That would be quite something to see. After all, if you promote a scumbag, you have to deal with a scumbag.

So now I see this NY Post article. An excerpt:

Maine Democratic candidate Graham Platner appears to be holding the Democratic Party hostage — refusing to drop out after he was accused of rape unless he gets to approve his successor to run for the Senate, The Post has learned.

A source familiar with the campaign discussions said Platner, his campaign and political strategist Morris Katz are deliberating about the Maine Democrat dropping out but only if his replacement shares his left-wing values.

So the report is that he’s making demands and threatening not to drop out if they’re not met. Nice.

It certainly makes sense that the powers-that-be would like someone more moderate, in order to appeal to the somewhat purple state of Maine. Then again, Collins is pretty moderate herself. But my point is that Platner knows he has some power here and is loathe to give it up.

Needless to say, there’s been a ton of coverage of Platner in the last 24 hours, much of it about how the Democrats supported him till the current revelations about rape. Not date-rape, but what Whoopi Goldberg might or might not refer to as “rape-rape.”

Ace has a good summary of how the NY Times did a limited modified hang-out a while back by trying to get ahead of the rape and assault allegations without actually covering them truthfully. Rather, they mostly covered them up. It’s a long and involved post, but here’s some of it to give you the flavor:

The New York Times Knew All About Graham Platner’s Rape Allegation But Deliberately Buried It …

They also buried the allegations of non-rape abuse by Lyndsey Fifield — and she says she gave them the names of five friends who would corroborate the story (at least as far as her telling the same story contemporaneously).

Two of those friends, she told them, didn’t know about the abuse, but could corroborate the dates of their relationship. The other three could corroborate the abuse.

The New York Times chose to only contact the two friends Fifield expressly told them could not corroborate the abuse. They didn’t contact the three who could corroborate the abuse, deliberately.

Then the Times wrote that they contacted two friends “who could not corroborate” Fifield’s claims of abuse.

Don’t ever let anyone tell you that the people who write at the Times are stupid. They may be both knaves and fools in the classic sense, but they are not stupid and they know how to write exactly what they want to write.

There’s also a good piece in National Review in terms of a summary of what went wrong with Platner. But it has a flaw that I’ve noticed is present in just about every article I’ve read from the right about Platner, an omission that puzzles me.

For example, here’s a quote from that link:

If Platner fooled you [he’s addressing reporters on the left], maybe you should find something to do with your life besides writing columns about politics. Because the U.S. political landscape is full of creeps, cretins, con artists, crooks, and cads of every kind, and it always will be. If the media has any useful role to play in our system, it is to look beyond the spin and the campaign-crafted image and to tell the world who these candidates really are, warts and all, so the electorate can make an informed choice.

Talk about an idealistic vision! The point is that Platner did not fool them, not for a single moment. Nor will they ever “look beyond the spin.” They proudly create the spin. There is no devotion to the principle of truth. It’s about winning, period.

What’s more, this story did not come out now in the interests of truth. It came out now because Democrats and the MSM (redundancy, I know) realized Platner almost certainly would lose. So they had to torpedo him. They had held back the rape story not only to protect him till now, but to use in case they needed it in the future. Now they need it, so it’s printed. I think it’s just as simple as that.

And so you have a flood of people (take a look here) suddenly saying he has to go, people who defended him mightily till now. I repeat: it’s not the result of the story itself. The story being revealed is the result of the polls. The outrage at Platner’s behavior is the result of the polls. That’s all it is. Now, maybe they were outraged and worried even earlier, but they had to keep their mouths shut and pretend to defend him, all in the interests of winning. Once he no longer was a winner, they’re free to suddenly virtue-signal about him.

[ADDENDUM: The allegations have gotten worse.

How could that be, you ask? Here’s how:

One of Graham Platner’s ex-girlfriends alleged Tuesday that the embattled Maine Democrat repeatedly removed his condom during sex without asking permission.

“He would pull condoms off,” Lyndsey Fifield said in an interview with the Washington Post. “He would do it in a sneaky way. He wouldn’t tell me.”

“I confronted him both during and after [sex] because he knew that I was not on birth control and how dangerous that was,” Fifield added. “He would act like cute about it, like ‘Oh sneaky me.’”

Actually, I’m not sure that’s worse than breaking and entering and rape. Then again, it’s pretty bad.

