SCOTUS agrees to hear the Trump presidential immunity case

The New Neo Posted on by

This means there will be a delay in the Jack Smith trial:

… [T]he case was moving towards a March 4 trial when Trump appealed denial of his defense that the conduct alleged was covered by presidential immunity. Special Counsel Jack Smith sought to go directly to the Supreme Court, to try to keep the trial on track, but was rejected in favor of allowing the Court of Appeals first to consider the issue. To no one’s surprise, the Court of Appeals rejected the immunity defense, and Trump sought a stay from the Supreme Court preventing the Appeals Court issuing a “mandate” for the case to proceed to trial pending the Court taking the case on the merits.

Today SCOTUS granted the stay and treated it as a grant of certiorari to hear the case on the merits. …

With an April 22 argument, even a quick decision would mean, assuming Trump loses on the defense, that a trial in DC prior to the election is doubtful, as there is a lot of work to be done before trial, and the March 4 trial date was unikely even without the appeals. Of course, if Trump wins in the Supreme Court, the case likely is over.

I know nothing about the speed of such things, so I defer to Professor Jacobson’s judgment on the issue. I do think, however, that the situation is so complex and volatile that anything is possible.

More on the oft-discussed topic of Biden’s cognitive health and what the Democrats might do about it, as well as what the MSM says about it

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: Scott Johnson at Powerline.]

From Danielle Pletka:

The question of Joe Biden’s age, recently vaulted onto front pages by the devastating Hur report on the President’s retention of classified material, has become a political football. Montages of Biden’s senior moments, his trips on the stairs, his new sturdy sneakers, his bizarre whispering, his frequent confusion etc etc etc have become staples in opposition news dumps.

But that’s been highlighted on the right for his entire presidency and even during his 2020 candidacy. It was just that the MSM protected him.

To a certain extent, the MSM still does. But now the MSM reporters go back and forth between denial that anything is wrong other than a few “gaffes” – which is their old line – and admitting that he’s not quite as sharp as he used to be.

Biden is clearly in some sort of decline, but he never was mentally sharp and he always lied or made egregious errors that the MSM would have called him out on had he not been useful to the Democrats. In fact, back in the 1980s, when Biden was not senile and was just one of a large group of presidential candidates, the MSM did call him out on his plagiarism.

This Time article is from 2019; the topic is his campaign for the 1988 nomination for president [emphasis added]:

“Then, as now in fact, Biden is not as fast on his feet as a successful candidate usually is,” argues Laurence I. Barrett, a former TIME national political correspondent who profiled Biden during his three-month-long presidential bid in the run-up to the 1988 election. …

Not that the candidate was without his drawbacks: “Biden’s mouth is both his greatest asset and his greatest liability,” Barrett wrote [in 1987] shortly after Biden announced his candidacy. That analysis would prove enduringly prescient.

A few days before [the Bork hearings] began, video surfaced that spliced together footage of U.K. Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock giving a speech and Biden clearly quoting Kinnock at the Iowa State Fair without attribution. More examples of misattribution came to light, and the plagiarism scandal became more memorable than [Biden’s] leadership during the Bork confirmation hearing. His mouth — or rather, what he failed to say — got him in trouble again.

Here’s how TIME described [the article is from 1987] why the fallout was so intense:

[T]he Biden brouhaha illustrates the six deadly requirements for a crippling political scandal.

1) A Pre-Existing Subtext. “The basic rap against Biden,” explains Democratic Pollster Geoff Garin, “is that he’s a candidate of style, not substance.”

2) An Awkward Revelation. The Kinnock kleptomania was particularly damaging to Biden since it underscored the prior concerns that he was a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.

3) A Maladroit Response. Top Aide Tom Donilon claimed that Biden failed to credit Kinnock because “he didn’t know what he was saying. He was on autopilot.”

4) The Press Piles On. Once textual fidelity became an issue, reporters found earlier cases in which Biden had failed to give proper citation to Humphrey and Robert Kennedy. By themselves these transgressions would not have been worth noting.

5) The Discovery of Youthful Folly. During his first months at Syracuse University Law School, in 1965, Biden failed a course because he wrote a paper that used five pages from a published law-review article without quotation marks or a proper footnote. Since Biden was allowed to make up the course, the revelation was front-page news only because it kept the copycat contretemps alive.

