Netanyahu’s Iranian files

The New Neo Posted on by

Netanyahu made an announcement today:

Netanyahu, a longtime opponent of the nuclear agreement, said Israeli forces had recently seized reams of secret documents from Iran detailing what he called Tehran’s past attempts to conceal a military nuclear program. Iran has always insisted that it is developing nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.

“Tonight we’re going to reveal new and conclusive proof of the secret nuclear weapons program that Iran has been hiding,” Netanyahu said. “Iran lied. Big time. After signing the nuclear deal in 2015, Iran intensified its effort to hide its nuclear files.”…

The files predate the 2015 nuclear deal and thus do not reveal a technical violation of that agreement, which Trump has threatened to abandon next month. Many U.S. officials and experts have long believed that Iran conducted research into the development of nuclear weapons in the past decade.

So these files constitute evidence that what most people suspected was true of Iran actually was true of Iran.

And, by extrapolation, probably still is true of Iran.

The opposition says it’s really irrelevant:

“While Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump have long been determined to undermine this agreement, their own security establishments continue to confirm that the deal is working and that Iran is compliant with all of its commitments. Nothing we were shown today contradicts or disproves that expert assessment,” said Dylan Williams, [J Street’s] vice president of government affairs.

And I have to say that it’s not clear what’s new here, except for the details. After all:

[Q] So when Netanyahu says the entire basis for the deal was a lie, he’s only partly correct: Iran may have lied, but the deal was already based on the assumption that Iran had lied?

[A] That’s absolutely correct. I would say that the basis for the deal was a face-saving way out for Iran whereby we didn’t make the Iranians fess up that they had a nuclear weapons program. Of course it would have been better if they had been willing to do that. But in order to get the deal we chose not to force the Iranians to fess up.

I’m obviously not condoning Iran lying to the IAEA, and of course these documents need to be fully investigated for their veracity and the IAEA should push Iran on the information found in these documents. So I’m not saying we shouldn’t just ignore it. But I am saying that we forged the Iran deal on the basis that Iran had a nuclear weapons program that it wasn’t about to admit to.

If you make a deal with liars, why would they not lie again? I think the argument of people such as James Acton, the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment of International Peace and the person being interviewed in the above quote, is that if we don’t trust them the situation is dire. Of course, the situation is dire if we do trust them and they’re not trustworthy.

Reagan said “trust but verify” (which was actually an old Russian proverb). When Obama was negotiating the Iran deal, the administration supposedly changed the saying to “distrust but verify”—which would have to mean “that the P5+1 deal must verifiably eliminate any pathway to nuclear development for Iran.” The problem is that it didn’t.

[NOTE: I think there is also some significance in the fact that it may have been Israel who just attacked some weapons sites in Syria. My guess is that this is a message to Iran.]

[ADDENDUM: Also, Iran must be wondering how those files were obtained. And “wondering” is a mild word for what I mean.]

The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner: so funny I forgot to laugh

The New Neo Posted on by

The brouhaha over the jokes (that should be the “jokes”) at the White House correspondents’ dinner is basically a big yawn.

The most interesting part of it is that even some people on the Democratic side of things seem to have been a bit put off by the mean-spirited quality of the “humor” on display that night. Or maybe they were merely put off by an approach that seems to have targeted Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ looks. Or maybe they just felt the proceedings exposed too much of their own venom, contradicting their own version of themselves as objective purveyors of truth, and made it seem as though the abominable Donald Trump showed great good judgment in boycotting them.

I bet certain other attendees wish they hadn’t been there, too

But my takeaway is: why would anyone be surprised at this? This sort of freely-expressed bile has long ago become mainstream. And comedians are for the most part no longer the least bit funny.

I don’t think that latter observation is solely because I’ve become an old curmudgeon myself, although I suppose I have. But I’ve noticed that being edgy, offensive, and obscene has become a substitute for humor these days.

I used to actually go to comedy clubs now and then. The last time I did was a long time ago, and the transition had already occurred. I didn’t laugh once, and I think most of the people who did were either very drunk or very stoned.