However, a caveat the left will no doubt point out is that this allegation is by the Republican ex-girlfriend, not the “progressive” one. So it’s more suspect, as far as they’re concerned.

My own question is why, after he did this, would anyone continue to see him or sleep with him? She said it happened six times. And he’s not so compelling a specimen; he’s a pretty repellent guy even without this kind of sleazy conduct, as far as I can see.

Then again, Sylvia Plath may have had it right – at least, about some women but certainly not all:

… I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.]

The post The Platner rape story: all in the timing appeared first on The New Neo.

Israel’s ban on Palestinian workers has left families hungry and parents unable to pay for their children’s school fees. Still, the ban is being justified in the name of security, and shows no signs of abating.

It reminds me of the old joke about the man who murdered his parents and threw himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan.

As Katie Pavlich writes on X:

Israel is a sovereign country and Palestinians from Gaza or the West Bank have zero right to work in that country – especially after Israelis who lived on the border with Gaza invited Palestinians into their homes to work and break bread. Gaza Palestinians returned the favor by taking notes about where safe rooms were, layouts of the homes, if there were dogs, etc. in plans for their ultimate slaughter, pillaging and rape on October 7. Dozens of Americans were murdered at the NOVA peace festival down the road.

So yeah, they’re not allowed to work in Israel anymore. Maybe you should be asking the governments of Gaza and the West Bank to foster economies that benefit their people so they don’t have to go work in the country next door.

However, it’s actually more complicated than that. There were indeed early reports that many Gazan workers spied on the kibbutz residents and helped Hamas with gathering information for the slaughter. But this spying was apparently not as widespread as initially reported – or was it? I’m referring to this report:

According to a Channel 12 report on Wednesday, the Shin Bet has investigated some 3,000 Gazans who had permits to work in Israel to assess if they had provided the terror group with information about the communities it was planning on attacking and has concluded that no such concerted effort was made.

The report noted that the Shin Bet did not completely rule out the possibility that some individual laborers had cooperated with the terror group.

“There’s no concern that the people who were investigated passed information to Hamas as a result of their work in Israel,” Channel 12 quoted the Shin Bet as saying. There was no immediate confirmation of the report from the agency, which rarely responds to inquiries.

What is the political bent of Israel’s Channel 12? I’ve read in that past that it’s on the left, and Google AI seems to think it’s center or center-left. At any rate, the issue is that this is (a) a report about a report, with no confirmation (b) a report based on interviews with 16% of the workforce; but who comprised this 16% and how were they made available for interrogation? (c) a report that there was no “concerted” effort.

What does “concerted” mean in this context – does it mean sheer numbers or does it mean coordination? Were the 16% typical of the group as a whole? How did Shin Bet determine whether they were telling the truth or not? Does the report even exist? If it does, is it being fairly represented? Not only is it not available for reading, but Shin Bet hasn’t even confirmed the story.

I don’t know the answers. What I do know is that Hamas is the government of Gaza and at the time of the attack had the support of the vast majority of the people of Gaza. It’s harder to tell how people in Gaza feel now, but I think it’s safe to say that many continue to harbor an intense hatred of Israel. Hamas itself is dedicated to Israel’s destruction. Israel is under no obligation to employ any of the people of Gaza.

Another response to the New Yorker tweet asks the question: why can’t Egypt employ the unemployed Gazans? After all, they’re next door and many are of Egyptian descent. But we all know why: Palestinians have been a destabilizing element wherever they go.

In other news of Israel and Hamas, it appears that Israel continues to make inroads in Gaza, if this report is true:

The post Israel and Gaza: you’re mean if you don’t hire your sworn enemies to work for you appeared first on The New Neo.

I first noticed this while listening to a podcast in which people were pointing out that America was built on immigration, that they themselves got their citizenship as the children of immigrants, and so forth, and therefore they’re against Trump’s proposals on birthright citizenship. But of course, that basic process is not in dispute – for legal immigrants. Nor, as far as I know, was the idea to make Trump’s EO on this retroactive and apply to people already born here.

It’s a separate issue whether Trump had the power to do this by executive order. I don’t think he does have that power, as I’ve written before. But the issue I’m writing about in this post is what he actually was trying to do with the order, not whether an executive order would be sufficient to actually accomplish it.

