Archive for 2018

WEIRD, POLITICO HAD A SIMILAR PIECE THE OTHER DAY: TNR: How Trump Wins Re-Election.

Internal polling by the Democratic group Priorities USA showed the president’s approval rating had climbed to 44 percent in early February, which “mirrors Trump’s improving position in public polls.” Gallup finds a narrow majority of Americans support his handling of the economy, and the new Republican tax law is getting more popular.

“I think people just kind of assume he’s a goner,” FiveThirtyEight statistician Nate Silver told me recently, “but look, he’s now more in a range where presidents have recovered to win reelection. His approval rating is up to 41 or 42 percent in our tracking. That verges on being a normal number that resembles what happened to Reagan or Clinton or Obama in their second years.” (Silver noted over the weekend that Trump dipped to 39 percent in their tracking.) As Jim Messina, who managed President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012, warned earlier this month, “Donald Trump can absolutely be reelected.” . . .

“If you had the election literally today, I think Trump would be an underdog in the popular vote, but I don’t know about the electoral college,” FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver told me. “He’s coming from a low point where he had, approval ratings wise, by far the worst first year of any president. But he’s kind of reverting to some mean, in a way, and the mean is how, on average, incumbent presidents get reelected. You know, on average incumbent presidents are having a rough time two years in and their parties suffer anywhere between mild and humongous loses in the midterms, but the baseline case is that incumbent presidents usually win.”

Interesting to see the conventional wisdom shifting. Plus:

Lichtman said the only variable that Democrats can control in the 2020 election is whether they nominate a charismatic candidate. He noted that the party’s past three presidents—Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter—were all elected as “young unknowns,” which does not describe the top likely candidates to run against Trump in 2020: Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders. “The Democratic Party increasingly is looking like a nursing home,” Sabato said.

But don’t get cocky, kids.

ROBBY SOAVE: 5 Things Barack Obama Said in His Weirdly Off-the-Record MIT Speech. “‘We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us,’ said the former president. ‘I know that seems like a low bar’.”

Journalists present had agreed for whatever reason not to record the speech, but somebody smuggled out a recording.

Now let’s do the Khalidi tape.

NOT GONNA HAPPEN: US calls for ‘immediate end’ to Syria offensive.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Syria is “terrorizing hundreds of thousands of civilians” with air strikes, artillery, rockets and “a looming ground attack.”

She adds that, “The regime’s use of chlorine gas as a weapon only intensifies this.”

More than 500 people have been killed since last week in the eastern Ghouta region, where activists on Sunday reported a suspected poison gas attack.

A U.N. Security Council resolution for a 30-day cease-fire across Syria has failed to stop the carnage.

The U.S. last year bombed a Syrian air base in retaliation for a chemical weapons attack against civilians.

Sanders said that Trump “put the Assad regime on notice some time ago.”

Perhaps SecDef Mattis ought to authorize giving Assad’s army a bloody nose like the one the Russian mercenaries got a couple weeks ago, and see if attitudes don’t change.

GOOD QUESTION: Why Does The Media Care More About The Parkland Shooting Than It Ever Did About Las Vegas? “You might speculate that the media has found Parkland to be more politically useful due to the anti-gun activism from some of the survivors. You might speculate that the media simply had less sympathy for the Vegas victims because they were white country music fans. You might speculate that there are some very powerful forces — Vegas hotels and casinos, namely — interested in burying the Vegas shooting. You might speculate that the unanswered questions just made the story too difficult for our lazy and apathetic society to track. You might come up with a more conspiratorial explanation than any of these I’ve listed.”

LIKE, YESTERDAY: Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel Needs To Resign For Incompetence.

In the days since the shooting, as allegations of incompetence and misconduct stacked up, Sheriff Israel has shown absolutely no willingness to accept any responsibility for the gross failures of his department. Yesterday, in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN, Israel was asked about how his department dropped the ball. His shocking response was the playful old quip, “If ‘ifs’ and ‘buts’ were candy and nuts…” Even Tapper, who hosted the town hall and is a former gun control spokesman, seemed shocked. He reminded the sheriff that they were talking about an incident that left 17 people dead.

But that response, as horrible as it was, wasn’t even the height of Israel’s bizarre hubris yesterday. He also claimed he has provided “excellent leadership” to the department. Not only is his assessment of his own leadership delusional, it’s dangerous. Israel assures us that independent investigators will look into the actions of his department and assess what went wrong. But given his own assessment, that he did a bang-up job, how can anyone have confidence that he will implement any changes that investigators may recommend?