This year, I’m surprised that the White House Correspondents didn’t invite the enormously unfunny Kathy Griffin to be the keynote comedy act and do a reprise of her enormously unfunny severed head routine.

Posting will be a bit late today

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve had a busy day today, so posting will be delayed till later than usual in the afternoon.

Nothing special going on; just some appointments and tasks I need to do. But I thought since we’re all creatures of habit (at least, I am) I’d let you know.

Tune in later…

When we had to wait

The New Neo Posted on by

While taking a walk the other day in a suburban area, I passed a yard with a tire swing tied to a large tree branch.

Into my head popped a song lyric that goes like this:

Life was just a tire swing
‘Jambalaya’ was the only song I could sing…

That was it. Just a fragment. What was it from? I remembered that I’d first heard the song on the car radio, back when the car radio was all I had to entertain myself while driving (and before that, I’d had no car radio at all for quite a few years).

No iPod. No CDs. Not even audiotapes. Just that little ole car radio and me. I was in the habit of listening to one particular radio station that played nonstop non-pop songs—some country music, some folk songs, and a lot of singer-songwriters.

That was the first place where I’d ever heard any song by Richard Thompson: it was “From Galway to Graceland,” if I’m not mistaken. Thompson’s unique voice wasn’t the prettiest in the world, but there was something so arresting about it that I had a 3-day-long earworm for the song and had to find out who sang it. I’d missed the moment when they’d announced that on the radio. No internet, no Google; I couldn’t think of any other way to find out the singer than to listen intently to the station and wait for them to play it again and announce it again.

And play it again they finally did, some weeks later. They said it was “Richard Thompson.” I made a mental note, and Richard Thompson made a lifelong fan.

Same for Don McLean and “American Pie.” It had a great hook: “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/And them good ole boys were drinking whiskey and rye/Singing ‘this’ll be the day when I die’…” I waited for the next time the station played that song, and discovered the name and artist.

That’s the way we used to do it. It was like a treasure hunt. I suppose I could have gone to a record store (remember them?) and asked. But I didn’t think of it.

But now, of course, the answer to the “life was just a tire swing” question is at my fingertips. I’d never Googled it before this, but voila! The answer is Jimmy Buffet, with these words—and here it is, as though by magic. I don’t have to wait for any radio station to get around to playing it (which would be a mighty long wait these days):

And here, just for the heck of it, is Richard Thompson with “From Galway to Graceland”:

The phenomenon wasn’t just limited to music, either. Every week when I was a kid I’d eagerly await the arrival of the TV Guide and open it. What was I looking for? The movies that were scheduled that week. I had three or four that were always on my radar screen, although their identity changed over time as I grew from child to teenager. At this point I don’t even remember what they were, but I do remember my extreme excitement on the rare occasions when one of them appeared on the TV Guide list.

And then, of course, I had to be home at that exact time to see it. No going out and setting the VCR to record it, no tevoing. And if there was a conflicting show at the same time, tough. You had to make your decision—had to say yes to one, and let the other one ride:

Alfie Evans and British liberty

The New Neo Posted on by

Alfie Evans died last night. RIP, and condolences to his mourning and suffering family.

Evans’ death has spotlighted some legal and philosophical issues about the Brits that I first noticed years ago when I was researching the laws of defamation in England. The common thread is the British attitude towards liberty. This may seem like a digression, but believe me it’s not:

Given how closely the U.S. and Britain align on many topics, the degree to which they differ on the issue of free speech is striking…

In American courts, the burden of proof rests with the person who brings a claim of libel. In British courts, the author or journalist has the burden of proof, and typically loses.

Britain is not an outlier, either. In fact, it’s the US that is the outlier in its more stalwart defense of liberty (the same is true of the laws of hate speech). And the Alfie Evans case—with its enormous and complex medical and philosophical and religious overlay—is also an example of liberty denied by the state.

So I agree with this:

…I cannot help but look on with sadness and occasional revulsion as the British State increasingly seems to regard and treat its citizens as subjects.

