Dershowitz says a Mueller firing would not be an impeachable offense

The New Neo Posted on by

Alan Dershowitz keeps walking a lonely road as one of the few true liberals out there, trying to apply basic principles to cases no matter who might be involved and whether he, Dershowitz, happens to like that person or not. But Dershowitz stands more and more alone in the party he keeps insisting he belongs to, the Democrats.

Dershowitz has been reiterating what he’s said before:

“First of all, firing the special counsel would not be an impeachable offense because it wouldn’t be a crime,” Dershowitz said. “The president would have authority to do it. It would be politically very damaging to do it.”

The entire video at the link is worth listening to; Dershowitz makes several other points that all boil down to fairness and the pursuit of truth.

Regarding Dershowitz’s opinion on impeachment, it strikes me (and not for the first time) that the legal points he’s making are irrelevant to today’s current Democratic Party, which is all about power. They can impeach a president for anything they want, if they have the votes, because the bottom line is that impeachment is a political act although it has a legal framework. It is much more political than an ordinary legal proceeding, because the rules are much more vague, and the body making the decision is the US Congress (House for impeachment by simple majority, and Senate for conviction by super-majority). If Dershowitz thinks the politicians involved are interested in such niceties as whether a certain act is a crime or not, I’d say he’s got another think coming.

And of course, if deemed necessary, there is no problem whatsoever in getting an entire phalanx of legal scholars on the left to say that firing Mueller (or just about anything else Trump might do) would be an impeachable crime.

The “migrants” and nationalism: Angela Merkel speaks

The New Neo Posted on by

Angela Merkel gave an uncharacteristically impassioned speech about a subject dear to her heart: “migration” policy. Merkel was defending Germany’s support of the UN-backed Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration, which has been rejected by the United States, Hungary, Austria, Israel, Australia and Poland, and which certain political factions in Germany are questioning, as well.

The agreement would be non-binding, so it’s hard to know in what way it would really be enforced. It seems to me mostly a declaration of intent, but an important one to Merkel, which is no surprise given her influential legacy in terms of immigration policy not just for Germany but for the EU as a whole.

Here’s one of the most quoted statements from her speech:

…Merkel trained her sights on “those who believe they can solve all problems on their own and only have to think of themselves — that’s nationalism in its purest form, not patriotism.”

That’s a strawman, of course. I cannot think of a single country that believes it can “solve all problems” on its own, a country that is so isolated that it doesn’t have multiple treaties, trade agreements, and all sorts of relations with other countries.

What’s more, there are some problems that countries must solve on their own. One happens to be setting the rules about who it lets in and who it bans, for what purposes and for how long, and how to go about defending its own borders. After all, what makes a nation a nation in the first place? Each nation decides on a form of government, of course, as well as how to pass laws and finance that government, but one of the clearest and most important tasks of any nation is defending its boundaries by making decisions about entry, immigration, and citizenship.

A nation without defined and defended boundaries is not a nation. Instead, it’s an undefined geographic area that is at the mercy of other nations to define it. If a nation surrenders its right to make the rules about its own boundaries and who will live within them as citizen or as temporary visitor, than the nation is no longer a nation because other people and other nations will decide on its makeup and population.

But protecting its own borders and its own definition of citizenry and how to achieve it is not the sort of problem-solving Merkel has in mind. I think the following is very telling:

…Merkel warned against thinking that migration is an issue “that one country can solve on its own.”

But of course migration is not an issue any one nation can solve on its own. Migration occurs all over the globe for a wide variety of reasons by a wide variety of people. But most countries are not trying to solve the general problem of migration. They are trying to solve a rather different problem: who to let into their own country.

The leaders around the world who object to the UN agreement are quite clear about what they see as the threat of agreeing to it: the surrender of their sovereign right to make such decisions as a nation. They consider that right to be a feature, whereas Merkel and those who agree with her consider it a bug.

For example, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had this to say:

“The global compact on migration would compromise Australia’s interest,” Morrison told 2GB Radio. “It doesn’t distinguish between those who illegally enter Australia and those who come the right way.”

And Israel’s Netanyahu said:

“I have instructed the Foreign Ministry to announce that Israel will not accede to, and will not sign, the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration,” the prime minister said. “We are committed to guarding our borders against illegal migrants. This is what we have done, and this is what we will continue to do.”

