The disgraceful Bowe Bergdahl saga

The New Neo Posted on by

Bowe Bergdahl has pleaded guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy, and this article reminds us—if anyone needed reminding—what a terrible deal Obama made for him, and what a farce his welcome-home ceremony and the publicity around it was:

In 2015, Obama tried to cover Bergdahl in the glory of a war hero, even inviting his parents to the Rose Garden to celebrate the news of his release. The former president maintained he only freed five Taliban leaders to free a soldier who, in the words of his National Security Adviser Susan Rice, served “the United States with honor and distinction.”

But they knew better. They had to have: The Pentagon itself refused to list Bergdahl as a POW. That’s because an internal 2009 Army report found he had a history of walking off his post and more than likely deserted. It also found he shipped his laptop back home to Idaho, and left a note expressing his disillusionment with the war, before ending up in the arms of the Taliban.

Obama had access to this intelligence long before he made his Taliban deal. So why did he trade a known deserter – and likely enemy sympathizer, if not collaborator – for five enemy commanders whom he acknowledged posed a national security risk? Simple: To justify the release from Gitmo of five “forever detainees,”who otherwise would never have been released and would have delayed achieving his promise to antiwar liberals to withdraw from Afghanistan and empty Gitmo.

It didn’t take more than a few days for the truth to emerge, either. For example, I wrote this post about five days after the Bergdahl story first broke. In it, I stated:

Nothing about the Bergdahl/Taliban affair should have surprised me””or, for that matter, you. Nothing.

Not Obama’s audacity, nor his disregard of prior bipartisan warnings in Congress or from the intelligence community, nor his aides’ attempts to discredit those from Bergdahl’s unit who are calling Bergdahl a deserter or worse, nor Obama’s refusal to offer any apologies whatsoever for his actions in this affair, nor his lies and broken promises, nor the fact that many Democrats are lining up to defend him like the good party hacks that they are.

But an intellectual reaction is one thing. Intellectually, I’m not surprised. But there’s still an emotional reaction””what Peter Wehner referred to as a visceral reaction””which is to be stunned, disgusted, outraged, and full of trepidation about both the long-term effects of this move and what Obama will be doing for a series of encores.

By the way, I think Trump was out of line during his campaign when he called Bergdahl a traitor. Correct, but out of line, because it could have ended up with the judge ruling that Bergdahl could not get a fair trial.

Waiting for Hillary-Godot

The New Neo Posted on by

Laurence Lessig is a law professor at Harvard, with credentials of the impeccable sort (or what used to be called “impeccable”): the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University, and before that a law professor at Stanford.

He also ran for president in 2016 as a Democrat, but if you blinked you missed it.

Anyway, he seems to be the champion of “when trout swim down Great Ormond Street” speculation. I wrote about an op-ed he’d written for the WaPo (certainly not an obscure newspaper) shortly after the 2016 election, which I characterized this way:

“The obligatory ‘the electors should vote for Hillary’ articles”—What are these articles about? After all, it’s pretty much a certainty that there won’t be a revolt by an enormous group of rogue electors…

Electors ordinarily comply with the wishes of their states, and certainly not enough of them have ever defied those wishes to make a particle of difference…

Not gonna happen, and I submit that the authors of both articles [there were two articles to that effect, one by Lessig] know it’s not gonna happen. So what’s the point of writing them? To stir up anger, hope, and turmoil among Democrats who are eager to delegitimize Trump as president, and also to discredit the institution of the Electoral College, which liberals and leftists tend to believe works against them and the pure democracy they believe would favor them.

Lessig has not given up, nor have some others. Nearly a year later he’s been featured in a Newsweek article by perhaps-aptly-named Julia Glum, who outlines his five-step program by which Hillary Clinton could yet become president:

If number 1: If Trump is definitively found to have colluded directly with Russia, he would be forced to resign or be impeached.

If number 2: If Trump is removed, Vice President Mike Pence would become president.

