On Thursday, Pence delivered one of the most hawkish speeches by a senior U.S. official since the two countries restored ties four decades ago.
Pence assailed China as a military aggressor, a prolific thief of U.S. technology and, controversially, as interfering in American elections.
Yet in a sign that the United States still sees a need for China, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will visit on Monday after his latest negotiations in North Korea, the nuclear-armed regime which counts on Beijing as its diplomatic and economic lifeline.
Pompeo, speaking to the traveling press on his way to Asia, said China was “determined to support our efforts” on North Korea despite the high tensions…
Pence’s speech “doesn’t completely preclude cooperation on narrow areas like North Korea, but it’s much more clear in the U.S. assessment of Chinese intentions and China’s goal of really replacing the U.S. and pushing back U.S. power,” [Jamie Fly, a former official in the George W. Bush administration who heads the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States] said.
Remember back in 2012 when Obama laughed at Romney when the latter said that Russia was our biggest geopolitical threat? At this point there may be a consensus that it’s China:
Few policymakers with ties to the rival Democratic Party raised broad objections when the Trump White House in December released a National Security Strategy that cast China as a competitor.
The bargain set forth by former President Bill Clinton when he welcomed China into the global trading order — that greater prosperity would bring reforms — has fallen flat, with President Xi Jinping increasingly clamping down on domestic dissent and religious freedoms tightly controlled.
U.S. business leaders, who long advocated warm ties with China as they coveted the world’s largest consumer market, have cooled markedly toward Beijing amid complaints of widespread industrial espionage, which Beijing denies.
Here’s another article on the subject, which calls it a possible Cold War II, but I can’t get behind the paywall.
Nikkii Haley was one of the best UN ambassadors ever, so I’m sorry to see that she’s leaving the post. That said, her job was a largely thankless task in terms of any change being effected in that body. The UN is the UN, and although she was a strong voice for the US there, her skills might be better used elsewhere.
She preemptively sought to mute speculation she might run against her old boss, stressing that she will support Trump and will not campaign for the White House in 2020.
Haley called her time at the U.N. a “blessing,” but offered no reason for leaving other than a belief that government officials must know “when it’s time to step aside.”
Trump told reporters that Haley did “an incredible job” and is a “fantastic person.” He said she had told him six months ago that she wanted to take a break “maybe at the end of the year.”
“Hopefully you’ll be coming back at some point, maybe in another capacity,” he told her. “You can have your pick.”
Haley called her time at Turtle Bay the “honor of a lifetime” and said there was “nothing set on where I am going to go.” She also praised the work of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, particularly Kushner’s role in re-negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). She called Kushner a “hidden genius.”
That doesn’t sound to me like any sort of rift between Haley and Trump. Of course, looks can be deceiving. But that kind of praise between the sides is more than strictly necessary, and seems fairly convincing.
Others will spin it as they wish, of course, as described by Jim Geraghty:
Her departure set off a lot of breathless, and fairly inane, speculation, including claims that Haley was upset with the administration’s defense of Kavanaugh (when has Haley ever not spoken her mind?) or that there’s some sort of terrible scandal about to be revealed (how would Haley know about, say, the Robert Mueller investigation?). Occam’s Razor would suggest that the stated reasons are the true ones — that she has two college-age kids, the job is exhausting, and she’s accomplished a lot of what she set out to do…
Haley has explicitly stated that she plans to support Trump in 2020, so unless she wants to be called a liar, those who fervently hope she’ll primary Trump in that election are barking up the wrong tree. There’s also a widespread meme that the Trump administration was blindsided by her resignation, despite the fact that he says he’s known about it for 6 months.
I have no idea which of those is the truth, surprise or 6-month lead time; maybe neither. Maybe it’s actually something in-between the two.
It will be interesting to see whether there’s a next political step for Haley. My guess is that there will be, but she will be at the job until the end of the year so it may take a while to find out.
There was another bot crawler attack last night, unfortunately. My apologies to all of you who might have gotten “error” messages for a while when you tried to access the blog.
