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Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence

August 1, 2017

Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence, American Greatness, , July 31, 2017

(How about media bias against Candidate and then President Trump? — DM)

In a logical world in which Republicans enjoy monopolies on political power, they would have dispensed with the progressive strategy of emasculating the Trump administration through endlessly hyped fake news accounts of quid pro quo Russia-Trump subversion. And they would have done so by themselves taking the offensive.

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In a perfect and disinterested world, when Washington, D.C. is deluged in scandal, a nonpartisan investigator or prosecutor should survey the contemporary rotten landscape. He would then distinguish the likely guilty from the probably falsely accused—regardless of the political consequences at stake.

In the real cosmos of Washington, however, the majority party—the group that controls the House, Senate, presidency, and U.S. Supreme Court—if it were necessary, would de facto appoint the government’s own special investigatory team, and then allow it to follow where leads dictate. Its majority status would assure that there were no political opponents in control of the investigations, keen on turning an inquiry into a political circus. That cynical reality is known as normal D.C. politics.

But in contemporary Republican La-La Land, the party in power with control over all three branches of government allows its minority-status opponents to dictate the rules of special investigations and inquiry—a Jeff Sessions recused, a Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) excused from his investigations of unmasking and leaking, a Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel, friend of to-be-investigated James Comey, and employer of partisan attorneys.

Is naiveté the cause of such laxity? Do Republicans unilaterally follow Munich rules because they hope such protocols will create a new “civility” and “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington?

Demonizing Resistance 
Or is the culprit civil dissension among the ranks, as the congressional leadership secretly has no real incentive to help the despised outsider Trump? When Republicans get re-elected on repealing and replacing Obamacare during the assured Obama veto-presidency, and then flip in the age of surety that Trump would reify their campaign boasts, should we laugh or cry? Is the Republican establishment’s aim to see Trump’s agenda rendered null and void—or does intent even matter when the result is the same anyway?

Or is the empowerment of progressive conspiracy-mongering due to fear of the mainstream media, which demonizes principled resistance to progressivism and lauds unprincipled surrender to it?

Or, lastly, is the cause a bewildering misreading of human nature? I say “bewildering” because conservatives supposedly brag that they are the more astute students of unchanging human nature, while progressives are purportedly naïve believers in therapeutic remedies to perceived human frailties?

If any of the above, the Republicans had better soon wise up. For eight months, progressives have swarmed the media and our politics with false charges of Russian collusion, aimed at delegitimizing both a president and his conservative agenda.

In a logical world in which Republicans enjoy monopolies on political power, they would have dispensed with the progressive strategy of emasculating the Trump administration through endlessly hyped fake news accounts of quid pro quo Russia-Trump subversion. And they would have done so by themselves taking the offensive.

Endlessly refuting each week’s new progressive charges—no, Donald Trump did not watch sick sex acts with prostitutes in Moscow; no, Donald Trump did not send his lawyer to Eastern Europe to rig the election; no, three swing states did not have their voting machines rigged; no, the electors will not betray their constitutional responsibilities; no, Trump is not going to be removed through impeachment, the 25th Amendment, or the Emoluments Clause—achieves nothing but to undermine public confidence in the conservative effort to undo the Obama agenda. They are no more serious stories than the scandal sheet allegations that Trump shorts his guests a scoop of Häagen-Dazs, that his wife is an illegal alien, or that his son is autistic. Apparently, Republicans don’t get it that when a president is smeared as watching urine-porn in Moscow or getting Russian hush money for undermining Hillary’s campaign, then the abyss between such charges and assassination chic in the popular media, is considerably narrowed.

Go Full-Bore on Real Scandals
The salvation of both the Trump Administration and the Republican congressional fate in the 2018 elections is to reestablish political deterrence—accomplished by going on a full-fledged offensive against real, not merely perceived or alleged, political scandals. Only that way will the accusers feel the predicament of the accused, especially as there is real merit to Democratic liability in a way that charges of Trump collusion have largely proved a political fraud. Only when deterrence is achieved, will the Democrats be forced to concentrate on agendas, issues, laws, and messages, not on ambushing the president.

The Republicans should announce far more forcefully to the media that Vladimir Putin may have been funneling via shady third-parties millions of dollars to anti-fracking groups. Such collusion, if proven through investigation, really is treasonous—given that the crashing price of oil, brought about solely due to North American frackers, is about the only check on Putin’s ambitions that the West enjoys. So, to take one example, did the San Francisco-based, family-controlled, and hedge-funded Sea Change Foundation receive laundered Russian money to help enhance its anti-fracking messaging? If so, when, how, and who?

Secondly, Republicans should go full bore on the most explosive scandal of the age, the House Intelligence Committee’s investigations into the surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of American citizens by key members of the Obama Administration, likely done for perceived political advantages.

Rather than envisioning the ethical Devin Nunes as a liability to be controlled, the House leadership should see him as an asset to be encouraged to uncover inconvenient truths—especially given that progressives see the unprincipled Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) as a resource in hiding a scandal. After all, what in the world was the self-righteous and self-described civil libertarian and humanitarian Samantha Power doing, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in allegedly reading, unmasking, and leaking intelligence reports on conservative private citizens during a national campaign?

Thirdly, we forget that Hillary Clinton’s scandals were terminated not by exonerating investigations, but by the fact that she lost a presidential campaign, and thus they were no longer deemed disruptive of an election.

No one has ever really understood exactly why Russian interests paid such lucrative honoraria to Bill Clinton or gave so lavishly to the Clinton Foundation, or why they cut an advantageous deal to acquire substantial interests in North American uranium holdings, but apparently did not prove so generous both before and after Hillary Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state and her announced presidential candidacy. When Clinton not only destroyed requested emails, but also lied that they were all neither classified nor connected to government business, and faced no consequences at a time when regular citizens went to jail for such transgressions, then there is no equality under the law left to speak of.

Fourthly, what an Orwellian world it is when progressives allege “obstruction of justice” (which  Mueller’s burgeoning team of lawyers is apparently investigating) in the case of Donald Trump’s sloppy, off-handed, and out-loud wishes to FBI Director James Comey that he hoped “good guy” Michael Flynn did not get ruined by a loose investigation.

Yet obstruction is not much pursued even when no one seems to deny that former Attorney General Loretta Lynch met stealthily for private discussions with the spouse of a suspect of a current Justice investigation (subsequently dropped), and when she unapologetically seems to have directed the self-described moralist, Director Comey again, to alter the nomenclature of his ongoing investigation of fellow Democrat and presidential candidate Clinton (and Comey shamelessly acceded to Lynch’s detailed requests).

Fifthly, there is the surreal case of Imran Awan and his tribal clan, the frauds, cheats, and possible blackmailers, who worked as techies for Democratic congressional representatives and in particular for former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Schultz apparently maintained some unfathomable relationship with the disreputable Awan that would force her into utterly untenable positions to protect his skullduggery. And unlike other allegations of collusion, the Florida congresswoman appears on video unapologetically threatening the chief of the U.S. Capitol Police with “consequences” unless he returns computer data concerning possible crimes to Awan.

Reestablish Deterrence or Lose
Finally, no one has ever fully gotten to the bottom of the Fusion GPS/Steele dossier, the fountainhead (thanks to Buzzfeed and CNN) of the entire Russia-Trump collusion mythos.

The much passed-around file was one of the most repugnant episodes in our recent checkered history, with evidence of ethical and perhaps legal wrongdoing on the part of Republican primary candidates, the Clinton campaign, the office of Senator John McCain, the FBI, and the Obama administration, who all at various times trafficked in preposterous and pornographic untruth, in some cases leaked the smears to the toady press, and apparently believed that it was the silver bullet that would put down the Trump werewolf.

