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Author: New Neo

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New Neo

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

Posted by New Neo on August 11, 2014 45 Comments
ISIS is the embodiment of evil. But:
“We don’t understand real evil, organized evil very well,” said America’s former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, Ryan Crocker, in an interview with The New York Times. “This is evil incarnate.” “People like [Islamic State commander] Abu Bakar al-Baghdadi have been in a fight for a decade,” he added. “They are messianic in their vision, and they are not going to stop.”
My question is: does anyone ever "understand" evil? I don't think so. Evil's very nature is to be inscrutable. Evil is altogether mysterious and altogether different from the way most people operate or could even imagine operating. In all the biographies and histories that have dealt with Hitler, for example, who has ever really explained him? No one. Religious people posit a spiritual origin for evil. Non-religious people tend to doubt its existence, until they look into its eyes. If it were necessary to fully understand evil in order to fight it, World War II would have never been won by the Allies. What is necessary is to be able to recognize evil and see it for what it is quite early in the game. Those are the important first steps. The next steps are finding the will and the tools to fight it. Evil is very strong, because it doesn't know the same restraints and limits as morality or good. Regarding ISIS, Elizabeth Warren pipes up:

Posted by New Neo on August 08, 2014 23 Comments
Post-9/11, I read a quip that went something like this: "I just realized what the problem is with the 21st century. We got the numbers mixed up. It's not 2001, it's 1200." In the ensuing years, barbarism and religious wars have made a strong comeback---not that they'd ever really disappeared. But with the rise of ISIS, we now have a group giving itself over to their purest expression. Beheadings and crucifixions are part of their m.o., as well as forced conversions with the threat of death or exile looming, and now the imminent extermination of a minority religious group, the Yazidi, at ISIS's bloody hands. The Yazidi have one representative in Iraq's parliament. Her name is Vian Dakhil and her recent raw cri de coeur to save her people has made her famous. The world loves a show and a dramatic story, but it no longer loves actually taking on risky rescues, and has become accustomed to relying on the Americans to do so. Nature---and geopolitics---abhors a vacuum. The deposing of bad guy Saddam Hussein left a hole that other bad guys would inevitably try to rush to fill. Anyone who would cause the toppling of Saddam had to know it might be necessary for them to stick around at some level for at least a generation if they wanted a chance of ensuring that a new group of leaders of a different and better ilk would be substituting instead. But quite early on it became clear that, due to the efforts of the left in this country and changes in Americans' attitude towards war, occupation, and sacrifice, we lacked the requisite commitment.

Posted by New Neo on August 06, 2014 35 Comments
Today is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, with Nagasaki following three days later, and the surrender of Japan on August 15, 1945. To date these two bombs remain---astoundingly enough, considering the nature of our oft-troubled and troubling species---the only nuclear warheads ever detonated over populated areas. Oliver Kamm wrote a while back:
Our side did terrible things to avoid a more terrible outcome. The bomb was a deliverance for American troops, for prisoners and slave labourers, for those dying of hunger and maltreatment throughout the Japanese empire - and for Japan itself. One of Japan's highest wartime officials, Kido Koichi, later testified that in his view the August surrender prevented 20 million Japanese casualties.
This context always needs to be kept in mind when evaluating any "terrible thing"---and there is no question that the dropping of these bombs was a terrible thing. But critics who are bound and determined to portray the West as evil, marauding, bloodthirsty--- whatever the dreadful adjective du jour might be---are bound and determined to either avoid all context, or to change the true context and replace it with fanciful myth. As Kamm writes, those who want to portray Hiroshima and Nagasaki as American crimes cite evidence of an imminent Japanese surrender that would have happened anyway.

Posted by New Neo on July 30, 2014 27 Comments
Congress been mulling over some sort of amnesty plan for illegal immigrants for a very long time, whether it's been called "amnesty" or whether euphemisms are used to substitute for the word. But there's a reason Congress hasn't done much about it, and that's because the American people don't want it and Congress is at least somewhat responsive to the people, despite the fact that many politicians and those who give them money are more interested in amnesty than the general public is. Past presidents have understand that, too, and have also understood that it's Congress that needs to deal with this for the most part. Until now. Now we have a president who has the novel idea of completely ignoring the public during his lame duck years. Most presidents are hampered in their power during lame duck time, and they don't want to do anything to hurt their party's standing with the public and therefore their party's election chances. Obama, again, has the novel idea to ignore the public and hurt his party in the short run for enormous gains in the longer run: a demographic that will be reliably Democratic and will insure the party's hegemony (not to mention his "legacy" as a transformative president) . At least, that's the calculation. All the Democratic impeachment chatter ("watch out, the evil Republicans are planning to impeach me, aren't they mean and aren't they silly?") is both an attempt to head outrage off at the pass and to pre-characterize it as inappropriate and hateful, and a simultaneous tacit acknowledgement of the tyrannical nature of what Obama is contemplating. I'm with Patterico on this:

Posted by New Neo on July 25, 2014 15 Comments
How do you fight an enemy that is willing---nay, eager---to force you to kill its children even if you don't want to? That's the situation Israel faces against Hamas. It's the situation we face against Islamist terrorists, too, because they use such techniques as one of their primary tools, and the liberal west and the MSM all too often play into their hands by demonizing Israel and the US rather than the perpetrators. This is not new. It began when the west decided that all-out war was something it could no longer in good conscience wage. Civilian casualties in the first half of the 20th Century had reached such huge numbers that we turned in revulsion against them, and the increasing accuracy of weaponry enabled us to entertain the idea---for a short while, anyway---that wars could be fought with "surgical precision." That would be true, if the enemy cooperated. But it doesn't. The Islamist terrorists didn't invent the technique. In order for it to come to full fruition, the enemy needed a west with a guilty conscience about itself and a desire to excuse that enemy's barbarism, and an MSM fully on board with the program. This was already beginning to be the case during the War in Vietnam:

Posted by New Neo on July 21, 2014 11 Comments
There's a long, long article appearing in TNR that professes to be "The Explosive, Inside Story of How John Kerry Built an Israel-Palestine Peace Plan—and Watched It Crumble." It's worth reading, but perhaps not for the reasons the authors intended. The problem with the article and so many other treatments of the subject is that its premise is that there is a peace plan that can be built and that can crumble---and that someone like John Kerry has the smarts to do it, if it were possible to do it. But the whole thing is a chimera at this point. The piece's conclusion contains a more realistic appraisal of the situation, from Avi Dichter, former head of Israel's Shin Bet:
The American effort will always be multiplied by the amount of trust between the two leaders. So if Kerry's pressure represents the number five, and then Obama's help brings the number to ten, it really doesn't matter. You're still multiplying it by zero. The final result will always be zero.
The amount of trust---or distrust---between the two leaders reflects the amount of distrust between the two countries and their peoples. Peace plans sometimes have been entered into by these two groups (or Israel and other Palestinian groups) for temporary tactical reasons, but that's about it. The Palestinian government does not recognize Israel's right to exist and Hamas is a terrorist group dedicated to its destruction. But for various reasons both have become the darlings of Europe and the Left, and that helps tie Israel's hands to a certain extent. But "partners for peace" they ain't.

Posted by New Neo on July 16, 2014 16 Comments
Obama is often criticized for refusing to enforce laws. But this time he's being criticized for enforcing the 2008 Act of Congress that requires that unaccompanied minors from countries other than Mexico and Canada be given special treatment. However, the bill in question---the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008---dealt with a very different set of circumstances and was never envisioned as applying to what's happening now. As its name suggests, it was aimed at stopping human trafficking, and only a small part of the law dealt with unaccompanied minors from other countries, and even that portion was written in the context of the children being presumed human trafficking victims. Back when the law was passed, there were no hordes of unaccompanied minors coming here from Central America in an attempt to gain entry on rumored promises of amnesty. Obama is also very inconsistent about his enforcement. He ignores the laws he doesn't like, or changes them, but with those that suit his purpose he falls back on the idea that he simply must obey the law. It's his intentionally selective enforcement that's the problem. In particular, if Obama enforced the laws on border security, Wilberforce wouldn't have become such a problem in the first place. Concerning Wilberforce, Charles Lane invokes the law of unintended consequences, legislative version:

Posted by New Neo on July 13, 2014 13 Comments
The Democratic Party creates its coalition by catering to a diverse group of ethnic interest groups, and sometimes the special interests of those special interest groups clash. In the following clip where people are talking about the border problems, we see a microcosm of the competing groups, as well as rifts within the black community itself. They may all be Democrats (it's hard to know for sure), but they demonstrate a diversity of opinion and a great intensity of feeling. The Vietnam vet has a quiet firmness, and the earnest younger man in the black shirt who says "This make no sense!" comes through loud and clear. It's true that our government's reaction to what's happening on the border makes no sense if we ordinary people look at it conventionally. But it makes plenty of sense to Obama and others in his party who think it will give them a permanent and unbeatable majority in the not-too-distant future, as well as placate the huge Hispanic voting bloc in the present. And if their formerly reliable ethnic group, African Americans, suffers as a result---well then, what are they going to do about it anyway? Turn Republican? After Democrats' successfully branding Republicans as racist for several decades, that would be a tough pill for many black people to swallow, and the Democrat know it. Towards the end of the tape, the soft-spoken guy on the right in the red shirt talks the hard leftist line of "Americans have caused all the ills of the world by interfering with it." Thank you, Howard Zinn! The young woman in the tank top with the thin straps counters him at the very end by saying the US does some good, too. It's a little microcosm of America, complete with the drumbeats of the Native American demonstrators who are using the occasion to air their grievances as well:

Posted by New Neo on July 10, 2014 24 Comments
Hillary Clinton is a lawyer, and a smart one at that. So she knows better than this statement she made about the Hobby Lobby SCOTUS decision:
It’s very troubling that a salesclerk at Hobby Lobby who needs contraception, which is pretty expensive, is not going to get that service through her employer’s health care plan because her employer doesn’t think she should be using contraception.
Politifact rates Clinton's statement as Mostly False. The WaPo's fact-checker gave it 2 Pinocchios. But although both articles say Clinton is dissembling to a certain extent, they both give Clinton's statement a more generous interpretation than it deserves, with the WaPo even insinuating that her error might have been inadvertent. Absurd; as I said, Clinton is a razor-sharp lawyer when she wants to be. She should have gotten the maximum number of Pinocchios and then some.

