Chuck Hagel is surprised that Obama is who Obama is

The New Neo Posted on by

Any surprise at this shows a certain amount of poor judgment, I’d say. On Hagel’s part:

It was Aug. 30, 2013, and the U.S. military was poised for war. Obama had publicly warned Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad that his regime would face consequences if it crossed a “red line” by employing chemical weapons against its own people. Assad did it anyway, and Hagel had spent the day approving final plans for a barrage of Tomahawk cruise missile strikes against Damascus. U.S. naval destroyers were in the Mediterranean, awaiting orders to fire.

Instead, Obama told a stunned Hagel to stand down. Assad’s Aug. 21 chemical attack in a Damascus suburb had killed hundreds of civilians, but the president said the United States wasn’t going to take any military action against the Syrian government. The president had decided to ignore his own red line ”” a decision, Hagel believes, that dealt a severe blow to the credibility of both Obama and the United States…

In the days and months afterward, Hagel’s counterparts around the world told him their confidence in Washington had been shaken over Obama’s sudden about-face. And the former defense secretary said he still hears complaints to this day from foreign leaders.

“A president’s word is a big thing, and when the president says things, that’s a big deal,” he said…

The 69-year-old former Nebraska senator and Vietnam War veteran, speaking for the first time about his treatment by the Obama administration, said the Pentagon was subject to debilitating meddling and micromanagement by the White House ”” echoing criticism made by his predecessors, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

Looking back on his tenure, Hagel said in the Dec. 10 interview that he remains puzzled as to why some administration officials sought to “destroy” him personally in his final days in office, castigating him in anonymous comments to newspapers even after he had handed in his resignation…

Hagel’s biggest hurdle, though, was that he was never fully embraced by Obama’s tight inner circle.

By the time Hagel was confirmed he should have been aware that (a) Obama was never going to order that sort of response in Syria, no matter what he said for public consumption (b) one of Obama’s goals is to destroy the credibility of the United States so that other nations do not trust it in the future (c) the hallmark of this administration has long been “debilitating meddling and micromanagement” of the military, as his predecessors have said (d) personal destruction has long been an Obama tactic; and (e) no one is “fully embraced by Obama’s tight inner circle” except Obama’s tight inner circle—that’s what makes it tight.

Hagel served his purpose.

Choices liberals face

The New Neo Posted on by

People don’t like to change their minds, and they particularly don’t like to have to reorder a belief system they’ve held for years or a lifetime. With increasing attacks of the Paris and San Bernardino type, liberals are faced with a dilemma: hold onto their beliefs about terrorism and how to fight it, or descend into what they see as a pit of despair, chaos, and retaliatory violence or tyranny. Which would you choose? To hold onto your beliefs, of course, if you could.

For people looking at the world and events like the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, these are some of the choices

(1) There is either something about Islam that is leading to this, or it has nothing to do with Islam.
(2) Terrorists are either forces of evil and chaos, or they are people with a grievance.
(3) We can solve this either by being nicer to them and more self-abasing, and then they’ll stop hating us, or we can solve it by warring with them in a host of ways that are violent, nasty, brutal, distasteful, and/or tragic, and that don’t always work.
(4) We can be tolerant and loving or start hating those who hate us and want to murder us.

Leftist thought offers a way out. Answering “nothing to do with Islam” to number 1 allows a person to feel tolerant and loving—which would lead to a solution for number 4 as well. Tolerance and the avoidance of even the appearance or hint of anything remotely resembling bigotry is one of the biggest goals of young people today, who have been taught that those things are the worst of sins and make a person into a moral pariah. Answering “people with grievances” for number 2 allows a person to be much less afraid, and to establish the world as a rational orderly place, filled with dangerous people who sometimes seem evil but really aren’t. Answering “nicer and more self-abasing” to number 3 allows us to sit tight and enjoy our lives as is, and not have to make any hard sacrifices.

It’s really a no-brainer. I’m not sure what it would take at this point to change minds, either. Even a much greater and more dangerous conflagration might not do it for that many people.

