Tonight we have…

The New Neo Posted on by

…the first Republican debate. Actually, two debates, one at 5 PM for the second string, and one at 9 PM for the first.

You can discuss it all here.

UPDATE 6:15: Well, I’ve been watching it, sort of. As some of you long-time readers know, listening to things (speeches, debates, interviews, lectures) is not my forte; I don’t do well with an auditory format and never have. In addition, live debates make me nervous, and the speed with which these candidates are almost forced to talk makes their messages sound both forced and canned, and there’s already a tendency to sound forced and canned anyway.

Nevertheless, I’ll say that Fiorina did fine but seemed more grim than usual, Perry was intermittently okay, and Gilmore (with whom I wasn’t familiar) sounded competent. Lindsay Graham sounded grumpy and tired. Jindal always talks way too fast and in addition swallows many of his words; not sure if he’s tried to overcome this and failed, or if he really hasn’t tried, but it’s a big problem.

The empty auditorium didn’t do them a favor, either. What’s Fox thinking? Are they out to get these candidates (some think so)?

The commentators afterwards on Fox (Wallace and Will) were impressed with Fiorina.

And the commenters at Ace’s really liked Martha MacCallum’s hair.

I wonder how many people watched the undercard debates, though, and will watch tonight at 9. My guess is that it’s mostly political junkies like us.

The Iran apologists have been around for a long time

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Here’s a tremendously informative article in Commentary on the “give Iran a chance” wing of the left, and how long they’ve been trying to influence our foreign policy—essentially, ever since the 1979 Iranian revolution that ushered in the theocracy there. Please read the whole thing.

I’d like to focus on one particular person, however: Richard Falk. In a way it’s an odd choice of mine, because he is not really on the same page as the Obama administration on Iran these days. Falk has been an Iran apologist off and on for decades, as well as a consistent pro-Palestinian (and a 9/11-truther, by the way), but he disagrees with the Obama administration’s approach because Falk would like to see the entire Middle East de-nuclearized (see this) and would like the administration to focus on achieving that end—which of course at this point would mean forcing (or “convincing”) Israel to give up its nuclear weaponry.

What interests me most, however, is how successful and influential Falk has been in his long, long career. One of the earliest players of that Iran apology game, he was a Princeton professor who wrote a well-known op-ed in the New York Times in 1979 called “Trusting Khomeini.” In it, Falk offered all sorts of excuses for Khomeini’s actions in the early stages of his taking power, and Falk saw much potential for “nonauthoritarian humane governance” in Iran. Again, please read the whole thing; it’s really quite something.

If I or any other blogger had made that large an error, we’d be hanging our heads in shame for a long time afterward. But Falk has never shown repentance, and he still has respect in the international community—which probably does not care if he’s right or wrong, as long as he’s on the right—that is the left—side of things. And remember that the left supported Khomeini back then, and some still support his successors.

Falk is a communist, or at least was one quite openly back in the 1950s, and certainly is a man of the far far left today. His entire history reads like a primer of leftist causes and attitudes, and his most recent appointment was to the UN, although Obama did not make the appointment:

On March 26, 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to a six-year term as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.”…

The appointment of Falk was reached through a consensus decision by the 47 members of the UN’s Human Rights Council. Despite attempts from Jewish groups to persuade the EU and Canada to publicly oppose the appointment the EU remained silent, while Canada chose not to oppose the consensus, instead issuing a statement distancing itself from the choice.

According to a UN press release, then Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Itzhak Levanon strongly criticized the appointment stating that Falk had written in an article that it was not “an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with the criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity”, arguing that “someone who had publicly and repeatedly stated such views could not possibly be considered independent, impartial or objective”. According to the The Jewish Daily Forward Falk actually said: “Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

The most intriguing thing about Falk is not his political position, which is clear and consistent, but the fact that he has taught with great honor at Princeton since the early 1960s and is now affiliated with the University of California at Santa Barbara, and that the Times was presenting him as a seemingly objective expert on Iran in 1979. When you think about it, it’s no surprise that generations of students were influenced by the kind of thinking espoused by Falk.

Looking backward with the perspective of time, here’s what Falk had to say in 2012 about that 1979 article of his in the Times on Iran:

I am inclined to think that my response to what took place in Iran was authentic at its various phases, reflecting my best understanding of the unfolding circumstances, adjusting my evaluations phase by phase. I prefer such a view, even in retrospect, to indifference to the Shah’s oppressive regime, while realizing that drastic change, especially in a country endowed with abundant oil reserves, is almost certain to be a rocky road. Should I have been immediately more suspicious of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Islamic dimensions of the revolution? Probably, but it was not clear at the time”¦

But it was plenty clear at the time, to those who wanted to see. Just as Iran is clear today.

