“Whistleblower” credibility

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a post at RedState entitled, “If Ciaramella is the Whistleblower, Democrats Have Made a Major Blunder and Their Credibility Will Evaporate.” An excerpt:

When the American people fully understand that Ciaramella submitted his complaint for the sole purpose of triggering an impeachment inquiry, and learn about his activities and close associations in D.C., the limited credibility the Democratic Party still retains will evaporate. Especially if the Durham investigation turns up criminal or merely unethical behavior on the part of Obama Administration officials.

One observation I have is that the repeated use of the term “whistleblower” gives Ciaramella (or whosever it is) much too much credit. He is not an actual whistleblower, a term with a precise legal definition that this person does not even begin to meet, and that’s true whether it’s Ciaramella or not:

As I first explained in a column six weeks ago, the so-called “whistleblower” is not a whistleblower at all. The complaint he filed against President Trump does not meet the two requisite conditions set forth in the ICWPA. That is, the alleged wrongful conduct must involve intelligence activity and it must be committed by a member of the intelligence community.

This was meticulously explained in an 11-page opinion by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) when it issued the following opinion: “The president is not a member of the intelligence community, and his communication with a foreign leader involved no intelligence operation or other activity aided at collecting or analyzing foreign intelligence.”…

To put it plainly, there is no whistleblower statute that permits an unelected and inferior federal employee to blow the whistle on the president, the most superior officer in the U.S. government.

Article II of the Constitution gives the president sweeping power to conduct foreign affairs, negotiate with leaders of other nations, make requests or solicit information.

In addition, even for a bona fide whistleblower, there is no guarantee of anonymity.

And yet you will find that virtually every liberal – and nearly all the MSM coverage – proclaims that this is a whistleblower and that it is wrong to “out” him. So much for facts, or law. The stakes are too high for the Democrats and the MSM to pay attention to such niceties.

So why would they care who Ciaramella is or what his motives might be, or even whether he is trustworthy? Will Democratic credibility collapse even more as a result of what we learn about him and how biased he is, and how connected to the major coup planners? It really depends, as so many things do, on what the vast (or maybe not-so-vast) middle-of-the-road group of Americans manages to learn about it, and what they ultimately come to believe is true.

The Democrats’ plan is ultimately to marginalize the “whistleblower,” and make him a person who served merely to jump-start a huge investigation in which biased witnesses attempt to corroborate (mostly through their own opinions rather than factual knowledge) what the “whistleblower” said Trump had done and how alarming it was. The idea was (and still is) to hammer home the same message from various other sources and hope that sheer repetition and numbers will make the public forget that there is no actual evidence of wrongdoing.

Another hope the Democrats have is to discover an actual smoking gun if they search long enough and hard enough. If that were to happen, who the “whistleblower” is will then become relatively unimportant.

Those are their hopes. So far it doesn’t seem to have happened. And of course, there are the looming Horowitz and Durham investigations, breathing down their necks.

[NOTE: For much more on who Ciaramella is, please see this.]

Schiff rules

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I wrote a post about impeachment in which I mentioned that they are about to hold public hearings. The post ended like this:

If this report is correct, Republican counsel will be allowed to ask questions. Fancy that.

Note the sarcasm. I could not imagine that Schiff would be allowing Republicans free rein to point out the flaws in what the witnesses would be saying.

And indeed, my skepticism was warranted:

Just a little earlier today, House Intelligence Committee Chairman and de facto leader of the House impeachment caucus released a directive in which he identified the only three areas potential public witnesses would be allowed to testify about…

Schiff is also requiring Ranking Member, CA Republican Devin Nunes, to submit a list of all the GOP’s potential witnesses no later than “Saturday, November 8” (apparently calendars are not available to the House Democrats) and he must provide “detailed” justification of each witness.

The three questions are as follows:

1. Did the President request that a foreign leader and government initiate investigations to benefit the President’s personal political interests in the United States, including an investigation related to the President’s political rival and potential opponent in the 2020 U.S. presidential election?

2. Did the President — directly or through agents — seek to use the power of the Office of the President and other instruments of the federal government in other ways to apply pressure on the head of state and government of Ukraine to advance the President’s personal political interests, including by leveraging an Oval Office meeting desired by the President of Ukraine or by withholding U.S. military assistance to Ukraine?

