Will Hillary drop out of the race?

The New Neo Posted on by

I noticed that several people had raised the above question in the comment section of this post, and answered it in the affirmative.

Well, I’d never say “never,” but I don’t see it happening except in a very limited set of circumstances, all of which are unlikely to occur, IMHO. Unlikely, but hardly impossible.

The first circumstance is that she would probably drop out (or be forced to) if she is indicted. The Obama DOJ would do that, but only if he orders it, and he would only do that if he finds an alternative Democratic candidate he thinks has a good chance of winning instead. The reason? As much as he detests Hillary, and as cold-bloodedly ruthless as he can be (see “Alice Palmer”), he knows that he needs a Democratic successor as president in order to properly solidify his “legacy.” A Democrat can veto anything the Republicans might try to do, whereas a conservative Republican could actually attempt to lead the legislature to repealing Obamacare and could undo the Iran deal. Whatever the chances of those things actually happening under Republican leadership, Obama wouldn’t want to chance it.

The second way Hillary could drop out is if she drops precipitously in the polls and/or when the primaries start. But most of the Democrats I know still like her, so I don’t see that happening unless some enormously shocking new revelation comes out, and perhaps not even then.

A third possibility is if her health declines dramatically—for real, not as an excuse.

The law professors and the terrorists [UPDATED]

The New Neo Posted on by

John Hinderaker has written a must-read piece on how a group of lawyers in academia is undermining the fight against terrorists. It’s based on this article by William Bradford:

Bradford writes that radical Muslims have targeted “an interconnected ”˜government-media-academic complex’ of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues” for anti-American psychological operations. But his real target is academia”“specifically, the anti-Western law professors he defines as the “critical law of armed conflict academy” (“CLOACA”). As always when the word “critical” is used in the context of legal theory, these academics are bitterly anti-American…

It’s one of the more depressing things I’ve read lately, and that’s saying something. But it also explains certain interesting fixations of Obama’s, such as the need to close Gitmo and release its terrorists out into the world.

[UPDATE 9/4/15: It’s been called to my attention that Bradford’s article contains misrepresentations and mischaracterizations, as well as prescriptions that are way over the top, all of which undermine its credibility and reliability.]

Forget Hillary; what about security?

The New Neo Posted on by

In all the focus on Hillary’s server and what she knew or should have known and how it will affect her politically, a very important question is somehow being given short shrift, and that’s how serious were the security breaches?

There are indications that the answer might be, very:

So America’s intelligence agencies are assuming that every communication of America’s Secretary of State for months or more was read by our adversaries. Isn’t that likely to amount to one of the worst intelligence breaches in American history? And here’s the kicker. Even if we got lucky and the Russians and Chinese didn’t actually intercept some or all of Hillary’s emails, our intelligence agencies now have to behave as if they did. Doesn’t that mean that we are now making massive changes to the sources and methods of our intelligence? Are we now withdrawing valuable agents? Are we trying to replace methods that cannot be easily replicated? Are we now forced to rebuild a good deal of our intelligence capabilities from the ground up? Are we not suffering tremendous intelligence damage right now, regardless of what foreign intelligence services did or did not manage to snatch from Hillary’s server””simply because we are forced to assume that they got it all?

Hey, I’ve got an idea—let’s make this woman president!

Michael Totten on why Palmyra matters

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s why:

They finally did it. The bastards destroyed Palmyra’s Temple of Bel.

We all knew it was coming in May when ISIS conquered the ancient Roman-era city an hour’s drive east of the Syrian city of Homs…

In March of 2001, the Taliban destroyed the ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan. They used dynamite. They used anti-aircraft guns. It took them weeks of dedicated effort, but they finally got the job done.

They destroyed those statues for one reason only: they were not Islamic.

One of my best friends was so aghast he told me that the United States should invade Afghanistan. I said he was nuts. We’re not going to invade a country on the other side of the planet because some primitive yahoos blew up some statues. And I was right. We did not invade of Afghanistan because some primitive yahoos blew up some statutes.

But I’ll never forget what he said next.

People who commit cultural genocide will mass-murder humans. War is inevitable.

Six months later, the United States invaded Afghanistan after the most devastating attack on American soil in history.

I was right. But so was he.

The Taliban’s cultural genocide was just a prelude to what would come later.

Of course, with ISIS, the cultural destruction is not a prelude; we already know their propensity for genocide and mass murder of a magnitude that makes the Taliban look like Quakers. It’s just that we can’t figure out what to do about it, or maybe we’re too weary to try, or perhaps some potentially suicidal combination of the two.