But Barack Obama is now in charge, along with John Kerry. And as the author of the Commentary piece, Sohrab Ahmari (who came to this country from Iran at the age of 13), writes, “We have come full circle. The apologists are now running the show, even if the Obama administration feels compelled to lie about the fact.”

[NOTE: Ahmari had a bit of a run-in with the Iranian regime himself, before coming to the US in 1998:

As a child, he was interrogated by security officials about his parents and faced disciplinary action for accidentally bringing a videocassette of Star Wars into school at a time when Western films were officially banned in the country.]

Hinderaker on Obama’s Iran deal speech

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John Hinderaker has what I think is just about the best analysis and reaction to Obama’s speech yesterday to sell his Iran deal. It’s well worth reading the entire thing (and sending it out to others), but the summary line at the end tells the tale:

Barack Obama is a terrible president, but he is a worse man.

True enough, but Obama as a man would only be a problem for those around him. As a president, he has been able to do far far more damage.

And this is a good comment to the article, as well.

There have been many reactions from the right to Obama’s speech. including my rather short one here. At this point my reaction to the situation is a fairly intense combination of weariness, sorrow, and anger. If some of those things seem contradictory, so be it.

[NOTE: Another good article about the speech is this one by Rich Lowry.]

A poet of the right

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[NOTE: An exchange I had with commenter “Cornflour” on the Robert Conquest thread (here and here) reminded me of a previous post from about two years ago, one that I think it appropriate and interesting to revisit with some added words for today.

It features a poem by a friend of Robert Conquest’s, the British poet Philip Larkin.]

British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a complicated man, like many poets. But unlike most of them these days, he was politically of the right, at least in some respects.

Larkin wrote in forms, which is inherently conservative. But his language, although direct and very accessible, was most assuredly not conservative (liberal use of the f-word, for example). There’s a tension between the traditionalism of his forms and the modernism of what he was saying, and in that conflict lay his uniqueness and a good deal of his appeal. He wrote about things people tend to understand and care about: love, death, time, country, religion, sex. And he wrote in a way that doesn’t need special training to understand, although he’s a good (and many think great) poet.

Here’s a poem of Larkin’s that I recently discovered. Seems that England went through a lot of things before we did, or simultaneously (the poem was written in 1969 and published in 1974, around the time of the wind-down in Vietnam):

HOMAGE TO A GOVERNMENT

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly.
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

In our case, we know who wanted it to happen: Obama and the left.

On reading that, four years after Obama’s complete withdrawal from Iraq and squandering of everything we accomplished there, and one day after his execrable Iran speech, I would add that I’m not at all sure that we’ll be able to leave our children money (Larkin wasn’t sure, either; he wrote of a hope). Nor do I think Obama’s motivation was to save money. The amount of money that would have been used by keeping the requested residual troops in Iraq was not that much in the governmental scheme of things.

And I don’t see money as the motive for the Iran deal, either. It is something much more ideological and destructive.

Obama’s Iran speech

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Obama pisses on America’s leg and tells us it’s raining.

You can read about it here and here.

Highlighted quote:

“Just because Iranian hard-liners chant ”˜death to America’ does not mean that that’s what all Iranians believe,” Obama said to strong applause from the audience.

“In fact, it’s those hard-liners who are most comfortable with the status quo,” Obama said Wednesday afternoon. “It’s those hard-liners chanting “death to America” who have been most opposed to the deal.”

“They’re making common cause with the Republican caucus,” Obama said to laughter and wild applause.

Yessiree, the “Death to America” chanters and the Republican caucus, joined at the hip.

By the way, this quote also contains a classic Obama strawman, “that that’s what all Iranians believe.” No one on earth believes it’s what all Iranians believe. But that sort of sophistry is Obama’s favorite rhetorical device.

[ADDENDUM: And here’s a report on Obama’s attempt to scare Jewish leaders into supporting his deal.]

The debris found on Reunion Island is from Flight 370

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Confirmed:

It is with a very heavy heart that I must tell you, an international team of experts have conclusively confirmed that the aircraft debris found on Reunion is indeed from MH370,” Prime Minister Najib Razak said at a brief press conference. “We now have physical evidence that … Flight MH370 tragically ended in the Southern Indian Ocean.”

You can be sure that more people will be scouring the beaches of islands between Africa and the suspected crash site, and beyond.

Kerry doesn’t want us to screw the Ayatollah

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And “screw” is our illustrious Secretary of State’s word, not mine.