Posted by New Neo on July 03, 2014 22 Comments
Ruth Marcus thinks that the female SCOTUS justices do. And she thinks it's a good thing:
How did the Supreme Court manage to agree unanimously that police must obtain a warrant before searching cellphones, yet split on whether employers must offer contraception as part of their health care plans? My explanation, slightly crude but perhaps compelling: All the justices, presumably, have cellphones. Only three have uteruses, and you know which way they voted.
This is hardly an isolated idea. It was inherent in Sotomayor's statements about the superior judgment of a "wise Latina":
And [Sotomayor] often said that she hoped those experiences would help her reach better judicial conclusions than someone without such a varied background might reach. The line was almost identical every time: "I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion." That sentence, or a similar one, has appeared in speeches Sotomayor delivered in 1994, 1999, 2002, 2004 and 2001. In that speech, she included the phrase "than a white male who hasn't lived that life" at the end, which sparked cries of racism from some Republicans.
A similar notion about the superiority and importance of membership in a minority or other group officially designated as oppressed was strongly suggested in an execrable comment by Harry Reid (is there any other kind?) in connection with Hobby Lobby, about which I wrote:

Posted by New Neo on June 28, 2014 11 Comments
Why has the mainstream media been so silent about the scandals in which the Obama administration has become embroiled? From Roger L. Simon at Pajamas Media:
Obama is beside the point. They [the liberal media] don’t even like Obama anymore. Nothing could be more obvious. Almost nobody does. But they won’t say so in public because that would mean that they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it. So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake. Who wants that? No wonder they won’t investigate the scandals. No wonder they won’t report any of this. They are too ashamed of themselves to speak.
I agree that the MSM is deeply disappointed in Obama, and deeply reluctant to say so. But I doubt they're as deeply disappointed as all that, not deeply enough to question their own role in the whole thing, or their belief system. That takes a great deal of courage and integrity, particularly for people with entrenched and vested interests---such as the Times editors and their ilk, as Simon points out---who would therefore be extremely reluctant to do it.

Posted by New Neo on June 19, 2014 39 Comments
The federal government of the United States has jurisdiction over the border problem but is doing nothing to stop it and might in fact be encouraging it. So the state of Texas announces that it will take action:
Texas’ top three leaders, Governor Rick Perry, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, and House Speaker Joe Straus directed the Department of Public Safety to immediately begin law enforcement surge operations along the Texas-Mexico border... The surge operations will cost $1.3 million each week, and DPS is authorized to continue the operations for the rest of the year... In a statement, Governor Perry said, “Texas can’t afford to wait for Washington to act on this crisis and we will not sit idly by while the safety and security of our citizens are threatened.” State officials worry that while the federal government scrambles to house thousands of unaccompanied children crossing the border, there are fewer federal agents to keep up with criminals and gangs trying to get into the U.S. The state says last year, when DPS conducted Operation Strong Safety, crime rates related to drug cartels, gangs, and other illegal border activity dropped sharply.
Note what's being said here. My understanding is that the state can use the increased patrols only to help prevent entry or to apprehend illegal immigrants and turn them over to the feds; they can't actually deport people if the Obama administration refuses to do so.

Posted by New Neo on June 14, 2014 13 Comments
To refresh your memory in light of recent events in Iraq, this is how it went down in there in 2011:
The U.S. had tried to extend the presence of our troops past Dec. 31 [2011]. Why did we fail? The popular explanation is that the Iraqis refused to provide legal immunity for U.S. troops if they are accused of breaking Iraq's laws... But Mr. Maliki and other Iraqi political figures expressed exactly the same reservations about immunity in 2008...Indeed those concerns were more acute at the time...So why was it possible for the Bush administration to reach a deal with the Iraqis but not for the Obama administration? Quite simply it was a matter of will: President Bush really wanted to get a deal done, whereas Mr. Obama did not. Mr. Bush spoke weekly with Mr. Maliki by video teleconference. Mr. Obama had not spoken with Mr. Maliki for months before calling him in late October to announce the end of negotiations. Mr. Obama and his senior aides did not even bother to meet with Iraqi officials at the United Nations General Assembly in September. The administration didn't even open talks on renewing the Status of Forces Agreement until...a few months before U.S. troops would have to start shuttering their remaining bases to pull out by Dec. 31. The previous agreement, in 2008, took a year to negotiate.
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