Had Israel responded to the shocking and obvious failures of his department by admitting very bad mistakes were made by himself and others, had he acknowledged those mistakes and promised to do all in his power to do a better job, then maybe continuing his tenure as sheriff could be a reasonable option. As it stands, his refusal to do so makes it clear to any reasonable person that he has absolutely no business being the sheriff of anything, let alone one of the largest police departments in the country.

After Waco, Janet Reno at least paid lip service to accountability, stating that “I made the decision. I’m accountable. The buck stops with me,” before dodging any actual accountability. Israel is too smug to observe decency even in the breach.

SCOTT PRUIT: THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE EPA IS OVER.

But the key to me is that weaponization of the agency that took place in the Obama administration, where the agency was used to pick winners and losers. Those days are over.

You know, to be in Pennsylvania as I was early in my term, shortly after the CPAC speech last year, and to spend time with miners in Pennsylvania and be able to share with them underground. I was a thousand feet underground and 3 miles in. First time that an administrator in history had done that, and I talked to those long wall miners in Pennsylvania, and delivered the message from the president that the war on coal is over. That was a tremendous message for them, emotion that I saw on their faces.

Can you imagine, in the first instance, an agency of the federal government, a department of the U.S. government, declaring war on a sector of your economy? Where is that in the statute? Where does that authority exist? It doesn’t. And so to restore process and restore commitment to doing things the right way, I think we’ve seen tremendous success this past year.

That the San Francisco Chronicle didn’t jump at the fromt page headline story that then-candidate Obama handed them when he vowed the bankrupt the coal industry before their editors in January of 2008 was one of the great “dog that didn’t bark” moments for the DNC-MSM.

CHARLIE CAMPBELL: China’s Lurch Toward One-Man Rule Under Xi Jinping Should Worry Us All.

The move is the culmination of a series of power plays by Xi over recent months, including having his eponymous political thought enshrined in the national constitution, and failing to appoint any potential successors to China’s apex executive body, the Politburo Standing Committee (PSC). But the timing of the announcement before Xi has even officially completed his first term in office has stunned China-watchers and raised serious questions concerning the governance of the world’s number two economy going forward.

“This is a very significant move towards China transforming into a one-man system,” says Jude Blanchette, a Beijing-based researcher on Chinese politics for The Conference Board analysis firm. “It’s hard to overemphasize what a big deal this is for the future of China and the world given China’s importance to the global economy and global institutions.”

Xi’s consolidation of power domestically comes as he has also announced his intention to be more assertive internationally. His signature Belt and Road Initiative — a trade and infrastructure network tracing the ancient Silk Road though Eurasia and Africa — stands to radically boost China’s geopolitical clout at a time when the White House under Donald Trump has questioned key alliances and the very international institutions that have been the foundation of American hegemony.

Leave aside the anti-Trump talk, which is based on old campaign promises that (thankfully) never materialized.

But the author of this piece is also mistaken about why we ought to worry.

Dictatorships trade the superficial instability of democratic republics, where ritualized revolutions — in the form of elections — make for institutional stability, and allows for overhaul without violence. In its place, dictators bask in superficial stability, immune from electoral whims. But when the would-be electorate gets fed up, violence is often their only outlet.

Just ask the Ceaușescus.

Or, to keep the people distracted, the dictator might embark on a war of foreign conquest — which almost always ends poorly for the would-be conquerer.

This is the road Xi has chosen. We’ll see if he (or China) likes where it leads.

TUNKU VARADARAJAN: Is the Maldives India’s Grenada, and will Narendra Modi be India’s Reagan?

Under the redoubtable Ronald Reagan in 1983, the United States sent troops into Grenada, a Caribbean speck much farther away from the American mainland than the Republic of Maldives is from mainland India. The US forces ousted a violent, communist, Cuban-backed regime that had suspended Grenada’s democracy and was hostile to the United States, and restored a democratic order that was appropriately pro-American.

I’m attempting to draw a parallel here: There is today in the Maldives—which is even more intimately in India’s sphere of influence than Grenada was in Washington’s—a regime that has hijacked Maldivian democracy, is almost pathologically antagonistic to India and is backed by a China that’s muscling hard into India’s rightful precinct.

So: Is the Maldives India’s Grenada, and will Narendra Modi be India’s Reagan?

My advice is, if you can be Reagan, you should be Reagan.