Here is the full Kerry quote, from a Jeffrey Goldberg interview in the Atlantic. It is worth pondering and understanding that Kerry is the man in charge of the negotiations, and that the following is either what he actually believes or what he wants us to believe (I think the latter, because I don’t think Kerry is that stupid or that naive, but perhaps I’m wrong):

The ayatollah approached this entire exercise extremely charily. He gave a kind of dismissive OK to [President Hassan] Rouhani and company to go do this, in the sense that he didn’t want to be blamed if this didn’t work. It was all Rouhani’s risk. He was playing the IRGC [Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps], and this and that. And so it was clear to me from my many conversations with Zarif and from the entire dynamic how fragile that journey was with him. The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them. This will be the ultimate screwing. We cut a deal, we stand up, it’s announced, five other countries believe in it””six other countries, because Iran signs off, and we’re the seventh””but you know, China, Russia, France, Germany, Britain, all sign off. Now the United States Congress will prove the ayatollah’s suspicion, and there’s no way he’s ever coming back. He will not come back to negotiate. Out of dignity, out of a suspicion that you can’t trust America. America is not going to negotiate in good faith. It didn’t negotiate in good faith now, would be his point.

Actually, what Obama, Kerry, and company did to the interests of the US, Congress, the people of the US, Israel, and quite a few of the US’s ostensible allies in the Arab world will be the “ultimate screwing” if the deal goes though. And what Kerry is saying here, among other things, is that neither Congress nor the American people have a right to go against anything that the executive branch does unilaterally in this regard, even if that executive action screws us and our allies (or the pooch, for that matter). All to placate and reassure a homicidal, fanatical, tyrannical dictator of a state that is a sworn enemy and has been for over thirty years?

One of the most interesting things about that Kerry quote is this sentence: “The ayatollah constantly believed that we are untrustworthy, that you can’t negotiate with us, that we will screw them.” It is unusually rich in irony, isn’t it? The idea that we have to prove ourselves trustworthy to him rather than the reverse would be ludicrous if it weren’t so dangerous. Kerry is correct, however, that the behavior of Kerry and company has taught Khamenei something about the US. But the thing it has taught has not been our trustworthiness; it has been our fecklessness, cravenness, stupidity, and impotence.

I have focused on this one remark of Kerry’s because it is so dramatic, and because it is featured in the headline of the article. But there are many other jaw-droppers in the interview. For example:

Goldberg: But does it bother you that money will be going to [Syrian President Bashar] Assad and Hezbollah?

Kerry: Yes, but it’s not dispositive. It’s not money that’s going to make a difference ultimately in what is happening. We have huge mechanisms by which we can push back and make the counter-difference. And the biggest, most important thing this is doing is that it is galvanizing a stronger, more defined security relationship between us and the Gulf states, and it will with Israel. We have countless ways to push back against those activities. And this will put to test whether or not Rouhani and Zarif are serious when they say they want a different relationship with the region.

It’s the equivalent of “Hey, let’s give Hitler (or Stalin, or choose your dictator) a ton of money and see what he does with it, and hope we can stop him in time if he uses it for ill. Isn’t that a great idea?”

Or how about this from Kerry:

Kerry: Let me put this in very precise terms. Look, I’ve gone through this backwards and forwards a hundred times and I’m telling you, this deal is as pro-Israel, as pro-Israel’s security, as it gets. And I believe that just saying no to this is, in fact, reckless.

Goldberg: So why do you think you can’t convince the majority of Israelis, or the majority of the organized Jewish community, of this?

Kerry: Because there’s a huge level of fear and mistrust and, frankly, there’s an inherent sense that, given Iran’s gains and avoidance in the past, that somehow they’re going to avoid something again. It’s a visceral feeling, it’s very emotional and visceral and I’m very in tune with that and very sensitive to that.

That’s not a parody; that’s a quote.

[ADDENDUM: Commenter “F” in the thread below describes Kerry’s narcissism, so I thought I would add that that was one of the first topics I wrote about when I first began this blog (see this, this, and this).]

RIP Robert Conquest

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Noted historian and poet Robert Conquest has died at the age of 98. In honor of his lengthy and fully-lived life, I’ll repost a piece I wrote about him three years ago, updated to change the tense from present to past.

First, however, I’ll add his brilliant “three laws of politics“:

—Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
—Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
—The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

An interview with Robert Conquest* on the eve of the sort-of millennium makes for some fascinating reading in retrospect.

I call it the “sort-of” millennium because it took place in late December of 1999, whereas the real millennium would have begun with the year 2001. But no matter; Conquest, who wrote the book (actually, several books) on the Soviet and especially Stalinist crimes of the 20th century, had quite a bit to say in the interview:

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’ve seen the ravages committed by the Nazis and Communists in the huge scale. I mean, millions have killed but in this book I’m not so much concerned to present the actual ravages as to how they came about, how people who went in to perform these horrible operations, what motivated them. Where did they pick up these awful ideas?

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It is ideas, ideas you are exactly what you blame for these ravages.