6) An Overwrought Press Conference. With a rambling and disjointed opening statement, Biden failed to reap the benefits of public confession, even though he called himself “stupid” and his actions “a mistake.” Part of the problem is that he contradicted himself by also insisting that it was “ludicrous” to attribute every political idea.

The “final blow” for the campaign came when Newsweek unearthed C-SPAN footage of Biden rattling off his academic accomplishments, including saying that he graduated in the top half of his law school, when in fact, he ranked 76th out of 85.

Note the following: he’s not a candidate of substance, he’s “a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas,” “he didn’t know what he was saying,” he gave “a rambling and disjointed opening statement,” and he lied about his accomplishments and was a serial plagiarizer. All known and acknowledged in 1987, when the MSM could afford to notice because there were plenty of other candidates. If Biden had revealed himself to be one of the weaker candidates instead of one of the stronger ones, then he was dispensible and the MSM would help get rid of him by highlighting these flaws.

In 2008, Obama picked him, partly for this very reason: that he is “a shallow vessel for other people’s ideas.” That’s exactly what Obama needed. Biden also had the undeserved reputation – which the MSM would support because of its need to have Obama win – of being a mature and seasoned expert on government and especially foreign policy. And so, although Biden was neither of these things, the press was all too happy to ignore that fact, especially when it was revealed during Biden’s debate against the supposedly ignorant Sarah Palin.

If you’ve forgotten what Biden said in that debate, here’s something to refresh your memory. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are a few examples, especially a relevant one on foreign policy:

“Article I of the Constitution defines the role of the vice president of the United States, that’s the Executive Branch,” Sen. Biden said, dismissing Sarah Palin’s expressed intention to play a role in legislative affairs.

Article I of the Constitution defines the role of Congress, the legislative branch, and declares that “The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no vote, unless they be equally divided.” That is the only responsibility of the vice president delineated anywhere in the Constitution. …

“When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon,” Sen. Biden said.

“Biden said the strangest and most ill-informed thing I have ever heard about Lebanon in my life,” said Michael Totten, who reported from there during the so-called Cedar Revolution. “Nobody has ever kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon. Not the United States. Not France. Not Israel. And not the Lebanese. Nobody. Joe Biden has literally no idea what he is talking about.”

Despite that, the MSM coverage focused on Palin and her supposed errors, and often took this form. An excerpt:

Biden offered a fluent, self-assured performance of the sort that cannot be especially hard for him after two presidential campaigns, 35 years in the Senate and countless appearances on Sunday morning programs. People impressed by references to legislation, or citations of his record in world hot spots from Bosnia to Darfur, got these in spades.

Hezbollah – what’s that?

We all saw years later in 2020 how the MSM covered for Biden, when his decline – from the supposed high-water mark of 2008 – was obvious. The current back-and-forth on the issue of his cognitive function reflects, I believe, a behind-the-scenes uncertainty and dissension on what to do about it. There is probably a wing that thinks keeping him is okay – perhaps the “rigging” and the “fortifying” or the anti-Trump lawfare, or some combination of all of them, will pull Joe across the finish line. Another wing almost certainly thinks he needs to go, and if they can figure out the best way to do that and the best person to replace him, they will.

And the MSM will do their bidding.

More on the decline of Britain, with an emphasis on the role of the influx of “migrants”

The New Neo Posted on by

The following is a long video. But although I found the entire thing interesting, it’s not necessary to watch it all to get the gist of it. Twenty minutes or even ten minutes would do as a summary version.

The content is quite depressing and at least somewhat relevant to our own situation in the US. It’s pretty clear that Britain – and other Western nations – are even further down this cultural change road than we are. But we’re on the same basic path. One thing I learned from the video of which I’d been previously unaware is that Boris Johnson – a conservative PM, at least nominally – ran on a platform of reducing the enormous numbers of “migrants” entering the country and yet, while in power, did exactly the opposite. Apparently this is the reason that in the next election the Labour Party is projected to do very well.

Why? After all, they will be worse on the subject, won’t they? The speaker (Matt Goodwin) contends that it’s because the right is so frustrated and angry at the betrayal by the Tories that apathy will rule and they won’t vote at all. It’s not that they’ll be voting for Labour.