The good news is that it seems to have been thwarted fairly quickly by some changes I made behind the scenes. I think that now, with these changes in place, something similar is unlikely to recur. I certainly hope so.
Let me know if you’re still having some problems connecting. For me, it’s a little bit slow, so the situation is significantly better but not 100% better. I’m about to contact the web developer to see if he can fix the problem for good, but he’s pretty busy and it could take a little while. Once again, apologies.
There, did I cover enough bases? Did I get it right (I mean left)?
Like many things, Columbus Day has evolved. And here’s a discussion of the postmodern Columbus Day (from Dr. Sanity, circa 2009).
As for me, since I live up in New England and the weather has been good, I’ll should just play it safe and call it Leafpeepers Day. They’re out in force now (both the leaves and the human peepers).
I plan to take an official leafpeeping drive some weekday this week in order to try to avoid the worst of the vehicular congestion over the holiday itself.
Here are some photos I’ve taken during previous New England falls. The first isn’t a leaf, it’s a berry in its fall raiment. But let’s not get technical:
The most spectacular colors are always the reds, which come first:
You hear it everywhere right now: the Republican Party is united as never before.
Mitch McConnell was pretty witty about it: “I want to thank the mob because they’ve done the one thing we were having trouble doing, which was energizing the base.”
It’s not just the base, of course. The moderate right and the more conservative right and the more extreme right are all on the same page for the moment, thanks to the behavior of the Democrats.
But Democrats have behaved badly before, and it certainly didn’t unify the GOP. The Kavanaugh attacks and the GOP defense against those attacks had some very unusual characteristics that gave them that unifying potential and ensured that the potential was fulfilled:
(1) Kavanaugh is not especially conservative. He’s long been allied with the Bushes, and his judicial positions and decisions have not been extreme. In fact—although so much has happened since his initial nomination that it’s hard to remember the buzz at the beginning—quite a few people from the right wing of the party were unhappy about the nomination because they felt he’d be a squish as a justice and not conservative at all. And maybe he will be a lot squishier than we think. So initially it was actually the more conservative side of the GOP that wasn’t ecstatic about his nomination.
(2) Kavanaugh was seen by all as a sort of Boy Scout. He was nominated in part because there was no hint of scandal around him.
(3) And yet the most vicious attack ever seen against a SCOTUS nominee was launched against this particular candidate. The Roy Moore attacks worked in large part because the moderate wing of the GOP hated him, and he was seen even on the right as a bit loopy. Brett Kavanaugh had none of those characteristics. So although the GOP was expecting Kavanaugh to be attacked during his hearings, they were not expecting a combination of Borking (in the first stage for Kavanaugh) and the Clarence Thomas hearings (in the second, post-Ford stage), with the offensiveness of the accusations in that latter stage exponentially more serious than those leveled against Clarence Thomas by Anita Hill.
(4) The outrage and anger from both wings of the Republican Party was tremendous. But the far right of the party is often outraged and angry at what Democrats do. It’s the moderate wing that usually shrugs its shoulders or gives in. This time, that was not an option. Kavanaugh was their man, and he was being trashed.
(5) He was also being trashed in an exceptionally underhanded and extreme manner: sexual charges from when he was a teenager, minus any detail that would enable him to defend himself properly or disprove them, and with no corroboration. Then came the piling-on of even more scurrilous and less believable charges, and it was clear that the Democrats were championing trial by ordeal and mob rule.
(6) That was frightening to both sides of the GOP. But not one Democrat—with the single uncertain, wavering, and self-serving exception of Joe Manchin—was frightened by it. The rest jumped on board the USS Defamation.
(7) At that point, it was the moderate wing of the GOP that was galvanized. They suddenly discovered that the rules they thought they’d been playing by all this time, the ones they thought at least some of their Democratic colleagues shared, meant nothing to the opposition. They either had never held them at all, or were more than willing to abandon them—and all sense of decency—in their lust for power.