ROBERT CONQUEST: With a capital “I” these things not ordinary idea like you and I would have but an overwhelming idea that we’ve got everything right, we know the answers for everything, and we can do anything to enforce it…

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it’s very attractive in some ways. People do want answers; this is natural, but the ordinary man in the street didn’t think he got all full answers. He knew he didn’t – it was the intellectual, creating the single, perfect answer and time and time again this has happened.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You use a term that is — Orwell’s term actually — that I like “the lure of the profound” — what do you mean by that?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, that I use because in the book I’m trying to avoid anything plotted and incomprehensible or referring to things that nobody is going to be interested in. I tried to keep it like in Orwell’s terms, clear, and making the points and illustrating with many examples — not just examples of horror or stupidity but striking ones.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: But the lure of the profound is also one of the things that at least from what I’ve observed, drives intellectuals into these totalitarian ideas, right?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Yes.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: They want the deepest, most scientific, most modern and most profound idea to be theirs?

ROBERT CONQUEST: I think they think it’s modern, that counts as profound…

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So, do you think that there are still in our intellectual life right now, ideas that are like – or remnants of ideas that are still quite dangerous?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, I think there are ideas that given much more scope and importance than they are willow wisps on a dangerous marsh. I would include the idea of the European Community, for example. I mean, Europe is not really, cannot be a nation state. So it’s a big thing, horrendous bureaucracy. And it can’t hang together. But that’s nothing like the totalitarian ideas, it’s still an idea with a rather small, capital letter, which is distorting European history and the West —

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: What else do you see right now that worries you for the next century?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, we’re nearly there. Russia, of course, is in a terrible state. And we don’t know what’s happening today in Chechnya for one thing, in Moscow. And it doesn’t look very nice, and that could cause real trouble. But I still think that –

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Expand on that, what do you mean?

ROBERT CONQUEST: Well, it could spill over into the caucuses, into Azerbaijan or somewhere. But I still think that real trouble is getting the real unity of the democratic countries which will be able to face the troubles together, based, of course, on American alliance, and be able to cope with the really rogue states. There are states worse than Russia that don’t have much arms, but enough to cause trouble.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You’re talking about —

ROBERT CONQUEST: North Korea. Iraq. There are rogue states which have to be somehow accommodated or prevented from doing — it’s a dangerous situation.

Conquest was a poet as well as historian, which made him a rara avis in my eyes. As recently as 2010 he was still actively writing poems, such as this one entitled “Getting On”:

Into one’s ninetieth year.
Memory? Yes, but the sheer
Seethe as the half-woken brain’s
Great gray search-engine gains
Traction on all one’s dreamt, seen, felt, read,
Loathed, loved”¦
. . And on one’s dead.
-Which makes one’s World, one’s Age, appear
Faint wrinkles on the biosphere
Itself the merest speck in some
Corner of the continuum.

More on Conquest and the intellectuals (and of course he himself was one, but a gadfly to the left rather than a member of it):

[Conquest] accused [left-wing intellectuals] of denying the full scale of the [Stalin-induced] famine, attacking their views as “an intellectual and moral disgrace on a massive scale.” He later wrote that the western world had been faced with two different stories about the famine in the 1930s, and accused many intellectuals of believing the false one: “Why did an intellectual stratum overwhelmingly choose to believe the false one? None of this can be accounted for in intellectual terms. To accept information about a matter on which totally contradictory evidence exists, and in which investigation of major disputes on the matter is prevented, is not a rational act.”

My favorite anecdote about Conquest is the following (which probably is not about Conquest at all but rather his longtime friend, the writer Kingsley Amis):

After the opening up of the Soviet archives in 1991, detailed information was released that Conquest argued supported his conclusions. When Conquest’s publisher asked him to expand and revise [his book] The Great Terror, Conquest is famously said to have suggested the new version of the book be titled I Told You So, You Fucking Fools. In fact, the mock title was jokingly proposed by Conquest’s old friend, Kingsley Amis.

And it comes as no surprise that, like so many illustrious minds on the right who understood the mentality of the left, Conquest was a political changer:

In 1937, after studying at the University of Grenoble, Conquest went up to Oxford [and got a doctorate in Soviet history], joining both the Carlton Club and, as an ‘open’ member, the Communist Party of Great Britain…

In 1944, Conquest was posted to Bulgaria as a liaison officer to the Bulgarian forces fighting under Soviet command, attached to the Third Ukrainian Front, and then to the Allied Control Commission…At the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Office, returning to the British Legation in Sofia. Witnessing first-hand the brutal Stalinist takeover in Bulgaria, he became completely disillusioned with communist ideas…

Conquest joined the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), a unit created by the Labour government to “collect and summarize reliable information about Soviet and communist misdoings, to disseminate it to friendly journalists, politicians, and trade unionists, and to support, financially and otherwise, anticommunist publications.”