But not voting at all would – and probably will – facilitate a huge Labour victory and bring about exactly the results those voters are against. The idea is that some day the conservatives may end up regrouping and be more conservative in fact and not just in name. But when? And by that time, what will be left of Britain?

Here’s the video:

The blood libel is alive and well and living at the LA Times

The New Neo Posted on by

Actually, even the general MSM reportage on the Gazan war is often a form of blood libel against the Jews: that is, a promotion of the idea that the IDF either deliberately targets children or doesn’t take care not to target them, when in reality the IDF probably tries to prevent such a thing more than any other military would if placed in a similar position against a similar enemy.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term “blood libel,” you can look up the history here. In the past it had to do with falsely accusing Jews of purposely killing Christian children for ritual purposes. But in recent years it’s been employed to claim that Israelis have it in for Palestinian children in particular.

The Mohammed al Durah incident was a particularly egregious – and effective – example of such a claim; I’ve written extensively about that here, and you can also go to this site for more detailed information.

What tale is the LA Times pushing now? You can read about it at CAMERA in an article entitled: “LA Times Refuses to Substantiate, Retract Toxic Charge That IDF Snipers Targeted Kids”:

As of this writing, The Los Angeles Times continues to refuse to either substantiate or retract a spurious charge that Israeli snipers in the Gaza Strip targeted several young Palestinian children, shooting them in the head.

In his Feb. 16 Op-Ed, “I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza. What I saw wasn’t war – it was annihilation,” Irfan Galaria made the very alarming accusation that Israel Defence Forces snipers targeted multiple small children in Khan Younis, fatally shooting them in the head. Galaria, an American doctor who volunteered in the European Hospital in Khan Yunis, alleged:

“On one occasion, a handful of children, all about ages 5 to 8, were carried to the emergency room by their parents. All had single sniper shots to the head. These families were returning to their homes in Khan Yunis, about 2.5 miles away from the hospital, after Israeli tanks had withdrawn. But the snipers apparently stayed behind. None of these children survived.”

Given that this is such an egregious, serious charge which has not been independently confirmed, CAMERA turned to the Spokesmen Unit of the Israel Defense Forces for a response, a routine step which The Los Angeles Times did not take before publishing the Op-Ed, with its vitriolic charges of “annihilation.”

“Too good to fact-check” by the LA Times. CAMERA wrote to the IDF, which said that “the claims have no factual basis.” Nor does the author provide any. But as anti-Israel and anti-Semitic propaganda, it’s great.

Who is Irfan Galaria? All I could discover is that he was born in Michigan, and he and his wife (also a doctor) appear to be Muslims from the photos of her head covering. Michigan is of course one of the US states with the largest Muslim population. “Irfan” is a first name that is popular in Turkey and Pakistan, and with a different spelling in Iran. Hard to say about the last name, which is not common.

That doesn’t mean that Galaria is lying, of course. But it certainly means he might have a motive to do so, or at least to be susceptible to the lies of others in the area, such as Hamas “health authorities.” More importantly, the absence of any corroborative evidence is telling and should mean that the paper either should not be publishing the piece, or it should contain a disclaimer pointing out the lack of any evidence.

The assertion by Galaria reminds me strongly of an article that once appeared in Harper’s and was a very deft example of the blood libel. I discuss the author, Chris Hedges, in this post; he is a liar about a lot of things in addition to the IDF (see the post for many details).

Here’s the part of my 2014 piece on Hedges’ lies that’s relevant to the blood libel:

Harper’s no longer publishes Hedges since the 2010 incident. However, he had already served the left’s purpose many times over by that time. One of the ways in which Hedges had done that was in this Harper’s article published in October of 2001, in which he wrote of IDF soldiers vis a vis Palestinian children in Gaza:

“Children have been shot in other countries I have covered – death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo – but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport.”

That gives you an idea of the flavor of Hedges’ writing. I read the piece at the time it appeared, long before my political change experience but during what in retrospect must have been the very early stages of it. His assertions had shocked and saddened me back then, but it hadn’t occurred to me when I first read them that Hedges might just be flat-out lying.