Here’s Trump’s executive order; you can take a look yourself. The order relies on the 14th Amendment requirement that, in order to gain birthright citizenship, a person born here must also be “subject to the jurisdiction” of the US:

Among the categories of individuals born in the United States and not subject to the jurisdiction thereof, the privilege of United States citizenship does not automatically extend to persons born in the United States: (1) when that person’s mother was unlawfully present in the United States and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth, or (2) when that person’s mother’s presence in the United States at the time of said person’s birth was lawful but temporary (such as, but not limited to, visiting the United States under the auspices of the Visa Waiver Program or visiting on a student, work, or tourist visa) and the father was not a United States citizen or lawful permanent resident at the time of said person’s birth.

In other words, the order sought exclude babies born to pregnant illegal aliens, and babies born to tourists. The next paragraph goes on to say that documents conferring citizenship should not be issued to those two classes of persons. It adds that it is not retroactive; it only applies to children born after 30 days of the order (I’ve noticed that some people had also wrongly assumed it would be retroactive).

And then it adds this:

Nothing in this order shall be construed to affect the entitlement of other individuals, including children of lawful permanent residents, to obtain documentation of their United States citizenship.

In other words, birthright citizenship would have remained intact for other classes of people.

Now, perhaps you all already knew all this. I had pretty much assumed that everyone already knew it. But then I kept hearing otherwise, some of it from people who are clearly intelligent, some of them also on the right. Was the misunderstanding a failure of the MSM to cover it properly? Or was it just a kneejerk assumption about Trump being an intolerant, marauding person who supposedly wants no immigrants? I don’t know. But I thought I’d clear it up, just in case.

What’s more, I’ve read little recently about a fact I wrote about years ago when discussing this birthright issue, which is that the US is almost alone among first-world nations in conferring it in the first place to the babies of illegal aliens and of tourists. Only Canada has a similar policy (excluding children of diplomats, however, much as we do) along with a host of third-world countries such as Cuba, Chad, and Guyana that ordinarily don’t have to fend off birth tourism anyway. I think a great many people assume that countries such as England and France have birthright citizenship much as we do, but they do not. The general rule for Europe and even for some third-world countries is that the parents must either be born there for some countries, or be legal residents for others.

When I look at recent headlines on the subject, I see a great many like this one from the BBC: “Trump loses Supreme Court battle to end birthright citizenship.” If a person reads only the headline and not the article – which people often do – that person would get the wrong idea. The body of the article itself uses the word “limit” rather than “end,” but doesn’t explain the details, and I think many or most readers would get the impression that Trump wanted to ban much more than was actually the case.

[NOTE: I’m having major WiFi connectivity problems today and had to use my cellphone to publish this. I had originally meant to add a few other articles at the end to illustrate, but have given up at the moment because it’s just too hard to do from a phone. GRRRR!]

[ADDENDUM: Here’s the part I was trying to add earlier, when my Wifi connection dropped out:

Then there’s this headline from something called the American Immigration Council. It reads: “SCOTUS Rules Trump’s Attempt to End Birthright Citizenship Is Unconstitutional.” At least, this article explains the restrictions in paragraph three, but there’s no question in my mind that for the many who don’t read that far, the impression received would be that Trump tried to ban the practice altogether.

On the other hand, this NBC News article uses the word “limit” rather than “end” in the headline. However, it doesn’t explain in the body of the article what those “limits” would be until quite a ways down – that is, paragraph ten. By that point many or even most readers probably would have given up.

The post Trump wasn’t trying to <i>eliminate</i> birthright citizenship appeared first on The New Neo.

Ace describes some of the claims thusly:

NYT: “Ex GF of Platner Says He Knew All About “My Totenkopf,” Used Physical Force Against Her, Bragged That He Would Rape His Male Enemies, “Not in a Gay Way,” But to Show “I’m Dominant” …

Most of the Democrats refused to address this except to say that Platner’s reformed, and that he needs to beat Collins and is poised to beat Collins and that this will give them a Senate majority, as though that would justify anything. And of course, in their eyes it would.