Our country has now come to a political place that, right after 9/11, I did not dream would be our destination in such a short time. And yet—both initially in the reactions of the left to 9/11 and Iraq, and then more definitively with the election of Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, and now the widely-supported 2016 candidacy of Hillary Clinton—I have become more and more convinced over those fourteen years that the majority of people cling to their previous beliefs in order to maintain a rosier picture.

I always knew that, in general. In fact, I began this blog in late 2004 with the premise that changing one’s mind on a large political subject is both difficult and rare. And yet I’ve come to believe it’s even more difficult and more rare than I thought it was back then.

Democrats for Trump?

The New Neo Posted on by

I keep encountering the statement from Trump supporters that Trump appeals to a lot Democrats, more than the other Republican candidates do, and enough to make a difference in the general.

Except for the fact that, if you look at all the polls, Trump is not appealing to Democrats, and is doing worse than the other Republican candidates against Clinton. He also has the highest unfavorables. And those statistics have been pretty consistent for Trump right along.

So, asserting he will do well against Clinton appears to be an article of faith, unsupported by anything but personal conviction (and perhaps anecdotal evidence about some Democrat a person might know who likes him, which is basically irrelevant). It’s a conviction I definitely don’t share.

About a month ago I spent a lot of time trying to find a poll measuring Trump’s support among Democrats and Independents vs. the support from that same group towards the other Republican candidates. I found only one poll back then, and I noticed that in it Trump did worse than most of the other Republican candidates with Democrats and Independents. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to locate it again to check it out and write about it in more detail, and I haven’t found another since then that even discusses the issue. Looking for one is somewhat labor-intensive, because it requires delving deep into the actual questions asked and the breakdown of the answers; for example, this poll might contain the information but I can only find a lengthy report rather than the full results, and the shorter but fairly comprehensive report doesn’t even discuss it.

So, why do people think Trump would do well with Democrats and against Hillary, short of any actual data that supports it, and in the face of some data (particularly the face-to-face with Hillary polls, and Trump’s high unfavorables) that argues against it? Well, there’s Trump’s own claims. But short of that it seems to me it’s just an example of wishful thinking on the part of Trump supporters at this point.

Who does best against Hillary? It’s Rubio all the way, and has been for a long time. I imagine that Trump supporters in particular would be especially annoyed with this news. Many conservatives—and particularly the group that has come to support Trump—have come to detest Rubio, and consider him the establishment substitute for the failing Bush.

I don’t agree. I have made no secret of the fact that Rubio is not one of my favorite candidates in terms of policy. I initially liked Walker, then I switched to Cruz and Fiorina, and now I’m pretty much with Cruz. But I have not ruled out Rubio (or Christie, for that matter). Rubio is far far more conservative than Hillary—in fact, he’s far more conservative than Trump as well, but I know Trump supporters don’t see it that way and/or couldn’t care less. And Rubio has the added plus (a potentially big one) of looking like he could beat her.

I don’t usually talk about “electability” in elections. But in this case I’m going to talk about it, because I see it as more of an issue than ever in this 2016 campaign. If a candidate can’t beat Hillary, I’m not interested (that’s not the reason I don’t like Trump, as my readers probably already know). And yes, although Rubio’s not my front runner I’m somewhat more interested in him than I otherwise would be, because I think he can beat Hillary. And no, I don’t think he’ll let in the floodgates on immigration, although he’s not as tough on it as I would prefer even now, and I understand that his Senate history on this gives me pause.

I realize these mildly pro-Rubio statements will probably unleash a flood of condemnation in the comments section. But I cannot lie about it; that’s what I’m seeing right now in the race for 2016. It could change in the future, of course; there’s lots and lots of time. But at the moment, that’s what polls are telling me and have been telling me consistently for quite a while, and that’s what my gut is telling me. Both are important.