Reestablishing deterrence—or what a mellifluous constitutional scholar and recent Nobel Peace Laureate once variously called “taking a gun to a knife fight,” “getting in their faces,” and “punishing our enemies”—is not quite Old Testament eye-for-an-eye, but rather, given human nature, the only way to stop a progressive and media lynch mob.

In the old West, a sheriff did not save those falsely accused in his jail by walking outside to the street to calm an armed and frenzied hanging mob through reason and appeals to sobriety.

Categories: "Trump scandals", 2016 elections and Russia, Awan brothers, Clinton corruption, Clinton cover ups, Comeygate, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Democrat scandals, Democrats and Republicans, double standards, Imran Awan
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Trump’s Greatest Deal

March 24, 2017

Trump’s Greatest Deal, Front Page Magazine, Caroline Glick, March 24, 2017

(Before the Flynn debacle, Trump’s efforts to get Russia to divorce itself from Iran appeared to be proceeding well. Please see, Highly Classified National Security Information Must Not be Leaked. Part b of the article is titled “Flynn telephone conversations.” Part c is titled “General Flynn, Russia and Iran.” Flynn’s departure from the Trump administration and America’s current Russophobia do not augur well for future success in pushing for the divorce. — DM)

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. 

If Trump can convince Russia to ditch Iran, then he has a chance of dismantling the regime in Tehran and so defusing the Iranian nuclear program and destroying Hezbollah without having to fight a major war.

The payoff to Russia for agreeing to such a deal would be significant. But if Trump were to adopt this policy, the US has a lot of bargaining chips that it can use to convince Putin to walk away from the ayatollahs long enough for the US to defuse the threat they pose to its interests.

The problem with the Russia strategy is that since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1920s and 1950s.

The fact that Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole.

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What can be done about Iran? In Israel, a dispute is reportedly raging between the IDF and the Mossad about the greatest threat facing Israel. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot thinks that Hezbollah is the greatest threat facing Israel. Mossad Director Yossi Cohen thinks Iran’s nuclear program is the greatest danger facing the Jewish state.

While the media highlight the two men’s disagreement, the underlying truth about their concerns has been ignored.

Hezbollah and Iran’s nuclear program are two aspects of the same threat: the regime in Tehran.

Hezbollah is a wholly owned subsidiary of the regime. If the regime disappeared, Hezbollah would fall apart. As for the nuclear installations, in the hands of less fanatical leaders, they would represent a far less acute danger to global security.

So if you undermine the Iranian regime, you defeat Hezbollah and defuse the nuclear threat.

If you fail to deal with the regime in Tehran, both threats will continue to grow no matter what you do, until they become all but insurmountable.

So what can be done about Tehran? With each passing day we discover new ways Iran endangers Israel and the rest of the region.

This week we learned Iran has built underground weapons factories in Lebanon. The facilities are reportedly capable of building missiles, drones, small arms and ammunition. Their underground location protects them from aerial bombardment.

Then there is Hezbollah’s relationship to the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF).

For more than a decade, the Americans have been selling themselves the implausible claim that the LAF is a responsible fighting force capable and willing to rein in Hezbollah. Never an easy claim – the LAF provided targeting information to Hezbollah missile crews attacking Israel in 2006 – after Hezbollah domesticated the Lebanese government in 2008, the claim became downright silly. And yet, over the past decade, the US has provided the LAF with weapons worth in excess of $1 billion. In 2016 alone the US gave the LAF jets, helicopters, armored personnel carriers and missiles worth more than $220 million.

In recent months, showing that Iran no longer feels the need to hide its control over Lebanon, the LAF has openly stated that it is working hand in glove with Hezbollah.

Last November, Hezbollah showcased US M113 armored personnel carriers with roof-mounted Russian anti-aircraft guns, at a military parade in Syria. The next month the Americans gave the LAF a Hellfire missile-equipped Cessna aircraft with day and night targeting systems.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun is a Hezbollah ally. So is Defense Minister Yaacoub Sarraf and LAF commander Gen. Joseph Aoun.

Last month President Aoun told Sen. Bob Corker, the chairman of the US Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, that Hezbollah serves “a complementary role to the Lebanese army.”

And yet the Americans insist that it continues to make sense – and to be lawful – to arm the LAF.

You can hardly blame them. Denial is an attractive option, given the alternatives.

For the past eight years, the Obama administration did everything in its power to empower Iran. To make Iran happy, Obama did nothing as hundreds of thousands of Syrians were killed and millions more were forced to flee their homes by Iran and its puppet Bashar Assad.

Obama allowed Iran to take over the Iraqi government and the Iraqi military. He sat back as Iran’s Houthi proxy overthrew the pro-US regime in Yemen.

And of course, the crowning achievement of Obama’s foreign policy was his nuclear deal with the mullahs. Obama’s deal gives Iran an open path to a nuclear arsenal in a bit more than a decade and enriches the regime beyond Ayatollah Khamenei’s wildest dreams.

Obama empowered Iran at the expense of the US’s Sunni allies and Israel, and indeed, at the expense of the US’s own superpower status in the region, to enable the former president to withdraw the US from the Middle East.

Power of course, doesn’t suffer a vacuum, and the one that Obama created was quickly filled.

For decades, Russia has been Iran’s major arms supplier. It has assisted Iran with its nuclear program and with its ballistic missile program. Russia serves as Iran’s loyal protector at the UN Security Council.

But for all the help it provided Tehran through the years, Moscow never presented itself as Iran’s military defender.

That all changed in September 2015. Two months after Obama cut his nuclear deal with the ayatollahs, Russia deployed its forces to Syria on behalf of Iran and its Syrian and Lebanese proxies.

In so doing, Russia became the leading member and the protector of the Iranian axis.

Russia’s deployment of forces had an immediate impact not only on the war in Syria, but on the regional power balance as a whole. With Russia serving as the air force for Iran and its Syrian and Hezbollah proxies, the Assad regime’s chances of survival increased dramatically. So did Iran’s prospects for regional hegemony.

For Obama, this situation was not without its advantages.

In his final year in office, Obama’s greatest concern was ensuring that his nuclear deal with Iran would outlive his presidency. Russia’s deployment in Syria as the protector of Iran and its proxies was a means of achieving this end.

Russia’s alliance with Iran made attacking Iran’s nuclear program or its Hezbollah proxy a much more dangerous prospect than it had been before.

After all, in 2006, Russia supported Iran and Hezbollah in their war against Israel. But Russia’s support for Iran and its Lebanese legion didn’t diminish Israel’s operational freedom. Israel was able to wage war without any fear that its operations would place it in a direct confrontation with the Russian military.

This changed in September 2015.

The first person to grasp the strategic implications of the Russian move was Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu recognized that with Russian forces on the ground in Syria, the only way for Israel to take even remedial measures to protect itself from Iran and its proxies was to drive a wedge between President Vladimir Putin and the ayatollahs wide enough to enable Israel to continue its raids against weapons convoys to Hezbollah and other targets without risking a confrontation with Russia. This is the reason that Netanyahu boarded a flight to Moscow to speak to Putin almost immediately after the Russian leader deployed his forces to Syria.

Israel’s ability to continue to strike targets in Syria, whether along the border on the Golan Heights or deep within Syrian territory, is a function of Netanyahu’s success in convincing Putin to limit his commitment to his Iranian allies.

Since President Donald Trump entered the White House, Iran has been his most urgent foreign policy challenge. Unlike Obama, Trump recognizes that Iran’s nuclear program and its threats to US economic and strategic interests in the Persian Gulf and the Levant cannot be wished away.