BYRON YORK: Trump and Obama: Who’s really tougher on Russia?

In a text exchange, I asked one GOP lawmaker: If you believe Trump has been tougher on Russia, what is the best evidence? He quickly came back with a list. The U.S. is, he said:

Bombing Syria, Russia’s main client, and generally unleashing the U.S. military in Syria, including against Russians when necessary.
Arming Ukraine.
Browbeating NATO allies to increase defense spending.
Adding low-yield nukes to our arsenal.
Starting research and development on an INF noncompliant missile.
Shutting Russia’s San Francisco consulate.

To clarify some of the less-obvious references, on the “arming Ukraine” front, the lawmaker noted the Trump administration’s decision to supply Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles. (The Washington Post called Trump’s decision “a worthy application of the ‘peace through strength’ principle'” that will help Russian President Vladimir Putin understand that “his aggressions … will be resisted.”) The “low-yield nukes” reference is to developing a new generation of (relatively) small nuclear weapons that, the New York Times noted, “advocates say are needed to match Russian advances.” The “INF non-compliant missile” refers to U.S. work on a new missile that does not comply with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and is “a direct response to Russia’s deployment in recent years of its own treaty-busting missile,” according to Time magazine. (Time added that, “The Obama administration worked unsuccessfully to persuade the Kremlin to stand down the program.”)

The items on the list were all solid, hard-edged measures designed specifically to push back against Russian aggression.

So why do so many believe Obama was tougher on Russia? It wasn’t that Obama took a harder line against Russian adventurism. Just the opposite. “Under President Obama, Vladimir Putin hardly had reason to fear that anyone would push back on anything,” John Bolton, the U.N. ambassador under George W. Bush, noted recently.

But some journalists cite the measures the lame-duck Obama took in December 2016 in retaliation for Russian attempts to influence the presidential election as a case-closed argument that Obama was tougher. “Thirty-five diplomats were expelled,” explained CNN’s Tom Foreman. “They imposed sanctions on Russian businesses and agencies that were involved, and they closed two Russian compounds here in the United States. … You can certainly say Barack Obama could have been tougher, but any evidence that Donald Trump has been tougher than him, no, there is none. The statement is simply false.”

Yes, Obama’s December 2016 actions were actual punitive measures. But it’s hard to compare them to the lawmaker’s list of Trump actions — including, for example, U.S. forces killing at least 100 Russian mercenaries in Syria recently — and say Obama was the president who was harder on Russia.

The problem could be that some Trump critics appear to think of Russia only in terms of countering online election interference. They don’t seem to think that real, physical-world actions, like blowing up Russian mercenaries and building new missiles and bombs, constitute a tough policy toward Russia.

When you understand that Democrats will tolerate anything from Russians so long as it isn’t a direct threat to their power, you’ll understand why.

DEROY MURDOCK: The Russians Colluded Massively — with Democrats.

There is not enough proof of Russian collusion by Trump to fuel a stovetop pilot light.

In contrast, the evidence of Democratic collusion with Russia blazes on, even as Team Mueller ignores it.

• The Obama administration’s Russian Reset began in Geneva on March 6, 2009. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton huddled with Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and together they pressed a red button that should have been labeled “Reset” in Russian. Instead, Hillary’s aides had mislabeled it with the Russian word for “Overload.” Regardless, once pushed, the button symbolized a red dawn of increasingly cozy U.S.–Russian affairs.

• Obama announced on September 17, 2009, that he would cancel President George W. Bush’s plan to station missile-defense systems in Poland and the Czech Republic. “This is a U-turn in U.S. policy,” complained former Czech ambassador to Washington Alexander Vondra. “Russia had furiously opposed the project, claiming it targeted Moscow’s nuclear arsenal,” added Luke Harding and Ian Traynor of London’s Guardian. “Obama’s climb-down is likely to be seen by Russia as a victory.”

Indeed, Vladimir Putin applauded Obama’s strategic abandonment of the Poles and Czechs. The Russian strongman said: “I do anticipate that this correct and brave decision will be followed by others.”

Plus, Obama had all that extra flexibility after his re-election.

There’s more DNC-Kremlin collusion at the link. Much more.

A TASTE OF THEIR OWN MEDICINE: Time to Go Ask Your Local Progressive Bakery to Bake an NRA Cake. “If they refuse, sue them.”

The First Amendment gives everyone enough elbow room to avoid these kinds of legal unpleasantries, but since the progressive left wants to short-circuit the First, this might be the only way to make them learn.