Not your father’s marijuana, revisited

The New Neo Posted on by

In mid-April I wrote a post entitled “Not your father’s marijuana” about the problems involved in underestimating the strength of legal marijuana edibles. I guess Maureen Dowd doesn’t read neo-neocon, because she ran into that exact difficulty in Colorado when she decided to try a pot candy bar and found she’d bitten off a lot more than she could chew:

I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

An interesting thread about Dowd’s experience here.

The sophomoric administration

The New Neo Posted on by

Bizarre Marie Harf, State Department spokesperson, tackles the Bergdahl prisoner swap and its aftermath:

Some people commenting on the video at YouTube say the clip looks like a Saturday Night Live skit. But that doesn’t quite capture it for me. There’s something much more profoundly disturbing about her, as though she’s a bad actress miscast in a role for which she’s learned only some of the lines. The director has given her poor advice on how to play it, how to dress and wear her hair, and what voice quality would be suitable. To say that she lacks gravitas it to say the obvious. But she lacks even the appearance of gravitas; there’s no attempt at gravitas, except perhaps the glasses.

And this is real. This is one of the people leading our country—an eager and snarky high school student giving a school report, or trying to think on her feet as a member of the debating society.

Harf is quite young—she’s 32—and although that’s hardly the whole problem it’s some small part of it. The fault lies in an administration that would place her in such a position and expose her inadequacies. But those inadequacies are congruent with those of the administration itself, an administration too lacking in judgment to even recognize what’s missing here, or to even recognize that there is anything missing here. Or, if they do, they see it as a feature, not a bug.

I’ve been focusing on Harf’s manner and style, but of course a much larger problem is her message. That, too, is congruent with that of the administration and so many of its other spokespeople. Dude, that was five years ago [minute 1:41]! And who are you going to believe, those lying soldiers who knew him and saw him leave, or us?

How shocking is the Bergdahl prisoner swap?

The New Neo Posted on by

Nothing about the Bergdahl/Taliban affair should have surprised me—or, for that matter, you. Nothing.

Not Obama’s audacity, nor his disregard of prior bipartisan warnings in Congress or from the intelligence community, nor his aides’ attempts to discredit those from Bergdahl’s unit who are calling Bergdahl a deserter or worse, nor Obama’s refusal to offer any apologies whatsoever for his actions in this affair, nor his lies and broken promises, nor the fact that many Democrats are lining up to defend him like the good party hacks that they are.

But an intellectual reaction is one thing. Intellectually, I’m not surprised. But there’s still an emotional reaction—what Peter Wehner referred to as a visceral reaction—which is to be stunned, disgusted, outraged, and full of trepidation about both the long-term effects of this move and what Obama will be doing for a series of encores.

I’ve been wanting to know what the American electorate thinks of it all. Today I read that the results of a Fox News poll showed Americans evenly split on the subject, and that news surprised me, too, although it probably shouldn’t have.

But turning to the poll itself, I see that it was taken June 1-3, which would be the second, third, and fourth days after the story broke. If I understand these things correctly, that would mean that approximately a third of respondents were questioned June 1, and another third on the second. That makes the results of the poll as a whole nearly meaningless, since so much of importance in the story hadn’t come out at the beginning.

The poll is a curious document, as these things often are. It is one of those general things with tons of questions about many topics, and Bergdahl was hardly one of the main issues it probed. That was one of the very last questions asked, number 45, and its phrasing went like this: “Do you approve or disapprove of the United States releasing five Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the release of a U.S. soldier who was being held as a prisoner of war in Afghanistan?,” with 45% approving, 47% disapproving, and 8% uncertain. Note that Bergdahl’s name isn’t even mentioned.

So I don’t think we can conclude much about public opinion of the Bergdahl exchange from this poll; subsequent ones will tell the tale. The poll did measure a fairly high level of dissatisfaction with Obama about the VA scandal that had been dominating the news prior to the Bergdahl incident. Hmmm. And I found the response to this question interesting, too: “Do you think the Obama administration is more or less competent than the George W. Bush administration?” Only 42% said more competent and 48% less competent. Interesting, no? And yet Obama’s approval rate in the poll was 40%, which seems to represent the percentage of Americans who will not desert him no matter what.

[NOTE: One other thing really did surprise me, and that’s Krauthammer’s defense of Obama in the Bergdahl affair. To be sure, I don’t always agree with Krauthammer. But this is inexplicable.]

Not Obama’s PR guy

The New Neo Posted on by

A Taliban commander who has been in touch with Time magazine for years and according to them “has consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity” has told them that there’s more to come:

It’s better to kidnap one person like Bergdahl than kidnapping hundreds of useless people…It has encouraged our people. Now everybody will work hard to capture such an important bird.