If number 3: If Pence becomes president, he should resign too, given that he benefited from the same help from Mother Russia.

If number 4: If Pence resigns before appointing a vice president, Ryan would become president.

If number 5: If Ryan becomes president, he should do the right thing and choose Clinton for vice president. Then he should resign.

“The answer seems unavoidable: He should nominate the person defeated by the treason of his own party, and then step aside and let her become the president,” Lessig writes. “Without doubt, if Ryan did the right thing, that would be the most extraordinary event in the history of America since the Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter. But unlike that, this event would build the union, not divide it.”

Lessig, who briefly ran for the Democratic nomination in 2015, adds that Clinton would then appoint Ryan to be veep out of political goodwill.

Remember, this man is a professor of law at Harvard.

I also discovered he is a political changer with a right-to-left trajectory. That sort of change is very rare if it takes place after the formative (that is, student) years, but Lessig’s change seems to have occurred while he was in college, which makes him fairly typical of right-to-left changers. Here’s the story:

Lessig earned a B.A. degree in Economics and a B.S. degree in Management (Wharton School) from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. degree in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (Trinity) in England, and a J.D. degree from Yale Law School in 1989. After graduating from law school, he clerked for a year for Judge Richard Posner, at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, Illinois, and another year for Justice Antonin Scalia at the Supreme Court…

Lessig has been politically liberal since studying philosophy at Cambridge in the mid-1980s. By the late 1980s when he was selected to serve as a law clerk for two influential conservative judges, Judge Richard Posner and Justice Antonin Scalia, he was effectively the token liberal on their staffs, chosen for his brilliance rather than for his ideology. Posner would later call him “the most distinguished law professor of his generation.”

Lessig has emphasized in interviews that his philosophy experience at Cambridge radically changed his values and career path. Previously, he had held strong conservative or libertarian political views, desired a career in business, was a highly active member of Teenage Republicans, served as the Youth Governor for Pennsylvania through the YMCA Youth and Government program in 1978, and almost pursued a Republican political career.

What was intended to be a year abroad at Cambridge convinced him instead to stay another two years to complete an undergraduate degree in philosophy and develop his changed political values. During this time, he also traveled in the Eastern Bloc, where he acquired a lifelong interest in Eastern European law and politics.

Lessig remains skeptical of government intervention but favors some regulation, calling himself “a constitutionalist.”

Maybe some day I’ll do a bit more research on this guy to try to discover what happened to swing him to the left. Right now, it seems to me from a quick perusal that he’s not a very typical leftist (or a very typical anything). He seems to be primarily a libertarian of the left and a deeply quirky character who lives, as far as I can see, in a dreamworld. But that dreamworld certainly seems to get quite a bit of traction in the press and academia, and no doubt influences some unknown number of people.

What I wrote a year ago about Lessig’s op-ed is something that could be repeated about this latest effort by Lessig channeled though Ms. Glum: “To stir up anger, hope, and turmoil among Democrats who are eager to delegitimize Trump as president.”

Hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego: when the excrement hits the pavement

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a hepatitis A outbreak in San Diego, and this article was the first one I read about it. It seems to tap-dance around directly stating what has caused the problem, but it’s not all that difficult to figure it out [emphasis mine]:

At least 481 people have been infected and 17 have died of the infection since November in San Diego. Eight-eight other cases have been identified in Santa Cruz and Los Angeles counties, where hepatitis A outbreaks have been declared.

Officials throughout the state are now rushing to vaccinate homeless populations, which are considered the most at risk…

Dr. Janet Haas, president-elect of the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, said the outbreak is unusual for the U.S. because the spread of the liver infection has been blamed on a lack of basic hygiene and sanitation, not contaminated food…

“It’s not like there’s never been a hepatitis A outbreak before. ”¦ We know what’s worked in the past. Usually that contains it and the story ends,” Haas said. “But sometimes it doesn’t work, or circumstances are different and you have to ramp it up.”…

In San Diego, where nearly 85 percent of all confirmed cases are located, cleaning crews are hitting the streets, attacking them with high-pressure water mixed with bleach to sanitize any surfaces contaminated with feces, blood or other body fluids.