The people of the UK are still able to elect their leaders and impose dramatic changes, of course, so it would be a gross overstatement to liken their government (as some critics have) to a totalitarian regime. But a string of recent stories and incidents have raised serious fears in my mind about whether Great Britain is becoming something other than ”” something less than ”” a truly free country…

…Free people have a general sense of what freedom looks like, and that isn’t it.

And this:

Imagine having to go to a hospital in a case where no abuse or neglect has been alleged, let alone imagined, and having to bargain for the release of your own child. Now imagine that added to the knowledge that the hospital’s plan for your child is to neglect him to death, even though he has been breathing on his own for three days straight, and when other medical facilities are volunteering to offer treatment or at least palliative care for as long as the child still lives.

In a previous post I discussed how the US presently treats similar cases. It is still quite different here; generally, the parents’ wishes are afforded more weight. I think this bears repeating:

A better analogy to the Charlie Gard case [and that of Evans] is that of Jahi McMath, involving a minor child and a dispute between Jahi’s family and her hospital and doctors over the definition of brain death and when life support should end. However, the McMath case was settled by an agreement between the child’s family and the hospital in which the family was allowed to take her from the hospital and continue life support.

If the Charlie Gard case had occurred in the US, however, the legal emphasis differs. In the UK, disputes between parents and doctors are brought to court under an objective best interests of the child standard. But in the United States, in similar cases the best interests “tend to be resolved in favor of parental rights,” according to Dr. John D. Lantos, director of Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. And, when courts do overrule parents’ wishes in the US, they usually do so to order care over parental objections rather than the opposite.

The different legal standard in the UK was further described by Claire Fenton-Glynn, legal scholar at the University of Cambridge:

“English law”¦does not see parents as having the ”˜right’ to make decisions on behalf of their children. The concept is called parental responsibility: That is, the parent has a responsibility to make decisions, to look after the child,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t give them rights; parenthood gives them responsibilities.”

And lawyer and ethicist Seema Shah describes the differences between American and British law this way:

Legally, though, US courts are following the same best-interest standard as the UK, but the way it works here, at least in practice, is that “courts are deferring to parents,” Shah said.

We could go the way of Britain, however. The general drift of this country, particularly during the Obama years, was in that direction. I doubt the majority of people in this country would welcome the adoption of something like British law in cases like that of Alfie Evans, despite our general leftward shift. Actually, I doubt that the majority of people in Britain favor this policy, either, but the only poll I could find on the subject was this highly unscientific one in which 92% of respondents said Alfie’s parents should have been allowed to take him to Italy. My guess is that although that might not be the true figure, it still represents the fact that a strong majority of people in Britain are not happy with the decision of their government.

But more and more it seems as though judges and elected officials are going in an entirely different direction than the people they are supposed to represent and serve. It is not the least bit surprising that this tends to be in the direction of increasing their own power over those citizens. The Alfie Evans case is a particularly poignant and stark example of the exercise of this power.

Austin Bay on Trump and the Koreas

The New Neo Posted on by

Austin Bay on Trump and the two Koreas. Here’s a sample:

In March 2017, Trump’s foreign policy team of then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, Vice President Mike Pence and the tweeter-in-chief himself began a coordinated attack on Kim Jong Un’s miserable regime, with the interim goals of disrupting Pyongyang’s political and military plans, exposing the regime’s grave weaknesses, psychologically rattling its leader, and determining if the plump brat was educable or merely a homicidal fat rat dead set on his own extermination. Team Trump’s ultimate goal was to set conditions for achieving the long-range goal: denuclearizing the Korean peninsula.

On March 17, 2017, Tillerson said: “Let me be very clear: the policy of strategic patience has ended. We are exploring a new range of diplomatic, security, economic measures. All options are on the table.”

Bay describes some of the details.

Trump will never get credit from the MSM for any of this if it works out. If it doesn’t (which is a distinct possibility, considering who we’re dealing with in Kim) he will most definitely get the blame.

I’ll tell you one thing: it it does work out well, or even somewhat well, he’ll certainly get credit from me. I’m with Lindsay Graham on this:

“Donald Trump convinced North Korea and China he was serious about bringing about change. We’re not there yet, but if this happens, President Trump deserves the Nobel Peace Prize,” Graham said Friday on “Fox & Friends.”