[NOTE: Here’s an article on the life and death of Khaled al Asaad, the 81-year-old archaeologist of Palmyra who was beheaded by ISIS a few weeks ago. RIP.]

Oh, and by the way…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Hillary sent classified information, too. Except it wasn’t marked “classified” at the time:

The extent of the redactions in e-mails sent by Clinton and others, including ambassadors and career Foreign Service officers, points to a broader pattern that has alarmed intelligence officials in which sensitive information has been circulated on non-secure systems. Another worry is that Clinton aides further spread sensitive information by forwarding government e-mails to Clinton’s private account.

But it also highlights concerns raised by Clinton and her supporters that identifying classified material can be a confusing process, and well-meaning public officials reviewing the same material could come to different conclusions as to its classification level.

Lately, Clinton keeps repeating that she didn’t send material marked classified. That’s certainly a lawyerly claim—and I don’t mean that as a compliment. She should not have been even using a private email and a private server (especially one stored in some closet) for any of her official correspondence, and she certainly shouldn’t have been sending questionable material through that system. For example, information on the location of North Korean nukes?:

One of the most serious potential breaches of national security identified so far by the intelligence community inside Hillary Rodham Clinton’s private emails involves the relaying of classified information concerning the movement of North Korean nuclear assets, which was obtained from spy satellites.

Multiple intelligence sources who spoke to The Washington Times, solely on the condition of anonymity, said concerns about the movement of the North Korean information through Mrs. Clinton’s unsecured server are twofold.

First, spy satellite information is frequently classified at the top-secret level and handled within a special compartment called Talent-Keyhole. This means it is one of the most sensitive forms of intelligence gathered by the U.S.

Second, the North Koreans have assembled a massive cyberhacking army under an elite military spy program known as Bureau 121, which is increasingly aggressive in targeting systems for hacking, especially vulnerable private systems.

I am not the Secretary of State. But even I know that’s not the sort of thing you send through your private email. It’s not the sort of thing that has to be marked “classified” in a big font, with a skull and crossbones, for you to know it’s extraordinarily sensitive information. It’s the sort of thing, in the old spy movies, that the recipient would be told to eat or burn after receiving.

Our next president? Certainly hope not.

Bush is a “very low-energy kind of guy”

The New Neo Posted on by

No way you can disagree with this, from Donald Trump:

[Jeb’s] doing very poorly in the polls, he’s a very low-energy kind of guy…

Bush comes across as the most boring teacher you ever had, a fairly decent sort but a big snooze. As he talks, you can almost feel the juices ooze right out of you.

Trump, of course, has a ton of energy. Whether you think he’s worth your vote or not (and for me it’s “not”; I much prefer several other candidates), he has an energizing, fun, lively quality.

Make no mistake about it: a great deal of politics rests on personality. It may seem irrational, but it really isn’t. We are always judging people in ways that we barely understand. Some of it leads us astray; I still find it mind-boggling that so many people trust Obama and think he’s basically a nice guy, when the opposite seems so apparent to me. But personality, and the energy it expresses, would logically carry over into other endeavors. That isn’t always the case—sometimes the most phlegmatic, calm people get a lot done, and sometimes the most peppy dissipate all that energy in restless, unfocused actions. But personality is still a guide, and people react to it.

One of the many reasons people detest Boehner and McConnell is this very same thing: lack of energy. They must have done something to get to their present positions—something rather Machiavellian, I’d imagine. But it certainly doesn’t come across in anything that would give people the impression that they will fight for them. They don’t just fail to walk the walk, they fail to talk the talk.

The 34th Democrat joins the rest on the Iran deal

The New Neo Posted on by

It was a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would amass at least 34 votes to block an override of Obama’s prospective veto of a bill that would disapprove the Iran deal and its lifting of sanctions by executive action. It was so much of a foregone conclusion that I’ve already analyzed it, here.

But still, the announcement brings with it a heavy weight.

As far as I can tell, the Senate could still vote on the deal as though it were a treaty and roundly fail to give its “advise and consent” to it. Unfortunately, that would have the force of big fat zero. And yet I think it should be done; I am unaware of any drawback to such a gesture.

But let’s not fool ourselves that would be more than a gesture. A president determined to go this far, and a Senate that does not have a 2/3 to either override his veto or convict him after an impeachment, can do pretty much whatever he wants. And even had the Republicans the will, there’s nothing they could do about it other than shut down the government.