And so he has decided to deal with Iran.

The question is, what is he supposed to do? Trump has three basic options.

He can cut a deal with Russia. He can act against Iran without cutting a deal with Russia. And he can do nothing, or anemically maintain Obama’s pro-Iran policies.

The first option has the greatest potential strategic payoff. If Trump can convince Russia to ditch Iran, then he has a chance of dismantling the regime in Tehran and so defusing the Iranian nuclear program and destroying Hezbollah without having to fight a major war.

The payoff to Russia for agreeing to such a deal would be significant. But if Trump were to adopt this policy, the US has a lot of bargaining chips that it can use to convince Putin to walk away from the ayatollahs long enough for the US to defuse the threat they pose to its interests.

The problem with the Russia strategy is that since Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the presidential race, the Democrats, their allied media outlets and powerful forces in the US intelligence community have been beset by a Russia hysteria unseen since the Red scares in the 1920s and 1950s.

The fact that Obama bent over backward to cater to Putin’s interests for eight years has been pushed down the memory hole.

Also ignored is the fact that during her tenure as secretary of state, Clinton approved deals with the Russians that were arguably antithetical to US interests while the Clinton Foundation received millions of dollars in contributions from Russian businessmen and companies closely allied with Putin.

Since November 8, the Democrats and their clapping seals in the media and allies in the US intelligence community have banged the war drums against Russia, accusing Trump and his advisers of serving as Russian patsies at best, and Russian agents at worst.

In this climate, it would be politically costly for Trump to implement a Russian-based strategy for dismantling the Iranian threat.

This brings us to the second option, which is to confront Iran and Russia. Under this option, US action against Iran could easily cause hostilities to break out between the US and Russia. It goes without saying that the political fallout from making a deal with Russia would be nothing compared to the political consequences if Trump were to take the US down a path that led to war with Russia.

Obviously, the economic and human costs of such a confrontation would be prohibitive regardless of the political consequences.

This leaves us with the final option of doing nothing, or anemically continuing to implement Obama’s policies, as the Americans are doing today.

Although tempting, the hard truth is that this is the most dangerous policy of all.

You need only look to North Korea to understand why this is so.

Seemingly on a daily basis, Pyongyang threatens to nuke America. And the US has no good options for dealing with the threat.

As Secretary of State Rex Tillerson acknowledged during his recent trip to Asia, decades of US diplomacy regarding North Korea’s nuclear program did nothing to diminish or delay the threat.

North Korea has been able to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles while threatening the US with destruction because North Korea enjoys the protection of China. If not for the Chinese, the US would long ago have dealt a death blow to the regime.

Israel has moved Russia as far away from Iran as it can on its own. It is enough to stop convoys of North Korean weapons from crossing into Lebanon.

But it isn’t enough to cause serious harm to Tehran or its clients.

The only government that can do that is the American government.

Trump built his career by mastering the art of deal making. And he recognized that Obama’s deal with Iran is not the masterpiece Obama and his allies claim but a catastrophe.

The Iran deal Trump needs to make with the Russians is clear. The only question is whether he is willing to pay the political price it requires.

Categories: America and Russia, Democrats and Russia, Democrats and Trump, double standards, Hezbollah, Iran and Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, Iran scam, Iranian proxies, Netanyahu and Russia, Obama and Iran, Russia - Middle East, Russia and Iran, Russia and Trump, Trump agenda, Trump and Iran, Trump and Putin, Trump and Russia
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Is This The Coup the Left Wanted?

February 15, 2017

Is This The Coup the Left Wanted?, The Resurgent, , February 15, 2017

trumpandflynn

There is no evidence that Donald Trump’s campaign and Russian intelligence cooperated to steal the election from Hillary Clinton. But the New York Times waits for the third paragraph of this sensational story to tell you. First, they want you to know intelligence sources say Trump campaign staffers had multiple, repeated contacts with the Russians.

What we are seeing is an intelligence community trying to sabotage the President of the United States. We should all be concerned even if we have our own concerns about the President and Russia.

It is more and more apparent that, while Mike Flynn misled Vice President Pence and should have been fired, we only know this because members of the intelligence community engaged in an opposition research dump on Flynn with the media. They engaged as a separate and distinct branch of government, and that is a dangerous situation.

The left is cheering on the outcomes, as are some on the right, but they are all ignoring the process. When the intelligence community ceases to serve the Commander-in-Chief and instead tries to sabotage him because they do not like the direction he is taking the country, they are putting their interests ahead of the voters and the electoral process.

The same problem exists with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and its decision on the immigration order. In large part, the court based its decision on Donald Trump’s campaign statements that he wanted a Muslim ban. At first blush, that may seem legit to people but consider Barack Obama and Obamacare.

Chief Justice John Roberts upheld Obamacare’s constitutionality because he said it fell under the taxation powers of the constitution. But Barack Obama had campaigned on Obamacare saying that it was not a tax. Had the Supreme Court used President Obama’s campaign statements against him, they would have thrown out Obamacare.

While one may cheer on the outcome from the Ninth Circuit, they should not cheer the process and flawed legal reasoning.

Both the intelligence and court situation raise troubling issues. By cheering outcomes based on deeply problematic processes, people are rapidly moving towards “ends justify the means” reasoning. That will bring about the very creeping authoritarianism the left fears from Donald Trump.

They cheer this on now because it is working to their advantage as rogue leakers try to undermine a President they do not like. But it will eventually happen to them. By then they will have surrendered any and all moral high ground to cry foul.

The intelligence community serves at the pleasure of the President, not the other way around. The President must be able to depend on the intelligence community’s assessments. Right now, the intelligence community is causing a breakdown in trust with the Trump Administration through leaks designed to undermine his authority.

If a terrorist attack on our soil happens because the President felt he could no longer trust the intelligence community’s assessments, that will be on them. This behavior, in a democratic republic, must be considered unacceptable.

It is possible to be happy Mike Flynn is gone and also be deeply bothered by the means through the intelligence community designed his ouster. People on all sides should be speaking up loudly that the behavior of the intelligence community in damaging leaks is unacceptable.

Finally, we know that Mike Flynn intended to reform the intelligence community and expose side deals made with Iran to secure a diplomatic agreement. President Trump should commit to replacing Mike Flynn with someone as hell-bent on reform and exposure of the Iran deal as Mike Flynn was. The intelligence community cannot be rewarded for bad behavior that undermines the democratic processes of this nation, even if some of us are happy Mike Flynn is gone.

Categories: "Muslim ban", Coup, Courts, Create chaos, double standards, Executive order, Federal Bureauracy, Foreign governments, Foreign policy, Hypocrisy, Intelligence community, Iran, Iran scam, Media and Trump, Michael T. Flynn, Transition, Trump and Iran, Trump and refugees, Trump and Russia
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A Maniac is Running Our Foreign Policy! (It’s Not Trump)

February 9, 2017

A Maniac is Running Our Foreign Policy! (It’s Not Trump), Front Page Magazine, Ann Coulter, February 9, 2017

(There has been much criticism of President Trump’s rather mild criticism — please see also, A Strange Ruling from a Strange Judge —  of  “so called” Judge Robart. I disagree with the notion that Judges should be immune to criticism regardless of the stupidity demonstrably erroneous natures of their rulings, while other officials nominated by the President and approved by the Senate are fair game. From whence and why did that notion arise? Do judges assume a civil divinity when confirmed? When they don black robes? Had President Trump referred to the Judeo-Christian God as a “so-called God,” I suspect the outrage would have been less vocal and widespread. Perhaps only a similar reference to Allah would have been equally vocal and widespead.– DM)

judge-james-robart

When Arizona merely tried to enforce the federal immigration laws being ignored by the Obama administration, the entire media erupted in rage at this incursion into the majestic power of the president over immigration. They said it was like living in Nazi Germany!