Trump has already spoken on the subject:

“We recognize the right of every nation in this room to set its own immigration policy in accordance with its national interests, just as we ask other countries to respect our own right to do the same – which we are doing,” he said. “That is one reason the United States will not participate in the new Global Compact on Migration. Migration should not be governed by an international body unaccountable to our own citizens. Ultimately, the only long-term solution to the migration crisis is to help people build more hopeful futures in their home countries. Make their countries great again.”

This seems completely obvious, and not too long ago would have had the support of the vast majority of people not just in the US but all over the world. No more.

[NOTE: Please see this previous post of mine for more about nationalism and some of the background to the post-WWII movement against it in Europe. For example, compare Merkel’s speech to this excerpt from author Thomas Mann’s 1947 introduction to Herman Hesse’s (both Germans) novel Demian:

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the “fatherland” has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration…

Sounds like Merkel, doesn’t it, just expressed a bit more elegantly?]

Old wall, new wall

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently the stretch of wall near San Diego that’s been built to new specifications was an area the caravaners did not successfully scale:

When it’s finished, the new section of border wall near San Diego will replace about 14 miles of an 8- to 10-foot-high scrap metal wall with an 18- to 30-foot bollard-style wall topped off with an “anti-climbing plate,” CBP announced earlier this year.

I assume there’s a way to climb or tunnel under any wall. But that’s no reason not to make it more difficult to do.

Meanwhile, protestors send the message “Let them all in.” That’s part of the open-borders movement—recall that the caravan was funded and promoted by a leftist group whose name translates as People Without Borders.

And a showdown in Congress is on the horizon:

“We need Democrat votes to have a wall,” the president stated, according to the WaPo. “Now, if we don’t get it, will I get it done another way? I might get it done another way. There are other potential ways that I can do it. You saw what we did with the military, just coming in with the barbed wire and the fencing, and various other things.”

What will the Democrats do? For that matter, what will the Republicans do?

Why the MSM couldn’t resist the Manafort/Assange story

The New Neo Posted on by

If you blinked, you might have missed it, but the left-wing rag known as the Guardian published a bombshell story yesterday about a secret meeting between Manafort and Assange, and then slowly and stealthily crept the story back.

Everyone fingered in the story denies it most vociferously. Assange is threatening to sue. The Ecuadorian embassy in London, where the meeting supposedly occurred, has no logs of it.

Otherwise, no problem.

And even the Guardian has now introduced hedge-y language into the story to establish plausible deniability.

But perhaps the writers and editors at the paper aren’t as negligent as they might seem. I used to ask the question “fool or knave?” when this sort of thing happened. But in recent years I’ve come to think that it’s not all that relevant, because it’s pretty obvious that the MSM is more than willing to publish many stories with knowledge of their sketchiness (or even their downright falsehood) because the price they pay for this is low and the rewards are high.

If reporters see themselves first and foremost as warriors in the fight against the evil right (and the evil Trump, of course), then all news is only as good as its propaganda value. True or false, if it reaches a large audience it affects that audience, even if the story is later shown to be false. The mental seed is planted, and for many many readers the correction never comes. Which is all to the good if journalists see their role as Speaking a Greater Truth than Truth Itself.

And the Mississippi run-off election for senator goes to…

The New Neo Posted on by

…Republican Cindy Hyde-Smith, as expected. Her victory brings the GOP Senate total to 53.

That’s good, because of the tendency of certain other Republican senators to bolt and to vote with the opposition.

But this particular race was a bit troubling nonetheless. First of all, the result will only last for two years, because Hyde-Smith is filling out the remaining term of the retired Thad Cochran. She will have to run again in 2020 if she wants to remain in the Senate.

The campaign also featured charges of racism against Hyde-Smith for things that seem more tone-deaf on her part than actually racist. But that’s what campaigns seem to have come down to in the 21st century. Just ask George Allen.

The final tally for Hyde-Smith vs. Espy was 54 to 46 in a state that Trump won by 18 points in 2016. That’s the sort of result we kept seeing in the 2018 midterms. Despite Trump’s relative unpopularity, many of the GOP’s candidates are even more unpopular in traditionally red states.