A private company was hired in September to deliver portable hand-washing stations in places where homeless residents tend to congregate.

Despite those efforts, the disease is spreading and many are asking what could have been done and what will effectively prevent future transmission…

County health officials have been hesitant to release any additional information about where the cases are specifically concentrated, citing state and federal health privacy laws.

In other words, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that this outbreak has been caused by homeless people defecating in the streets.

Is San Diego anything like the far more leftist Seattle, where cleaning human poop off the sidewalk with a power hose is considered insufficiently sensitive? And New York City has recently ended criminal prosecutions for public urinating (which is nowhere near the health hazard of public defecating).

HuffPo is quite direct about the San Diego problem and the fact that public human defecation has caused it. But it’s not as simple as blaming the homeless, because the volume of homeless people in San Diego (and certain other cities) has grown with the rise in housing costs and the lack of low-income housing. In addition, San Diego has remarkably few public restrooms:

In 2015, San Diego had just three city restroom facilities open round the clock, the San Diego County grand jury that investigates government operations reported. San Francisco had 25. San Diego had spent more than a decade trying to solve the problem, but funding difficulties, lack of support from businesses and concerns that additional facilities would attract more homeless people downtown have stood in the way, the grand jury noted.

Last week, as the crisis expanded, the city was making 14 public bathrooms accessible 24/7, and the mayor’s office said the city is hoping to install more. City officials plan to open three new temporary tented shelters with restroom facilities and other services, they announced Wednesday. At least 30 hand-washing stations have also been installed around the city, with the option to add more.

There are a lot of problems that come together here: the lack of affordable housing, the pleasant year-round climate that makes many areas of California a magnet for street people, the lack of public bathrooms, the refusal of many homeless people to go to shelters, the marginal mental status of no small number of homeless people (my guess is that this sub-population may be the one doing the bulk of the public defecating) either through chronic mental illness or drugs, and city governments that haven’t dealt with the problem adequately either because it’s not easy to solve or because they lack the political will (or both).

And why so few public bathrooms in San Diego? Lest you think it’s a simple problem with a simple solution—such as “build more of them”— please read this from 2015, before the current hepatitis outbreak:

…Portland Loo…[is] a prefabricated public restroom that’s been popping up from Seattle to Cincinnati to Montreal. The loos have real toilets and running water, and are better ventilated than port-a-potties.

But they’re controversial. The toilets turned out to be much pricier than expected, and some people complain that they could attract illicit activity ”“ prostitution or drug use…

Portland Loos are designed to ease the daunting task of keeping a public restroom safe and clean. They can be power-washed and have slits along the bottom to make it clear if there’s somebody inside. They cost about $100,000 each, but that doesn’t include the connection to sewer lines, which is where some cities stumble.

San Diego spent more than half a million dollars installing its two loos ”” double the initial price tag. Now, due to more costs and residents’ complaints, it’s planning to remove one and put it in storage. A nearby homeless shelter will open its bathrooms around the clock instead…

“The homeless population is up in this area since the Portland Loo was installed,” says Jon Wantz, who runs a restaurant a few blocks away from one. “The increased activity, whether it be criminal or drug-related, or just transient-related in general, it’s not good for business.”

“Affording individuals the ability to use a private and safe space to utilize the restroom is basic dignity,” counters Heather Pollock, executive director of Girls Think Tank, a San Diego homeless advocacy nonprofit. A restroom isn’t truly public, she says, unless everyone can use it ”” and many people aren’t allowed in the restrooms inside stores and restaurants.

“If I walked in and was holding all of my belongings, or I hadn’t showered in a few days, there’s a very high likelihood that I would not be able to utilize that,” she says.

What a mess. Literally.