North Korea has seemed like an intractable problem no matter who was president and no matter what party was in control. This has been true for decades, as we watched the situation slowly and seemingly-inexorably worsen. Say what you will about Trump, but he has a different approach than his predecessors—although actually it seems (as Bay describes in his essay) like a Trumpish version of the classic carrot-stick method.

Pro-Trump vs. Never-Trump blogging

The New Neo Posted on by

Ace has a fascinating piece about the decisions bloggers and other pundits on the right have had to make in the era of Trump.

Fascinating to me, anyway. He writes:

Some time ago I faced the choice of doing an anti-Trump-but-pro-conservative blog, or getting on board with Trump…

But when I was contemplating the idea of a blog that was allegedly pro-conservative while simultaneously being against the key player (flaws and all) of the actual on-the-ground real-world conservative movement, I realized: This makes no sense.

What’s the audience for that? How many readers would that attract? How narrow a window would I have to shoot for, simultaneously opposing the president and the putative leader of the conservative movement while also allegedly being a bright red TruCon gung-ho for conservative political victories?

Wouldn’t any conservative political victory redound to Trump’s benefit? And wouldn’t my opposition to Trump mean that I would not welcome such victories?…

Add into this the fact that most blog commentary involves very attitudinal snark and denigration of one’s political opponents. It doesn’t have to involve that, but the practical reality is: It almost always involves that.

I faced the same dilemma during the primaries and prior to the election in 2016. But I didn’t really see it as a question for me. That’s because my philosophy is if you’re not going to speak your mind on your own blog, why blog at all?

Of course, it helps that my traffic isn’t all that big. I mean, it’s not tiny, but it’s probably a small fraction of Ace’s, and although I make some money on this blog the amount is also probably a small fraction of what someone like Ace makes blogging. Naturally, I’d like both those numbers to increase, but (as he also points out) “very attitudinal snark and denigration of one’s political opponents” seems to be the way of most (not all) high-traffic blogs, and that’s not my forte (or my interest, or my inclination) either.

In fact, this paragraph of Ace’s might just be the problem with yours truly, although I hope I’m more interesting that that:

And now what’s the audience down to? You can either write in such a careful and emotionless way that you aren’t read as snarking at your intraparty rivals — but that would probably result in a dry and overly-milquetoast blog, with few readers.

When Trump was a candidate, I was honest about my opinion that his track record and style as a private citizen indicated there would be big trouble. If he were to be nominated, I thought he’d lose the election. And if he were to be elected, I thought he’d break his conservative promises and/or be power-mad and/or wreak havoc in foreign affairs. But I always said I’d be happy to be proven wrong, and I always said if he somehow were to become president I would evaluate him on his actions thereafter.

I think my position during the campaign was supported by the evidence at the time, and I’m happy to report that I’ve been pleasantly surprised by his actions since the election. But if that trajectory puts me in some sort of “careful and emotionless…overly-milquetoast” category—well then, that’s the way it is.

But the dilemma for bloggers and pundits has been (and remains) real. I lost a lot of readers during the campaign, about 1/3 of my previous traffic. My income from the blog declined, as well. Some have come back, but far from all. Of course, those developments might also reflect the fact that people are tired of politics and its bitterness, and turned off from Amazon (from which I derive a certain percentage of my blog income).

Who knows? But in the final analysis, I gotta be me. I yam what I am. Yadda yadda yadda.

[ADDENDUM: Here’s an article on the RedState firings of a lot of anti-Trump bloggers, the topic that sparked Ace’s post. I read RedState quite often, and I have to say that—for me, anyway—one of the big problems with the writing of some of the people RedState fired (I don’t read them all, but I’m familiar with some of them) is that they seemed reflexively anti-Trump, seeing nefarious things about him even in the most innocuous things.]

The Cosby verdict and the law

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Bill Cosby was found guilty on three counts of aggravated indecent assault against Andrea Constand in 2004.

The MeToo movement is happy, flooding Twitter with tweets such as these:

Do I think Cosby is guilty? Most likely.