“Flawed candidates” is as good an explanation as any (although Trump was the original “flawed candidate”). It’s no wonder so many Republican candidates are flawed, though. Who would want to open themselves up to the combination of the Democratic Party, its donors, and the MSM in an all-out effort to search the Republican candidate’s entire past—everything that person has ever said or done, going back to childhood—for an Achilles heel or heels that can brand the candidate as a sexist or a racist or a rapist or some especially toxic combination of all three.

Let’s hear it for orphanages

The New Neo Posted on by

Orphanages have gotten a bad press for quite some time, but here’s a corrective that points out how often orhpanages have been either good experiences for their residents, or at least far better than many of the alternatives. Adoptive and foster homes are, after all, only as good as the parents involved in each placement.

I’ve long wondered about the kneejerk rejection of the entire idea of orphanages. Some have been quite literally life-savers and psyche-savers, although of course some have been abusive (just as foster families and adoptive families and birth families can be abusive). All else being equal, a family is better. But all else is not always equal (the following was written by a man who had a good experience growing up in an orphanage):

Beginning in the mid-1990s, I started surveying orphanage alumni from as many orphanages as I could find. I assumed initially that orphanage critics were likely right: “Orphanages were generally bad, but my orphanage was special”—or so I thought. After receiving more than 2,500 responses, I learned that my home was ordinary. An overwhelming majority (85 percent) of the surveyed alumni look back “favorably” or “very favorably” on their orphanage salad days. Only 2.3 percent of the alumni had hostile assessments.

Moreover, the alumni reported that they had done better than the general population on almost all measures, including education, income, attitude toward life, criminal records, psychological problems, unemployment, dependence on welfare, and happiness. For example, the alumni reported that they had an overall college graduation rate 39 percent higher than the general population in their age group (and the respondents, who lived an average of eight-plus years in their orphanages, were 56 to 97 years old, with a mean age of 68). They also reported 10 to 60 percent higher median incomes than those in their age cohort.

Other kinds of children’s institutions can work out well, too. One of the most famous alums of a group situation was the actor Steve McQueen. Possessed of not-exactly-symmetrical good looks, a coiled energy, and a sensitivity that was very magnetic, McQueen was not an orphan. But he had a troubled past that included these formative experiences:

At age 14 [McQueen] left [his great-uncle] Claude’s farm without saying goodbye and joined a circus for a short time, then drifted back to his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles – resuming his life as a gang member and petty criminal. McQueen was caught stealing hubcaps by the police and handed over to his stepfather, who beat him severely; ending the fight by throwing McQueen down a flight of stairs. McQueen looked up at his stepfather and said, “You lay your stinkin’ hands on me again and I swear, I’ll kill ya.”

After the incident McQueen’s stepfather persuaded his mother to sign a court order stating that McQueen was incorrigible, remanding him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino. Here, McQueen began to change and mature. He was not popular with the other boys at first: “Say the boys had a chance once a month to load into a bus and go into town to see a movie. And they lost out because one guy in the bungalow didn’t get his work done right. Well, you can pretty well guess they’re gonna have something to say about that. I paid my dues with the other fellows quite a few times. I got my lumps, no doubt about it. The other guys in the bungalow had ways of paying you back for interfering with their well-being.” Ultimately McQueen became a role model when he was elected to the Boys Council, a group who set the rules and regulations governing the boys’ lives. He eventually left the Boys Republic at age 16. When he later became famous he regularly returned to talk to the boys and retained a lifelong association.

McQueen wasn’t entirely out of the woods when he left the group home at the age of 16; as you can see if you read his Wiki entry, his tough-guy persona was no pose. Nor was Boys Republic a model institution, from the description given. But it offered McQueen an experience he never forgot, and one for which he remained grateful his entire life.

Andrew C. McCarthy on the Manafort breach

The New Neo Posted on by

As so often happens, former prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy sheds light on some legal-political news that no one else seems to have quite understood (and that includes me). The subject matter is Mueller’s charge that Manafort’s lies have abrogated their previous plea agreement.

Here’s McCarthy:

When it comes to claimed breaches of a plea agreement, the prosecutor holds the dominant position. Defendants who plead guilty and agree to cooperate, as Manafort did on the day before his Washington trial was to begin, do so with the understanding that the value of the cooperation is the prosecutor’s call. If the prosecutor decides the information provided is not useful — or, worse, that the defendant has lied — the defendant does not get to withdraw his guilty plea. Further, if the prosecutor decides the defendant has breached the agreement, the government is under no obligation to support reductions in sentence that the defendant hoped to achieve by entering the agreement.