3. Did the President and his Administration seek to obstruct, suppress, or cover up information to conceal from the Congress and the American people evidence about the President’s actions and conduct?

Schiff wants to present a semblance of fairness without actual fairness at all. The real question is – as it has been all along – how many of the people can Schiff fool how much of the time?

[NOTE: This may be parenthetical – but I don’t think Schiff is an especially popular figure, even among Democrats. There is something shifty (pun intended) and repellent about him.]

The long-running coup

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Trump gave a speech Wednesday in Louisiana in which he quoted tweets made by the current “whistleblower’s” lawyer back in 2017:

“I don’t know if you saw, I’m coming off the plane and they hand me — look at this character — they just hand me this story,” he said, referring to Mark S. Zaid, the attorney representing the so-called “whistleblower” in the impeachment inquiry against the president.

“Coup has started. First of many steps,” Zaid wrote. “Rebellion, Impeachment will follow ultimately.”

Trump called Zaid a “sleazeball” and read another post on Twitter from the lawyer predicting that “CNN will play a key role in Donald Trump not finishing out his first term.”

“It’s all a hoax, it’s a scam, and you know who helps them, these people, the media,” Trump said, pointing to the back of the hall, as the crowd booed.

This is the original Fox News article that Trump quoted. Zaid’s tweets occurred shortly after Trump was inaugurated and could not possibly have referred to anything he was later doing as president.

There is nothing surprising about those tweets by Zaid. They are reflective of a process that began even before Trump was inaugurated, and about which the plotters were actually quite up-front about their intent if not every one of their methods. I have previously written this post about the process, entitled “The Deep State hatched its plot against Trump very early, and they told us so.” In that post I cited this article from Vanity Fair which was published a mere twelve days after Trump’s inauguration. I’ll quote it again:

Others, however, view resistance as a part of the job. “Policy dissent is in our culture,” one diplomat in Africa, who signed the letter circulating among foreign diplomats, told The New York Times. “We even have awards for it,” this person added, in reference to the State Department’s “Constructive Dissent” award. One Justice Department employee told the Post, “You’re going to see the bureaucrats using time to their advantage,” and added that “people here will resist and push back against orders they find unconscionable,” by whistle-blowing, leaking to the press, and lodging internal complaints. Others are staying in contact with officials appointed by President Obama to learn more about how they can undermine Trump’s agenda and attending workshops on how to effectively engage in civil disobedience, the Post reports.

Zaid’s tweets are merely one part of this plan.

Zaid is now trying to defend himself in this way:

…Zaid sent Fox News a formal statement Thursday in which he said the social media posts were written with the belief that Trump would likely be “stepping over the line” at some point during his presidency.

“Those tweets were reflective and repeated the sentiments of millions of people,” Zaid said. “I was referring to a completely lawful process of what President Trump would likely face as a result of stepping over the line, and that particularly whatever would happen would come about as a result of lawyers. The coup comment referred to those working inside the Administration who were already, just a week into office, standing up to him to enforce recognized rules of law.“

Yeah, sure, Mr. Zaid. The word “coup” is a term always used to refer to “a completely lawful process” and particularly what happens “as a result of lawyers.”

Let’s revisit Zaid’s words: “Coup has started. First of many steps.”

He doesn’t say that it will start if and only if Trump crosses some line. He says it has already started. Lawyers know how to use words, and they tend to use them very precisely, and Zaid is a lawyer.

Zaid also wrote at the time: “Rebellion, Impeachment will follow ultimately.” Again, he is saying these things will happen, not as a result of anything Trump might do, but as a result of the coup that has already begun.

And no, impeachment is not ordinarily a coup – unless, of course, it’s a completely partisan act based on information cooked up by enemy moles plotting against a president, spying on him, planting traps for him, and then pretending they can read his mind and interpret what he really meant (a sort of thoughtcrime that they cannot prove) rather than relying on his actual words and deeds.

Impeachment isn’t going so well for the Democrats so far

The New Neo Posted on by

Mollie Hemingway writes:

…[T]he witnesses thus far cannot point to a single crime, much less a high crime, for which to impeach the president. Instead, the witnesses either broadly support the president’s handling of foreign policy or are livid with rage over his disagreement with their foreign policy views.

While the losing faction in 2016 has great trouble with Trump’s less interventionist foreign policy, it is not actually grounds for impeachment. Even if one were to take issue with that foreign policy, nobody has been able to point to a single crime that took place in any interaction with Ukraine, much less one committed by the president, which is a serious barrier for an impeachment inquiry.