Fetterman was one exception, however (although here he’s addressing some previously-revealed offenses of Platner’s):

“[Platner] is a guy that had a problem with me, how I dress, but he seemed to have no problem posing in a towel at a disgusting website that consistently had serious problems about that kinds of depravity,” Fetterman told Fox News host Sean Hannity. …

“Let me make a deal. I’ll tell P-Hustle, I’ll wear a suit every day, if he releases all those texts and messages that he’s had,” Fetterman said. P-Hustle is a reference to the account name Platner reportedly had on his Kik account. …

Fetterman replied [when asked if there were more lies to come from Platner], “Well, he lied to everybody. He said that there wasn’t any after his Nazi tattoo situation. And now there’s more and more of the things. So he’s already lied about that.”

Fetterman added, “So I assume, you know, it’s like they say, for every ranch you see in Texas, there’s 50 that you haven’t seen. So I’m sure there’s plenty, a lot of more ranches in P-Hustle’s life.”

I think the Democrats actually would like to rid themselves of Fetterman, or at least muzzle him. But he’s not up for re-election until 2028, and they won’t replace him then unless they find someone they think can win in Pennsylvania.

But I digress.

The story behind the Times story about Platner’s girlfriends actually seems to have been even more Byzantine than I originally suspected. Take a look:

But these allegations [of girlfriend abuse] are buried [in the Times story] under mountains of campaign flack bullshit and then packaged as “intimidating” and “unsettling.” Normal people have another phrase for it: domestic abuse.

That characterization is by design.

Let me be clear: the New York Times story was not journalism. It was a soft catch-and-kill operation. It was a favor to Platner’s campaign, a disservice to readers, and an insult to the women who say they were hurt by him.

One of those victims, Lyndsey Fifield, is my friend.

Fifield has been attacked by the left as not credible because she’s on the right politically – therefore, of course, lying. Believe all women – if they’re Democrats.

More:

The term ‘catch and kill‘ refers to a shady practice where a public relations firm or consultant works with a friendly news outlet that was pitched or ‘stumbled’ upon a negative story about a client to effectively ‘catch’ and then ‘kill’ the story — or delay it until it no longer has impact.

A ‘soft catch and kill’ works similarly, though it mostly involves the publication still running the story in a timely manner, but the details are softened or buried deep in the narrative to soften the bite. …

In fact, for the first third of the New York Times expose, they focused on women provided to the newspaper by the Platner campaign — who, of course, sang the degenerate former bartender’s praises. And frankly, that is all many readers will come away with, because that is about as far as their attention span lets them get into the narrative. Which is, again, the point.

I didn’t know that “catch and kill” terminology, but that’s the sort of thing I meant by “getting ahead of the story.” In other words, the friendly outlet shapes it before an unfriendly one does.

This is the part that wasn’t apparent from the story itself:

Prior to publication, I’m told that the Times spoke to two women who had credibly accused Platner of sexual assault. This detail was revealed to Fifield — likely in an effort to encourage her to divulge more of her story. Those women’s allegations never made it into the story. They were effectively ‘killed’ by the Times’s editors and by Platner’s attorneys, I’m told. …

Even more telling, and perhaps a tip of the hat to the nature of this soft catch and kill, is the fact that numerous Democrat aligned influencers and operatives were essentially flooding the zone on social media in the hours before the story was published. Somehow, they knew that one of the women was an activist in the conservative movement — a detail that surmisably came from the New York Times or from the Platner campaign, or both, ahead of publication. Others appear to have known details that were cut from the story.

Then there’s Fifield herself (see this describing and quoting a series of tweets of hers on X) [my emphasis]:

Fifield explained that in early April, the New York Times contacted her and she told them she was not interested in discussing her story. The reporter told her there are other women coming forward about Platner’s conduct. “ They said but wait—there are other women. Women terrified to tell their stories, too, and you need to band together. WE will help you. We will protect you. Men can’t keep getting away with this,” she wrote.

You could say that the Times was another abusive, lying boyfriend. Don’t ever believe what they promise [my emphasis]:

After seeing former Rep. Eric Swalwell’s downfall, she reversed course. She told them her story and even “let them take pictures of my diary pages.” She sent screenshots of her message exchanges with Platner.

“I explained very clearly that, like many women abused by their partners, I had not told anyone about his violence at the time—I had covered for and defended it. I accepted his earnest apologies. They said that’s fine because the diary entries and my on the record story was enough,” Fifield wrote.

The reporters connected her to other victims and she told them they were “doing the right thing” even though they had misgivings. Fifield also realized that Platner was in a relationship with one of the other victims while she was dating him.