And no, I don’t think all the pollsters are in a conspiracy to put the supposed establishment candidate Rubio in the driver’s seat. In fact, I’ve noticed in the past that US polls (particularly poll averages) have been much better at predicting most elections—especially national ones—than a lot of people seen to think they are. Pollsters actually have an investment in being correct, because it enhances their reputations if they have been good at predicting election results.

Hung jury, mistrial declared in Porter case (Freddie Gray)

The New Neo Posted on by

Mistrial declared:

Officer Porter is, of course, subject to re-trial on all four charges: involuntary manslaughter, second degree assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct in office. (Update: It’s being reported that the parties will meet before an administrative judge tomorrow to set a date for the retrial of Officer Porter.)

The mistrial must be seen as a stinging rebuke to State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby, who rushed to charge Porter and six other officers before the police investigation into the matter had even completed. Many legal experts, including myself, have been of the opinion that not only were the prospects for a conviction slight, but that the charges should never have been brought in the first place…

The trial of Officer Porter itself was notable for a lack of State’s evidence, other than speculation by their medical examiner, and a wealth of defense testimony that not only generated enormous reasonable doubt but also suggested that if anything Porter had gone above and beyond his duty in dealing with Gray.

I guess the jury was unable to “compromise.”

These are largely politically-motivated show trials, designed to placate an angry crowd whipped up by the press and the local leaders. The other police officers’ trials are slated to go ahead as planned.

[NOTE: Legal Insurrection has had excellent coverage of the trial, written by attorney Andrew Branca.]

Why did Paris and San Bernardino affect people so deeply?

The New Neo Posted on by

Why indeed? After all, 9/11 was far, far worse. There were many more victims. The attacks themselves during 9/11 were far more high-tech and fiendishly clever, as well.

And perhaps that’s one clue. 9/11 was so spectacular, so creative in a near-diabolical way, that it seemed almost otherworldly or like science fiction.

Paris and San Bernardino were relatively pedestrian, as evil inspiration goes. They involved the sort of places we go to every day: random cafes and restaurants, a stadium, a concert hall, a business meeting and holiday party. Places to relax and enjoy, the sort of places nearly all urban people go to on a regular basis, or at least on occasion. It took very little imagination to put ourselves in the place of the unlucky (and mostly young) people who lost their lives there.

John Kerry was his usual flatfooted, offensive self when he seemed to offer a distinction between two Paris attacks: the Charlie Hebdo murders and the recent Friday the 13th massacres:

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of — not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, ‘OK, they’re really angry because of this and that,'” Kerry said during remarks at the U.S. Embassy in Paris.

“This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people. It was to attack everything that we do stand for. That’s not an exaggeration,” Kerry added.

“Legitimacy” sounds like an apology—a rationale, if you will—for attacks that are unforgivable. But, without excusing Kerry in the least, I have to say that he has put his finger, albeit clumsily, on an important distinction that explains why people seem more deeply upset by the recent attacks. It’s not just the ordinariness of the venues— it’s their randomness.

The Charlie Hebdo murders were many things, but “random” was not one of them. The victims were targeted for their behavior, and although it was behavior that Western societies defend as free speech, it still was behavior that was very different than attendance at any one of thousands of restaurants in Paris or going to a workplace. It was something most people could avoid without putting much of a crimp in their lifestyles. Not so with the Friday the 13th victims, or those in San Bernardino.

There are other reasons those later attacks struck more deeply at the heart and soul of Europe and America and the West. Prior to 9/11, if you were to quiz 100 people on the street, perhaps only one or two would have heard of Al Qaeda or would know anything about it. But by the time of the Friday the 13th attacks and of San Bernardino, the vast majority of people in the West had come to know much more about ISIS and exactly how bloodthirsty and savage its members could be. ISIS coming to Europe and America was something greatly feared because of this knowledge.

In addition, not long before these attacks occurred, the West had been rocked by a massive influx of so-called “refugees” from Syria—home of ISIS—and the concomitant fears about who they were and why they were on the move from the relative safety of their refugee camps in Turkey and other Muslim countries. Europeans and Americans feel helpless in the face of their leaders’ failure to protect them, or to even acknowledge there might be something wrong with accepting all these refugees at this point.