Also, unlike the Russia collusion hoax, Republican politicians aren’t falling for it at all.

The GOP is presenting an unusually united front of Trump support, with just a few exceptions that really don’t matter (Mitt Romney, who has squandered whatever influence he may once have had). The polls, however, are all over the place, probably because polls have become more and more untrustworthy in recent years. What does the American voter really think? I do not know, although to me the entire inquiry has been obviously biased as well as dangerously secret and partisan.

But I don’t necessarily represent the views of the majority of the American public:

Polls that were working very hard to show growing support for impeachment have seen decreased support as Americans learn more about the probe, settling into a proxy for questions of Trump’s approval or favorability. National Review editor Rich Lowry noted in that “Meet the Press” panel that even in a poll that showed a slight majority of Americans favoring impeachment, a larger majority opposed removal in favor of waiting to see election results in 2020.

Polls also show that impeachment is disfavored in critical battleground states. And according to the latest Fox News poll, only 38 percent of independents favored impeachment.

And this entire business of a quid pro quo that the left and the MSM keep harping on is a red herring for a number of reasons, but the main one is that unless Trump had clearly made aid contingent on a unwarranted and corrupt investigation of Biden himself, there would be nothing especially suspicious even in a quid pro quo. As Alex Breusewitz writes

The President has taken a firm position that he did not hold out foreign aid to Ukraine as a condition for investigating Hunter Biden’s activities there. But, even if he did, bargaining isn’t corruption—it’s policymaking…

To be sure, some folks may disagree with the President’s foreign policy, but elections matter in a representative democracy, and President Trump was duly elected. Whether or not you agree with his politics, he has been elected to do a job: govern.

So let’s suppose—strictly for the sake of argument—that the President did withhold foreign aid to Ukraine in exchange for a commitment to investigate allegations of corruption. This is, quite literally, the exchange of one policy for another—horse-trading in every sense. Does the United States have no policy interest in making sure that the countries with which it interacts—and to which it sends aid money—do not engage in corrupt practices? Of course, it does. The case for “corruption” would require that President Trump withdraw aid in exchange for personal profit—not policy gains that are ultimately good for American foreign policy.

At its core, the case for impeachment is more than a sham: it’s a misinformation campaign in which Democrats and their media are willfully ignoring the way our policy process works to prevent our President from governing.

A sign that Schiff and company may sense the hearings aren’t going so well in the present format is that that format is about to change:

“We’re glad to see that Chairman Schiff has decided to move his impeachment proceedings out of his top-secret bunker and into the public eye,” a GOP aide told Fox News Wednesday. “We’re confident that the American people will see that there was no quid pro quo and no pressure on the Ukrainian government — for anything.”

The GOP aide added: “Unlike Chairman Schiff, we have never had anything to hide and look forward to the opportunity to present the facts of the case.”

If this report is correct, Republican counsel will be allowed to ask questions. Fancy that.

Spicing up Dancing With the Stars

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve watched Dancing With the Stars for a season or two a few years ago, and haven’t viewed it in ages. But I’m well aware of the brouhaha around the fact that execrable dancer Sean Spicer, former press secretary of none other than Donald Trump, is still on the show while far better dancers have been voted off.

Earth to critics: this is one of those shows where audience votes call the shots completely. It’s not a meritocracy about dance skills, although there’s some of that. But the audience is given complete power, and therefore the show represents an example of that much-abused word, democracy. And as such, right now the voting reflects the populist nature of Trump’s own support.

All of this is apparently driving a certain segment of the population stark raving mad. Or maybe they’ve been that way for a while.

Reader “LeClerc” called my attention to this piece by Gia Kourlas in the NY Times by asking:

Do you agree with Ms. Kourlas that Spicer’s green shirt was “scary” ?

Do you agree that Spicer exhibited a “cold brutality” ?

Thanks in advance for your assessment.

The headline to Kourlas’ piece is “No, Sean Spicer Really Can’t Dance.” And indeed, he cannot dance at all well. Simply put, he’s a terrible dancer, although I’ve seen much worse. He’s wooden and his movement has no flow or grace. But he seems to be having a good time, and he’s game and a good sport, which I think is worth something. After all, it takes guts to dance in front of the world when you are quite bad at the activity, or to appear in costumes that make you look more than a tad foolish after having been in public life previously as a serious person.