[NOTE: It is estimated that about 12% of the world’s population defecates outdoors, mostly in rural areas (where it tends not to cause as many problems) but also in many urban areas in third-world countries such as India.]

Austria moves to the right

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s a trend:

Angela Merkel’s misguided migration policy ”” which allowed nearly 1 million people from Africa and the Middle East to enter Germany in 2015 ”” has claimed another political victim. Her centrist Christian Democratic government lost a great deal of support to the populist Alternative for Germany in last month’s election because of her mishandling of the migration flood. And today, Christian Kern, the left-wing Social Democratic chancellor of Austria, lost his job because of his own party’s involvement in opening Austria to 75,000 new migrants. Germany borders Austria, and many refugees and economic migrants entered Germany through Austria, with 75,000 remaining.

Festering public anger at uncontrolled immigration, crime, wasteful spending, and bureaucratic arrogance has hurt all established political parties. But the damage to left-wing parties has been the most severe. Taken together, the three left-wing parties in Germany ”” the Social Democrats, the Greens, and the Left party ”” won only 38 percent of the vote in last month’s elections. Twenty years ago, the three combined won 53 percent. Similarly, in Austria, the three left-wing parties together won only 34 percent of the vote today, with the environmentalist Greens shut out of parliament for the first time in more than 30 years.

People don’t like being condescended to and not listened to.

The Austrian political situation also seems to represents a coup by the young against a more staid Old Guard, the latter perhaps somewhat equivalent to our Republican establishment that’s aroused so much ire in the US from former supporters impatient with them. I don’t pretend for a moment to be conversant with Austrian politics, but that’s what the following sounds like to me:

The clear winners are the parties of the populist Right. Take Austria. The center-right People’s Party was floundering early this year, trapped in an unpopular, status-quo coalition with the leftist Social Democrats. Then, in May, 31-year-old Sebastian Kurz ”” the leader of the party’s youth wing ”” mounted a coup and ousted the party’s complacent leadership.

Kurz quickly moved his party to the right. He promoted tougher policies in a range of areas: migration, welfare benefits for foreigners, relations with the European Union, and border controls. He called for a ban on the wearing of burqas. He then announced his party could no longer govern with the Social Democrats, forcing this month’s snap election…

Here are the actual results:

In the end, Kurz and his party took first place, with 31.4 percent of the vote. The Freedom Party won 27.4 percent, and the Social Democrats won 26.7 percent. Even Chancellor Kern of the Social Democrats had to admit the nation has seen a “massive slide to the right.”…

The almost certain outcome of the election will be a coalition government of the People’s Party and the Freedom Party. They governed together once before, from 2000 to 2005, and were able to implement what for Austria were radical economic reforms before they split after various scandals.

Kurz himself seems to be some sort of wunderkind. He’s not just young; at 31, he’s nearly fetal. He’s a fairly handsome guy, too, in the mold of the youngish Justin Trudeau, who at 45 seems positively geriatric in comparison.

[NOTE: In the US, by the way, a 31-year-old could not become president; the age requirement is 35.]

Does a single day go by…

The New Neo Posted on by

…without an MSM article on this sort of theme: “Inside the ”˜adult day-care center’: How aides try to control and coerce Trump”?

There’s a steady stream that never flags. They all seem more or less the same to me. Some focus more on Trump’s immaturity, some on his craziness, but I believe they are designed to keep readers on the left (and/or those on the right who detest Trump) in a constant state of anxiety, fear, rage, and hope.

The “hope” for Democrats is for Democratic control of the House in 2018 and the resultant impeachment of Trump. That drum is being beaten with greater vigor than ever lately.

And then we also have this article from Jane Mayer in The New Yorker that basically says “be careful what you wish for in impeaching Trump.” It tries to stir up fear about Pence. The article is incredibly long and incredibly boring. I tried to skim it in order to glean its main content, but what I mostly got was “Pence is in the pocket of the evil Kochs.”

