FBI operatives trafficking in a “dossier” drawing on purchased Russian disinformation sources, anemic responses to the Russian absorption of Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and wet-noodle reactions to Russian cyber interference in the U.S. (“cut it out”, Vladimir?).

All of this naivete was based on the mythical assumptions that Russia was in transition to a civil society and should no longer be alienated as it had been in the last years of the derided Bush administration, and that Putin would interpret such restraint as magnanimity to be reciprocated rather than as timidity to be exploited.

Trump’s rhetoric was certainly not as eloquent on questions of Russian human-rights abuses as we heard in the twilight of the Obama administration in 2016, when the reset was in ruins.

But Trump’s 2017–19 record stands in stark contrast to all of the above: Pulling out of an asymmetrical anti-missile deal, arming the Ukrainians with lethal aid, defeating and killing Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefing up U.S. defense, jawboning NATO to rearm, opposing energy deals between Germany and Russia, and pushing for more U.S. gas and oil production and exports that stabilized or lowered global export prices. Are these witnesses going to criticize Trump’s “unfair” dismantling of Obama’s Russian reset on grounds that he knew Putin had tried to sabotage his campaign via having Russian operatives seeding Christopher Steele’s phony dossier?

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What If the Democrats Hadn’t Cried Wolf? By Kyle Smith

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/what-if-the-democrats-hadnt

Sondland’s testimony provided their daily ‘this changes everything’ fix.

The excitable team of Brian Stelter and Oliver Darcy is especially excitable in Stelter’s a.m. newsletter today. Darcy, filling in today for Stelter, thinks everything has changed. “Historic day” is the headline of his newsletter. Isn’t every day? Approvingly, he quotes CNN colleague Jeffrey Toobin: “I think you can divide the Trump presidency into two periods, before November 20th, 2019, and after, because now we know. I mean, now we know that every fantasy about how corrupt this administration was is actually true. That this was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.”

I won’t bore you by listing all the other times Team Excitable has solemnly declared that Suddenly Everything Has Changed, the Other Shoe Finally Dropped, and it’s The Beginning of the End. Just to give a quick recap, Trump was going to be dragged out of the Oval Office  because he colluded with the Russians during his campaign; because he fired James Comey, which was obstruction of justice; because he paid off Stormy Daniels; because he interfered with the Mueller investigation, which was obstruction of justice; and because he violated the Emoluments Clause by continuing to be a hotelier. This last was deemed the “number one” reason to impeach Trump by the Democratic party’s shaman-healer-id, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as recently as April.

Toobin’s statement is self-contradicting; Gordon Sondland’s testimony didn’t demonstrate that this administration “was a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning.” That Toobinism is the Democrats’ problem; the fact that they’ve been calling this administration a corrupt enterprise from the very beginning negates the idea that Sondland’s Testimony has Changed Everything. Darcy enthusiastically quotes pundits who called yesterday a “John Dean moment.” I think not. People who grew up in the 1930s and 1940s were about four standard deviations less cynical about politics than everyone is today.

Brian Stelter’s newsletter would have us believe that yesterday was like the moment when Krusty the Clown’s switch was flipped from Good to Evil. He and Darcy never expressed the slightest objection to anything in TrumpWorld until now, when it becomes their reluctant duty to call foul. That Darcy would suggest this simply indicates that his memory works about as well as that of the unfortunate hero of Memento. A more useful metaphor is that the Trump administration is like a tub of clear water into which beef-bouillon cubes of accusation have been thrown since before he even took office. The water turned dark brown a long time ago. Sondland’s testimony merely made the leather-colored water a bit more leathery-looking.

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Europe and Its Enemies Will the challenge of new adversaries galvanize the Continent? Pascal Bruckner

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/europe-and-its-enemies

n 1989, as the Soviet empire was imploding, Alexander Arbatov, a diplomatic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, addressed a brilliant remark to Westerners: “We are going to do something terrible to you. You will no longer have an enemy.” The disappearance of Communism indeed plunged Europe and the United States into a disorienting euphoria; for the “free world,” it was a symbolic catastrophe. There was something terrible and yet reassuring in the Soviet Union’s hostility: the East/West divide separated good from evil with razor-sharp clarity.