The most reviled section of the act, melodramatically called the “Papers Please” law, was upheld by the Supreme Court. But the other parts, allowing state officials to enforce federal immigration laws, were ruled unconstitutional. A president’s policy choice to ignore immigration laws supersedes a state’s right to enforce them.

The court conceded that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were arrested in Arizona each year, that they were responsible for “a disproportionate share of serious crime,” and that illegals constituted nearly 6 percent of Arizona’s population.

But Arizona was powerless to enforce laws on the books — if those laws happened to be about immigration. The president’s authority over immigration is absolute and exclusive, as part of his authority over foreign policy.

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If only we were able to deport citizens, we could use Trump’s new policy of excluding those who are “hostile” toward our country to get rid of Judge James Robart.

Judge Robart’s veto of Trump’s travel ban notwithstanding, there is not the slightest question but that the president, in his sole discretion, can choose to admit or exclude any foreigners he likes, based on “the interests of the United States.”

The Clinton administration used the executive branch’s broad power over immigration to send a 6-year-old boy back to a communist dictatorship. The courts were completely powerless to stop him.

As explained by the federal appellate court that ruled on Elian Gonzalez’s asylum application: “It is the duty of the Congress and of the executive branch to exercise political will,” and “in no context is the executive branch entitled to more deference than in the context of foreign affairs,” which includes immigration.

The court acknowledged that Elian might well be subjected to “re-education,” “communist indoctrination” and “political manipulation.” (Then again, so would enrolling him at Sidwell Friends.) It didn’t matter! Sending little boys back to communist dictatorships was the policy of the Clinton administration.

The Obama administration’s immigration policy was to ensure that millions of poverty-stricken foreigners would come here and help turn our country into a Mexican version of Pakistan.

When Arizona merely tried to enforce the federal immigration laws being ignored by the Obama administration, the entire media erupted in rage at this incursion into the majestic power of the president over immigration. They said it was like living in Nazi Germany!

The most reviled section of the act, melodramatically called the “Papers Please” law, was upheld by the Supreme Court. But the other parts, allowing state officials to enforce federal immigration laws, were ruled unconstitutional. A president’s policy choice to ignore immigration laws supersedes a state’s right to enforce them.

The court conceded that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens were arrested in Arizona each year, that they were responsible for “a disproportionate share of serious crime,” and that illegals constituted nearly 6 percent of Arizona’s population.

But Arizona was powerless to enforce laws on the books — if those laws happened to be about immigration. The president’s authority over immigration is absolute and exclusive, as part of his authority over foreign policy.

To review:

— When the president’s immigration policy is to promote international communism: The president wins.

— When the president’s immigration policy is to transform America into a different country: The president wins.

— But when the president’s immigration policy is to protect Americans: Some piss-ant judge announces that his authority exceeds that of the president.

This is exactly what I warned you about in Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole. Nothing Trump does will be met with such massive resistance as his immigration policies.

The left used to attack America by spying for Stalin, aiding our enemies, murdering cops and blowing up buildings. But, then liberals realized, it’s so much more effective to just do away with America altogether!

Teddy Kennedy gave them their chance with the 1965 immigration act. Since then, we’ve been taking in more than a million immigrants a year, 90 percent from comically primitive cultures. They like the welfare, but have very little interest in adopting the rest of our culture.

In many parts of the country, you’re already not living in America. Just a few more years, and the transformation will be complete. There will be a North American landmass known as “the United States,” but it won’t be our country.

The only thing that stands between America and oblivion is a total immigration moratorium. We are well past the point of quick fixes — as Judge Robart’s delusional ruling proves.

The judiciary, both political parties, the media, Hollywood, corporate America and approximately 1 million lobbying groups are all working frantically to bring the hardest cases to our shores. Left-wing traitors, who used to honeymoon in Cuba and fight with peasant revolutionaries in Peru, toil away, late into the night, to ensure that genocidal Rwandans can move to America and immediately start collecting food stamps, Medicaid and Social Security.

No matter how clearly laws are written, government bureaucrats connive to import people from countries that a majority of Americans would not want to visit, much less become. Federal judges issue lunatic rulings to ensure that there will never be a pause in the transformation of America.

Congress could write laws requiring immigrants to pay taxes, learn English, forgo welfare and have good moral character. It could write laws giving the president authority to exclude aliens in the public interest.

Except it already has. Those laws were swept away by INS officials, federal judges and Democratic administrations — under ferocious pressure from America-hating, left-wing groups.

The country will not be safe until the following outfits are out of business:

The ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project; the National Immigration Forum; the National Immigration Law Center; the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild; the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights; the Office of Migration and Refugee Services; the American Immigration Law Foundation; the American Immigration Lawyers Association; the Border Information and Outreach Service; Atlas: DIY; the Catholic Legal Immigration Network; the Clearinghouse for Immigrant Education; the Farmworker Justice Fund; Grantmakers Concerned with Immigrants and Refugees; the Immigrant Legal Resource Center; the International Center for Migration, Ethnicity and Citizenship; the Lesbian and Gay Immigration Rights Task Force; the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service; the National Association for Bilingual Education; the National Clearinghouse on Agricultural Guest Worker Issues; the National Coalition for Dignity and Amnesty for Undocumented Immigrants; the National Coalition for Haitian Rights; the National Council of La Raza; and the National Farm Worker Ministry.

And that’s only a small fraction of the anti-American immigration groups assiduously dragging the Third World to our shores — while you were busy working.

Look at that list — look at Judge Robart’s ruling! — and ask yourself: Is it possible that anything short of a total immigration moratorium can save this country? Only when there is no immigration to bellyache about will these nuts be forced to think of a new way to destroy America.

Categories: "Muslim ban", "Muslim Registry", double standards, Executive order, Exhalted status of Federal judges, Immigration laws, Refugees, Trump agenda, Trump and immigration, Trump and refugees, U.S. courts
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Amnesty International Attacks Democracies, Forgives Islamist Tyrannies

December 9, 2016

Amnesty International Attacks Democracies, Forgives Islamist Tyrannies, Gatestone Institute, Giulio Meotti, December 9, 2016

“Morally bankrupt.” — Salman Rushdie, author with a $600,000 bounty from Iran’s regime on his head, speaking of Amnesty International.

Amnesty sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Islamist speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust and demonized gays and Jews.

It seems that Amnesty turned its back on the battle of human rights in favor of a grotesque anti-Western bias. The Economist accused Amnesty of “reserving more pages to human rights abuses in Britain and the United States than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.”

Amnesty’s secretary general compared Soviet forced-labor camps, where millions died of hunger, cold and executions, to a US military base where no prisoner has died, and which has prevented countless innocent civilians from being blown up.

“Canada is obliged to arrest and prosecute Bush for his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture”, said Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s Americas programme director. Amnesty also charged Obama of “war crimes.”

Alan Dershowitz summarizes Amnesty’s definition of Israel’s “war crimes”: “Whatever Israel does to defend its citizens.”

A report by NGO Monitor detailed Amnesty’s “systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards.” There are even Amnesty’s officials who called the Jewish State “a scum state.”

 

According to Amnesty International, the centers that host migrants arriving in Italy, known as “hotspots,” are like concentration camps. This is what you learn from Amnesty International’s new report, which accuses Italy of nothing less than “torturing” migrants. The report features a sequence of testimonies, never proven, that describe methods worthy of a South American military junta.