In short, they—and we—feel vulnerable, unacknowledged, not listened to, betrayed, and literally disarmed in the face of a hidden enemy that has been revealed to have been as ruthless and bloodthirsty as the villains in a terrible nightmare. Only this nightmare is real.

The Fed raises the interest rate

The New Neo Posted on by

The Fed has announced a raise in the interest rate for the first time since 2006.

The new target will go from 0 percent to 0.25 percent to 0.25 percent to 0.5 percent. Most members expect the new rate to coalesce around .375 percent before the next hike, according to a chart showing individual member expectations.

The decision, given the official stamp of approval from the Federal Open Market Committee, marks the first increase since the panel pushed the key rate to 5.25 percent on June 29, 2006…

…[T]he FOMC took the rate to zero exactly seven years ago, on Dec. 16, 2008.

And well do I remember it. That 5.25 percent seems like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Now an average of .375 percent is big news.

“The premise behind today’s rate hike to me feels a little stagflationary. They didn’t raise rates today because real growth got a lot strong. In fact, if anything it got weaker, but they raised them anyway,” said Jim Paulsen, chief market strategist at Wells Capital Management, following the decision. “If we go through 2016 where real growth doesn’t pick up but wage and price pressures do because we’re in full employment, that’s stagflationary.”

Despite the history-making move, the road back to normalcy will be a long one. FOMC officials made it excessively clear in post-meeting documents that the pace of increases will be gradual and dependent on the quality of economic data.

It’s already been a long one.

Post-debate ennui

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched most (not all) of the debate last night. Regular readers may recall that I detest political debates in general, but this one bothered me especially much. Mulling over why that might be, I’ve come to the conclusion that—at least to me—just about everyone looked small, petty, and nitpicky when they weren’t being sanctimonious and cliched.

Actually, I didn’t think Ben Carson looked that way. But I don’t see him as having the right experience, and I don’t think he could win the nomination at this point anyway, so I can’t get excited about him. I was particularly studying the people I consider the front runners: Trump, Cruz, and Rubio. Trump was Trump (which to me is not a good thing, for reasons I’ve already explained ad nauseam), and he was particularly awful when doing his childish schoolyard taunt bit (and no, I don’t mind fighting words, but he sounds like a boastful, teasy fourth-grader). Cruz: there is always something off about him for me, and that makes me doubt he could win the general, because of that seemingly important “likability” factor. With Rubio there are just too many things for him to explain away that the base will never forgive him for.

At the end of the debate I had the gloomy sensation that Hillary is going to win no matter what. Now, that feeling could be a function of a lot of things other than prescient judgment. One is that this time of year it gets dark almost as soon as I get out of bed to start my day. Yeah, that’s hyperbole, but it does get dark way way too early for my tastes. So maybe it’s that.

In addition, yesterday afternoon I had spoken to a liberal but relatively apolitical friend of mine, and she mentioned casually that she would be busy that night, having volunteered to do phoning for the Hillary Clinton campaign. This shocked me, although it shouldn’t have. The reason it did, though, was that this particular friend has (unlike some) always been respectful of my point of view, sometimes asks me questions about it, listens with interest and without condemnation, and sometimes even agrees with me. I know she’s been disturbed by many things that have happened under Obama, particularly in the field of foreign policy. And yet here she is, phone-banking for Hillary.

I was so taken aback that I couldn’t come up with a thing to say. But it reminded me of something I didn’t think I needed reminding about: that a mind is a difficult thing to change, and that a person has to be motivated and engaged in order to do the work to change his/her mind, and that few people—even seemingly intelligent and reasonable people—are going to do it, no matter how dire things are and no matter how bad the candidate their party supports.