Conquest kept on doing so for the bulk of his very long and productive life.

[* NOTE: Since I first wrote the piece with the interview excerpts, the link seems to have gone dead and I can’t find an alternate source for it online.]

Alexander Hamilton: on Congress’ treaty power

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From Federalist Paper #75 [emphasis mine]:

However proper or safe it may be in governments where the executive magistrate is an hereditary monarch, to commit to him the entire power of making treaties, it would be utterly unsafe and improper to intrust that power to an elective magistrate of four years’ duration. It has been remarked, upon another occasion, and the remark is unquestionably just, that an hereditary monarch, though often the oppressor of his people, has personally too much stake in the government to be in any material danger of being corrupted by foreign powers. But a man raised from the station of a private citizen to the rank of chief magistrate, possessed of a moderate or slender fortune, and looking forward to a period not very remote when he may probably be obliged to return to the station from which he was taken, might sometimes be under temptations to sacrifice his duty to his interest, which it would require superlative virtue to withstand. An avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state to the acquisition of wealth. An ambitious man might make his own aggrandizement, by the aid of a foreign power, the price of his treachery to his constituents. The history of human conduct does not warrant that exalted opinion of human virtue which would make it wise in a nation to commit interests of so delicate and momentous a kind, as those which concern its intercourse with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and circumstanced as would be a President of the United States.

To have intrusted the power of making treaties to the Senate alone, would have been to relinquish the benefits of the constitutional agency of the President in the conduct of foreign negotiations. It is true that the Senate would, in that case, have the option of employing him in this capacity, but they would also have the option of letting it alone, and pique or cabal might induce the latter rather than the former. Besides this, the ministerial servant of the Senate could not be expected to enjoy the confidence and respect of foreign powers in the same degree with the constitutional representatives of the nation, and, of course, would not be able to act with an equal degree of weight or efficacy…It must indeed be clear to a demonstration that the joint possession of the power in question, by the President and Senate, would afford a greater prospect of security, than the separate possession of it by either of them.

The highlighted sentence applies, of course, to Obama and his “legacy.”

But brilliant though he was, and relatively far-sighted as well, Hamilton thought it very likely that people of integrity would continue to fill the office of the presidency:

And whoever has maturely weighed the circumstances which must concur in the appointment of a President, will be satisfied that the office will always bid fair to be filled by men of such characters as to render their concurrence in the formation of treaties peculiarly desirable, as well on the score of wisdom, as on that of integrity.

And that’s mostly been true, to a greater or lesser extent, concerning presidents in terms of foreign policy. But Obama’s “treachery” in the Iran deal isn’t just for the purpose of his own personal “aggrandizement” (something Hamilton did envision as a possibility). It is for some other reason as well, about which many theories have been advanced. I offered my own some years ago, here, and I see no reason to change it now.

[NOTE: It is also to be remembered that at the time Hamilton and the Founders wrote, the plan was that the Senate was to be composed of people elected by the legislators of their respective states rather than elected in a popular vote. See this for the history of the 17th Amendment, which was adopted in 1913 and which made the switch to a directly elected Senate.]

The obligatory post about Cecil the lion

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I’m a little late here, aren’t I? I’m only dealing with this topic because it’s been such an internet cause célé¨bre. That’s an interesting phenomenon in itself, illustrating the way that a meme spreads.

And I’ll get this out of the way at the outset, too: I don’t like big-game trophy hunting. It’s one of the last things on earth I’d ever do, probably even somewhat behind skydiving, and that’s saying a lot. But if a certain country has declared it legal, and people follow the laws, it seems to me that it’s okay, and if you’re really against the practice and really incensed about it then lobby and petition that country to change its laws.

But before you do, read Maetenloch at Ace’s on why killing Cecil helps more lions to survive in Africa rather than hurting them. It’s quite convincing.

The case against Palmer the Hemingwayesque dentist who killed the cuddly Cecil the lion in order to mount his head as a trophy turns on whether the legalities were followed, and by whom, and what Palmer knew when it occurred. That is murky at present, but my guess is that the guides on whom Palmer relied knew what they were doing and knew it was probably illegal, but he didn’t, and that the responsibility is theirs.

What interests me most, however, is the public furor over the incident, when Cecil is one of hundreds of lions hunted recently in Zimbabwe without all that much of a fuss, although a fuss is certainly being raised now:

Cecil the Lion’s killing made him a household name, but he was at least the 23rd lion that scientists from Oxford University have been tracking in Zimbabwe recently only to see its life cut short by illegal hunting.

“Cecil was by no means the first lion to leave Hwange National Park and be shot, or to be killed illegally,” says professor David Macdonald, the director of the 20-year-old Oxford science program that is focused around the sprawling park.