On that score, Mueller’s prosecutors are laying the groundwork to argue that Manafort should not even get any credit for pleading guilty and sparing the public the need for a second trial (after he was convicted at his first trial in the Eastern District of Virginia). In the submission, the special counsel points out that Manafort did not decide to plead guilty until the last minute, so prosecutors and the court had to gear up for the trial. Moreover, Weissmann emphasizes that the alleged breach relieves the government of any duty to support Manafort’s claim that he has demonstrated “acceptance of responsibility” — a standard sentencing reduction for defendants who plead guilty.

For their part, Manafort and his lawyers are clearly preparing to argue that Manafort was honest but that Mueller’s rabidly anti-Trump prosecutors did not like what he had to say — i.e., he would not implicate the president in misconduct. This would echo a theme posited by Judge T. S. Ellis in Manafort’s Virginia trial: Mueller aggressively pursued Manafort on charges that had nothing to do with Russia’s interference in the 2016 election in order to squeeze Manafort into singing, or even “composing,” as a witness against the president.

There’s much more at the link about the power plays going on here, and what might be behind them.

I will add, though, that the timing, context, and course of the Manafort prosecution has made it quite clear that the real prey Mueller has been stalking was and is President Trump. I don’t think there’s much question about that.

Think we have a higher rate of mass shootings than western Europe does?

The New Neo Posted on by

Think again.

John Lott writes:

People have been acting for a long time like the United States is the world’s hotbed of mass public shootings.

He gives many examples of statements from public officials—such as, for example, Barack Obama in 2015, after a mass shooting—making that point. It seems pretty clear that it’s a given, an obvious truth, that America leads the way in mass murders by gun. Right?

Wrong:

This belief is constantly used to push for more gun control. If we can only get rid of guns in the United States, we will get rid of these mass public shootings and be more like the rest of the world, gun-control supporters preach…

But America doesn’t lead the world in mass public shootings. We’re not even close.

We’re not even close? How many people would have checked that box in the multiple choice exam on the subject?

The Crime Prevention Research Center, of which [Lott is] president, recently finished updating a list of mass public shootings worldwide. These shootings must claim four or more lives in a public place. Following the FBI definition, the shootings we list are carried out simply with the intention of killing. We exclude gang fights because they tend to be motivated by battles for drug turf. Murders that arise from other crimes are also excluded.

Then there are politically motivated attacks, either by or against governments. Some shootings occur in the course of guerrilla wars for sovereignty. These attacks do not meet our definition. This meant excluding a lot of very deadly shootings such as those in the Russian-Chechen conflict…

Over the course of 18 years, from 1998 to 2015, our list contains 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the United States and 53 attacks and 57 shooters within this country. By our count, the U.S. makes up 1.49 percent of the murders worldwide, 2.20 percent of the attacks, and less than 1.15 percent of the mass public shooters. All these are much less than America’s 4.6 percent share of the world population.

Of the 97 countries where we identified mass public shootings, the U.S. ranks 64th per capita in its rate of attacks and 65th in fatalities.

That’s pretty astounding. But when I read those numbers, I figured that the first 63 nations were chaotic third- or second-world countries, and that the US came close to leading the pack among the developed countries, especially those of western Europe. Right?

Wrong:

Major European countries, such as Norway, Finland, France, Switzerland and Russia, all have at least 25 percent higher per capita murder rates from mass public shootings.

If those figures are correct—and I have no reason to doubt them at this point—they are truly shocking. Shocking in a good way, because although even one mass shooting would be one too many, it’s still good news to hear that there’s nothing especially violent about the USA in that regard.

The left uses every single mass shooting in this country to scream that anyone who doesn’t support stricter gun control doesn’t care about the victims of mass shootings. But the countries of Western Europe mentioned in that list are stricter about gun control than we are (see this for the somewhat special case of Switzerland). And yet they exceed us in mass shootings per capita.

The Obama administration used tear gas at the border: an inconvenient truth

The New Neo Posted on by

Apparently, the use of tear gas at the southern border had become a rather commonplace occurrence during the Obama years, especially in his second term. And yet few if any people seemed to care at the time.

