Image 01 Image 03

Author: New Neo

Profile photo

New Neo

Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.

Andrew McCarthy has written a National Review article entitled "Hillary's Breathtaking Mendacity." It describes the lies that were revealed and "made explicit" in Clinton's testimony before the Benghazi committee last Thursday, and it's well worth reading in its entirely. But it also exemplifies a response that's occurring only on the right. McCarthy's clear and painstaking description of how Clinton lied to the American people (but not to her daughter) is freely available to all who read National Review, but how many people would that be, compared to those who read the ubiquitous MSM spin that says she acquitted herself admirably in the hearings and no one laid a glove on her, nor was any new or interesting information revealed? The Benghazi hearings have underlined---even though such underlining wasn't needed---how those who control the narrative control the perception and even the conclusion. Clinton can lie through her teeth about material facts for political reasons, it can be demonstrated over and over (or it can be obvious to anyone listening or paying a particle of attention), and if the media decides to ignore that fact, how many people will look for themselves and decide for themselves? Very few, I'm afraid. Apparently, facts are not stubborn things. Not any more. Maybe they never were.

It's fairly clear that there's no love lost between Donald Trump and Jeb Bush. Trump's recent criticism of George W. Bush in relation to 9/11 has been largely seen as a way to needle Jeb and keep the friction going between them. And it's certainly accomplished just that. Although that's undoubtedly part of Trump's motivation for his recent remarks, it doesn't even begin to explain Trump's long history of extremely critical and incendiary comments about GWB, which date back to many years before Trump or Jeb ever ran for president and most definitely were not sparked by their rivalry for the presidency in 2016. On Wednesday I wrote about the subject in this article for the Weekly Standard. Here's an excerpt:

What are the roots of the stabbing intifada? Jeffrey Goldberg takes a long time to say it, but he gets some of it said. It's not a "cycle of violence" where both sides are similar. One side is lying and inciting its people to violence, and this has been going on at least since the 1920s in very similar fashion. The current dispute concerns the history of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, and access to those sites. The NY Post says it more succinctly, and adds a few more things, such as the latest incident of what one might call the Muhammed al Durah phenomenon, complete with the cooperation of our State Department:
...Wednesday...Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said in a speech that Israeli security forces “executed” an innocent 13-year-old boy, Ahmad Mansara, “in cold blood.”

The Wapo announces that a verdict appears to have been rendered in the case of one of its journalists who has been imprisoned in Iran:
Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, imprisoned in Tehran for more than 14 months, has been convicted in an espionage trial that ended in August, Iranian state television reported. News of a verdict in Tehran's Revolutionary Court initially came early Sunday, but court spokesman Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Ejei did not specify the judgment. In a state TV report late Sunday, Mohseni-Ejei said definitively that Rezaian, The Post’s correspondent in Tehran since 2012, was found guilty. But many details remained unknown. Rezaian faced four charges — the most serious of which was espionage — and it was not immediately clear whether he was convicted of all charges. Rezaian and The Post have strongly denied the accusations, and his case has drawn wide-ranging denunciations including statements from the White House and media freedom groups.
Statements from the White House. That'll do the trick.

Hillary Clinton's opponents in the race for the 2016 Democratic nomination are against the TPP deal, unions are against the deal, and now she's against it too although previously she was one of its strongest supporters. It's hard to imagine that a single thinking human being would be convinced that her change of heart on this issue is on the merits rather than merely politically expedient. For example, even Ezra Klein finds himself a mite perturbed by her reversal on this and other matters:
Of late, Clinton is again looking like the kind of candidate who puts polls in front of policy. First, she came out against Obamacare's Cadillac tax — a policy that enjoys wide support among health economists... ...What I have trouble believing is that Clinton and her policy advisers really think the Cadillac tax is a bad idea. Her past policies embrace its theory, her past advisers helped pass it into law... On Wednesday, Clinton came out against the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, saying that she's concerned with the provisions around pharmaceuticals and the absence of provisions around currency manipulation. But as Tim Lee notes, Clinton strongly supported early versions of the deal — she called the TPP "the gold standard in trade agreements" — that were worse on pharmaceuticals and identical on currency manipulation...

Is this the wave of the future?:
Central bank policymakers had believed they had run out of room to support their respective economies, with their interest rates held close to the floor. ...Cut rates too deeply, [they thought], and savers would end up facing negative returns. In that case, this could encourage people to take their savings out of the bank and hoard them in cash... [But as] central bank rates have turned negative, the rates offered on bank deposits have followed. Yet rather than stuffing cash under mattresses, people have left their money in the bank or spent it.
This is already happening in Sweden. One of my first thoughts on reading that people are not pulling their money out of the banks was that perhaps the Swedes are just used to the habit of banking and don't quite know where else to put their money. After all, a few hundred thousand kronor would be hard to stuff under a mattress, and perhaps anxiety-provoking. And it is true that Sweden already has a very high savings rate.