The number of lions being killed across broader Zimbabwe is even more dramatic. Between 1999 and 2009, 800 lions were killed in legal hunts in the country, on top of what was likely an even greater number that were killed illegally.

It’s an interesting article. Zimbabwe, a dangerous place for humans, too, doesn’t seem to be uniquely bad for lions compared to several other African countries. In 2000, when the lion population had fallen in Zimbabwe, the country suspended legal lion-hunting for a few years until the numbers came back up. Trophy-hunting brings in fairly big bucks to the country’s economy as well. But in response to Cecil’s death and the resulting furor, the Zimbabwean authorities have suspended legal lion-hunting for now, and have thrown in a ban on hunting leopards and elephants for good measure.

A fact that might surprise most people is that some conservationists support legal trophy hunting (this also ties into Maetenloch’s post):

Supporters say regulated hunts raise much-needed money for conservation and help manage populations, since game officials typically try to make sure hunters target animals that are no longer able to breed or that might inhibit the reproduction of others around them.

Earlier this year, the Dallas Safari Club auctioned off a permit to shoot a black rhino and used the proceeds for conservation. The club did not have anyone available for comment Wednesday but said in a statement: “Lawful, ethical, vigilant hunters play an important role in public acceptance of sustainable hunting as a vital tool for modern wildlife conservation and management.” Club president Ben Carter previously told National Geographic that regulated trophy hunting is a tool that wildlife managers use to keep animal populations healthy and strong. “By removing counterproductive individuals from a herd, [populations] can actually grow,” Carter said.

The counter-arguments go like this:

Other hunters are taking a closer look at a practice that critics say is prone to corruption, fuels demand for black market wildlife products, and can be too hard to enforce on the ground, leaving lions like Cecil to end up as collateral damage.

I would say that just about anything in Zimbabwe is “prone to corruption,” and the demand for illegal lion hunts will probably not diminish all that much if the legal ones are abolished.

My strong suspicion is that if Palmer had killed some unstoried and unnamed lion we wouldn’t be hearing a whisper about it right now. But he killed Cecil, everybody’s favorite and one of the few lions the public had given a name. What was so special about Cecil? It appears that his fame rested on two factors. The first is that he was very very photogenic, with a classic lion “look,” regal and large. The second and not unrelated fact is that he was unafraid of humans and let them get close enough to him to regularly photograph him in all his leonine splendor.

I don’t mean to libel Cecil, especially now that he’s gone, but doesn’t that trait of being unafraid of humans constitute a potential danger, because even photogenic lions are wild and powerful predators after all, and people shouldn’t feel so comfortable with them that they are relaxed enough to come close to them? That’s not really Cecil’s fault, but isn’t it still the case? (Calling all lion experts.)

For example, in this recent incident in which a lioness killed an American tourist in South Africa (and which attracted some internet attention but not as much as Cecil’s death), the focus of attention seemed mostly to be critical of the woman killed and defensive towards the lion. Her mistake appears to have been the prohibited rolling down of her car window in order to take a photo, and her death underscored the fact that the magnificent beasts are inherently dangerous.

And that’s not just to humans, but to other wildlife. It is part of the natural order of things, of course; “nature red in tooth and claw.” And it’s very good to remember this if you have any intention of being around lions, whatever your species:

“Almost any organism around lions might be a potential prey item, and for people to think that they are an exception is folly,” says Luke Dollar, program director for National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative.

“I would imagine that every other primate that co-exists with big cats is acutely aware of the position they hold relative to the top predators of the world.”

Dollar says danger arises when we allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security in the presence of lions or other carnivores.

And therein lies a clue as to why some people like to hunt lions for trophies. Human weaponry gives mankind a leg up, as it were, on the creatures that otherwise dominate all other animals, and give hunters a chance to assert some dominance of their own. Lions hunt, too, but they hunt for food, and humans hunt lions for other reasons than food.

I wrote that lions hunt for food, and mostly they do (that’s generally true of humans who hunt as well, although not when humans hunt lions these days). But it turns out that lions sometimes resemble humans more than one might think even in this regard, because male lions don’t hunt for food (for example, it is routine for rival male lions to kill the cubs of vanquished or dead previous male leaders).

It is female lions that are the hunters for food; male lions such as Cecil are the protectors of territory:

Males defend their territory, be it open woodland or scrub, through urinating to mark the area, roaring to promote fear and literally chasing off any intruders. Their main competition is spotted hyenas that often go for the same prey as lions. These animals will fight and steal each other’s food. This warfare goes beyond food; it is also the problem of territorial boundaries being crossed. Lions can be extremely aggressive and have been seen hunting hyenas, killing them and not eating their prey. They dominate and promote fear in other animals, such as cheetahs and leopards, so that they do not prey the same time that lions do. Males eat the prey first despite the females usually catching it.