An enemy represents a guarantee for the future, a certainty of solidarity; it mobilizes individuals who would otherwise be ready to go their own way; and it overcomes the apathy that inheres in prosperous societies. The Cold War provided a polemical ordering of memory and of knowledge—a pedagogy for the problems of the present. The obligation to follow and check the adversary’s movements made us attentive to the slightest guerrilla actions and to the most local of conflicts; humanity remained a common concern. The threat that loomed over our social life restored an unprecedented clarity to our institutions, rights, and well-being. Democracy was once again fragile and precious, like a treasure that could be stolen at any moment.

Three decades later, the Old World, which meantime has been overcome with skepticism, seems to have provoked in its uncertainty the encroachments of two enemies: radical Islamism, in the double form of terrorism and Salafism; and Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Both view the West with resentment, considering it, in the first case, guilty of hostility toward the religion of the prophet and, in the second, of having brought about the fall of the Soviet Union. There, though, the resemblance ends.

Vladimir Putin sees himself as a hyperbolic Westerner, despising European decadence in the name of the true European values that he claims to incarnate. “The liberal idea,” Putin told the Financial Times in June 2019, “has become obsolete.” All the ills that Russia suffers supposedly come not from Russians themselves but from Europe’s corruption, America’s malfeasance, and a satanic NATO. What the Kremlin’s master dreads above all is democratic contagion, an importation of the spirit of Maidan—Kiev’s Independence Plaza—into Russia itself.

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Treatment with Dignity New York’s mental health court system is a proven success that deserves recognition and continued support. DJ Jaffe

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.city-journal.org/ny-mental-health-court-system

Today’s jails hold a disproportionate number of offenders with mental illnesses. As Stephen Eide has noted, these individuals often stay in jail far longer than typical inmates, which increases the likelihood of violent incidents or even solitary confinement. If they receive any treatment, it’s provided in a punitive rather than therapeutic environment. 

Working to change this grim reality is the Brooklyn Mental Health Court, which last week celebrated a milestone: 1,000 successful graduates from its criminal-justice-system diversion program. Mental health courts provide low-level offenders with community-based treatment as an alternative to trial and potential incarceration—if both the prosecution and defense agree to it. Participants must appear in court regularly to report on their progress. If they complete their program (which often lasts 12 months or more), their charges are dropped. Thanks to the court’s approach, New York has 1,000 fewer instances of jailed mentally ill persons.

The Brooklyn Mental Health Court works in similar fashion to Kendra’s Law, the New York statute that empowers judges to order people with serious mental illness to receive mandated and monitored treatment while they live in the community. Both programs catalyze treatment and can reduce recidivism by holding systems accountable for providing services to those who require care. As the city prepares to close Rikers Island, mental health courts and Kendra’s Law are more important than ever.

Judge Matthew D’Emic has presided over the program since its creation in 2002. Today, 29 other mental health courts operate in New York State, including in Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx. They have handled over 11,000 cases. According to an evaluation of the mental health courts in the Bronx and Brooklyn prepared for the National Institute of Justice, participation reduces the likelihood of re-arrest by 46 percent. By diverting defendants with serious mental illness from the criminal-justice system into community-based treatment, mental health courts improve public safety and limit unnecessary incarceration. This common-sense solution ultimately increases coordination between systems responsible for the mentally ill—a shortcoming since the 1960s.

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The Tragedy of the ‘Trans’ Child By Madeleine Kearns

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-tragedy-of-the-trans-child/

In Texas, the case of James Younger points to a disturbing trend in the treatment of gender-confused youth

His mother pulling him by one arm, his father pulling him by the other, seven-year-old James Younger, dressed in a skirt, looks distressed and confused. His mom, Anne Georgulas, wins the struggle and rests him on her hip. His dad, Jeffrey Younger, calls 911. “Why?” asks James. “She was supposed to give me custody,” his father replies. A video recording of this incident, which occurred on March 8, 2018, at James’s elementary-school open house, was played before a jury in Texas last month. It is a larger symbol of how children such as James Younger have become pawns in the transgender debate.

The Younger case has gained much media attention, in the U.S. and beyond. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the BBC all seem to cast the father as the villain, in particular for his refusal to agree that his child is transgender. Rolling Stone opines that the Younger story has become a “terrifying right-wing talking point.” Vox is worried about Republican state legislators’ trying to introduce bills prohibiting chemical and surgical interference with the sexual development of children who say they’re transgender, and “what [this] could mean for families nationwide” when “legislators want to have a say in whether Luna Younger should be allowed to socially transition.” For the Left, the Younger story is a tale of backwards attitudes victimizing a child.