Here’s CAMERA’s treatment of that Hedges article. Pay particular attention from points 4 to the end. If you read it, you will see why it is almost certain that Hedges was lying in that article, and not just once but many many times. However, the article was very influential as part of the left’s campaign against Israel. By 2010 the magazine’s fact-checker may have become interested in making sure Hedges didn’t plagiarize in his articles, but it appears there was never an interest at Harper’s in making sure he didn’t lie in them, as long as those lies fit nicely into the preferred leftist narrative.

Lies work. That’s why people tell them. It’s the task of reporters not to publish unsubstantiated “facts” of such a potentially damaging nature. But if they fit “nicely into the preferred leftist narrative” they often are not questioned or fact-checked. And the blood libel fits very very nicely.

[NOTE: Hedges is still going strong with his anti-Israel propaganda and has a large YouTube following.]

McConnell stepping down from post in November but not quitting the Senate

The New Neo Posted on by

McConnell is 82 years old and a great many people on the right think he should have done this a long time ago. But here’s the announcement:

“One of life’s most underappreciated talents is to know when it’s time to move on to life’s next chapter,” he said in his floor speech. “So I stand before you today… to say that this will be my last term as Republican leader of the Senate.”

The dramatic decision, which will set up a leadership election in the GOP conference with several likely candidates, comes as Republicans have expressed increasing discontent with McConnell’s handling of the bipartisan border bill and national security supplemental package that included aid for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

I would have thought it was long past time to move on. At any rate, he’s doing so now. McConnell is the longest-serving party leader the Senate has ever had.

Apparently he is planning to stay as one of Kentucky’s senators to serve out his term, which expires January of 2027.

I’m not going to recap my views on McConnell; here are my many posts about him, although I will mention that he did a good job holding the line on SCOTUS. My questions at this point are: (a) who will replace him?; and (b) will it be as majority or minority leader?

I don’t know the answers. But the idea that change is afoot may energize more voters on the right to vote for Republicans for the Senate. So many conservative have been fed up with the GOP in the Senate for a long time.

The anti-Israel CIA

The New Neo Posted on by

There was quite a bit of discussion of this Tablet article (author Justine El-Khazen) yesterday in the comments here. So I decided to take a look at it. It begins this way:

My mother died on Dec. 4 of last year. On her deathbed, she begged me not to raise my children Jewish. In life, she worked for the CIA, in the Near East Southern Asia Division, for six years as head of the Arab-Israeli Division. She was an expert on Syria and political Islam.

I found it to be an oddly disjointed article. It took me a little while to understand – and the author never made it 100% clear – who in the author’s family was Jewish and what religion the other parent was. It seems to have been her father and not her mother who was Jewish, but the author never says whether her mother was Christian, or atheist, or what (other than a CIA analyst).

Much of the latter part of the article is a discussion of the current Middle East situation, but it says nothing particularly unique. On the CIA, however, the author seems to have been strangely naive, and seems to still be naive about John Brennan, whom she seems to trust. But I see no reason that anyone would trust Brennan (do a search on this blog for “Brennan” and you’ll see why I say that).

Why would the author be surprised at the anti-Israel bent of anyone connected with our foreign policy or intelligence community these days? The State Department, the CIA, all of it? When this stance started I don’t know (I think it got worse during the Obama administration but I think the trend predated that). The only person I personally knew who went into the diplomatic corps was definitely a leftist, and I knew him in the 70s when he was in grad school shortly before he entered that profession.

She writes this about her father, who was Jewish (at least ethnically):

Never mind that my father hated visiting Israel. The story he told me was that he’d talked to a woman in a bar when he was there in his 20s, a “working girl.” When he found out she was Jewish, that was it. The dream of a Jewish homeland was done. He never wanted to go back …

This doesn’t make much sense to me, unless her father was extremely strange. In Israel there are Jewish plumbers, Jewish police, Jewish thieves, Jewish prostitutes, Jewish whatever. It’s a society. Did he, a Jew, think Jews had to be perfectly pure?

More from the article:

My mother and I had dinner one night in April 1996 at the CIA station chief’s house in Israel, north of Tel Aviv. There was some kind of minor war underway. Fighter jets kept skidding above us as we ate. The IDF and Hezbollah were trading fire again, which was not that remarkable in itself. This time, the IDF bombed a U.N. compound, killing 106 civilians.