The uproar over Cecil ignores all of this, as uproars often do.

The Iran deal: Schumer’s choice

The New Neo Posted on by

Senator Charles (“Chuck”) Schumer of New York faces a tough choice: back Obama’s Iran deal and anger many of his New York Jewish constituents, or oppose the deal and anger Obama and much of the Democratic Party leadership.

Prediction: Schumer will cave to Obama. Or he will take the weaselly option mentioned here, voting to override Obama’s veto of a Congressional bill to continue sanctions and block the Iran deal’s lifting of them, but being careful to not bring along enough people with him to make an override stick. Schumer, as the probable heir apparent to Reid’s position, seems to have quite a bit of influence over his fellow Democratic senators who are likewise hesitating, and therefore his vote is considered a sort of bellweather or linchpin.

Here’s a good discussion of the “is the Iran deal a treaty or not?” question, from back in March. Most people who condemned Corker-Menendez as a surrender of Congress’s power to approve treaties haven’t dealt with the reality that if Obama doesn’t regard it as a treaty there is little Congress could do to effectively challenge that position.

There is no currently no suit on the issue being discussed on Capitol Hill, and it’s far from clear that Republicans would be standing on firm legal ground with such a challenge. The debate, rumbling for decades, has yet to be definitively resolved in case law.

“It is a very interesting question,” said Nicholas Burns, a former senior U.S. diplomat, arguing that it is essentially up to the administration to decide whether it is negotiating an agreement that formally binds the United States to commitments under international law; i.e., a treaty, or a less stringent arrangement.

“interesting question” indeed. It seems obvious that whether an agreement is a treaty or not should not be left solely to the discretion of a president, because that would make the treaty power of the Senate a joke. A president would have carte blanche to make any sort of arrangement he/she wanted and just call it an agreement and not a treaty, and no one could fight that designation. What’s the point of Senate approval or disapproval if a president can, by this simple expedient, negotiate an unpopular treaty and then avoid the need to have the Senate vote on it merely by not having the Senate vote on it? Surely the Senate’s advise and consent power wasn’t meant to just be a rubber stamp?

And yet I am relatively certain that if Republicans tried to bring such a case, SCOTUS would either say they had no standing, or rule in Obama’s favor 5-4 with Kennedy as the deciding vote.

From that same article:

Biden argued Monday [back in March] that this practice is as old as the United States itself.

“Under presidents of both parties, such major shifts in American foreign policy as diplomatic recognition of the People’s Republic of China, the resolution of the Iran hostage crisis, and the conclusion of the Vietnam War were all conducted without congressional approval,” he said in his statement opposing the GOP letter.

But were these so-called “major shifts” disapproved of by a majority of the Senate at the time they happened? No [and see the “NOTE” below about Nixon and China and the differences between that and Obama’s Iran deal]. Were they disapproved of in a bipartisan manner by every single member of the opposition party, plus a significant number of members of the president’s own party? No again. Any previous president who had thought to do anything like what Obama is doing in opposition to Congress would have feared losing his own party members, and even perhaps risked impeachment and conviction. Obama has tested his party and has no such fears.

So, besides Schumer (who actually may have made up his mind already and only be pretending to waver), how many Democrats are wavering over their vote on the deal? I don’t think there will be enough to override, but I’d be happy to be proven wrong.

Here is the sort of unicorn mentality we are dealing with in some of them:

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., called voting for the Iran nuclear deal “the most important decision we may ever make in our lifetime,” and tantamount to “averting nuclear war.”

“I grew up in the ’60s, and what got me into politics was ”˜give peace a chance, avoid war,’” Farr told reporters. “For the first time in my life, instead of voting on whether we’re gonna invade Iraq or not invade Iraq, or invade this or invade that, or Bosnia, or whatever, for the first time in my life we have a chance to vote on something that will avoid war. And that’s so fundamental, so historical. I can’t see why anybody in their right mind wouldn’t support this.”

I think there’s a lot of blah blah blah among Democrats about how they have reservations about the deal, but that’s just to show they’re not Obama’s puppets and to imply that they are being really really contemplative. But in the end they will not oppose Obama or their leaders. Remember all the wavering on Obamacare before it was passed? In the end, a few people were allowed to vote against it to protect themselves if they came from red or purple areas, but the number of such allowances was limited in order to assure there would be just enough votes to pass Obamacare.

You can bet there will be a great many twisted or even broken arms among Democrats on Capital Hill before this is through.

As for Schumer himself, this Politico piece says he’s still undecided and may vote against Obama, while this from Michael Goodwin in the NY Post says that Schumer’s loyalty as a party man with lots of ambition will overshadow any lingering inclination to be an Israel hawk.