Well, Obama has to have some excuse for emptying out Gitmo, doesn’t he?

As I’ve written before, the enemy always was interested in capturing Americans, military members or otherwise, even before this. But I can’t think of a single reason why the Bergdahl exchange wouldn’t make them far more eager to do so during the rest of Obama’s term. “The enemy” doesn’t just refer to the Taliban in Afghanistan, either. I’m talking about jihadists around the world.

[NOTE: By the way, I’ve noticed that Time appears to be covering the Bergdahl prisoner exchange story with somewhat more honesty than it usually deals with news that reflects poorly on Obama. This particular incident seems to have stirred up some alarm there.]

Why England voted the way it did

The New Neo Posted on by

Even though the Bergdahl prisoner swap is dominating the news, there are other things happening in the world.

For example, remember the elections in Europe just a short while ago? Here’s an article that sheds more light on what happened in the UK and why people voted as they did:

The minute you gave drastically poor countries free entry to the UK, the inevitable happened. Since 1997, four million people have come to Britain ”“ the equivalent of a city the size of Birmingham ”“ yet there has been no concomitant expansion of roads, schools or hospitals. It explains why it is now easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to buy a coffee in England from a native English speaker.

It also explains why regions such as my own East Anglia voted Ukip so overwhelmingly last week. If places such as Peterborough turned purple with apoplexy, it is not because its residents are necessarily racist or because they saw in Nigel Farage the finest statesman since Winston Churchill. It is more likely to be because women in labour are often turned away by one of the region’s major maternity units, which has several times actually locked its doors, so difficult does it find a soaring, immigrant-driven birth rate. A midwife friend who was seconded there described conditions as “third-world”.

Until recently, it would have been “racist” to point this out. Four years ago in Rochdale, when Gillian Duffy challenged Gordon Brown on immigration, the affronted prime minister shied away and muttered darkly about that “bigoted woman”. It is quite clear now who was the bigot. Brown was typical of a political class that became shamefully biased against its own people. In thrall to a post-war European ideal, they had scant interest in the difficulties and discomfort it caused ordinary people on the ground. If anyone complained, simply shut them up by hissing “bigot” or “racist”.

A plasterer out of work because Poles living five to a room undercut him? Little Englander!

A mother-of-three hit by the child-benefit cuts, which come into force next week, and expressing disbelief that the UK is still sending £30 million in benefits to the kids of EU workers, who aren’t even living here? Sorry, nothing we can do about it, madam. It’s all for the greater European good, you know. Do be quiet.

A teacher hounded from a school by Islamist hardliners who want girls and boys segregated and treated in a way that is anathema to British values? Racist!

Disgusted at countless male, Muslim grooming gangs treating vulnerable white girls like “chewing gum thrown in the street”? Racist!

Fed up with being required to show cultural sensitivity to customs we find morally repugnant, and getting no cultural sensitivity in return? Racist!

I hope this isn’t our future. It’s perilously close to being our present. At least we don’t have membership in the EU to contend with.

The Bergdahl scandal and public opinion

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a growing sense that, at least for now, the Bergdahl prisoner exchange and its fallout has the left spooked.

Maybe Obama will weasel out of this mess, too, either by way of the same tricks that have extricated him from so-called “scandals” such as Benghazi, or by distracting us in some new and horrific way. Or maybe there will be a hurricane somewhere that can provide a serendipitous photo-op to impress those Americans who have political attention-deficit disorder.

But at the moment this story, probably more than any other story of Obama’s presidency, is one that makes him look bad. It seems to simultaneously expose his disregard for the safety of America and Americans, his sympathy for fundamentalist Islamist governments, his failure to do his homework, his drive towards greater executive power, his disregard for Congress (including some members of both parties) and the law itself, his mendacity, and the stupidity and collaboration of his advisors in all of the above.

I may have left something out, but you get the idea.

The military men and women who served with Bergdahl and on whom Obama counted to keep their mouths shut are (unlike the diplomats in Benghazi) speaking up and telling what they know. The NY Times and Time and other organs that normally can be counted on to carry Obama’s water are spilling it all over the place. That leaves lonely folk such as TNR’s Brian Beutler and Esquire’s Charles P. Pierce doing their level best to convince the world that it’s only vile Republicans complaining about the swap, and that their carping is motivated by petty politics and a cold attitude towards the suffering of prisoners of war.