Kourlas, on the other hand, sees the Spicer she wants to see: a scary, brutish figure:

He hides behind an egregious smile, parting his teeth to make it look as though he’s been caught mid-laugh. That smile seems meant to distract from his plan of attack: never actually performing a dance, but conquering it…

Watching Mr. Spicer try to wipe away some of his disgrace through dancing hurts. Yet here he is, week after week, using dance as a way to redeem his character. Giving the public the chance to laugh with him — dressed as a buffoon in that scary green ruffled shirt, dancing to “Spice Up Your Life” — and not at him comes off as a calculation, on his (and probably the show’s) part. And Mr. Spicer’s later performances have been scary in a different way, like his militaristic Paso Doble, which had a cold brutality to it.

I watched a couple of Spicer’s offerings and saw none of that. I saw a guy who is an awkward dancer – as are a lot of people – trying his best to do a good job. All awkward dancers look stiff and uncomfortable, and Spicer’s body language is nothing unusual for a bad dancer. But he puts on a good face and has a lot of upbeat energy.

Koulas also writes:

Bad dancing by a nonprofessional can be disarming. It allows you to see the truth within the body that reveals character. But Mr. Spicer, the former White House press secretary and communications director for President Trump, is something worse: an untruthful dancer.

But if dancing reveals truth within the body, then there is no such thing as an “untruthful dancer.” And I actually agree with Koulas that dancing reveals a sort of “truth,” but I don’t think it’s a global truth, it’s merely a dancing truth. Nor does that “truth” reveal character in general.

For example, there are smooth and relaxed and open dancers who are nothing of the sort as people in real life. And vice versa. And I’ve noticed time and again that there are wonderful athletes, full of grace and ease in their movements while doing their favored sports, who can’t dance worth a dime.

So give it a break, Spicer-haters.

And I give Spicer extra points here for bongo playing, and for the knee-slide at the end. That last move would lay me up for weeks (trigger warning: I believe this features the aforementioned “scary” green shirt):

The 40th anniversary of the Iran hostage crisis…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is being celebrated:

Iran on Monday held an event commemorating the 40th anniversary of the 1979 hostage crisis at the U.S. Embassy and also announced fresh violations of the 2015 nuclear deal it arranged with former U.S. President Barack Obama, including plans to deploy a new uranium centrifuge that would work 50 times faster than the equipment it was permitted to use under the deal.

For the occasion, I’m going to recycle a (slightly edited) post I wrote in 2006 about the Iranian spokesman during the crisis, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, a figure who fascinated me at the time of the crisis and who met a sorry end. (There are a number of dead links in the post; I noted some but probably didn’t catch them all.)
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In this Atlantic article [link now dead], a name on the first page caught my eye: Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, the Iranian foreign minister at the time of the hostage crisis.

Suddenly, although I hadn’t thought of him in decades, the memory came back. Ghotbzadeh! I recall his sardonic, jaded, man-of-the-world expression—a strange combination of arrogance and weariness. As the spokesperson for the regime, he was featured often on TV (I think on the nascent “Nightline,” “America Held Hostage”). As a visible and familiar figure, he became somewhat of a focus for my frustration and annoyance with the entire situation. Something about him seemed hollow, although he was clearly intelligent and articulate.

As events unfolded, it turned out that Ghotbzadeh was one of those cautionary figures, a man who was instrumental in planning a revolution that then got away from him and proceeded to devour him in the process. Like Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins; like Trotsky and so many other engineers of the Russian revolution who were slaughtered in the great purges; authors of violent revolutions often come to violent ends at the hands of their violent former comrades.

Thus it was with Ghotbzadeh. Here he is:

Ghotbzadeh was close to the Ayatollah Khomeini while both were in exile in Paris, and became one of his right-hand men back home in the early days of the revolution. He seems to have been motivated most strongly by hatred of the Shah’s regime. But, paradoxically, his role in the hostage crisis was as a relative moderate (accent on the “relative;” moderate in comparison to what?). He seemed to be working for a diplomatic solution, and lost favor with the Iranian powers that be in the process.