(8) And that’s why it was the moderate side of the right that stepped up to the plate and delivered the goods in the Kavanaugh fight. Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Chuck Grassley, Mitch McConnell, all of them harshly vilified in the past by the more conservative wing of the party, found themselves uttering words that those who had previously reviled them were now cheering.
(9) Those words from the RINOs had more power to rally the base than if the same messages had been delivered by senators further to the right. The factor of surprise made for a much more attention-getting story. Lindsay Graham’s tirade was much more newsworthy because it came from Graham rather than, for example, Ted Cruz. But in addition, because one of the biggest beefs the far right had previously had with the RINOs was the latters’ lack of courage and fight, the experience of actually seeing and hearing those RINOs fight, and fight hard, did much to evaporate the base’s former reasons for despising them.
And that, folks, is why the GOP is united for now.
I’m not going to bother to fisk this NY TImes op-ed by Alexis Grenell because Ann Althouse has already done it very well in this post. Instead, I want to concentrate on one phrase in one sentence of Grenell’s leftist, race-and-gender-obsessed screed [emphasis mine]:
Meanwhile, Senator Collins subjected us to a slow funeral dirge about due process and some other nonsense I couldn’t even hear through my rage headache as she announced on Friday she would vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh.
…[T]his debate is complicated further by the fact that the Senate confirmation process is not a trial. But certain fundamentally legal principles about due process, the presumption of innocence, and fairness do bear on my thinking, and I cannot abandon them. In evaluating any given claim of misconduct we will be ill served in the long republic if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness tempting though it may be.
We must always remember that it is when passions are most inflamed that fairness is most in jeopardy. The presumption of innocence is relevant to the advice and consent function when an accusation departs from a nominees otherwise exemplary record. I worry that departing from this presumption could a lead to a lack of public faith in the judiciary and would be hugely damaging to the confirmation process moving forward.
Some of the allegations levied against Judge Kavanaugh illustrate why the presumption of innocence is so important. I am thinking in particular not at the allegations raised by professor Ford, but of the allegations that when he was a teenager Judge Kavanaugh drugged multiple girls and used their weakened state to facility gang rape.
This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others. That’s such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court confirmation process is a stark reminder about why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our a American consciousness.
We’ve heard a lot from Democrats for the past couple of weeks about “due process” and how irrelevant it is when men are accused by women of the most serious sexual crimes in the court of public opinion. So that sentence of Grenell’s—which appears to be saying that due process is some sort of “nonsense”—is not some strange and idiosyncratic statement. Apparently the idea has become mainstream among Democrats, which is yet another sign (as though we needed any at this point) that leftists have taken over the Democratic Party.
Democrats used to champion due process. No more. But that was when there were more liberals in the Democratic Party than there are now. Alan Dershowitz just may be the only liberal left standing, because he actually does believe in applying the same rules to everyone accused, because he believes that process protects us all. But Alan Dershowitz seems pretty much alone in his own party, although Joe Manchin could at least claim that devotion to principle rather than naked self-serving political interest drove his vote for Kavanaugh.
It is completely understandable that the left thinks due process is “nonsense” when it might benefit someone they consider the enemy. If a political group is focused entirely on certain results and holds the banner of “ends justify means” aloft as their standard, then what would due process mean to them and why on earth would they value it? Due process is a process that is supposed to ensure the fairest possible end result, but sometimes a fair end result doesn’t benefit your side. If a political movement is only interested in what benefits its side it cannot possibly support a process that would be applied equally to all comers.
“Process” then becomes “nonsense,” mere meaningless babble that can be safely ignored because a person is having a “rage headache” at not getting the desired results. Results are the only thing that matter, after all.
I’m still at that big family event, so I’ll be relatively brief.