But it’s not taking too well so far, not as well as during previous dustups. Obama and his advisors may be surprised at that because they may not have understood the feelings this story would tap into. Peter Wehner understands that this story has had a visceral effect, shocking even some people who didn’t think themselves shockable anymore about anything Obama might do:

My response to what has occurred is not just intellectual but visceral. I consider what occurred, when everything is taken into account, to be substantively indefensible and morally dishonorable. The president, in my estimation, has rendered a great service to our enemies, and they know it. (Mullah Omar, the head of the Taliban, hailed the release of the top five Taliban commanders from Guantanamo as a “great victory” for the mujahideen of Afghanistan.) The president’s decision may well endanger American lives down the road. And his administration has elevated an apparent deserter”“one whose actions were reported on in the past (see this 2012 Rolling Stone article by Michael Hastings) and who is responsible for the death of fellow soldiers who tried to rescue him”“into a hero.

This strikes me as morally grotesque…

In this case, it’s the president and I who occupy different worlds, including different moral worlds.

This story, unlike some of the others, is neither hard to understand nor difficult to follow. It seems awful on its face, and many of the American people are reacting on that same visceral level. For how long they will react that way, however, and to what effect, I do not know.

As evidence of the revulsion towards what Obama has done and towards Bergdahl’s actions, I present Facebook’s “Bring Bowe Bergdahl Back” page and its fellows:

A number of individuals who initially supported the page’s mission are now having second thoughts as troubling revelations continue to emerge…

The page, which is nearly five years old, has about 34,500 likes as of this writing. Other pages, including one called ”˜Bowe Bergdahl is a Traitor,’ have already attracted nearly as much attention in just the past 48 hours.

Administrators of that page are sharing anonymous comments by self-identified soldiers who offer a glimpse into their knowledge of Bergdahl and the circumstances of his ostensible capture by the Taliban.

Comments on the page show an overwhelming shift in public sentiment regarding the prisoner.

When Chris Matthews and Diane Feinstein are among the critics, Obama knows he’s got a problem. Jon Stewart, an Obama supporter who was already angry at the Obama administration over the VA hospital scandal, is at least as unhappy about the prisoner exchange, too.

All of this indicates that there’s something about this one that—at least temporarily—is achieving a level of disgust with Obama that doesn’t seem to have been reached previously. But the only obvious remedy, impeachment, seems to still be politically unavailable. I repeat a question that’s been asked before: what would Obama have to due to trigger a real possibility of impeachment in the House leading to actual conviction in the Senate?

[NOTE: Here’s a good summary of the Bergdahl scandal so far.]

The Bergdahl memes emerge

The New Neo Posted on by

It became clear as soon as the background information about Bergdahl began coming out that the left would say the right was swiftboating Bergdahl. After all, as I wrote previously here, “swiftboating”:

…has become a synonym for “a political low blow.” And of course, in the eyes of the MSM, it tends to be the province of those nefarious Republicans.

Forget about whether the charges are actually true or not; that’s a minor quibble, hardly worthy of consideration.

In the case of those who criticize Bergdahl for being a deserter or worse, not only are their charges against Bergdahl almost certainly accurate, but the accusers (like Kerry’s, the original Swift Vets) are veterans who did serve honorably in the military, unlike Bergdahl. So the parallel is almost irresistible to the left.

What’s more, it’s one of the few defenses available to them for Obama’s actions in freeing Bergdahl in exchange for the Taliban Five. The Bergdahl affair has been distinguished for being so egregiously awful—so nakedly political, so dangerous, so full of knave/fool possibilities and lies—that even the left is hard-pressed to find a silver lining there.

I’ll make another prediction. If those freed Taliban leaders end up doing something vile, whether it be limited to Afghanistan or whether the harm is directed more pointedly at Americans somewhere else, the people who tie it to Obama’s decision to swap the Taliban for Bergdahl will be accused of using the Willie Horton ploy against Obama.

[ADDENDUM: Apparently I’m not the only one who has thought about the Horton meme in connection with the Bergdahl prisoner exchange: James Taranto has written about it as well.]

What about Obama’s defiance of Congress’ 30-day notice rule?

The New Neo Posted on by

Among the many huge problems associated with Obama’s release of five Taliban prisoners in exchange for the captive Bergdahl is the fact that in doing so Obama violated a Congressional statute that requires a president to give 30 days notice to Congress of any such release.

When that statute was originally passed and Obama signed it, he issued a signing statement claiming that “executive authority vested in the Constitution gave him the right to override the law.” So he was already planning to disregard it if at some future date that would serve his purposes.

Obama is hardly the only president who’s issued that type of signing statement, however; George Bush issued quite a few saying similar things, as did certain other presidents. It’s all been part of the continuing struggle between the legislative and executive branches over their relative power.