Former hostage and Ambassador at the time, Bruce Laingen, has this to say [another dead link] about Ghotbzadeh:

I didn’t like him at the outset for the role he played as Foreign Minister, but I sensed as time went on over those months, that he came to the conclusion, himself, fairly early, that this hostage business was counterproductive to the revolution and that it needed to be ended. I think he genuinely wanted to end it and was prepared to make some concessions to do that. And he stuck his neck out to do that. He showed some guts.

It all unraveled rather quickly:

Ghotbzadeh finally resigned in 1980 over the deadlock in negotiations. That year, after he was arrested and briefly detained after criticizing the ruling Islamic Republican Party, he retired from public life. In 1982 he was arrested on charges of plotting against the regime. Although he denied any conspiracy to take Khomeini’s life, he apparently admitted complicity with Ayatollah Mohammad Kazem Shariat-Madari in a plot to overthrow the government. Ghotbzadeh was convicted in August 1982 and executed the following month.

Did he really plan to end the Khomeini reign, and, if so, with what was he planning to replace it? Or were the charges trumped up, and was he forced to confess to crimes he didn’t commit? At the time, I remember being astounded at the news of his startling reversal of fortune and allegiance; it was quite a switch from disliking him to feeling some sympathy for the man.

Guillotining having gone out of style, Ghotbzadeh was shot by a firing squad shortly after his trial. The revolution had eaten another of its own.

But not everyone connected with the early days of the revolution has met such a fate. Others connected with the hostage crisis have prospered. It’s unclear whether or not the current Iranian President, our good friend Ahmadinejad, was one of those “student” hostage-takers, although several former hostages have identified him as such. But there’s very little doubt about the identity of another former hostage-taker who’s riding high at present: Hussein Sheikholeslam, recently an Iranian diplomat and legislator.

Why do I mention Sheikholeslam? Only because I came across an interesting fact about him, an indication of the sort of cross-fertilization process that seems to have been at work in the revolutions of the 60s/70s. Sheikholeslam may not have been an actual student at the time of the hostage-taking in Iran. But whether or not Sheikholeslam was a student at that point, he certainly had been a student earlier—at UC Berkeley, where he learned a thing or two:

UC Berkeley gained a reputation as a center of student anti-war protest during the 1960s and 1970s. During that tempestuous period, an Iranian student named Hussein Sheikh-ol-eslam attended Cal. He became fluent in English. He also absorbed the demonstrations criticizing American imperialism in Vietnam and other nations.

After Hussein returned to Iran, writes Mark Bowden in his new book, “Guests of the Ayatollah,” his anti-Americanism planted deep roots in his Islamic religion. In late 1979, the tree connected to those roots bore ugly fruit.

The student protests of the 60s didn’t actually revolutionize much in the directly political and traditionally revolutionary (i.e. a sudden overthrow of the existing government) sense in the US. The “revolution” they began here took a cultural form, with resultant political results (and intent). But in Iran, students who had learned the anti-American and propaganda lessons of the 60s used them later to great (and more instant) effect. Some forget that the 60s didn’t just happen in this country; the protests occurred in Europe as well.

Khomeini spent some of his exile in France, but I was surprised to learn (from Wikipedia) that the French were not necessarily simpatico to him during his rather short sojourn there:

In 1963, [Khomeini] publicly denounced the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was thereby imprisoned for 8 months, and upon his release in 1964, he made a similar denunciation of the United States. This led to his forced exile out of Iran. He initially went to Turkey but was later allowed to move to Iraq, where he stayed until being forced to leave in 1978, after then-Vice President Saddam Hussein forced him out…after which he went to Neauphle-le-Ché¢teau in France. According to Alexandre de Marenches (then head of the French secret services), France suggested to the Shah that they could “arrange for Khomeini to have a fatal accident”; the Shah declined the assassination offer, arguing that this would make him a martyr.

[NOTE: My post about Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, is relevant here. Nafisi, an Iranian national, likewise fell in with other radical Iranian students while studying in this country. Then, when she returned to Iran, she saw quite a few of those former associates imprisoned—and in some cases executed—by their former comrades-in-arms.]

[ADDENDUM: Also please see this about the Carter administration’s failed hostage rescue attempt.]

Burisma and the Obama administration

The New Neo Posted on by

The plot thickens:

Hunter Biden and his Ukrainian gas firm colleagues had multiple contacts with the Obama State Department during the 2016 election cycle, including one just a month before Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire the prosecutor investigating his son’s company for corruption, newly released memos show.