That’s reality as I see it. It’s not a picture I like, but I try not to shy away from the truth. The truth, as I see it, is that even the nuclear option would not help here. The only thing it would do is make sure that the Democrats couldn’t get to 40 votes to block a vote on the merits. Then the bill would be vetoed by Obama anyway, and that would be that. Is it worth activating the nuclear option for that? I wrote here that I think so. Even though it’s just another gesture, it would at least show a certain toughness that the Republican leadership in Congress doesn’t seem to be able to muster.

Why are the Democrats so powerful despite their lack of numbers? It’s really quite simple: they can’t pass legislation they want without the numbers, but they can block it, and their blockage is successful only because they have the president on their side. Without the president’s veto, the nuclear option would “work” in the sense that it would get bills past the magical 40 number, and there would be no need to worry about overriding a veto.

Now we will get the usual crowing from the left, and outrage from the right. The full effects of the deal won’t show up for a while, probably years, although Iran will immediately grow stronger.

It will be very interesting to see whether the Senate now votes on the Iran deal as a treaty. I wish they would; I doubt they will. It will also be very interesting to see whether the Democrats in the Senate will get to 40 votes to block a vote on the deal, and how the Republicans will react to that—whether they will invoke the nuclear option to vote on it anyway. I tend to doubt it.

By the way, don’t mistake my usual even tone for a lack of outrage or bitterness.

CNN may be changing its rules for the debate…

The New Neo Posted on by

…in a way that would let Carly Fiorina participate in the first-tier debate.

That’s unofficial and may just be a rumor. But, if it does happen and she replaces Chris Christie, don’t expect him to take it lying down. My best guess is that they’ll let him stay in, and have 11 instead of 10. The more the merrier, right?

If they do let Fiorina participate, it will be edifying to see her up against the more major players. Many people theorized that she shone in the first debate in part because the contrast between her and the people on the stage with her was so great. Interest will certainly be exceptionally high for the second, and all eyes on her if she is allowed in.

[Hat tip: commenter “KL Smith.”]

UPDATE 5:51 PM: This announcement indicates the rule change is official. It seems to still be limited to 10 candidates, though, which would mean that Christie gets the boot.

Trump’s favorable/unfavorable shift

The New Neo Posted on by

Chris Cillizza writes in the WaPo about the unprecedented shift in Donald Trump’s favorable/unfavorable polling in Iowa, from 27/63 back in May to 61/35 now. Did I say “shift”? More like “reversal”:

Numbers just don’t reverse themselves like that in the space of a few months (or ever). Especially when the politician in question is totally known by the electorate. Once you are both totally known and broadly disliked ”” as Trump was in May both in Iowa and everywhere else ”” you are doomed. One hundred times out of one hundred.

That’s why I was SO certain of Trump’s inability to matter at all in the 2016 race when he, somewhat stunningly, decided to enter it 70-odd days ago. In the almost 20 years ”” gulp ”” I have spent following politics closer than close, I’ve never seen anything like the total reversal in how Trump is perceived by Republican voters. It is, quite literally, unprecedented.

Cillizza seems dumbfounded by it. But Ann Althouse has a theory:

I suspect the change is that people have become accustomed to the idea that Trump hasn’t toppled, that the obvious ways of attacking him have failed, so he seems to be a credible candidate. In that sense, the media’s attacks have helped Trump, because he got the opportunity to very conspicuously show how he can stand his ground.

I think she’s correct and that his ability to withstand the onslaught of attacks has caused admiration. But I have an additional theory. I submit that, although Cillizza points out that prior to his candidacy Trump was “totally known and broadly disliked,” he was not known in his role as politician; certainly he wasn’t known that way back in May. Yes, he’d had a few desultory forays into politics before (2011), but who even knew that or paid attention at the time? I certainly didn’t.

When Trump first officially entered the 2016 race, his speech drew fire for his contention that many illegals were criminals (particularly the “rapists” remark), and he was widely criticized in the press and elsewhere because it seemed like such a stupidly incendiary thing to say. They thought it would finish him. But then it turns out that the facts seemed to back him up regarding criminality, and the Kate Steinle murder was a terrible and graphic example to which people could relate.

Trump got to say “See! Told you so!,” and this caused people to wonder whether he was really so off-the-graph after all.

As Trump went on, people became more familiar with him as a candidate. That’s a different thing from being familiar with a person’s business record or his reality-TV performances. As a politician—at least, this time round—he has had an almost uncanny knack for saying things, being ridiculed for them, and then having them come true. He also has demonstrated a remarkable ability to speak off-the-cuff, without notes, in a way that strikes many people as honest, sincere—and above all, likable.