Democrats criticized Bush for it back then, and Republicans are criticizing Obama for it now. Critics I consider more objective (and with whom I agree) claim instead that the right thing to do in such a situation would be to veto the bill instead. Another would be to wait for the Supreme Court to make a determination about constitutionality. But in recent years, particularly since Raines vs. Byrd in 1997, the Court has strictly limited the rules about who has standing to ask the Court to consider that question, so that remedy has become more difficult to use:

The Supreme Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing to sue, as they had not suffered any particularized injury. The courts reasoning held that individual members of Congress were subject to strict limits on their ability to sue, particularly in a dispute between different branches of government.

Aside from the legality of what Obama has done, there is also (as so often happens with Obama) the question of lying. In this instance the lies were delivered by none other than recently-retired press secretary Jay Carney, who stated the following back in June of 2013 while discussing negotiations for Bergdahl’s possible release [emphasis mine]:

Q Jay, going to back to Afghanistan, the Taliban has offered to release Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five members of the Taliban who are currently being held at Guantanamo Bay. Is this something that the administration is considering? Is this something that the President would agree to?

MR. CARNEY: What I can tell you is that the main dialogue that we support is the dialogue between Afghans — between the Taliban and the Afghan government. However, there are some issues that we would like to discuss with the Taliban directly, and this includes the safe return of Sergeant Bergdahl, who has been gone for far too long.

We continue to call for and work toward his safe and immediate release. We cannot discuss all the details of our efforts, but there should be no doubt that on a daily basis we are continuing to pursue — using our military, intelligence and diplomatic tools — the effort to return him home safely. And our hearts are with the Bergdahl family.

With regard to the transfer of Taliban detainees from Guantanamo Bay, we have made — the United States has not made the decision to do that, though we do expect the Taliban to raise this issue in our discussion, if and when those discussions happen.

As we have long said, however, we would not make any decisions about transfer of any detainees without consulting with Congress and without doing so in accordance with U.S. law.

Q So you haven’t ruled it out?

MR. CARNEY: I’m simply saying that — first of all, you have to separate the two issues. We are focused on the return — the safe and immediate return of Sergeant Bergdahl, and we continue to use the tools at our disposal to help bring that about.

We also expect the Taliban to raise the issue of their detainees in discussions that we have with them if those discussions take place. And at this time we’ve made no decisions about the transfer of detainees. And in accordance with law, we would be consulting with Congress should we make any decisions about that. So we remain committed to the closure of Guantanamo Bay, as you know. But separate from that on these specific issues about individual detainees, that would be a process that is done in accordance with law.

So we see that the reporter asking the question of Carney linked Bergdahl’s return with the release of the five Guantanamo prisoners almost a year ago. That was the offer the Taliban in Afghanistan were making to Obama at the time. Carney’s answer then was hedgy (fancy that!): he declined to say exactly what was being done about Bergdahl or whether Obama had plans to link the two in a prisoner exchange as the Taliban had requested. But Carney was absolutely unequivocal about one thing, which was that (“as we have long said”) Congress would be informed in accordance with the law if those Taliban were going to be released.

Carney actually said it several times during the press conference. What’s more, as recently as six months ago Obama himself gave the same assurances to leading members of Congress. But Obama thought he could dispense with the need for notice, and also that he could get around objections to the release that might arise from other sources, though the use of speed.

Back when this exact swap was first discussed back in 2011 and 2012, many of Obama’s advisors (including even Leon Panetta) said it would be too risky. What changed between then and now?:

To start, President Obama won reelection. Panetta is gone, and in his place is Chuck Hagel, a Republican former senator who has been much more in sync with Obama’s views on the war on terror than his predecessors.

But current U.S. intelligence and defense officials who spoke to The Daily Beast on Monday say the process for exchanging Taliban for Bergdahl this time was rushed and closely held, in some instances leaving little room for any push back against a policy clearly favored by the White House.

“This was an example of forcing the consensus,” one U.S. military official said. “The White House knew the answer they wanted and they ended up getting it.”

The article goes on to say that Clapper, head of National Intelligence who objected to the Taliban Five’s release previously, became convinced it was okay at this point for the following reasons:

U.S. officials say that this time around there were three factors that swayed Clapper to support the deal. To start, the guarantee from the Kingdom of Qatar to monitor the detainees for a year under a loose form of house arrest. When the deal was first explored in 2011 and 2012, there was no such offer from a third party.

One senior U.S. intelligence official said the Qatar arrangement would allow the detainees to receive international visitors but would not allow them to travel for a year. “This is not a situation like returning detainees to Yemen, where there was a risk of a breakout,” one former senior Obama counterterrorism official said. “I expect the Qataris would keep them under house arrest but certainly communications with the Taliban are quite possible. After the first year there are no controls and they still will pose a danger to U.S. interests in Afghanistan.”