Do I think the trial was fair, and that Bill Cosby got justice? I have grave doubts, and that’s what this post is about. Continue reading →

SCOTUS has been hearing arguments on the Trump travel order

The New Neo Posted on by

How will the Court rule? You can see various tweets discussing it here.

I’ve long been impressed by how much of the speculation about future SCOTUS decisions, based on how the oral arguments go, turns out to be wrong. But for what it’s worth, most people seem to think the Court will rule for Trump. I certainly think the Court should rule for Trump, based on the law. But we all know that’s not always the way things go.

Have you noticed how much of the news lately seems to have to do with law and legal issues? One reason is that “lawfare” is a favorite way the so-called Resistance has been fighting tooth and nail against Trump. In that bitter battle, at the SCOTUS level, the actions of McConnell in the waning days of the Obama administration to block his ability to nominate a SCOTUS justice loom large.

The McConnell-hating “Congressional GOP and the Democrats are all alike”-stating wing of the right often forgets things like that.

[NOTE: I wrote more here on the subject of McConnell and how he blocked Garland and helped confirm Gorsuch—and, by the way, how the blocking of Garland may have helped elect Trump.

It used to be that presidents pretty much got their judicial nominees approved. That was pre-Bork; the Bork battle began a long slide to the point we’re at now, where both sides play hardball.]

Trump: guilty till proven innocent…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and of course there is no way he is innocent no matter what proof might be offered.

Here’s Andrew C. McCarthy on the subject:

Byron York’s Washington Examiner column takes up the question of whether, where Donald Trump is concerned, the “generally accepted standard of justice has been turned on its head.” The matter at issue is the so-called Steele dossier, the Clinton-campaign-sponsored compilation of opposition-research memos that the author, former British spy Christopher Steele, masqueraded as intelligence reports. Byron collects commentary from left-leaning political, academic, and media doyens, all arguing that the dossier’s sensational allegations carry a degree of credibility because, though unverified, they have not been proven untrue.

It is a depressing fact that most people who hate and fear Donald Trump would see nothing wrong with that sort of argument. After all, they want to “cut down every law” to “get after the Devil.” And Trump is the Devil.

McCarthy again, on the Steele dossier’s allegations and their credibility:

The dossier did not drop out of the sky five minutes ago. Many media outlets had it long before it was finally published 17 months ago, refusing to run with it because they well knew that doing so would be irresponsible. The FBI has had Steele’s reports for nearly two years. As former deputy director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee, the bureau made elaborate efforts to corroborate it. What’s more, the FBI and Justice Department have come in for fierce criticism for failing to verify dossier allegations that were included in the surveillance applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court). They have great incentive to show corroboration if it exists, but they haven’t.

The provenance of the document (about which the FISA Court was kept in the dark) strongly counsel against crediting its assertions. It is partisan opposition research generated for the purposes of a heated, acrimonious election campaign. Its allegations were leaked to the media for partisan purposes, and journalists, notwithstanding their unabashed anti-Trump biases, have not been able to corroborate it, either. We know that Steele, who is banned from entering Russia, relied on third- and fourth-hand hearsay from Russian sources who, for the most part, have not even been identified. And (as I’ve recounted here), Steele himself does not stand behind what he has written. In court proceedings, he has taken the position that the dossier is a collection of bits of “raw intelligence” that are “unverified” and “warranted further investigation” before anyone should have publicized or relied on them.

So the proponent of uncorroborated assertions, upon being sued for libel, has not just declined to defend them but has undercut their reliability. How could fair-minded people, then, repeat these allegations as if they had standing?

The president’s opposition has clearly decided there is no duty to be fair-minded in matters Trumpian. When I ask about this, there’s not so much a defense as a deflection: Well, is Trump’s commentary fair-minded? No, it’s often wrong and way over the top. But I’m not making Trump’s behavior the standard by which I measure mine, so it’s odd to me that people who detest him do so.

McCarthy is a very smart—even brilliant—lawyer. But it’s not the least bit “odd” that people who detest Trump use this sort of rhetorical ploy when they have no other way to counter McCarthy’s arguments. Because there is no valid way to counter his arguments. The force of logic, tradition, and law is behind them.

But the Devil must be cut down.