I wrote about Trump’s unexpectedly populist touch here. For a man who was actually born with a silver spoon in his mouth, it’s surprising. But some of the very things the MSM and the “establishment” GOP dislikes him for—his anti-PC bluntness, his bluster, his seemingly stream-of-consciousness speeches—are exactly what give him that common touch for many listeners.

There’s something else going on, too, with his poll numbers. The public has not only gotten used to Trump as candidate, and (as Althouse writes) gotten used to seeing that he can stand his ground, but people have also become accustomed to the ideas he expresses, thoughts that initially may have seemed far out of the mainstream because they hadn’t been commonly voiced by politicians. An end to birthright citizenship for the children of illegals is the sort of issue only talked about previously by Senator Vitter (and relatively obscure bloggers like me), and how many people had ever heard of it before Trump, or knew the arguments pro or con? Trump dragged the idea out into the sunlight to be discussed and dissected, and many people who heard him (and had found it a radical notion at first) decided, once they became familiar with the discussion, that the idea had some merit. Over time, the shock value of Trump’s positions generally has been diluted.

All those things contribute to the Iowans’ change of heart. But is Iowa typical? This article, and the polls it cites, maintains that, overall, Trump’s negatives are still quite high compared to his positives, and he gets a lot of “would never vote for” responses.

One thing is certain: Trump is stumping a lot of people as he continues on the stump.

Mark Moogalian—one of the other train heroes—tells his story

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace translates a fascinating interview Mark Moogalian gave to Le Figaro.

In case you don’t recall who Moogalian is, he’s the Virginia-born professor married to a Frenchwoman and living in France, who was one of the first people to engage the terrorist (an anonymous Frenchman was the other) on the train. Moogalian was sitting towards the front of his train car when he saw the Frenchman in the rear of the adjoining train car grappling with the terrorist, and rushed forward, grabbing the terrorist’s AK47.

Here’s an excerpt, but do yourself a favor and read the whole thing:

Q: You had at the same time the reflex to tell your wife to get out of there?

A: I turned towards Isabelle [his wife] who, herself, was still seated, and I told her “get out of here.” This must be serious. I wanted more than anything to protect her. She saw in my face that I wasn’t joking. And then, I don’t know how, I managed to pull the Kalcahinikov from the man.

Q: Did you exchange words with him?

A: No, not at that moment…I left car 12 getting away from him crying out “I’ve got the gun!” (j’ai la arme). I was satisfied… but not very experienced because I didn’t think that he might have a a pistol in addition. I took four or five steps and I felt a pain that almost knocked me unconscious, a shock that knocked me forward. I crumpled to the floor and I dropped the Kalachnikov.

Q: Were you able to keep on watching what was happening?

A: A little. I was between two rows of seats, another passenger against me. I felt my shirt become drenched with my blood. I tried to look and I saw Isabelle, a few rows away from me. We stared at each other, eyes locked. I told her, “I’m hit. I’m done for.” I saw nothing but her eyes. In the past, since as along as I remember, I had always thought: “When my time to die comes, I want to do it well, without any fear.” Well, here it was. I saw that Isabelle was about to burst into tears.

The Ace link also displays a video made by two jujitsu experts, explaining some of the details of the combat on the train as best they could piece together. The video was made fairly soon after the incident, so they get a number of things wrong (they thought Sadler was also in the armed forces, for example, and they knew little about Moogalian and his story). But the video is still of great interest, especially the second half of it, which contains their analysis of the mentality of the sort of people who race into defending the group at great risk to their own lives, and the mentality of a terrorist thus surprised by a group of defenders.

Camp of the Saints author interview

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “Beverly.”]

Here’s a 1994 interview with Camp of the Saints author Jean Raspail. He’s the Frenchman who wrote an extraordinarily prescient and disturbing work of fiction, published in 1973, about a future takeover of the West through immigration from the Third World.

Raspail emerges from the interview as somewhat of an eccentric, but he can certainly give himself a huge pat on the back for foresight on this particular topic:

Our first question is the obvious one Do you think that the vision portrayed in your book is coming true? The answer Haven’t you seen the preface to the third (1985) French edition of the book? No, indeed we hadn’t.

We should read it. This preface explains that the book is symbolic, a parable. History is speeded up to happen over the course of days rather than a couple of decades or a generation. In real life things don’t come about so quickly, but the principle remains the same. The Third World invasion of the West is unavoidable. If we don’t see it, our children will.