The report validates Salman Rushdie’s accusation against Amnesty International: “Morally bankrupt.” The Wall Street Journal added two more charges against the famous Western non-governmental organization (NGO): “Anti-American fervor and intellectual confusion”.

In the new Amnesty International report, a “witness,” under the name of only “Adam,” speaks of “a kind of clamp with three ends” by which Italian policemen allegedly grabbed his testicles. Evidence? Medical reports attesting to this violence? The version of the Italian police? Not in the wonderful world of Amnesty International, where a Western democracy can be safely accused of “torture” with flimsy, sub-standard, unverifiable “evidence” — the same as Amnesty’s many spurious charges against Israel. The Italian police and Interior Ministry denied all the charges, calling them ridiculous.

Already in February 2016, Antonio Marchesi, president of the Italian section of Amnesty, said: “Those in Italy who have committed acts of torture can sleep soundly.” A month ago, Amnesty issued a similar report on the immigration centers in Australia, another democracy denounced as a “torturer” by this now badly-degraded NGO that won the now badly-degraded Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.

The world owes a debt of gratitude to Amnesty — it fought hard to free political prisoners held by Communist regimes during the Cold War, and those held by South Africa’s Apartheid regime. But those days are gone. Now Amnesty keeps betraying its symbol: the light of its small candle trapped in barbed wire.

In 2005, Irene Khan, then secretary general of Amnesty, described the American detention center in Guantanamo Bay as “the Gulag of our time.” She compared the Soviet forced-labor camps, where three million people died of hunger, cold and executions, to a US military base where no prisoner has died, and which has prevented countless innocent civilians from being blown up.

It seems that Amnesty International abandoned the battle of human rights in favor of a grotesque anti-Western bias. This shift is why the British weekly, The Economist, accused Amnesty International of “reserving more pages to human rights abuses in Britain and the United States than in Belarus and Saudi Arabia.” This is the same muddled moral equivalence that probably led Amnesty International to use the same language for Italian “hotspots” as for the Saydnaya prison in Syria, run by the regime of Bashar al Assad.

If Guantanamo is the new Gulag, why not demand the arrest of its commander-in-chief? This is precisely what Amnesty did two years ago, when it asked Canada to arrest George W. Bush. “Canada is obliged to arrest and prosecute Bush for his responsibility for crimes under international law including torture”, said Susan Lee, Amnesty International’s Americas programme director. Amnesty’s also charged Obama of “war crimes”. The Western “war on terror”? According to Amnesty, “it is sowing fear“. US drone strikes? A “war crime.”

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The NGO has also accused Israel of “war crimes.” Alan Dershowitz summarizes Amnesty International’s definition of Israel’s “war crimes”: “Whatever Israel does to defend its citizens.” A report by NGO Monitor detailed “Amnesty’s repeated examples of “lawfare”; systematic flaws in the reporting of human rights abuses; limited understanding of armed conflict leading to erroneous claims and incorrect analysis; and violation of the universality of human rights, including a consistent institutionalized bias against Israel through double-standards”. There are even Amnesty’s officials who called the Jewish State “a scum state.”

In the name of “protecting human rights,” Amnesty International has even excused Islamic extremism. The secretary general of Amnesty, Claudio Cordone, said that “defensive jihad” is not “antithetical” to the struggle for human rights. He said this in response to a petition on Amnesty’s relationship with CAGE (formerly CagePrisoners), the NGO founded by Islamic extremist Moazzam Begg that campaigns for the release of acclaimed jihadists.

One prominent leader of Amnesty, Karima Bennoune, author of the book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here, wrote:

“During my years at Amnesty I shared the concerns about torture in Algeria, but I could not understand the organization’s paltry response to the violence of fundamentalist groups.”

She is not the first Amnesty official who has flung criticism at her own organization. Amnesty suspended one of its senior officers, Gita Sahgal, for having expressed some concerns. “To be appearing on platforms with Britain’s most famous supporter of the Taliban, whom we treat as a human rights defender is a gross error of judgment,” she wrote.

There was a time when Amnesty International defended the victims of ideological repression, such as the wife of Soviet writer Boris Pasternak, Olga Ivinskaya, who spent years under arrest and persecuted for her husband’s refusal to bow down to the Kremlin. Now, the Times of Londonhas documented links between Amnesty International officials and Islamists.

Today, Amnesty evidently considers freedom of expression something to use with “responsibility,” as Amnesty claimed during the Mohammed cartoons crisis. Is freedom of speech the right to say whatever you like, about any topic, whenever you want? Not according to Amnesty International, the watchdog group that today would apparently have lectured the great Soviet dissidents to write with “responsibility.”

Amnesty International sponsored a rally in Brussels, where Islamist speakers celebrated the 9/11 attacks, denied the Holocaust, and demonized gays and Jews. Before that, Amnesty refused to punish an official, Kristyan Benedict, Amnesty’s UK campaign manager, who tweeted: “Israeli regimes [sic] response to our Gaza report: Amnesty is ‘a propaganda tool for Hamas & other terror groups’ (#JSIL?).” The hashtag “#JSIL” is used on Twitter to compare Israel with the Islamic State terrorist organization by replacing “Islamic” with “Jewish” in the group’s common alias, ISIL. Amnesty also sponsored a speaking tour of Bassem Tamimi, a Palestinian militant who promotes anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.

Given Amnesty International’s embarrassing record, it is at least doubtful that the Italian police and authorities are “torturing” migrants whom they have so generously been rescuing at sea for more than two years.

Some in the Western “human rights establishment” have crossed the red line that separates the defense of human rights, even for terrorists, from complicity and collusion with repressive totalitarian ideas.

Categories: Amnesty International, double standards, Gulags, Islamist Tyrannies, War Crimes
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Kellyanne Conway Would Be A Feminist Hero If She Were A Democrat

December 1, 2016

Kellyanne Conway Would Be A Feminist Hero If She Were A Democrat, The Federalist, , December 1, 2016

kellyanne

Now that President-Elect Trump is appointing women to key posts such as UN Ambassador, Secretary of Education, and Deputy National Security Advisor, their anger is rising rather than abating. If anything, this election has further revealed the hypocrisy of the left—particularly modern-day feminists—who despite all their talk of empowerment, are now exposed as a weak and whiny sisterhood of victims.

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If you’re a woman still anguishing over “what to tell our daughters” about the 2016 election, I suggest you point to Kellyanne Conway: the first woman to run a presidential campaign. This smart, tough, cool mom of four was the winning campaign manager for the most brutal presidential race in history—and she kept a steely smile on her face the whole time. She’s now poised to become either White House press secretary, or the most sought-after political consultant in the world.

After taking the helm of the listless Trump campaign in August, Conway helped shape a more disciplined candidate, with a message focused on a stronger economy and national defense. Conway is like the pretty brainiac who tamed the school jock, got him to shut up in class, and made him carry her books. Hell, she even got him to study once in a while. She’s the kind of example I want for my own daughters on how to handle an egotistical, sometimes boorish male boss: with firmness, class, and calm.

But Conway didn’t just take on Trump. She faced down an antagonistic, male-dominated media that had declared was acting as a de facto arm of the Clinton campaign. One of the few bright spots leading up to Election Day was watching political commentators lose their cool and credibility trying to rile Conway. It didn’t work (and still isn’t). This lawyer, pollster, and business owner should be the new hero of the post-feminism era: a super mom who rose to the top of her field and is now, unquestionably, the most influential woman in Washington.

Why Don’t Feminists Love Conway?

But modern-day feminists are still wringing out their “I’m With Her” crying towels and snubbing Conway’s historic victory because, well, she’s a Republican.