In truth, it’s progressive attitudes that are victimizing the child, and James Younger is not an outlier. There are many more just like him, and some in even more dire straits. For years, the medical and legal establishments have been ignoring evidence and bending their standards to please transgender activists, some of whom are clinicians. There are three clinical approaches to helping children who exhibit symptoms of gender confusion. One involves a range of talk therapies and psychotherapies to address suspected underlying causes. A second, called “watchful waiting,” allows the child’s development to unfold as it will, which may mean that he chooses to transition later or not at all.

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Pelosi’s Projection A throwback to the Democrats’ great imposter. Lloyd Billingsley

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/pelosis-projection-lloyd-billingsley/

In Adam Schiff’s “impeachment palooza,” as one Republican called it, not a single witness has flagged an impeachable offence on the part of President Trump. As the smears, hearsay and lies surge onward, an offstage player has provided the key to all mysteries of the 2016 election and beyond.

After former ambassador Marie Yvanovitch failed to signal any bribery or crime on the part of the president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi promptly targeted President Trump. “I think part of it is his own insecurity as an imposter,” Pelosi told CBS. “I think he knows full well that he’s in that office way over his head. And so he has to diminish everyone else.”

Nancy’s keyword was “imposter,” a person posing as someone he is not. That profile hardly fits the current president of the United States.

Donald Trump has been a public figure for decades, putting up buildings, staging boxing matches, and appearing on television. Nobody has suggested that Donald J. Trump ever posed as somebody else, and nobody can point to mysteries in his ancestry. All that, and more, does apply to his predecessor in the White House.

The junior senator from Illinois, a virtual unknown, claimed that his father was a Kenyan goatherd who went to school in a tin-roof shack. That story came from the 1995 Dreams from My Father, which official biographer David Garrow proclaimed a novel and the author a “composite character.” That was apparent to the most casual reader of the Dreams book, which claims the Kenyan “bequeathed his name” to the Hawaiian-born American, and called him a “prop” in someone else’s narrative.

In all his writing from 1958-1964, the Kenyan Barack H. Obama makes no mention of an American wife and son. Barry, as his mother named him, was adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian student his mother Ann Dunham married, and raised in Indonesia.

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Global Warming’s Apocalyptic Path by Rael Jean Isaac

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://spectator.org/author/rael-jean-isaac/

It comes in waves, and it’s impossible to predict what will happen after the current wave of increasingly unhinged climate change activism breaks.

Global warming has been characterized by its critics (and occasionally by followers like Hawaii Sen. Mazie Hirono) as a religious movement. While this is correct, it is a religious movement of a special kind, that is, an apocalyptic movement. And although it is widely known that apocalyptic movements foretell an end of days, demand huge sacrifices by followers, and demonize dissent, what is less known is that these movements follow predictable patterns. The general “laws” that an apocalyptic movement follows over time explain both its short-term strength and, fortunately, its longer-term vulnerability.

In Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), Richard Landes chronicles recurring apocalyptic eruptions over the last 3,000 years. Typically there is belief in an imminent cataclysmic destruction that can only be averted by a total transformation of society. Precisely because the stakes are so high, a successful apocalyptic movement has extraordinary initial power. Believers are committed, zealous, and passionate, the urgent need for prompt action putting them at a high pitch of emotional intensity.

Landes describes the four-part life cycle of such movements. First comes the waxing wave, as those whom Landes calls the “roosters” (they crow the exciting new message) gain adherents and spread their stirring news. Second is the breaking wave, when the message reaches its peak of power, provokes the greatest turmoil, and roosters briefly dominate public life. Third is the churning wave, when roosters have lost a major element of their credibility, must confront the failure of their expectations, and mutate to survive. Last is the receding wave, as the “owls” — those who have all along warned against the roosters’ prophecies — regain ascendancy.

While Landes does not apply his apocalyptic model to global warming, the fit is obvious. In the 1980s and ’90s, a series of UN conferences on climate launched the waxing wave. This was followed at the beginning of this century by the breaking wave. In 2006, Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth (which later became a classroom staple) persuaded a broad public that man-made global warming threatened doomsday. That same year Sir Nicholas Stern, appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair to lead a team of economists to study climate change, prophesied it would bring “extended world war” and the need to move “hundreds of millions, probably billions of people.” In 2009, then–UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon told the Global Economic Forum, “We have just four months. Four months to secure the future of our planet.”