During that February 2016 contact, a U.S. representative for Burisma Holdings sought a meeting with Undersecretary of State Catherine A. Novelli to discuss ending the corruption allegations against the Ukrainian firm where Hunter Biden worked as a board member, according to memos obtained under a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. (I filed that suit this summer with the help of the public interest law firm the Southeastern Legal Foundation.)…

A person who assisted Blue Star and Buretta in settling the Burisma matters in Ukraine told me in an interview that the late February 2016 overture to State was prompted by a dramatic series of events in Ukraine that included when that country’s top prosecutor escalated a two-year probe into Burisma and its founder, the oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky…

By early 2016 the Ukrainian investigation had advanced enough that then-Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin authorized a court-ordered seizure of Zlochevsky’s home and other valuables, including a luxury car. That seizure occurred on Feb. 2, 2016, according to published reports in Ukraine.

Not too long after that, Joe Biden pressed for prosecutor Shokin’s removal – ostensibly for not being hard enough on corruption – and he was indeed removed. But Shokin says he was removed because he was investigating Hunter Biden’s firm.

About those NeverTrump Republicans

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve already talked an awful lot here about the phenomenon of the NeverTrumpers on the right. Even so, this piece on the subject is well worth reading:

Before President Trump’s explosive entrance onto the political scene, mainstream conservatism was somewhat tolerated by gatekeepers in the media, academia, and the arts. My heroes were nuisances to America’s increasingly liberal institutions, sure, but no real threat to the progressively progressive status quo. Establishment conservatives were tokens, allowing liberal elites to pretend they were objective when they were fully intent on transforming American society.

But Donald J. Trump was a different animal altogether, one who refused to kowtow to the cultural norms of American political theater. His frank and straightforward style was intolerable to liberal puppet masters who had spent decades corralling Republicans and forcing them to play nice.

Establishment Republicans have built entire careers out of playing nice. And it shows.

The threat of banishment from cocktail parties and university lectures—over Donald Trump of all people—has been enough to force much of the right’s pundit class to toss aside their ideals to preserve mainstream acceptance.

Three years later, it’s this cadre of tamed conservatives who are lending their efforts to the left’s never-ending coup against the President.

In some ways, author Greg Jones’ trajectory is like mine in that he wasn’t particularly political prior to 9/11 and yet found himself surprisingly attracted to conservative thought after that event. In addition, during the 2016 campaign, Jones was initially quite anti-Trump, but during Trump’s presidency he has come to appreciate what Trump’s been doing.

But Jones and I are also quite different. Jones is much younger than I am, for starters. He also describes some of the supposed conservatives who later became NeverTrumpers as having once been his “heroes.”

I would never, never ever, have described them that way.

If I have any “hero” at all in the camp of conservative thinkers, then or now – and I’m not sure that I do – it would be limited to Thomas Sowell, a uniquely clear and fearless thinker whose writings were especially resonant to me when I was undergoing my political change.

I think the word “hero” should be used very sparingly, and time has proven me correct as so many feet of clay are revealed.

The revival of the Juanita Broaddrick rape charges against Bill Clinton: coming soon?

The New Neo Posted on by

Ronan Farrow seems to be revving up for some investigative research on the rape allegations Juanita Broaddrick has made for years against Bill Clinton:

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow said on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, that “credible” accusations of rape had been made against former President Bill Clinton by Juanita Broaddrick, adding that an investigation into the allegations is now “overdue.”

My opinion? Sure, look into it.

The following is the content of a post I wrote on the subject in May of 2016. Interestingly enough, the reason I took the topic up back then was that Trump had discussed it during his campaign for the presidency.
_____________________________________________

The topic of Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton has come up again this campaign season, a result of Donald Trump bringing it up in an interview with Sean Hannity.

Although anyone who reads this blog regularly knows I have no hesitation to criticize Trump vigorously, this is not an instance where I’m going to do it. Trump’s point is a valid one, and not only because Broaddrick’s accusations are serious enough to be at least potentially credible (particularly since there are people who swear she told them the story close to the time it allegedly occurred, back in 1978). It also is particularly relevant for Trump, who was recently the target of an article in the NY Times alleging various rather mild offenses on his part towards women, which even if true were deemed unoffensive by a lot of readers.