Without any sense of irony, they ignore the achievements of a self-made woman (Conway), while lamenting the loss of a candidate who earned fame and power largely because of her husband. If she were a Democrat, Conway would be the toast of women’s groups across the country, feted in the media, splashed across the pages of Vogue and Cosmo. She would be touted as a future candidate herself. Maybe even Lena Dunham would’ve thrown out a tweet or two after her Election Night shower-cry.

But I suspect there’s even more to this than partisan politics. After all, you can’t accuse a man of misogyny—which literally means “hatred of women”—if he puts a female in charge of the riskiest, most important endeavor of his life. Trump can’t be a sexist pig who hates women if he fires two men and replaces them with a woman, right? Acknowledging, even celebrating, Conway’s success would undermine that entire plotline.

Conway Undermined Trump’s Misogynist Image

The Trump-is-a-misogynist meme was the cornerstone of Clinton’s campaign message: a Google search of “Trump” plus “misogynist” yields 579,000 results—not counting the approximately five billion tweets making the same accusation.

The day of the election, The Telegraph UK published a lengthy list of allegedly sexist Trumpisms dating back to the 1980s. Some were not bad (in 1994, he said he gets mad if dinner isn’t on the table when he gets home, so what did that make my grandfather). Many were cringe-worthy—particularly remarks he made as a guest on the Howard Stern show, perhaps one of Trump’s worst judgment calls of all time. Some were downright slap-worthy, and nothing you would want to hear from your husband or son or boss. But when people put a microphone in front of your face for three decades, you’re bound to have to live down a trove of dumb comments.

But raw, even offensive remarks do not a misogynist make. Yet the pearl clutching by the female left went into overdrive after Trump was elected, with women weeping and fearing for their daughters—as if Trump is a one-man Boko Haram ready to swipe them out of their classrooms and turn them into drink cart girls.

Now that President-Elect Trump is appointing women to key posts such as UN Ambassador, Secretary of Education, and Deputy National Security Advisor, their anger is rising rather than abating. If anything, this election has further revealed the hypocrisy of the left—particularly modern-day feminists—who despite all their talk of empowerment, are now exposed as a weak and whiny sisterhood of victims.

So what do we tell our daughters? Be less like Lena and more like Kellyanne.

Categories: 2016 elections, Democrats, double standards, Feminists, Hypocrisy, Kellyanne Conway, President Elect Trump, Trump campaign
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Morning Joe highlights liberals, Democrats claiming 2000 and 2004 elections were unfair, stolen

October 20, 2016

Morning Joe highlights liberals, Democrats claiming 2000 and 2004 elections were unfair, stolen, Washington Free Beacon via YouTube, October 20, 2016

Categories: 2016 elections, 2016 presidential debates, Democrats and vote fraud, Donald Trump and vote fraud, double standards, Media
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No, Trump Should Not Accept the Results of a Possibly Stolen Election

October 20, 2016

No, Trump Should Not Accept the Results of a Possibly Stolen Election, American Thinker, Selwyn Duke, October 20, 2016

Crooks on the left, cowards on the right. Where do we go to find integrity?

One of the most talked about parts of last night’s final presidential debate was Donald Trump’s statement that he’d let us know on election night if he’d accept the balloting results. An NBC commentator expressed her bubble-headed opinion that the statement lost him the election. Worse still, “conservative” commentator John Podhoretz wrote that Trump’s comment was “a shocking and cravenly irresponsible thing to say, the sort of thing that threatens to rend our national fabric, and for that alone, Trump has earned his place in the history of American ignominy.” But Podhoretz’ criticism is what’s shocking and cravenly irresponsible — and reflective of profound ignorance.

Are some of us living in an alternate-reality universe? We just saw NYC’s Democrat election commissioner, Alan Schulkin, caught on video admitting “there’s a lot of vote fraud,” as he talked about how people are “bussed” around to vote illegally. This was followed by a Project Veritas sting video showing a Democrat operative slug named Scott Foval giving advice on how to commit the fraud, saying that it has been going on for 50 years and that it “doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this m****rf****r.”

There was also the WikiLeaks released email showing that Clinton allies, also Democrats, presumably, believe that Obama forces committed vote fraud in 2008. Then there’s another WikiLeaks email in which Clinton campaign manager John Podesta wrote that “if you show up on Election Day with a drivers [sic] license with a picture [and 12 states and D.C. allow illegals to get licenses], attest that you are a citizen, you have a right to vote in Federal elections.” Add to this the 2012 Pew study showing that approximately “24 million — one of every eight — voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate. More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters. [And] [a]pproximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state,” and what does it add up to?

Reality # 1: There is vote fraud.

Reality # 2: Since there’s vote fraud, it’s possible an election — especially a close one — could be stolen.

Yet the three-little-monkey coward-cons think that, somehow, it’s noble and healthy to view a possibly stolen election and say “Nothing to see here; move along.” Maybe if we pretend hard enough, everything will be okay.

I have no idea how Trump’s statement will play out, given that he didn’t explain the matter well and we have coward-cons doing the jobs (real) Americans wouldn’t do, but I suspect the average person doesn’t share Podhoretz’ concern over violation of a twisted view of propriety. But here’s the answer I would have given debate moderator Chris Wallace when he stated, to Trump, that we have a “tradition” in this country of a peaceful transfer of power:

Yes, sir, and we have another American tradition: it’s called the “rule of law.” And when you suspect an election has been stolen, and allow it to go unanswered, you become complicit in the undermining of our rule of law. Moreover, vote fraud that swings an election thwarts the people’s will. You may not care about that. Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t care about that. But if I have reasonable suspicion that the Nov. 8 contest has been stolen, I will stand against the thwarting of the rule of law and the people’s will — even if I’m the only person in America to do it.

I cannot tell you how disgusting I find the coward-cons’ cravenness. It is, sadly, a common failing of man to prefer to rationalize, or stick one’s head in the sand, than to face up to tough challenges and hard truths. This is the mentality causing coward-cons to tell Sheriff Joe Arpaio not to look into Obama’s birth certificate and judges to refuse to hand down anti-establishment rulings for fear of opening “that can of worms.” But tolerating criminality gets you more criminality. This is, mind you, a hallmark of Third World nations. Corruption is rife, tolerated, and many pretend it isn’t going on. You want to descend fully into Third Worldism? Listen to the coward-cons.

What the coward-cons miss, in their infinite lack of wisdom, is that unanswered corruption means our national fabric is already being rent.  And their prescription is to allow corruption to fester, to grow, to become status quo? It’s as with cancer: attacking it early involves some pain, perhaps enduring nauseating treatments or an operation to excise a malignant tumor. But ignoring it, refusing to face reality, means a metastasis that will consume the whole body and lead, ultimately, to death. Tolerate a bit of visible rending now — or risk having nothing left to rend later.

The coward-cons are the people who get elected to office…and then get nothing done; they’re the weak sisters who never saw a culture-war battle they couldn’t lose. If you suspect your vote has been negated by electoral fraud, would you want those charged with ensuring the system’s integrity to look the other way? Or would you want the matter sifted to the very bottom?

If the coward-cons would choose the former, then they’ve earned their place in the history of American ignominy.

 

Categories: 2016 elections, 2016 presidential debates, Clinton campaign, Democrat National Committee, Donald Trump and vote fraud, double standards
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General Cartwright is paying the price for Hillary Clinton’s sins

October 19, 2016

General Cartwright is paying the price for Hillary Clinton’s sins, Washington Post Opinion, Josh Rogin. October 19, 2016

(Et tu, WaPo? Please see also, State Department: Sailor Who Mishandled Classified Information Would Be ‘Held to Account’ — DM)

The Obama administration Justice Department has investigated three senior officials for mishandling classified information over the past two years but only one faces a felony conviction, possible jail time and a humiliation that will ruin his career: former Joint Chiefs of Staff vice chairman General James E. Cartwright. The FBI’s handling of the case stands in stark contrast to its treatment of Hillary Clinton and retired General David Petraeus — and it reeks of political considerations.