When this fact was pointed out recently by Brandon Judd, president of the National Border Patrol Council, the response was predictable:

Host Erin Burnett scoffed at Mr. Judd’s facts, saying the agents were using tear gas against women and children this weekend.

“The tear gas was not deployed at the children,” Mr. Judd countered, saying migrants were attempting to use them as human shields.

That’s what I pointed out yesterday in this post. Children make the very best human shields of all, and the MSM is only too happy to encourage that practice by pretending not to even notice that the tactic exists. Thus, the risk to children increases over time rather than decreases.

Twitter bans another conservative

The New Neo Posted on by

Jesse Kelly has been banned from Twitter with no explanation whatsoever, which—among other things—is in violation of Twitter’s own stated policy for informing people of the reasons for a ban.

I’d never heard of Jesse Kelly before this incident. And I have detested Twitter from the start, a sort of mirror image of my love-at-first-sight attraction to blogs. Twitter plays to some of the worst human impulses: snarky simplistic put-downs, a race to the bottom, and the mobbing of those the group has deemed to have strayed from the increasingly narrow definition of acceptable thought and behavior.

So even without knowing much about Jesse Kelly, I’m on his side.

Twitter is incredibly powerful in the decisions it makes, and this is why:

Actually, there is an alternative to Twitter, but it comes at a big cost—traffic and attention. For years, Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) has been the way to go to garner attention and readers. I’ve realized that, but Twitter’s just not my medium.

However, for those who choose to use it and whose voices are blocked by Twitter for seemingly no good reason (except their conservative politics), this is an ominous development. Actually, it’s an ominous development for all of us, whether we use Twitter or not.

At the border: dealing with the invasion that isn’t an invasion

The New Neo Posted on by

Things have been heating up at the Tijuana border.

The good news: the Mexican government seems to be on board with deporting 500 “migrants” who stormed the border over the weekend and were repelled by tear gas from the US side.

The bad news (although it’s not news in the sense that it’s certainly not new): the US left (which now has come to include most Democrats, it seems) finds this outrageous. The tear gas, that is.

For example, Rep. Brian Schatz wondered whether it might be a type of chemical weapon attack, although he later deleted that tweet and added this instead:

The mob that stormed the border was not a Children’s Crusade; it consisted predominantly of young men. There were some children and women in it as well, however, a leaf out of the Palestinian book of putting children in harm’s way in order to get some good photo ops and play on the sympathies of the left in the country trying to protect its border. Tear gas is a miserable experience, but its time-honored use is to disperse crowds without the use of more permanently harmful means of crowd control.

If you don’t want your children to get tear-gassed (or worse), then don’t embed them into a lawless mob bent on storming a border fence; follow the rules instead and do whatever it takes to get into the country legally. An actual “coalition of the moral and the sane” would know that (a) countries—any and all countries—have a right to defend their borders; and (b) tear gas is a relatively safe way to do that; and (c) there is zero analogy to Jews in WWII, who were law-abiding members of the same type of societies they were trying to enter, and who faced near-certain death otherwise with no alternative way out.

As I noted, the Palestinians wrote this book (although they were not the first to do so) and the “caravan” members are merely copying it because it is so successful, while the left in the US and Europe further honed what arguments to make during its experience defending the Palestinians and the great success of those arguments and those visuals as propaganda. Here is a post I wrote some years ago on the subject; Palestinians play an even more deadly game, as did the leftist North Vietnamese before them.

The entire approach is a sort of left-handed (and leftist-generated) compliment to the people of the country it is used against. The more brutal the country really is, the less likely the opposing force is likely to use it, because truly brutal countries have no qualms whatsoever about using the deadliest of forces against anyone—including children—who would invade it, storm it, or otherwise harm it.

But let’s return to Schatz. When he writes, “we can argue about other stuff when we’ve got our country back”—I assume he means when the only valid party in America, the Democratic Party, takes power again, which he expects to happen rather shortly, certainly by 2020. Of course, other people might interpret the idea of “getting our country back” as referring to being allowed to defend borders and insist on legal immigrants, people this country has long welcomed and who are likely to become law-abiding US citizens. But that’s not what Schatz and today’s Democratic Party would say.

[NOTE: Please read Part II of Bill Reader’s series on the groups behind the caravan (I linked to Part I a while back). It makes for sobering reading.

And of course, when during the Obama administration border agents used pepper spray in a similar situation, the response was relatively muted. Because Obama.]