That does not mean, however, that Broaddrick’s allegations are true. We don’t know if they are or aren’t, and a good case could be made for either position. The full story is a complicated one, but you can read the pros and cons of it here if you’re interested. That Slate piece was published in 1999, when Broaddrick’s accusations surfaced, and it points out various inconsistencies in her story (including her saying under oath that Bill Clinton did not assault her, and then one year later saying he did). Also, several of the witnesses who said she told them the story long ago had beefs with Bill Clinton and might have a motive to lie. Lastly, although there is no question that Bill Clinton has been a major philanderer who came on to women at the drop of a—whatever, no one else but Broaddrick has ever alleged that he raped her.

That does not mean that Broaddrick is lying, however. She might indeed be telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The problem is that there are good arguments for either side. What does my gut tell me on this one? My gut says it just doesn’t know.

[NOTE: More details here.]

[ADDENDUM: That’s all I wrote in 2016. Later there was another discussion of her charges in a different thread, and I offered this comment there.]

Elizabeth Warren tries some math on Medicare for All…

The New Neo Posted on by

…and the results are not good:

Elizabeth Warren has come up with a plan to pay for her “Medicare For All” proposal, which has a price tag in the tens of trillions of dollars. Part of the plan is a “wealth tax,” which means taxing unrealized capital gains at ordinary income rates. Combined with other elements of her plan, this implies that unrealized capital gains will be taxed at more than 50%. …

I’ll tell you this, though: lawyers are a core constituency of the Democratic Party, and nearly every lawyer in the U.S. (along with many others, of course) tolerates paying 50% marginal tax rates on his or her income only because a chunk of that income is sheltered in 401(k)s. The 401(k) and the house are where the vast majority of high income earners accumulate wealth. Warren’s proposal essentially destroys the ability to build wealth via retirement savings. This may be OK with those who are already rich, like Elizabeth Warren, but it will be anathema to younger people who are trying to become wealthy.

That applies to a lot of people, but let’s stay with lawyers for now, the group I know best. Assessing a “wealth tax” that invades previously tax-free 401(k)s at a 50%+ rate will destroy Warren’s support in what has been, in recent years, a core Democratic Party constituency. “Wall Street,” i.e. the financial industry, has already warned that if Warren is the Democrats’ nominee, it will not support her. That in itself is seismic; no industry has ever supported a politician to the extent that Wall Street supported Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. But the loss of support from America’s lawyers might be even more deadly to the Democratic Party.

More here:

Economist Jonathan Gruber famously attributed the passage of Obamacare to “the stupidity of the American voter.” The MIT professor’s assessment of the electorate’s collective intelligence is clearly shared by Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren if she expects us to take her “Medicare for All” funding plan seriously. She wants us to believe that she can expand a program already verging on bankruptcy — Medicare for the elderly will go broke in 2026 according to the most recent Trustees report — to cover every American without raising middle-class taxes…

You are by now anxious to know where the extra $20.5 trillion is going to come from. Warren’s answer to that question may cause your BS detector to go off. Her plan repeatedly claims that this stupendous amount of money includes “not one penny in middle-class tax increases.” There will, of course, be taxes on the Left’s designated villains, including “the financial sector, large corporations and the top 1 percent of individuals.” There will be additional taxes paid by “ultra-millionaires and billionaires,” as well as an additional employer tax the plan styles a “new Employer Medicare Contribution.” It goes without saying, of course, that there will be a substantial cut in what she calls the “military slush fund.”

Part of the $20.5 trillion will allegedly come from “savings.” The savings scheme that will get your attention involves the loss of your employer health insurance. It’s going away whether you like it or not. How will that save money? “As the experts I asked to evaluate my plan noted, private insurers had administrative costs of 12% of premiums collected in 2017, while Medicare kept its administrative costs down to 2.3%.” This is fiction. Medicare’s overhead costs aren’t lower. They are just hidden in the budgets of other agencies such as the IRS, the Social Security Administration, and HHS. The Warren plan also double-counts certain savings, as Charles Blahous of the Manhattan Institute writes:

These proposals are always complex, and evaluating them takes a level of tax and financial knowledge most people lack (I certainly lack it). Warren relies on this, and on the fact that she can easily locate some experts to parrot the pro-Warren line. But some things are clear and reflect what used to be known as “common sense” because it used to be quite common: health care is expensive, there is no free lunch, and there is a finite amount of money you can squeeze from the very wealthy.

[ADDENDUM: I have previously discussed the problem of valuing unrealized gains here.]