I’ve read quite a few of these “Trump could be impeached after 2018” articles, and haven’t seen any of them dealing adequately with the question of what would happen next in the Senate after impeachment. If it’s mentioned at all that the conviction and removal of a president can only be accomplished by a 2/3 vote in the Senate, the lack of probability of that happening with Trump and the fact that if it didn’t happen his impeachment would be practically meaningless is rarely if ever dealt with. I find that a bit puzzling, except when I reflect that the purpose of these articles is mainly psychological, and that the authors are probably banking on the fact that most readers may think that “impeachment” is equivalent to “removal from office.” The Clinton impeachment and failure to convict/remove is probably ancient and nearly-forgotten history for a great many voters today.

Literary leftists: Bertrand Russell on the Bolsheviks

The New Neo Posted on by

Betrand Russell was a socialist, but he wasn’t impressed by the Communists:

I am compelled to reject Bolshevism for two reasons: First, because the price mankind must pay to achieve Communism by Bolshevik methods is too terrible; and secondly because, even after paying the price, I do not believe the result would be what the Bolsheviks profess to desire.

In this piece he wrote in 1929 for The Nation, he painted an illuminating portrait of Lenin and to a lesser extent Trotsky. In his description of Lenin in particular, I recognize the type [emphasis mine]:

I have never met a personage so destitute of self-importance. He looks at his visitors very closely, and screws up one eye, which seems to increase alarmingly the penetrating power of the other. He laughs a great deal; at first his laugh seems merely friendly and jolly, but gradually I came to feel it rather grim. He is dictatorial, calm, incapable of fear, extraordinarily devoid of selfseeking, an embodied theory.

“An embodied theory.” I know what he means; I have known political fanatics like that. Very cold-blooded.

I got the impression that he despises a great many people and is an intellectual aristocrat. …

I found in him, as in almost all leading Communists, much less eagerness than existed on our side for peace and the raising of the blockade. He believes that nothing of real value can be achieved except through world revolution and the abolition of capitalism…

He described the division between rich and poor peasants, and the government propaganda among the latter against the former, leading to acts of violence which he seemed to find amusing.

Ha ha ha.

And this is the most important part. After saying that Lenin had no love for liberty, he adds [emphasis mine]:

Perhaps love of liberty is incompatible with wholehearted belief in a panacea for all human ills. If so, I cannot but rejoice in the skeptical temper of the Western world. I went to Russia believing myself a communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not only of communism, but of every creed so firmly held that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.

The very same thing happened to the historian Will Durant when he visited Russia. I described his change of mind in this post. In the case of both Durant and Russell, most of the other members of their entourage did not share their disillusionment, and remained enthralled with Russia. Therein lies the difference between the changer and the true believer.

But neither changed all that much, although Durant went further than Russell. Durant remained a liberal; Russell remained a socialist, much as Orwell did during his lifetime of criticizing Communism. This is exceedingly puzzling, I think, and I attempted to explain it in regard to Orwell in this post. With Orwell, I think he just was so disgusted by the inequalities and unfairnesses of life that he greatly desired that it be possible to reconcile socialism and its goal of equality with liberty, although he realized the two were almost certainly incompatible. Russell seemed to realize the same thing, too, but he clung to socialism (intermittently, anyway) despite that fact.

Perhaps he was able to do so because he was something of a political dilettante. You don’t believe me? Russell said so himself:

At various points in his life [Russell] considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had “never been any of these things, in any profound sense”.

People are mysterious, aren’t they?

Trump, defender of the Constitution re Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

You may think the title of this post is sarcastic. After all, as commenter “Bill” wrote today, in regard to Trump’s recent announcements on Obamacare :

I don’t know enough about the changes, yet, to know if they will be bad or good.