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SPARTACUS FLUNKS HONG KONG QUESTION IN DEBATE

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/debate_booker_gets_a_softball_question_on_hong_kong_and_weasels_out_of_answering.html
Debate: Booker gets a softball question on Hong Kong, weasels out of answering By Monica Showalter

Sen. Cory Booker got the easiest question of the evening at last night’s Democratic debate in Atlanta, a whiff, a puff ball, an easy opportunity to sound grand in the invitation to say a nice thing about Hong Kong.  He blew it.

Here’s the NBC transcript:

MADDOW: On the issue of China, Senator Booker, China is now using force against demonstrators in Hong Kong where millions have taken to the streets advocating for democratic reforms. Many of the demonstrators are asking the United States for help. If you were president, would the U.S. help their movement, and how?

BOOKER: Well, first of all, this is president who seems to want to go up against China in a trade war by pulling away from our allies and, in fact, attacking them, as well. We used a national security waiver to put tariffs on Canada. And so at the very time that China is breaking international rules, is practicing unfair practices, stealing technology, forcing technology transfer, and violating human rights, this nation is pulling away from critical allies we would need to show strength against China.

There’s a larger battle going on, on the planet Earth right now between totalitarian, dictatorial countries and free democracies. And we see the scorecard under this president not looking so good, with China actually shifting more towards an authoritarian government, with its leader now getting rid of even his — getting rid of term limits.

And so I believe we need a much stronger policy, one that’s not led, as President Trump seems to want to do, in a transactional way, but one that’s led by American values. So, yes, we will call China out for its human rights violations.

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New Poll Shows Independents Oppose Impeachment By 15-Point Margin By Chrissy Clark

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/21/new-poll-shows-independents-oppose-impeachment-by-15-point-margin/

A new Emerson poll for November found more Independent voters oppose the impeachment of President Trump, compared to October when more Independent voters supported Trump’s impeachment.

In October, 48 percent of Independent’s supported impeaching Trump, with 39 percent in opposition. Now, the tides have turned. 49 percent of Independents oppose impeachment, while only 34 percent support it. That’s a 15-point margin in opposition of impeachment among Independent voters.

According to Emerson’s newest poll, the impeachment hearings are being watched, or at least followed, by 69 percent of voters. These open-door hearings are actually making an impact on American’s perception of the impeachment inquiry.

Emerson’s data concluded voters are getting their impeachment information from the following news sources (the percentage denotes how many voters watch each outlet for impeachment coverage):

Fox News – 26%
ABC, NBC, or CBS – 24%
CNN – 16%
MSNBC – 15%
Outside source – 19%

The results from these open-door impeachment hearings are helping Trump’s case for reelection. There are two narratives circulating in the media. The first, there is no question Trump bribed Ukraine and he must be impeached. The second, this impeachment is a partisan witch hunt.

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IMPEACHMENT FOLLIES

Posted By on November 21st, 2019

https://www.tothepointnews.com/2019/11/captain-queeg-on-steroids/  

CAPTAIN QUEEG ON STEROIDS  By Patricia McCarthy

Watching Schiff’s trumped up inquiry about nothing but a phone call, the transcript of which has been available to the public for many weeks, is like watching The Caine Mutiny (1954) without the drama.

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-coup-klutz-clan-the-pistol-toting-gang-that-just-cant-shoot-straight

The ‘Coup Klutz Clan’: The Pistol-toting Gang That Just Can’t Shoot Straight Judi McLeod

Infamy will forever define all members of the ‘Coup Klutz Clan’, depicted here in the cartoon caricatures of Canada Free Press cartoonist, Dag Barkley.

In the end, it will not be their crazed impeachment demands that will define the ‘Coup Klutz Clan’ but INFAMY—‘The Pistol-toting Gang That Just Can’t Shoot Straight’.

After all the histrionics of Adam Schiff televised LIVE at the Impeachment ‘Inquiry’ with one bureaucrat after another having to admit they have no evidence of wrong doing by President Donald Trump, they’re shooting themselves in their own feet.