—I wonder what older Democratic senators such as Feinstein and Schumer, who started out as liberal Democrats rather than full-on leftists, see when they look in the mirror today. I’m not referring to their physical selves and the ravages of time, I’m referring to their consciences and the proverbial mirror rather than the actual one. Do they like what they see, or do they feel any sense of shame whatsoever? Was the path to this point so slow and gradual, with compromise after compromise and rationalization after rationalization along the way, that they no longer have any consideration except “ends justify means” in the path to power? Or did they never care about anything else, right from the start? I don’t ask the question of the younger ones like Kamala Harris, because she is now exactly what she was the day she was elected.
—I hope Justice-to-be Kavanaugh has remarkable powers of recuperation, and a good set of bodyguards for his entire family.
—Those who praised the #MeToo movement in general have been misguided, IMHO. It always contained the pernicious idea “believe the women”—a rubric that is incompatible with fairness and justice—plus a built-in contagion effect in which the very title of the movement encourages a willingness to join in the accusative chorus and be part of the victim group. If one harks back to the days when women’s accusations were often ignored even when they had substance, then something like “take women’s accusations seriously” or “don’t disbelieve the women” might make sense as a slogan (although I realize they’re not the least bit catchy). But a requirement to automatically believe any class or group of people is always going to lead to a dangerous miscarriage of justice. So this isn’t really a perversion of the #MeToo movement or a highjacking of it. #MeToo always continued that mob element.
—It will be interesting to see whether the energy on the right holds through the election of 2018. I fervently hope it does. It certainly has a decent chance of doing so, because this has been an exceptionally painful and difficult episode to witness and to experience. My guess is that it won’t soon be forgotten.
Richard Landes, the man who exposed the al Durah hoax and coined the term “Pallywood” for the Palestinian staging of false scenes of victimization at the hands of Israelis, is writing a new book. It’s not out yet, but it will be called They’re so Smart cause We’re so Stupid: A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century. Landes is a historian by trade, a courageous and brilliant man, and a good friend of mine.
Here’s an excerpt from his work in progress; it describes his discovery of how obvious the fakery of Pallywood was, and how complicit the news media in Europe has been:
Even had the child [Muhammad al Durah] died in a crossfire, blaming his death on deliberate Israeli action made it a classic blood libel: A gentile boy dies; the Jews are accused of plotting the murder; violent mobs, invoking the dead martyr, attack the Jews…The first blood libel announced by a Jew (Enderlin)[a renowned French journalist], spread by the modern mainstream news media (MSNM), and carried in cyberspace to a global audience. It was the first wildly successful piece of “fake news” of the 21st century, and, as an icon of hatred, it did untold damage.
Here’s how Landes was able to see the rushes, the raw video footage from which the much shorter version that had been shown around the world had been taken:
And that had brought me to see these rushes, the raw, unedited footage shot that day in September 2000 at Netzarim Junction. The film was in the possession of senior French-Israeli journalist and France2 chief correspondent Charles Enderlin, who was the employer of Abu Rahma, the cameraman who had shot the footage. He was known to only show the rushes to investigators “on his side” but coming on the recommendation of a friend, Enderlin assumed I was sympathetic. For the viewing, I had Enderlin on my left, and on my right, an Israeli cameraman working for France2, who had been with Enderlin in Ramallah the day of the filming.
What I saw astonished me. In scene after scene, Palestinians staged scenes of battle, injury, ambulance evacuation, and panicked flight, which the cameraman deliberately filmed, all the while standing around in front of the Israeli position, completely unafraid. To judge by Abu Rahma’s 21 minutes of film, and a Reuters cameraman’s two hours, Netzarim Junction that day of September, the “third day of the intifada,” was the site of multiple makeshift stages upon which cameramen, most Palestinian, some foreign, filmed “action sequences,” performed by everyone from military men with guns to teenagers and kids standing by…
The Israeli France2 cameraman snorted.
“Why do you laugh?” I asked.
“It’s so obviously fake,” he responded.
“I know,” I said, turning to Enderlin, “this all seems fake.”
“Oh, they do that all the time. It’s a cultural thing” The senior correspondent replied.
“So why couldn’t they have faked it with al Durah?”