We were lucky in America for a great many years. Candidates didn’t think snark would go over well with the American people, and they were expected to be well-prepared. Voters didn’t get off on petulance and anger (although a little judicious dose of it was all right), nor did they expect candidates to be perfectly aligned with their point of view on all issues. I’ve never liked politicians all that much, with just a couple of exceptions, but now I like them even less. And the irony is that we need a competent, honest, bold and wise person as president even more than in the past, because the Obama administration and the left have trashed so much that used to be taken for granted by both parties that I sometimes despair that even the finest president could ever undo the damage, because it is global, societal, cultural, personal. And of course I’m aware that a president can’t just wave a hand and change things—it takes political office-holders, too, as well as bureaucrats, and in particular a people willing to support that change. Just as Obama could not possibly have done what he’s done alone, neither can it be undone alone.

Yeah, I know. All of this is not what I wanted to write, either. Maybe this down feeling is just a passing phase.

And speaking of passing phases, the sun has already started to set later in the day. That’s a turning point—literally.

Who is William F. Buckley’s nephew?

The New Neo Posted on by

Bill O’Reilly.

I find that rather odd, but apparently it’s true.

[NOTE: This was meant to inject a bit of levity into the proceedings. No, not THAT Bill O’Reilly.

But Buckley’s family was an interesting one, loaded with people of great achievement. He was the sixth of ten children, so you might imagine there were a lot of nieces and nephews. Here’s a discussion.]

Liveblogging the debate

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, I’ll start out by watching, anyway.

My first question: why is Kasich there? Why oh why? (That’s a rhetorical question; I know the answer).

Christie keeps the focus on Obama and Clinton. Cruz goes right to “radical Islamist terrorism.” Carson goes with “radical Islamist jihadism,” after a moment of silence for the San Bernardino victims.

Bush: “Trump’s a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Trump responds by basically saying Jeb’s a loser. At the moment, Trump is doing nearly the impossible, IMHO: making Jeb look kind of good.

Rubio is doing very well in deflecting a question about Trump’s proposal about banning Muslim immigration, and going on the attack against Obama. And Cruz is Cruz: a carefully composed and completely coherent answer that hits all the salient points.

No comments yet. Perhaps I’m the only person watching 🙂 .

Rubio and Cruz get into an argument about some of the finer points of a Senate battle about collecting NSA data, and Christie uses that as an opportunity to criticize the Senate, which is probably a popular stance. Who likes the Senate? Nobody.

Fiorina gives an eloquent and impassioned answer on why we’re not catching the terrorists, reminding me of why I liked her in the first place.

Trump says he’d shut off some part of the internet to terrorists, or something like that. I can’t say I understand exactly what he’s referring to, maybe because he’s not being exact.

More fighting between Cruz and Rubio about votes they’ve had in the Senate on funding the military. I think this sort of infighting is exactly what CNN would like to see, and doesn’t really help either Cruz or Rubio, because it seems (as Christie indicated earlier) like too much inside baseball. The Democrats would love nothing better than to see Cruz and Rubion destroy each other.

Boy, did Jeb Bush just press a button for Trump, who had a mini temper tantrum and sounded like a seventh-grader. (This was around 10:18 PM).

Cruz: I’ll build a wall, and I’ll have Donald Trump pay for it. Trump seems to find that funny, and he and Cruz have a little bro moment. The bad blood tonight seems to be between Rubio and Cruz.

Now (at around 10:55) we have a few minutes of everyone singing Republican kumbaya. And Trump pledges (seemingly sincerely, but that can change on a dime) to not run as an independent.

Now that the debate is over, I notice that I seem to have missed something Trump said, which is that he would kill the families of terrorists—or, rather, “take them out.” When asked by the moderator, he didn’t deny the charge that he would kill them, or explain exactly what he meant if he didn’t mean that. Why didn’t everyone pounce on this? Only Rand Paul did. I’d have to look at a transcript when it’s available to understand what Trump actually said, but it seems like this may have been one of the most controversial and inflammatory things he’s ever said. And it just slid right by.