She further explained that she felt guilty about having remained silent for so long, but at some point, she decided she couldn’t continue to keep this under wraps. “I couldn’t stay silent as he continued to lie and lie and lie. I want my daughters to boldly speak out if they’re ever abused as I was,” she wrote. …

“After the story went up I began to ask them … wait, where are the stories from the other women? Where are their accusations of sexual assault? Why am I the focus? Why are there 11 paragraphs dedicated to detailing my work history (more than has been published about Graham’s by far)?

“Why does it say “nobody could corroborate” when I offered them sources that COULD corroborate?”

The piece was obviously written in a way that would discredit her and/or make it easy for the left to attack her. She was naive, but it makes sense that she wanted to tell her story. It was a mistake to tell it to the Times – but then again, if it had appeared in an outlet on the right, it would also have been discredited because the only true “truth” appears in the leftist MSM.

ADDENDUM:

More here, including this from Fifield:

It dawned on me that this really was a set up all along. The journalists I trusted who convinced me to share a story I never wanted to tell methodically delayed and twisted this into a gift to the Platner campaign. Violating the trust of his victims. Shattering the trust I placed in them with the most vulnerable story of my life.

As Fetterman said, there are probably “a lot more ranches in P-Hustle’s life.”

The post Think the <i>NY Times</i> story about Platner’s ex-girlfriend’s complaints was an anti-Platner hit piece? Think again. appeared first on The New Neo.

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

So are we to conclude that author Bryan Walsh sometimes did know and yet failed to communicate that he was writing the equivalent of a Hollywood script?

As for why he’s telling the tale now, it’s a domino effect:

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

Walsh still says things will be bad, just not as bad. But why would we trust that prediction?

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100.

Walsh seems to be saying, in most of the article, that if we could predict the policy we could predict the climate. But I have always thought that’s a case of hubris. There are too many variables and too many unknowns interacting in too complex and too poorly-understood a fashion. And that’s even if you assume that scientists and journalists are always acting in good faith, which is – as they say – somewhat implausible.

The post Why, we were just telling scary stories – say the climate-doomers appeared first on The New Neo.

… [W]e have:

“Trump has set a final offer on the table with his minimum demands while pointing a gun at the IRGC’s temple: “Sign or die.” ”

And we’ve seen this same scenario of “final offer” multiple times for the past 7 weeks with no “sign or die” result happening. So why believe it this time? The Iranians just keep stringing it out

I think many of us (including me) share at least some of that impatient and uncertain feeling of unease. Why wouldn’t we? The outcome is uncertain and the propaganda around this enormous. Everyone reporting on the possibilities or probabilities has an agenda. Most of the agenda is anti-Trump.

Last night I was thinking about the need for patience. As physicsguy says, it’s been something like seven weeks since the ceasefire began. In the culture in which we live, that seems like a long time to wait while seemingly being jerked back and forth. But is it a long time, really? I submit that it is not, especially considering the stakes and the players.

Now, you may think – as I sometimes do – that there shouldn’t be negotiations at all with this entity. But I know I don’t have the full story. I strongly suspect (without actually knowing) that the reasons for the negotiations are as follows: (1) to reset the clock on the war for purposes of the need for Congress’ approval (2) intelligence gathering and planning (3) turning up the economic screws and letting the Iranian leadership fester in the problems that result (4) giving the Gulf States a needed rest; and (5) waiting to get what we want – the open Straits and the nuclear material – and then following up with more regime-weakening moves. The latter could definitely involve Israeli action, probably behind the scenes.

In the past, the only war endings that didn’t take a lot of time were situations in which one party surrendered unconditionally. Otherwise, when for example an armistice was involved, it ordinarily took many many months to iron things out. I’m not going to take the time to analyze each case, and often the peace achieved wasn’t on terms that were so great, but seven weeks is very short compared to the examples that come to mind (Versailles, Korea, Vietnam). For Korea, for example, Google AI says, “Negotiations for the armistice spanned over two years (1951-1953), the longest negotiated armistice in history.”

I don’t think there’s any chance of these talks going on that long. But at what point Trump will run out of patience I don’t know. It could happen any day now, or it could go on for another month or two. As a society we lack the patience for any more. Perhaps we lack the patience for even seven weeks.