The interview was given about twenty years ago. I wondered when I read this whether Raspail is still alive. He is, and would be about 90 now.

Let me repeat that I haven’t read his book and have no idea how I would review it. One thing I can safely say, however, it that its theme certainly seems relevant these days. The details are different, but the basic quandary that he laid out is the same.

Europe reacts…

The New Neo Posted on by

…to its own immigration (“migrant”) crisis. It seems that some of the countries with more lenient policies are trying to pressure the others into being more like them:

Interior ministers from all 28 EU states will meet in Luxembourg on September 14 to address the current crisis. In the mean time, the debate will continue. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has called on other EU nations to do more to assist those seeking refuge; meanwhile, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius lashed out at eastern states for taking harsher measures against the flow of migrants.

…Both Merkel and French President Francois Hollande are expected to propose a series of new universal regulations, including the construction of new processing centers and the institution of quotas for all EU member states. They have, however, floated the idea of creating a list of “safe countries”; those seeking asylum from those countries would be automatically turned away.

Germany has threatened to reintroduce controls at their own borders if other countries don’t fall in line with plans along the lines of those floated by Merkel and Hollande.

I wonder how many members of the EU might be regretting the day they joined it by now. Relinquishing aspects of your sovereignty might not be such a good idea after all.

What was that novel again? Called The Camp of the Saints, it was a 1973 book by Frenchman Jean Raspail in which:

…Third World mass immigration to France and the West leads to the destruction of Western civilization. Almost forty years after publication the book returned to the bestseller list in 2011.

I have never read it; never even had heard of it until a few months ago, and have no idea whether it’s any good or not. The immigrants in the book are from India rather than the Middle East or Africa, but the plot sounds interesting, to say the least:

The Camp of the Saints is a novel about population migration and its consequences. In Calcutta, India, the Belgian government announces a policy in which Indian babies will be adopted and raised in Belgium. The policy is reversed after the Belgian consulate is inundated with poverty-stricken parents eager to give up their infant children.

An Indian “wise man” then rallies the masses to make a mass exodus to live in Europe. Most of the story centers on the French Riviera, where almost no one remains except for the military and a few civilians, including a retired professor who has been watching the huge fleet of run-down freighters approaching the French coast.

The story alternates between the French reaction to the mass immigration and the attitude of the immigrants. They have no desire to assimilate into French culture but want the goods that are in short supply in their native India. Although the novel focuses on France, the rest of the West shares its fate.

Near the end of the story the mayor of New York City is made to share Gracie Mansion with three families from Harlem, the Queen of the United Kingdom must agree to have her son marry a Pakistani woman, and only one drunken Soviet soldier stands in the way of thousands of Chinese people as they swarm into Siberia.

Well, I think our leaders—such as the mayor of New York—would always be able to erect a personal firewall. But the entire scenario, and the photo at Legal Insurrection, is too close for comfort. The moral question—how far need we go to alleviate the world’s suffering, and how best to protect ourselves while we try to be at least somewhat humanitarian—is a crucial one, and getting more crucial every day.

[NOTE: It also reminds me of an Indian film I saw in the early 70s, made by Satyajit Ray and called “Distant Thunder.” The film didn’t deal with international migration, but it explored the same issues of compassion versus protection. Interestingly enough, it was made in the same year that The Camp of the Saints was first published, 1973. The Wiki description of the film goes like this:

The film is set in a village in the Indian province of Bengal during World War II, and examines the effect of the Great Famine of 1943 on the villages of Bengal through the eyes of a young Brahmin doctor-teacher, Gangacharan, and his wife, Anaga. Ray shows the human scale of a cataclysmic event that killed more than 3 million people. The film unfolds at a leisurely pace that reflects the rhythms of village life, but gradually shows the breakdown of traditional village norms under the pressure of hunger and starvation.

Well, yes—but that’s not what I remember most, which is the last scene or a scene that occurred close to the ending. I’m doing this from a memory that’s over 40 years old, about a film I only saw once, so I could be wrong. But what I recall is that the lead character, an aristocratic and originally arrogant guy, who has watched with his wife in growing horror as things degenerate all around him, decides in the end to take starving villagers into his own home. Some of the reviews mention an amazing and harrowing last scene but none describe it, so I’m not sure if it’s the one I recall or something else. From looking at the reviews now, I can see that the film almost certainly comes down on the side of compassion (which is what I remember as well), but that it’s not presented as being quite that simple. I’d like to view it again, and have had it sitting in my Netflix queue literally for years, but it seems to be unavailable anywhere.]