Another factor that changed Clapper’s view on the trade was that the five Taliban officials no longer had access to the same network of fighters that they would have had they been released several years ago. “A lot of their networks are decimated at this point,” one U.S. intelligence official said.

Finally, by the time the detainees will be allowed to leave Qatar, U.S. troops will be in the process of the final withdrawal from Afghanistan.

That’s certainly reassuring, isn’t it?

[NOTE: Speaking of lying, in 2007 Obama strongly criticized George Bush’s use of signing statements to go around the power of Congress and and swore that if he were elected he would never do such a thing.

While it is legitimate for a president to issue a signing statement to clarify his understanding of ambiguous provisions of statutes and to explain his view of how he intends to faithfully execute the law, it is a clear abuse of power to use such statements as a license to evade laws that the president does not like or as an end-run around provisions designed to foster accountability. I will not use signing statements to nullify or undermine congressional instructions as enacted into law.”

If you like your doctor, you can…

Oops, wrong topic.]

Bergdahl: “at best a deserter, at worst a traitor”…

The New Neo Posted on by

…according to former U.S. Army Sgt. Josh Korder, who served with Berghdahl in Afghanistan.

There is really almost no other conclusion one can draw from the facts that are coming out about Bergdahl’s departure from his unit five years ago.

Even the NY Times is reporting what would lead any thinking person to agree with Korder. For example, Bergdahl left a note in his tent saying “he had become disillusioned with the Army, did not support the American mission in Afghanistan and was leaving to start a new life…[taking] with him a soft backpack,water, knives, a notebook and writing materials” but leaving behind body army and weapons, something he would ordinarily need in that region.

Other curious facts about Bergdahl before his disappearance were that “he wouldn’t drink beer or eat barbecue” with the others, and he was teaching himself local languages such as Pashto and Dari, as well as Arabic. None of these things would be evidence of much of anything in and of themselves, but taken together with Bergdahl’s note and desertion they also could indicate a “going native” phenomenon that might involve a conversion to Islam, which forbids alcohol and pork.

As Korder said, at best a deserter and at worst a traitor.

[NOTE: Patterico calls the Obama decision to exchange Bergdahl for the five Taliban “inexplicable” in light of this information.

But I think the explanation isn’t so hard to find. As I wrote in my first article about the exchange, “it may be that the release of these particular prisoners wasn’t just a reluctant move in order to free Bergdahl, it may be more accurate to say that Bergdahl’s release was negotiated at this point in time in order to free the Taliban Five.” The president probably thought getting Bergdahl back would allow him (Obama) to be seen as a champion of the military because the non-disclosure agreements signed by many people who had served with Bergdahl would hold (as similar agreements seem to have done so far in Benghazi). Meanwhile, Obama anticipated that releasing the Taliban would serve at least two purposes, the first being to help empty Gitmo as promised and activate his supporters for the 2014 election, and the second being to jump-start talks with the Taliban leadership who had been asking for the release of these five people for years.]

Rudolf Nureyev and the USSR

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ll start by saying that Nureyev was not my favorite dancer, although I saw him perform in person many times and appreciated his blazing energy and the excitement he brought to the stage whenever he danced. He was Dionysian rather than Apollonian, and not a perfect technician, having gotten a late start in ballet and lacking some of the core upper body strength that many Russian dancers have. He transcended those limitations not only through his exhilarating presence, but because of the strength in his legs, his iron determination, and the extreme physical beauty of his form and face.

Nureyev had a sort of feral allure, mostly masculine with a little bit of feminine and a fair amount of some other exotic non-human creature—a panther perhaps. Something feline, with a hint of ferocity. No other male dancer thrilled people (men and women) so much.

When Nureyev defected to the west in 1961 at the age of 23 and caused a sensation, he was already a star in Russia. But after his defection he became a star of the world—everywhere except Russia and the countries it controlled, that is.

The following clip is the sixth and final part of a BBC documentary that deals only with his Soviet years and his defection. This particular part begins immediately after his defection with a description of one of the Soviet plans to harm him. The film is a reminder of how relentless the Soviets were in blighting liberty and in ruining—or threatening to ruin—innocent lives. And their retaliation against Nureyev, as described in this film, was relatively mild compared with what they regularly perpetrated on so many of those with the temerity to defy them, or even on people who merely ran foul of them. Evil empire, indeed.

Nureyev left Russia, and he probably couldn’t afford to think too much about the people he’d left behind. This is as much their story as his.