This event might not have made news here, but it rocked the Arab world. Mohamed Atta committed his life to jihad that very day. Osama bin Laden was none too pleased, either. “You supported the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon,” he explained in his “letter to America,” which, since Oct. 7, has gone viral in the TikTok feeds of America’s youth. Anti-Westernism has always been closely entwined with antisemitism in the Arab world; these days it’s closely entwined here too.

But she’s talking about this event and leaves out some very important (and relevant) facts (emphasis mine):

Israeli artillery fire strikes a U.N. compound where at least 800 Lebanese civilians are sheltering in the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. At least 13 shells hit the compound, killing 106 civilians and wounding more than 100 other people, including four Fijian U.N. peacekeepers.

The artillery attack comes during Operation Grapes of Wrath, an Israeli response to the collapse of a cease-fire with Hezbollah that had lasted nearly three years. The Israel Defense Forces issued a warning April 11 for civilians to evacuate from towns and villages to avoid the fighting. As a result, the roads are crowded with refugees fleeing northward, and civilians crowd into the U.N. compound in Qana.

Hezbollah uses several positions within 700 yards of the U.N. base to launch mortar and rocket attacks on IDF positions and northern Israel on the afternoon of April 18. An IDF commando unit commanded by Naftali Bennett calls in an artillery strike on one Hezbollah mortar unit firing from a cemetery less than 200 yards from the U.N. base, but none of the 36 shells fired by a four-gun battery of 155mm howitzers hits the mortar site. Instead, carnage within the U.N. compound results.

Israel apologizes for what it says are the accidental civilian deaths and blames Hezbollah for violating international law by using the U.N. compound as civilian shielding for its forces. A U.N. investigation finds that the Israeli attack on the base likely was likely not an accident, and a separate Amnesty International investigation concludes that what comes to be called the “Qana Massacre” was intentional. Israel rejects those reports, which it says are biased.

Recognize the pattern? I certainly do. Hezbollah violates a ceasefire. Hezbollah places munitions near the UN base, purposely putting all the civilian inhabitants at risk. Israel mistakenly hits the base and causes civilian casualties (all the people there may not have been civilians, but I’m going to assume that a great many were). The extremely anti-Israel UN and the extremely anti-Israel Amnesty say Israel did it on purpose, and Israel says it did not.

If Israel wanted to kill civilians it had much better ways to do so than this – to warn civilians to leave, and then to hit some while trying to take out a mortar launch site placed very nearby by Hezbollah. Hezbollah counts on a certain number of such mistakes on which it can capitalize in the propaganda war, after it has purposely put its civilians in harm’s way.

I think the author means well, but I found the piece very confusing and very incomplete, as well as naive.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) Sweden will be joining NATO:

Sweden cleared the final hurdle to become the military alliance’s 32nd member after Hungary — the last holdout among the countries — held a parliamentary vote to approve the move.

In recent years, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine pushed Sweden away from its decades of military nonalignment and toward the world’s biggest military alliance. Sweden’s accession comes amid increasing uncertainty over NATO’s future as the Republican front-runner in the United States presidential race, Donald Trump, threatens to abandon security guarantees for at least part of Europe.

Good old Politico just can’t resist a misleading dig at Trump, twisting what he actually said, which was similar to what he has said (and done) as president: put pressure on the NATO nations to do more to pay their own way rather than relying financially so heavily on the US.

(2) Aaron Bushnell committed suicide by setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy, having said “Free Palestine!” as his last words. Such gestures in this country are a tragic response, most often by a mentally disturbed individual. RIP. See also this.

(3) This online March 5 event (at noon) by Legal Insurrection sounds interesting: a discussion of the Communist origins of anti-Zionist anti-Semitism. I wrote this fairly lengthy post on the subject as well as this one.

(4) Was there a Biden operative in Fani Willis’ office? Perhaps. Certainly possible, but it’s a good idea to take it with a grain of salt at the moment.

(5) This is about an interesting article by an ex-NYT opinions editor who described the leftist atmosphere at the Times when he worked there. It doesn’t say anything we don’t already know, but I think it’s interesting that the editor’s original article appeared in The Atlantic. His name is Adam Rubenstein, and he quit his post at the Times after the furor over the publication of the Tom Cotton opinion piece.