I’m with Goodwin. As I wrote earlier, however, the only way I believe that Schumer would vote against Obama is if he makes sure there are enough votes for Obama to carry the day.

[NOTE: Nixon’s trip to China is not a good analogy with Obama and Iran, although the left is very fond of making it. Among other things, Nixon’s well-known history of anti-Communism defused criticism to a large extent, but Obama has no such hardline history on Iran. Au contraire.

Nixon faced very little criticism from either party in a Democratic-dominated Senate (it was 54/44 D/R and the House was 255 to 180).

This rather obscure piece is the only article I’ve found online so far that deals in any detail with the amount of Congressional or popular opposition Nixon faced. Basically, any serious opposition was limited to William Loeb, who had been the editor of the very conservative Manchester Union Leader, and just a few others. Similarly, the MSM was almost universally approving and optimistic about his overtures, as was most of the public. Taiwan was understandably negative about the US rapprochement with China, but that seemed a minor problem on the US domestic scene.

But the huge differences between Nixon/China and Obama/Iran are hardly limited to the differences in US public opinion, although that’s important. There are large substantive and strategic differences as well. Also important was the fact that Nixon was not negotiating a nuclear arms deal, but rather beginning diplomatic relations and opening trade, a far less controversial process (although at this point we see that it has had major repercussions, some of them negative for the US). But China already was a nuclear power at the time of Nixon’s trip, and had been for several years.]

[NOTE II: You can see in the comments section in threads such as this that many Democrats would see a Schumer vote against Obama as choosing Israel’s interests over that of the US, the old “dual loyalty” accusation. Of course, in this case, we on the right see Israel’s and the US’s interests as the same, and Obama as opposed to both.]

Some more good news…

The New Neo Posted on by

…here:

Three University of Virginia graduates and members of a fraternity profiled in a debunked account of a gang rape in a retracted Rolling Stone magazine story filed a lawsuit against the publication and the article’s author Wednesday, court records show.

The three men, George Elias IV, Stephen Hadford and Ross Fowler, filed suit in U.S. District Court in New York. They are also suing Rolling Stone’s publisher, Wenner Media.

A lawyer for the men said they suffered “vicious and hurtful attacks” because of inaccuracies in the November 2014 article, which was written by journalist Sabrina Rubin Erdely.

Also Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Will Dana, Rolling Stone’s managing editor, will be leaving the magazine next month. Dana said in a statement to The Times that after 19 years at Rolling Stone, “I have decided that it is time to move on.”

When asked whether Dana’s departure was linked to the retracted story, a spokeswoman for the magazine’s publisher, Jann Wenner, said that “many factors go into a decision like this,” according to the report.

In the lawsuit, the three 2013 graduates said the article “created a simple and direct way to match the alleged attackers” from the alleged gang rape to them based on details provided in the story.

Prediction: Dana will land on his feet, and then some. I make no prediction about whether the students will win their lawsuit, but I suspect they have an excellent case.

This is in addition to the lawsuit filed by UVA’s Dean Eramo back in May:

Dean Eramo, head of UVA’s Sexual Misconduct Board, is suing Rolling Stone, Wenner Media, and reporter Sabrina Rubin Erdely for portraying her as the “chief villain” in the now-debunked article. The suit says the article suggests Eramo “did nothing” and tried to suppress “Jackie’s alleged gang rape to protect UVA’s reputation,” when in actuality she quickly arranged a meeting with police, introduced her to sexual assault support groups on campus, and told her to encourage other alleged Phi Kappa Psi rape victims to come forward so the university could take action against the fraternity.

“Rolling Stone and Erdely’s highly defamatory and false statements about Dean Eramo were not the result of an innocent mistake,” says the suit, according to the Washington Post. “They were the result of a wanton journalist who was more concerned with writing an article that fulfilled her preconceived narrative about the victimization of women on American college campuses, and a malicious publisher who was more concerned about selling magazines to boost the economic bottom line for its faltering magazine, than they were about discovering the truth or actual facts.”

Eramo says the Rolling Stone story damaged her reputation and caused her physical and emotional distress, which contributed to surgical complications she suffered while being treated for breast cancer. She is seeking more than $7.5 million in damages.

That suit, unlike the one filed by the three UVA students, includes journalist Sabrina Erdely as one of the defendants. That seems very fitting to me, although she’s probably the one with the most shallow pockets.

In addition, the accused fraternity, Phi Kappa Psi, filed a lawsuit against Rolling Stone last April.

The wheels of justice appear to be grinding, and not so very slowly. But I doubt that any of this will undo the perception of rampant rape on campuses by frat boys, any more than did the unraveling of the Duke case and its aftermath.