If I had a dime for every headline I’ve seen lately with things like “disastrous deal” and “Trump surrenders,” I’d have a fair amount of extra cash. This is something to remember:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we… https://t.co/3bU7bf1LUO

— AG (@AGHamilton29) May 25, 2026

The whole message is this:

I hope people understand what’s happening because it’s been the same story over and over again.

The Islamic Republic and their allies leak their preferred details as if they are agreed to western sources. Then when U.S. refuses to agree to those absurd terms and insists we stick to the deal that had already been under discussion, they claim the U.S. is backing out of the deal.

Then they blame America or Israeli influence for the lack of a deal instead of The Islamic Republic making unreasonable demands for a settlement after they lost the military fight and are facing an economic crisis.

We saw the same thing with Gaza repeatedly.

And Trump himself has warned about that, for what it’s worth – in his own characteristic braggadocio style:

I laugh at all of the Dumocrats, RINOS, and Fools who know nothing about the potential deal I am making with Iran, things that haven’t even been negotiated yet, weak and ineffective people like failed Senator Thom Tillis (Soon out of office!), Bill Cassidy, who just suffered a massive Primary loss, really bad Congressman Thomas Massie, a major sleazebag who lost in a landslide to a great American Patriot (Endorsed by “TRUMP”) after showing tremendous disloyalty to his Party (and Country!), and almost all Dumocrats, people that have totally lost their way, constantly supporting bad policy and even worse candidates, but are constantly critical of each and every fantastic win I have. These people should go home and rest, they do nothing but create division and loss. In other words, they are losers! The deal with Iran will either be a great and meaningful one, or there will be no deal. It will be the exact opposite of the JCPOA disaster negotiated by the failed Obama Administration, which was a direct and open path to a Nuclear Weapon for Iran. No, I don’t do deals like that! President DJT

Trump is responding to this sort of thing:

Having started something he cannot finish, the US president, egged on by Israel’s warmonger-in-chief, Benjamin Netanyahu, has boxed himself into a corner. Either he resumes the illegal bombing of Iran on an even bigger scale, brazenly threatening war crimes in hopes of forcing surrender; or else he accepts a negotiated compromise that falls embarrassingly short of his initial aims, including eliminating Iran’s nuclear programme, and leaves an angry, more hardline, strategically strengthened regime in power. …

A peace deal, with add-ons, that is broadly in line with Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear pact with Tehran, which Trump foolishly wrecked and is now the most Iran seems willing to offer, would rightly be counted an abject Trump failure. It would represent a landmark US strategic defeat with significant implications for the global contest with China and Russia. And any deal that left the regime charging transit fees in the strait of Hormuz would be utterly humiliating. No amount of spin could conceal such a presidency-defining calamity.

You can feel the author’s excitement at the prospect.

The post Once again, Iran appeared first on The New Neo.

Katy Tur: What about this passage from Mike Johnson declaring that our rights do not derive from government? They come from you, our creator and heavenly father. Is this him putting God over the Declaration of Independence?

McKay Coppins: I actually think that that idea is not wholly uncommon. I mean, the idea that we have certain inalienable rights that come from god can be read in a fairly benign way, which is basically that we have innate human rights, that our constitution and our government, our democratic government are meant to codify. Right. That idea is not totally abnormal.

Good to know it’s not “totally abnormal” (Coppins is a staff writer at The Atlantic). Tur is 42 years old and Coppins is 39. Do they know anything about the text of the Declaration of Independence? Back in the ancient times of my own youthful education, we were required to memorize a couple of paragraphs, including the relevant passage “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”

It reminds me that it was often Obama;s habit to leave out the “Creator” part (from 2010):

At a Democratic fundraiser on Monday night, President Obama once again misquoted the Declaration of Independence’s most famous sentence and once again omitted its reference to our “Creator.” According to the text of his remarks published on the official White House website, he said: “[W]hat makes this place [America] special is not something physical. It has to do with this idea that was started by 13 colonies that decided to throw off the yoke of an empire, and said, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that each of us are endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”

The first time that something happens and is met with publicity and criticism, it could well be an accident or part of the learning curve — like the first time one bows down to foreign royalty when other U.S. presidents haven’t; or the first time one issues a public apology abroad for past (real or imagined) American sins in a way that other presidents haven’t. But the second time, the assumption must be that it’s probably deliberate — and that makes it all the more appalling. Other presidents didn’t deliberately misquote the Declaration, and they didn’t leave out (or rewrite) the words about our rights being endowed by our Creator.