“They’re not good enough,” said Enderlin. “They can’t fool me.” …
I already knew that Palestinians faked footage, but what I now understood was that the mainstream news media, whose first imperative was to filter out such blatant propaganda, had accepted it as a normal practice, and used the fakes to tell the “real” story…as they can cut it into believable site-bytes of Israeli aggression and Palestinian victimhood…When Esther Schapira, in her documentary Three Bullets and a Dead Child, asked a TV official with the Palestinian Authority why he had spliced into the al Durah footage a shot of an Israeli aiming his gun (at crowds rioting because of the al Durah footage, making it look like he was ‘targeting’ al Durah, he responded:
These are forms of artistic expression, but all of this serves to convey the truth … We never forget our higher journalistic principles to which we are committed of relating the truth and nothing but the truth…
A higher truth, of course.
Landes was shaken:
As I left the building, still stunned by Enderlin’s response—he had been using the cameraman, apparently never rebuking him for his unprofessional behavior, for twelve years!—thinking about the deep symbiosis of Palestinian staging and Western news reports. “It’s an industry,” I thought, “a ‘national’ industry, like Hollywood, or Bollywood… it’s Pallywood.
Had Enderlin had the courage to respond to Abu Rahma’s al Durah, lethal propaganda by firing him, and running a sensational piece on how his own Palestinian cameraman had tried to trick him into airing a staged scene in support of a potentially lethal blood libel… had he warned his fellow journalists of the danger to their professional integrity in running Palestinian-filmed footage without checking carefully… the course of the Oslo Jihad, and with it, the future of civil society in the 21st century might have been very different.
What I soon discovered, however, was the immense resistance of everyone involved, even the Israelis, to any effort to change the narrative.
I am heartily sick of Christine Blasey Ford, and I hope her three weeks of fame is now over or will be over very very very soon, and she will return to the obscurity she professes to crave. Whatever happens, I believe the left will continue to laud and reward her as a great heroine.
Note that I didn’t call her “Doctor,” the title used 99% of the time when referring to her. I know a huge number of people with PhD’s and not one of them —not one—insists on being called “Doctor.”
I have no idea whether in Ford’s pre-Kavanaugh-accusation life she habitually used the title and insisted on others using it when addressing her, but I believe that the consistent use of it ever since she became the center of America’s attention has been an attempt to bolster her credibility (I have become quite sick of that word, too) by keeping her professional status foremost in viewers’ minds.
This post isn’t going to be a thorough discussion of all the reasons I find Ford not “credible” but rather “incredible.” But I do want to take a moment to analyze just a single brief clip of Rachel Mitchell’s questions about flying, that exposed Ford as a blatant, brazen liar. This passage makes me wonder why anyone would believe a word Ford says after seeing it. And yet many do.
Mitchell was extraordinarily low-key in her own presentation. I believe that is a very studied and practiced role for her, meant to disarm and put the interviewee at ease. Mitchell seems friendly, but here she is carefully and calmly asking a series of questions to which she almost certainly knows the correct answers, although she’s not sure how Ford is going to answer. This basic line of questioning also had to be one that Ford anticipated being asked by Mitchell, so no doubt Ford had prepared some basic answers in advance. But it didn’t go quite the way Ford had hoped.
At the start of the clip, a very friendly, seemingly relaxed Mitchell asks how Ford got to Washington, a question Ford had to know would present her with a conundrum. How could she possibly explain that, after having put out word that she was afraid to fly?
Ford answers in her little-girl voice, “In an [here we get a slightly abashed smile from Ford] airplane.” Mitchell then asks her more directly about her fear of flying, a question Ford had to have been expecting, and Ford responds that she was [emphasis mine], “hoping to avoid getting on an airplane, but eventually was able to get up the gumption [to fly to DC] with the help of some friends.”