I do know that the “if congress won’t act, I will” shtick is just as abominable to the spirit of our system of three co equal branches and checks and balances as it was when we were all howling about Obama ruling by EO…

Maybe congress is completely ineffective…It’s still their job to do the legislating, regardless of if they are good at it and regardless of all the great ideas any given President might have. If they won’t do it we can vote them out. But as a nation it seems we’ve learned to just vote in Presidents who dig the “stroke of the pen, law of the land. Pretty cool huh?” method. It doesn’t end well.

That’s all quite true—and I would have no disagreement if it were relevant in this case. However, that’s not what’s going on with Trump’s end to the cost-sharing insurance company subsidies, although much of the MSM would have you think otherwise.

For clarification on the subject, please read National Review (most decidedly not a Trump-friendly establishment) on the subject. Take a look at this by Andrew C. McCarthy, this by David French,this by Chris Jacobs, and this by the editors.

If you are familiar with National Review, its editors, and those particular writers, you would have to conclude that theirs is not some knee-jerk support of Trump. That’s not their bag; au contraire. And yet they are saying that what Trump did regarding payment of the insurance subsidies was not only constitutional, it redressed Obama’s unconstitutional actions and was something that—if a president was actually intent on following the Constitution—was not even discretionary but obligatory.

I really could quote any of those four articles to illustrate, but I’ll choose McCarthy’s because in the past I’ve almost always found him to be fair, knowledgeable, and clear. The title of his piece is “Trump Faithfully Executes Obamacare; Media, Democrats Go Nuts”:

It’s ironic. Notwithstanding the many outrageous, mendacious things the president says and tweets, the press is aghast that his “fake news” tropes against mainstream-media stalwarts resonate with much of the country. Well, if you want to know why, this latest Obamacare coverage is why. What Trump has actually done is end the illegal payoffs without which insurance companies have no rational choice but to jack up premiums or flee the Obamacare exchanges. The culprits here are the charlatans who gave us Obamacare. To portray Trump as the bad guy is not merely fake news. It’s an out-and-out lie…

The media-Democrat narrative that President Trump is imperiously flouting the rule of law has it backwards. In cutting off the insurance-company subsidies, Trump is enforcing the ACA as written, consistent with his constitutional duty to execute the laws faithfully. It was President Obama who usurped Congress’s power of the purse by directing the payment of taxpayer funds that lawmakers had not appropriated.

Almost all the articles on the subject I’ve found so far deal with Trump’s order regarding the subsidies; that’s what the main hue and cry from opponents seems to have involved. I’m not sure about the constitutionality of Trump’s other changes in Obamacare, because I’ve only located one article that discusses them, but that author says:

Third, [Trump’s] order directs agencies to consider giving employers more flexibility in designing and offering health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs) to their employees. Prior to Obamacare, HRAs were health care accounts employers could create for employees to fund a broad array of health care expenses on a pre-tax basis, including individual health insurance premiums. The Obama administration, however, banned employers from using HRAs and other arrangements to fund individual market premiums pre-tax…

The Trump administration is on sound legal footing to roll back this ban. As far as I’ve seen, I’m the only attorney to subject Obama’s ban to serious legal scrutiny before Trump took office. In a detailed white paper on the issue, I concluded the ban “contradicts prior federal court and agency holdings and, moreover, conflicts with provisions in the ACA that show Congress intended to continue allowing employers to fund individual premiums pre-tax.” Simply put, the ACA never empowered the Obama administration to bar employers from funding individual health insurance. Trump’s executive order will correct this.

An executive order going against explicit provisions of the statute establishing Obamacare would most likely be wrong in the sense of unconstitutional. But to undo a ban Obama established by executive order (a ban that conflicts with provisions in the ACA) is quite the opposite.

Looking-glass world.