NOTE Some of what is going on with Tur et al. is that she suffers from a lack of cultural literacy (see this).

NOTE II: I know I’ve already written a lot about the abominable Kristof article, but here’s a link to a good essay about it, by Judge Roy K. Altman.

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As I thought, he says the lawsuit won’t work in the US. One reason is that an entity like Israel can’t sue under US law; it has to be a person who was harmed. Plus, the standard is very high in the US when suing a newspaper for defamation, due to New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (ironic, isn’t it, that the case involved the Times?).

Nevertheless, Dershowitz makes the point that Israel could sue in other countries that make it easier to win against media outlets, such as in Britain.

Dershowitz also points out that the NY Times’ printing of these particular allegations – which already had been floating around online for ages – gives the stories a kind of gravitas they didn’t have before, and could convince credulous readers who were neutral on the Israel question to turn against Israel because they trust that the Times wouldn’t print mere online rumors or mere Palestinian propaganda. Those who follow the Times more closely know that of course the paper would do that – and already has, many times. But lots of people aren’t that tuned in to these topics and can be persuaded by the Times’ high reputation of old.

Dershowitz also points out that the article was careful not just to be published as opinion – which doesn’t really protect it legally, although that’s the goal – but to not name any of the persons being accused of these crimes. Naming a person falsely would give that person a viable causer of action in the United States.

Plus, Dershowitz says that journalists are the most unethical group of people he’s ever dealt with; I can well believe it.

This National Review article describes what the advantages would be of a defamation lawsuit in Israel, even if the defamation case would basically go nowhere if brought in the US:

Which brings us to the real mechanism: 28 U.S.C. § 1782.

Once an Israeli proceeding is in reasonable contemplation, an interested person can apply in the Southern District of New York (where the New York Times is headquartered) to compel evidence production from a U.S. entity for use in foreign litigation. A properly framed § 1782 application does not ask the court to adjudicate the case; it simply asks the court to order the Times to produce the factual basis for one published allegation.

The subpoena categories write themselves: documents identifying the source and evidentiary basis for the dog allegation; fact-checking notes and editorial review records; communications with cited human rights organizations about this specific claim; internal discussions of reliability or corroboration. The Times will obviously raise reporter’s privilege. That is expected. But the answer here is a measured response: Nobody is asking for every source on every story. The request is for the factual foundation for one allegation the Times has publicly called corroborated and extensively fact-checked and “deeply reported.” Either show the corroboration or explain why you cannot. Both answers are informative.

None of this is a technical defamation case, but the critics declaring the claim dead on arrival are focusing on the colloquial use of the word “defamation” expressed in a spokesperson’s tweet and missing the tree for the forest. The real question is whether there exists a narrow, disciplined legal theory that forces the Times to produce the evidentiary basis for one of the most inflammatory factual allegations it has ever published. And there is.

Of course, many many more people have paid attention to the Kristof piece (many of whom might believe it) than would pay attention to any legal findings delegitimizing it. The Times and Kristof are well aware of that. They want their lies to get all the way around the world before the truth has a chance to get its boots on.

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Some excerpts:

The libel [Kristof] dutifully repeated in “The Paper of Record” was a hundred years old when he printed it. The Palestinian propaganda has not changed in a century. The Western press, which once exposed it, now promotes it.

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the man Palestinian historians call the father of their national movement, distributed the original handbills in the summer of 1929. The text called on Arab men to rise against the Jews, an enemy who had “violated the honor of Islam and raped the women and murdered widows and babies.” The leaflets had been printed in advance.

No Jewish man had raped any Arab woman. That didn’t matter.

He paired the rape libel with a second weapon. His crowds at the Nebi Musa riots of 1920 had chanted “Palestine is our land, the Jews are our dogs.” Dogs in Islamic law are najis, ritually impure, the same religious category as pigs and bodily fluids. Calling a Jew a dog made a religious statement about defilement. Twin demonizations, both concocted and distributed with the specific intent of inciting violence against the Jews.

The author goes on to describe the Hebron massacre that resulted, in which Palestinians (not called that back then, of course) committed barbaric crimes against Jews that have a great deal of resonance with what occurred on 10/7, nearly 100 years later. There are resonances with other historic events in the area, too.

I strongly suggest you read the whole thing; it can’t be summarized. It’s an extraordinary history.

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