I've noticed that we seem to get the popes that match our times---a harmonic resonance between popes and other public leaders of the day. That doesn't mean that popes are overtly political, although there’s really no way for a pope to retreat completely from politics, unless he speaks on ritual matters only and never ventures into more general statements. To paraphrase Madonna (not the Madonna, but Madonna Ciccone), we are living in a political world. No matter how hard a Pope tries to speak non-politically, politics enters the equation nearly every time he opens his mouth, unless he's talking Church business. Even then, what he says can have political repercussions. That said, I think that Pope Francis got somewhat political on his recent visit to the US. As the first pope ever to address an American Congress, what he's said about politics in the past seems relevant:

I have the deepest respect for Thomas Sowell and his work, and this column of his is no different:
It is easy to understand why there would be pent-up resentments among Republican voters. But are elections held for the purpose of venting emotions?... Elections...have far more lasting, and far more serious — or even grim — consequences than emotional venting. The actual track record of crowd-pleasers, whether Juan Peron in Argentina, Obama in America or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing... Despite many people who urge us all to vote, as a civic duty, the purpose of elections is not participation. The purpose is to select individuals for offices, including President of the United States... An election is not a popularity contest, or an award for showmanship. If you want to fulfill your duty as a citizen, then you need to become an informed voter. And if you are not informed, then the most patriotic thing you can do on election day is stay home. Otherwise your vote, based on whims or emotions, is playing Russian roulette with the fate of this nation.
Sowell is correct. But--- But elections will always turn partly on emotion.

George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a dystopian masterpiece. Part of the book's genius lies in its nomenclature, and most definitely its insight into the political propaganda process. Thus, the Ministry of Truth, or "Minitrue" for short:
As with the other Ministries in the novel, the Ministry of Truth is a misnomer and in reality serves the opposite of its purported namesake: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. In another sense, and in keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is aptly named, in that it creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes a willful fooling of posterity using doctored historical archives to show a government-approved version of events.
The government in the US does its share of that sort of thing, but under President Obama the practice has reached new heights (or depths, if you want to look at it that way). But the left is not limited to governmental publications. It now has the full cooperation of the press, an institution that is supposed to bring us the truth and can serve to counter government propaganda. The left also has the movies, TV and other popular entertainment, and the vast majority of entertainers.

On 9/11's 10th anniversary I wrote a post that contained this observation:
For those of us who were grownups when 9/11 happened, it’s also been transmuted—not to something that was always there, but to something that’s been incorporated into our view of the world. We’ve all done that differently. But for us, the shock and surprise and horror reoccurs (to a somewhat diminished extent, of course; there’s no shock like the first shock) whenever we see the footage, or when we think—really really think, without the protective shield of familiarity—of what actually happened on that day.
I believe that, in the four years that have passed since I wrote those words, 9/11 has been transmuted into something that was always there, something that no longer surprises. And although I haven't watched any footage today of the attack, I think there is less shock and no surprise. The reason for that is that a great deal has happened since I wrote those words four years ago. Since then, although we had responded in Afghanistan to 9/11 and then to Saddam Hussein's defiance of nuclear weapons inspections in Iraq, the Obama administration has purposely wiped out those gains, particularly in Iraq. When I wrote that 10-year anniversary piece in September of 2011, the US was poised on the brink of Obama's complete withdrawal from Iraq, which he was determined to accomplish against the opinion and advice of every military adviser. In the four years since that withdrawal, ISIS has risen up in the vacuum that was left, and it has wreaked horrors on civilian populations, barbarities that are of enormous scale and magnitude even compared to 9/11 and which have reverberated around the world with images of sadistic violence. Does anyone doubt for a single moment that the killers would wreak a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand 9/11s on us if they could?

As expected, the Iran deal disapproval measure failed to win the requisite 60+ votes to invoke cloture in the Senate and allow a vote on the merits. The linked article describes the Congressional Democrats as: "overcoming ferocious Republican opposition and delivering President Barack Obama a legacy-making victory on his top foreign policy priority." But the reality is that Obama's side not only did not get a single Republican vote, it failed to get all the Democratic votes, either. So this was another bipartisan vote---but as usual with Obama, the bipartisanship was all on the side of the opposition to the president. This "victory" of Obama's, so "legacy-making," therefore consisted of Obama getting just enough Democrats on his side to block a vote on the merits (that vote to invoke cloture failed by a margin of two). Even had cloture gotten the necessary 60+, and the disapproval bill come to a vote and been passed, Obama would have vetoed it and there would not have been enough votes to override that veto.