This is a very carefully crafted answer. In it, Ford attempts to convey the idea that she is indeed afraid of flying and therefore was telling the truth about that when she had asked for the delay, but that in certain rare and very pressing circumstances, with a lot of help from her friends, she can manage to muster up the courage to fly. She’s indicating that she’s emotionally vulnerable, and that if Mitchell or anyone else pushes too hard she could crumble, but that she is also strong when needed, although only with the help of friends and after great effort. Thus she is vulnerable yet strong when needed, and dependent on others to be kind to her and help her out. She’s asking Mitchell (and the listeners) to be gentle and kind with her, too.
At that point I think Ford believes she’s established exactly what she set out to do.
Shortly afterward, in the same gentle, non-threatening manner, Mitchell asks, “In fact you fly fairly frequently for your hobbies and you’ve had to fly for your work, is that true?” Note that “hobbies” comes first. If Ford answers “yes”—and she pretty much has to, because she knows there are probably records of this—she sounds frivolous, as though she’s ready to jet off at a moment’s notice, for a lark.
So Ford fastens on the “work” portion of the question, and answers “Yes, unfortunately.” emphasizing her reluctance and fear again. Then there are questions from Mitchell about possible work Ford’s done in Australia, and Ford answers that, although she worked for a company based there, there’s no requriement to go there and she’s certainly not been there. With a little smile she adds, “No, I don’t think I’ll make it to Australia!” The clear implication is that Australia is way too far for her to travel, and Mitchell responds by doing another friendly thing, smiling and agreeing, “It is long.” Ford smiles, too. Again, I think she believes she’s dodged that bullet, which is what Mitchell wants her to believe.
And later Mitchell says, without raising her voice or changing her friendly affect, that in Ford’s CV she lists as interests: surf travel, Hawaii, Costa Rica, South Pacific Islands, French Polynesia, and asks whether Ford has ever been to those places. The listener can’t help but contemplate how far away those destinations are—almost as far as Australia, a place Ford has just denied traveling to (and a place Mitchell almost certainly already knew that Ford had not traveled to but asked about anyway because Mitchell wanted to elicit the denial for contrast). And Ford says quite simply: “Correct.”
Correct. She’s flown to all those places. And they are vacation spots, too. It dawns on the listener that this women doesn’t just fly now and then, when she works up the gumption. This women is a world traveler, for adventure and fun. Nothing forced her to go to any of these places, and of course she wouldn’t hesitate to go to Australia too if she needed to or wanted to.
At this point Ford realizes how bad that sounded, and she regroups. Intensifying her little-girl affect, she says that it’s “easier for me to travel that direction when it’s a vacation”—which really makes no sense at all in terms of fear of flying. And what difference does the direction—east or west—make? At this point Ford’s body language also gives her away. She does a little flutter with both hands as though to say “Oh, whatever; I guess that wasn’t my most effective answer,” and then she shakes her head “no” almost imperceptibly.
Collins was the goat until yesterday. But her speech made her the hero. I wonder whether she wrote it herself, and when. It sounded like it took a while to compose, and if so, then she’s been thinking “yes” on Kavanaugh for quite some time. I didn’t agree with everything she said—for example, I am much harder on Ford. But I think it was an excellent speech nonetheless, and all the more powerful for her being a woman from a blue-ish state, and for having a reputation as one of the most moderate people in the Senate.
Graham—well, Graham may have surprised even himself in this fight. But ever since I saw him speak at a small venue during the 2016 campaign, I’ve been impressed by his very well-developed sense of humor, which was on full display that day, and his sharp mind.
Ever since the Garland nomination it’s been clear that McConnell is very serious about getting people on the right on the Court. Very. But for years, people on the right have been criticizing him as an establishment squish, no different and no better than the Democrats. Not true, although he has his faults.
I said “surprising,” so I didn’t put Trump in there because his defense of Kavanaugh is unsurprising, although it certainly was necessary. And Kavanaugh himself perhaps should be listed, except that since we hardly knew him before this, we can’t be too surprised.
That’s not a trio that conservatives usually praise. But that’s the way this one played out, strangely enough. The Democrats’ conduct was so egregiously horrific that even those predisposed to reach across the aisle (Graham, Collins) felt as though their hands had been slapped, and they didn’t like it one little bit.