Monday marked a stunning fall from grace for Cartwright, the man once known as “Obama’s favorite general,” who pleaded guilty to the felony charge of lying to the FBI during its investigation into the leaking of classified information about covert operations against Iran to two journalists. His lawyer Greg Craig said in a statement that Cartwright spoke with David Sanger of the New York Times and Dan Klaidman of Newsweek as a confirming source for stories they had already reported, in an effort to prevent the publication of harmful national security secrets.

Under his plea deal, Cartwright could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Last year, Petraeus cut a deal with the Justice Department after admitting he had lied to the FBI and passed hundreds of highly classified documents to his biographer and mistress Paula Broadwell. He pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor of mishandling classified information and was sentenced to two years probation and a $100,000 fine.

Clinton was not charged at all for what FBI Director James B. Comey called “extremely careless” handling of “very sensitive, highly classified information.” Comey said that although there was “evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of classified information,” the FBI’s judgment was that no reasonable prosecutor would have filed charges against Clinton or her associates.

“There is a lack of proportion just based on the facts that one figure, Cartwright, is getting severely punished and others so far have escaped the process,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the project on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. “He is being singled out for prosecution and public humiliation. It’s an implicit rebuttal to those who argued that other senior officials such as Clinton or Petraeus got off scott free or got too light of a sentence.”

In its statement announcing the conclusion of its three-year investigation of Cartwright, the FBI emphasized that his prosecution showed that the Justice Department is willing to go after senior officials.

“The FBI will continue to take all necessary and appropriate steps to thoroughly investigate individuals, no matter their position (emphasis added), who undermine the integrity of our justice system by lying to federal investigators,” said Assistant Director in Charge Paul Abbate.

That statement reveals that the FBI is trying address public criticism that it gives senior officials like Petraeus and Clinton special and favorable consideration, Aftergood said.

“They seem to be trying to make a policy point,” he said. “The Justice Department would say they are not influenced at all by policy or political considerations. In the real world, of course they are influenced.”

The announcement of the charges and Cartwright’s guilty plea came on the same day the FBI released documents that allege the State Department, through Undersecretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, offered the FBI a “quid pro quo” for altering the classification of documents found on Clinton’s private email server. The State Department maintains Kennedy made no such offer. The FBI said no deal was struck but it would investigate the issue.

Still, the FBI’s unprecedented release of documents related to its Clinton investigation shows the Bureau is keenly aware of the public criticism of Comey’s decision not to recommend any charges. And the mere fact that Clinton had the State Department, along with an army of lawyers, negotiating with the FBI over the investigation shows that the playing field is not even for the targets of such investigations. Petraeus, for his part, had several top U.S. senators publicly calling on the FBI to exonerate him before he cut his deal.

Cartwright, by contrast, was short on high-profile Washington friends. He had long ago run afoul of his two Pentagon bosses, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, who never forgave him for going around the chain of command to join with Vice President Joe Biden to present Obama with an alternate plan for the Afghanistan troop surge in 2009.

Cartwright’s greatest mistake was not talking to reporters or lying about it; he failed to play the Washington game skillfully enough to avoid becoming a scapegoat for a system in which senior officials skirt the rules and then fall back on their political power to save them.

I interviewed Cartwright on his way out of the Pentagon in 2011, after he was passed over for the job of Joint Chiefs chairman. A high-stakes whispering campaign about an alleged affair made the appointment politically difficult for Obama. Cartwright confirmed to me (on the record) that the president had promised him the job but later reneged due to the smear campaign. From that point on, Cartwright was a pariah to many of the Very Important People in Washington’s national security elite.

One notable difference between Cartwright’s case and that of Clinton and Petraeus was the fact that Cartwright was the subject of a leak investigation. There’s no evidence Clinton or Petraeus’s actions led to the public disclosure of classified information. The Obama administration has prosecuted twice as many leakers as all previous administrations combined. The mostly low-level prosecutions have often resulted in harsh prison sentences. For example, Army Private Chelsea Manning is serving 35 years at Fort Leavenworth.

Cartwright’s prosecution allows the Justice Department to say even senior-level leakers face consequences.

“General Cartwright violated the trust that was placed in him by willfully providing information that could endanger national security to individuals not authorized to receive it and then lying to the FBI about his actions,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord said in a statement. “With this plea, he will be held accountable.”

But McCord’s statement begs the question: Will the other Stuxnet leakers be held accountable? No one has suggested that Cartwright was the primary source of the Stuxnet disclosures. According to emails obtained by the conservative action group Freedom Watch, Sanger had meetings on Iran with several other high-profile administration officials, including National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and even Clinton herself. There’s no evidence of any other Stuxnet leak investigations of high-level officials.

Today, Petraeus maintains his status as a revered figure and sought-after thought leader. He works for a consulting firm, sits on several boards, teaches at a university, continues to advise the White House on national security and appears frequently on television. Clinton may go on to be the president of the United States.

In his best-case scenario, Cartwright could avoid prison time but will be saddled with a felony conviction that will bar him from most money-making opportunities. In the worst-case scenario, he could be getting released from prison around the same time Clinton finishes her first term.

In his statement taking responsibility for lying to the FBI, Cartwright asserted his motivations were patriotic. “My only goal in talking to the reporters was to protect American interests and lives; I love my country and continue to this day to do everything I can to defend it.”

Can Clinton or Petraeus plausibly make the same claim regarding their indiscretions?

Categories: Clinton cover ups, Clinton e-mails, double standards, Washington Post
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Worrying about Israel’s “moral compass”

May 25, 2016

Worrying about Israel’s “moral compass” | Anne’s Opinions, 25th May 2016

Ever since Deputy Chief of Staff Gen. Yair Golan warned Israel against becoming “morally corrupt”, and newly-resigned Defence Minister Moshe “Bogie” Yaalon expressed dismay at Israel’s loss of its moral compass, the world has been equally watching us with bated breath, looking for signs of imminent Nazism and racism to appear in Israeli society.

For the BBC of course this was manna from Heaven. BBC Watch reports on the BBC’s “World Have Your Say” radio program where they wondered aloud at this very moral compass that Israel looks set to lose. As you might expect, there was no such pondering about other, much more violent countries:

… However, BBC audiences have not been invited to ponder the question of whether the citizens of Austria (or America, Hungary, France, Switzerland, Finland or Denmark) have lost their moral compass en masse.

That question was posed –literally – in relation to a country which the BBC has long portrayed as ‘lurching’ to the right of the political map – regardless of the inaccuracy of that framing.

The May 20th edition of the BBC World Service radio programme ‘World Have Your Say’ (titled “Has Israel Lost its ‘Moral Compass’?“, from 00:48) based its discussion around the resignation of Israel’s Minister of Defence on the same day and presenter Anu Anand was joined by four telephone interviewees.

…

Towards the end of the item, as Gregg Roman [Director of the Middle East Forum – Ed.] tried to provide listeners with insights into the Israeli political scene, Anand interrupted and refocused the discussion on the programme’s real topic:

“But can I just move you guys back to the…the….you know, the talk about how Israel is losing its values. I do understand there are heavy politics involved, but perhaps for a global audience…”

The BBC of course is not the only media outlet shedding crocodile tears for Israel’s worrying morality though they are a leading influence. As one reads media articles, social media posts, talkbacks on articles, or watches and hears TV and radio programs, the effect on the average Israeli is suffocating and infuriating.