Trump untweaks Obamacare

The New Neo Posted on by

Please read the whole thing:

In just three short years, Obamacare has severely damaged health insurance markets across the country, leaving some markets on the brink of total collapse. Going into 2018, consumers will have access to just one health carrier in nearly half of the counties across America. In many cases, this sole health carrier does not include local doctors in its network, forcing people to switch doctors and drive long distances for care. Average premiums on the individual health insurance market have doubled since 2013, escalating premiums beyond what most people can afford…

Also see this as a counter to the inevitable denunciations:

Republican Kentucky Senator Rand Paul has been pushing for a plan that would allow people to come together to form groups and purchase insurance plans across state lines. The free market approach, according to Paul, would encourage insurance companies to compete for these groups, giving people more choice, and reducing costs.

On Thursday, Paul got his wish after President Donald Trump singed an executive order allowing this kind of plan to happen. According to Paul, he and the president had been working on the plan for months, and the order is now the first step to a real repeal and replacement of Obamacare.

But detractors have already begun lambasting the bill for disadvantaging low-income households and individuals. Paul dismissed the idea on Fox and Friends on Friday morning.

According to Paul, the ability for many low-income workers to come together to form a group represented by one person would give the power to the consumer, allowing many who can’t afford good insurance plans on their own to become a pile of accumulated money that can.

Paul said that this kind of group plan “requires no discrimination,” and “protects against pre-existing conditions,” since the coverage would be the same kind you get at big corporations. Corporations do not refuse you employment because you have a pre-existing condition, or fire you because you get sick.

Paul explained that his plan that was enacted on Thursday allows individuals to have the same purchasing power as corporations, essentially putting purchasing power into the hands of the people…

Paul has not until now been exactly a buddy and fan of Trump.

It will take some time to digest the new directives and what they actually might mean for Americans affected by Obamacare—which is all of us, although some are more directly affected than others.

Trump on the Iran deal

The New Neo Posted on by

We’ve been hearing for quite some time that Trump was going to make an announcement on the Iran deal and would refuse to re-certify it. Well, this is it.

That’s breaking news, and I haven’t had much of a chance to evaluate it. But here’s what happened:

President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to terminate the Iran nuclear deal if Congress doesn’t strengthen it, warning the agreement was merely a “temporary delay” in Tehran’s quest to obtain nuclear weapons.

In a speech at the White House laying out what he called a “new strategy” for dealing with Iran, Trump also accused Iran of violating both the letter and spirit of the deal and said the U.S. would impose new sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Iran’s elite security and military organization.

By declining to certify that Iran is in compliance with the 2015 nuclear agreement, Trump put its future squarely in the hands of Congress, which will now have to decide whether to attach new conditions to the agreement or reimpose sanctions on Iran with regard to the country’s nuclear program. Those sanctions were lifted as part of the agreement, and reimposing them would effectively destroy the deal.

And Trump, who throughout his campaign and his presidency has expressed intense disdain for the deal, made clear Friday that he wouldn’t hesitate to cancel it if complications with Congress arose in moving forward on toughening it.

In other words, Iran is on notice of something it already knew—that the deal was with Obama and that Trump isn’t Obama. Presidents make foreign policy, although Congress certainly has a say in the matter. The Iran deal was not a popular move at the time—even a lot of Democrats didn’t support it—but Obama did it anyway and now Trump may undo it unless Congress wants to get heavily into the act.

Iran is almost as big a fiasco for the US and the west as North Korea is in terms of the development of nuclear weapons. One difference is that Iran is not run by a single madman, it’s run by a group of fanatical zealots. We’re more familiar with the aims and behavior of the Iranian leaders, which makes them marginally more predictable. Something needs to change for the better, and I cannot even begin to say whether anything Trump or Congress does will effect this change:

In a briefing with reporters on Thursday afternoon, Tillerson and National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster explained that the administration’s goal would be for Congress to create “trigger points” for Iran that would mandate the reimposition of sanctions if Tehran doesn’t meet specific revised criteria…

n his speech Friday, Trump outlined a more aggressive overall strategy for Iran, focusing on the country’s “destabilizing influence” in the region, including its support for terrorism and militants and on its development of ballistic missiles.