It started yesterday, when conservative Republicans in the House expressed strong disagreement with the GOP leadership over whether to proceed with the vote of disapproval on the Iran deal. The conservative wing aimed to force Obama to first live up to the terms of Corker-Menendez and disclose the still-secret side deals with Iran that (which are an enormously important part of the big picture.) They claimed that the clock on the Congressional review period would not start until Obama complied, and thus the disapproval vote should be delayed. The movement had the support of Ted Cruz in the Senate, and many conservatives in the House (Roskam of Illinois; Pompeo of Kansas and the rest of the House Freedom Caucus). The House doesn't have a cloture or filibuster rule, so it is much easier to bring something to a vote there over minority Democratic opposition than it is in the Senate. Later, it was leaked that Boehner had given in to House conservatives on this issue, agreeing to postpone the vote and substituting a series of votes on three other resolutions in the House:

Those who were around during the Vietnam War protest days remember all those marches on Washington. I attended one, and it was absolutely huge and very impressive. And who can forget the photos of Martin Luther King standing in front of the Washington monument on the Mall? It's not clear how effective or important those marches were, even though they were actually dealing with administrations that appeared to care what the public thought, unlike the present administration. But visuals are powerful and they can affect some lawmakers and some of the public that hasn't made up its mind yet. They also help to rally energy on the part of those who are already aligned with the viewpoint of the demonstrators. And yes, the MSM would spin such demonstrations as it did the Tea Party demonstrations. But the MSM is not the only source of attention these days, and propaganda needs to be countered with better propaganda as well as facts. Facts all by themselves don't quite cut it, unfortunately.

We all know that Hillary Clinton is the first female frontrunner candidate of a major party. That is, she's long been the frontrunner, and remains the frontrunner, although who knows how long that will continue. I believe that the only thing that can stop Clinton is an indictment, or the entry of Elizabeth Warren into the race. That's how shallow the Democratic bench is and how much the public (especially Democrats) seems to thirst for another "first," as they did with Obama. The first woman president is the next logical step for them, and Hillary seems (or seemed until recently) to fit the bill. That's one of the reasons Carly Fiorina is an especially good foil for her. I don't doubt, however, that if Carly were to rise in the polls and become a strong possibility for first female president, the attacks on her as "not a real woman" would become the drumbeat of the opposition.

Donald Trump's immigration plan is certainly guaranteed to get him even more attention than before. It's a wish list for the most anti-illegal-immigrant wing of the electorate, although it also features some workable and laudable proposals that are not unique to Trump. Reading the text of Trump's document reminds me somewhat of Barack Obama in campaign mode. Not the content, of course---that is very different from Obama's---but the process: I will do this, I will do that, while ignoring whether what he suggests is workable, how much it would cost, and how Trump would probably have to don the mantle of dictator to accomplish some of it:
The problem with Trump’s wall is that it is infeasible; the geography of the border simply does not allow for one unbroken wall. Nor would it be effective. Even if you could erect this barrier around, say, Florida, walls can be surmounted, tunneled under, and circumvented in other ways. Policing the border requires police; human capital that comes at taxpayer expense. Mexico will not be paying their salaries, but Trump has a plan for that, too: confiscate all remittances from illegal immigrants working in America and hike the fees on all Mexican tourism and work visas. Erecting the structures necessary to identify much less confiscate illegal wages would prove daunting. Even if it was legal and could survive court challenges, a dubious prospect, this is a policy that would require a dramatic expansion of government’s ability to intrude on the lives of American citizens – a principle to which conservatives were once constitutionally opposed...

Here's an excellent article on the plight of the unarmed perpetrator, by John Hinderaker. Here's an excerpt:
This is the point I really want to make: the constant emphasis on police shootings of *unarmed* men that we see in the press is, for the most part, crazy. If you are a perp, or a suspect, or an inoffensive person walking down the street, you may be unarmed, but the police officer is not. Nor, in most cases, will he have any immediate way to know whether you are armed or not. If you attack him, what do you expect him to do? Challenge you to an arm-wrestling match? He is entitled to use deadly force to defend himself. Attacking a police officer rarely ends well. Likewise with fleeing a police officer who is ordering you to stop. If there is a problem here, it does not demand a thorough revamping of American police practices. Rather, it suggests that those who have influence with a small demographic group–6% of the population, according to the Post–impress upon them that they should not attack police officers under any circumstances, and if told to stop, they should stop. If they put their hands up, they are not going to get shot.
This makes the point that should be obvious to all but has somehow gotten obscured by all the post-Brown propagandist verbiage, which is that a police officer can't tell whether a belligerent aggressive suspect is armed or not unless he/she is brandishing the weapon in full sight.

Senator Charles ("Chuck") Schumer of New York faces a particularly tough choice: back Obama's Iran deal and anger many of his New York Jewish constituents, or oppose the deal and anger Obama and much of the Democratic Party leadership. My prediction: Schumer will cave to Obama and cling to his own long-nourished hopes of one day succeeding Harry Reid. Or he will take the weaselly option mentioned here, voting to override Obama's veto of a Congressional bill to continue sanctions but being careful to not bring along enough people with him to make an override stick. Schumer, as the probable heir apparent to Reid's position, seems to have quite a bit of influence over his fellow Democratic senators who are likewise hesitating, and therefore his vote is considered a sort of bellweather or linchpin. As for the vote itself, here's a good discussion of the "is the Iran deal a treaty or not?" question, from back in March:
There is no currently no suit on the issue [of its being a treaty] being discussed on Capitol Hill, and it's far from clear that Republicans would be standing on firm legal ground with such a challenge. The debate, rumbling for decades, has yet to be definitively resolved in case law.