A golden oldie but as relevant as ever

I am therefore very thankful that I came across Vic Rosenthal’s (aka Abu Yehuda) excellent two-part series on this very subject which should be required reading for all pro-Israel advocates.

In part I of Adjusting the Moral Compass he describes the origin of this discussion on morality, which was the incident of the IDF soldier Elor Azaria who shot dead an (apparently) incapacitated terrorist after a knife attack. He then places this discussion of morality into a historical context and also locates where Israel sits on the world stage:

On the one side, we have the primarily secular academic, cultural, military, legal and media elites, mostly Ashkenazim whose families have been in Israel for generations, who have become increasingly vocal, even frantic, about what they call ‘undemocratic’, ‘racist’, ‘ultra-nationalist’, ‘fascist’ and ‘theocratic’ trends in society.On the other side – now a majority – are found many religious Israelis and those of Mizrachi or Soviet origin, who believe that the elites are anti-Zionist, self-hating, bigoted against religious people and ignorant about the true nature of our enemies.

Both sides believe that the other, if not reined in, will destroy the state.

…

The real issue is the degree to which our moral system should be universal or tribal.

Universalism, the belief that we are obligated to treat all human beings alike regardless of who they are has reached its apogee in Europe and the US, where no crime is more detested than ‘racism’.

…

Universalist ethics are opposed to tribalism, which prioritizes one’s own tribe, religious group or nation. There was no Enlightenment in the Islamic world, and Middle Eastern cultures are still highly tribalistic; so much so that attempts to create modern states while ignoring ethnic, religious and tribal realities have been (e.g., Syria and Lebanon) spectacular failures. One way to characterize the moral system of a culture is by where it falls on the universalism-tribalism axis.

…

Former Israeli Supreme Court Chief Justice Aharon Barak tried to force Israel into the mold of a European or American “state of its citizens.” In the name of democracy, the Court opposed attempts to maintain a special status for Jews or Judaism. Foreign interests like the American New Israel Fund and the Union for Reform Judaism, as well as European-financed NGOs support this universalist vision, even to the point of calling for changes in our flag and national anthem because they don’t speak to our Arab citizens.

Of course they don’t. Why should they, in a Jewish state?

…

The environment is changing and the cultural organism must change too, if it is to adapt to it. In our new environment, a strongly universalist morality is not an advantage; it constitutes unilateral moral disarmament. Our state won’t survive as a copy of the US or Sweden (indeed, the pressures are such that neither the US nor Sweden may survive in their present form).

That doesn’t mean that we need to give up democratic government or adopt all the cultural practices of our neighbors, like their misogyny, religious coercion, or beheadings and barrel bombs. It doesn’t imply that we ought to view ourselves as superior to non-Jews or that we should deny non-Jews that live among us their civil rights.

What it does mean is that our objective should be a state that unashamedly prioritizes Jewish people, culture, religion and values.

In Part II Vic speaks of the consequences of moral equivalence, of applying a universalist belief to an area where tribalism rules:

The psychological consequences of our European-style ‘fairness’ on our tribal enemies are also counterproductive. They understand our ‘goodness’ as weakness, and take maximum advantage of it. It does not make them admire us or wish for peace; rather, it generates contempt and encourages them to continue using violent tactics.

What is true of our rules for warfare and counterterrorism also applies to our public diplomacy and other areas. Our leaders express an understanding of the supposed Palestinian need for a state and desire to sit down with them and negotiate a peace deal, while the Arabs publish maps on which Israel does not appear and educate their children to love martyrdom above all. We provide surgery in our best hospitals to the relatives of leaders of Hamas and the PLO, while they encourage their people to pick up a knife and stab a Jew.

…

One of the implications of a universalist morality is that there is no such thing as an enemy in the traditional sense. If anyone should be considered an enemy it would be the leaders of Hamas and the PLO; yet our doctors save the lives of their relatives. In this view even terrorists have rights, and the people of Gaza and the Arabs of Judea and Samaria shouldn’t be punished collectively for what their leaders do. After all, everyone is an individual and everyone has human rights.

Israelis have taken this European approach even further. Because of our (historically inappropriate) guilt complex toward the Palestinians, we might say that “everyone has human rights especially the Palestinians.”

But what if we realign our moral system to see the conflict in tribal terms?

This is war and the Palestinians are the enemy. Who speaks like this in Israel today?

…

You don’t supply water, electricity, food and cement to an enemy population, especially one which has no desire to overthrow its leadership. And the Palestinians, both in Gaza and Judea/Samaria have defined themselves as an enemy, by their choice of leaders, by what they teach in their schools and say in their official and social media, and in their popular support and enthusiastic participation in terrorism against Jews.

Collective punishment? Of course they should be punished collectively, because their guilt as an aggressor is collective.

Now before anyone gets outraged at the politically incorrect but (in my opinion) morally correct assertiveness expressed by Vic Rosenthal, let us just remind ourselves of a very similar instance that happened just last week – in New York. A knife-wielding man was shot dead – and guess what? There was no UN resolution or condemnation of New York cops, there were no editorials or programs on the BBC expressing hypocritical concern at the morality of the US. It was taken as a given that an armed man will be shot dead. As the Algemeiner reports on the “disproportionate response to the New York attacker“:

“Knife-wielding man shot dead in midtown Manhattan” was the headline making the rounds on the Internet last week. The man with the knife had not shouted “Allahu Akbar,” nor was he attempting to commit a terror attack. He was simply an apparently inebriated individual, identified as Gary Conrad, who went into a Food Emporium, where he allegedly became “aggressive and belligerent.”

According to NYPD Chief of Department James O’Neill, “He was swearing at the people in the store, swearing at the workers in the store.” Swearing, imagine that. What a lethal menace!

A police officer called to the scene began struggling with Conrad, who pulled out a knife. Police officers ordered him to drop the knife, but he continued to approach them with the knife in his hand. At that point, O’Neill said, an officer and a sergeant opened fire on Conrad.

They did not shoot him once. They did not merely aim to neutralize him by shooting him in the legs or his arms. They shot him an incredible nine times. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

…

Had this taken place in Israel, and had this man not been called Gary Conrad, but Mohammed, and had he not been merely an inebriated loon but a terrorist out to slash Jews, international outrage would have poured forth in torrents from the front page of every single news outlet and the mouth of every opinion maker worth his salt. The “disproportionate force” claim would have been thrown about and every self-respecting journalist would have asked why Israel had to kill the man — shooting him no fewer than nine times — instead of simply neutralizing him by shooting him in the legs or the arms and then taking him to hospital.

So far, not a single news report has questioned the judgment of the NYPD. No American liberal has come forth in self-righteous indignation, asking whether killing this man, who, after all, was not threatening to blow up the Food Emporium or stab anyone, may have been slightly on the disproportionate side.

Let us stop beating ourselves about the head and bewailing our loss or lack of morality, and instead we should be proud of just how well Israel and Israelis comport themselves while under the most extreme threat of constant attack and annihilation. We compare well not just in comparison to our degenerate neighbours, but compared to every Western country on earth.

Of course there is always room for improvement, and we cannot sit back and think we are saints, but nevertheless we have much to be proud of in our democracy, our enlightenment and yes, our morality.

Update: Lawrence in the comments provides us with another excellent link: Why some Jews are afraid of their inner-Nazi. It expresses similar sentiments to Abu Yehuda in a more concise manner. Go and read!

Categories: Israel and human rights, Israel's elite leftists, Palestinian terrorists
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