There was also this:

The Trump administration on Friday designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, a move that President Trump followed up with by calling for tougher sanctions against the organization.

“I am authorizing the Treasury Department to further sanction the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps for its support for terrorism and to apply sanctions to its officials, agents, and affiliates,” Trump said in a White House speech.

“I urge our allies to join us in taking strong actions to curb Iran’s continued dangerous and destabilizing behavior,” Trump added.

“The IRGC has played a central role to Iran becoming the world’s foremost state sponsor of terror,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Friday. “We urge the private sector to recognize that the IRGC permeates much of the Iranian economy, and those who transact with IRGC-controlled companies do so at great risk.”

I think some of this is long overdue, particular the call for greater sanctions on this group.

There’s no question, however, that most Democrats and a great deal of Europe will be incensed over Trump’s suggestions. Europe potentially has a lot to lose by what he said:

The billions of dollars of western trade and investment that have flowed into the Islamic republic since sanctions were lifted in January 2016 has been crucial for both the companies involved and for galvanising Iranian support for the agreement, European officials say.

Now they fear the trade ties could be thrown into jeopardy…Decertification would have no immediate legal effect on companies investing in, or trading with Iran. But Congress would then have 60 days to decide whether to reimpose the sanctions.

European governments are among the staunchest backers of accord…

One of the ideas behind the Iran deal was that it would help bring Iran into the community of nations and normalize it to a certain extent, which would encourage the Iranian leaders to relax their tyrannical grip on their own people, as well as their sponsorship of terrorism. Those two things are laudable goals. But I haven’t read anything that indicates that either thing (especially the latter) has changed, at least so far. Actually:

Trump’s case against the deal is more political and strategic: His team believes that Iran is an enemy of the United States, one that frustrates US objectives in places like Iraq and Yemen, and that the nuclear deal hasn’t done much to solve the problem.

“Iran is an adversarial power that is working against the vital interests of the region. The deal doesn’t make Iran any better, so the deal doesn’t serve our interests,” James Jay Carafano, a foreign policy expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation who served on the Trump transition team, tells me.

There’s a core truth to this case: Iran’s behavior is extremely problematic in a whole host of ways, from testing ballistic missiles to funding violent militia groups around the Middle East.

No one ever said this would be easy. Since 1979, Iran has been a thorn in our side, a troublemaker, and an oppressor of its own people, and I have yet to see any president make a dent in that reality. I wish Trump luck.

Those were the days—or were they?

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a movie clip—an old one.

I first saw this movie, “The Major and the Minor,” about a year ago. It’s meant to be light family entertainment, made in 1942 and starring Ginger Rogers (but no dancing, alas).

However, this opening scene was a bit more repellent than I’d expected, and the Weinstein scandal made me think of it again. Unfortunately, this particular clip is a slightly speeded-up version of the original for some reason, so their voices sound Mickey-Mousey. And the full frame of the movie isn’t shown; we can’t see the very tops of their heads in many of the shots.

In other words, this is a bad version of the movie, but it’s the only one I could find online. I’ve cued it up to show one particular scene. I think it conveys the idea that this sort of behavior was acknowledged even back then (or maybe especially back then) to be commonplace, though smarmy. Of course, the guy in the movie (actually, there are two) is a whole lot more easily dissuaded than Weinstein, and the scene is played for laughs. But note at 4:23 how he threatens her with getting her in trouble at her job, and how she has to brandish the raw egg to get out of there (you’ll understand what I’m talking about when you watch it). It’s also pretty clear that this sort of behavior from men, which seems everywhere around her, is what’s making her want to leave New York.

Here, Rogers’ character is arriving at a hotel to give a big muck-a-muck a scalp massage. She’s been newly-hired by a company that offers that service, and he is apparently a regular customer of said company:

The movie continues on a rather odd and ever-so-slightly icky trajectory. I’m not going to even try to explain the fairly convoluted plot, but it turns on the Rogers character’s disguising herself as a 12-year-old child.