The New Neo

Trump and the Australian PM—and those refugees

Posted on February 2, 2017 by neoFebruary 2, 2017

Today’s brouhaha du jour is about a fight Trump allegedly had over the phone with the Australian Prime Minister.

Before I get to the substance of the disagreement, let me say that I’ve come to the point where I immediately distrust all reports about Trump. This one seems extremely plausible—after all, one of my repeated concerns about the man during the entire campaign was/is his volatility, what I have referred to time and again as his tendency to be a loose cannon. This story is completely in line with the sort of thing I was talking about, and it would be disconcerting and disturbing if in fact Trump had been exhibiting that kind of behavior in a phone call with the leader of a country that is basically an ally of ours.

But I have come to the point described so well by Allahpundit in the first sentence of this piece at Hot Air:

American politics increasingly feels like a novel whose events are retold by two unreliable narrators, Trump being one and the media being the other.

I would merely change it to “Trump and his supporters and spokespeople…” rather than just “Trump.” But the sentiment is the same.

And at this point, I have come to trust the Trump forces more than I trust the MSM. That’s a sad, sad reflection on my lack of trust of the MSM. But in these skirmishes, the Trump forces have come closer to the truth in the majority of cases (so far, anyway) than the initial reports in the MSM.

Which brings us to the Australian call. First, let’s look at the WaPo headline: “”˜This was the worst call by far’: Trump badgered, bragged and abruptly ended phone call with Australian leader.”

You read that headline and you think “What a bully!” And that’s what you’re supposed to think. Now, the content of the article. It begins this way:

It should have been one of the most congenial calls for the new commander in chief ”” a conversation with the leader of Australia, one of America’s staunchest allies, at the end of a triumphant week.

Who knew that, according to the WaPo, the week had heretofore been “triumphant”? And all ruined by Trump! [emphasis mine]:

Instead, President Trump blasted Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull over a refugee agreement and boasted about the magnitude of his electoral college win, according to senior U.S. officials briefed on the Saturday exchange. Then, 25 minutes into what was expected to be an hour-long call, Trump abruptly ended it.

At one point, Trump informed Turnbull that he had spoken with four other world leaders that day ”” including Russian President Vladimir Putin ”” and that “this was the worst call by far.”

Trump’s behavior suggests that he is capable of subjecting world leaders, including close allies, to a version of the vitriol he frequently employs against political adversaries and news organizations in speeches and on Twitter.

Trump, who one day earlier had signed an executive order temporarily barring the admission of refugees, complained that he was “going to get killed” politically and accused Australia of seeking to export the “next Boston bombers.”

Trump returned to the topic late Wednesday night, writing in a message on Twitter: “Do you believe it? The Obama Administration agreed to take thousands of illegal immigrants from Australia. Why? I will study this dumb deal!”

That’s it? That’s the awful thing he did? That’s the terrible badgering, that’s the vitriol, that’s the loose cannon? I agree that it’s not full of diplomatic nicety, and it’s not the sort of thing I’d like to see. But it’s nowhere near as bad as what I expected from that headline. It seems to be directed mostly against Obama for making the deal, rather than the PM.

You might even think “No wonder Trump wasn’t keen.” His predecessor committed the US to a deal that arguably runs counter to one of the most basic platforms Trump ran on. Later in the article (no doubt after a lot of people have stopped reading, having gotten what they think is the gist of it) the WaPo explains the deal and who these refugees are:

The friction with Turnbull reflected Trump’s anger over being bound by an agreement reached by the Obama administration to accept refugees from Australian detention sites even while Trump was issuing an executive order suspending such arrivals from elsewhere in the world.

The issue centers on a population of about 2,500 people who sought asylum in Australia but were diverted to facilities off that country’s coast at Nauru and Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. Deplorable conditions at those sites prompted intervention from the United Nations and a pledge from the United States to accept about half of those refugees, provided they passed U.S. security screening.

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the fact that these are immigrants from the Muslim world that Australia has rejected. These are immigrants from the Muslim world that have been kept by Australia in camps under “deplorable conditions.” Obama said he’d take them in after they passed screening, but of course it’s that very screening that Trump has vowed to study and perhaps tighten.

The Klondike’s Golden Staircase

Posted on February 1, 2017 by neoFebruary 1, 2017

Yesterday I happened across a photo from the late-nineteenth century Klondike Gold rush of the part of the Chilkoot Pass that was known as the Golden Staircase. You can see why the photo caught my attention:

Here’s one that’s more of a closeup, to see what they were carrying up that mountain staircase:

I’m not quite sure why that was called a pass. Looks an awful lot like a mountain to me, but I guess it’s a low one. People were awfully tough back then. Here’s more about the Staircase:

The twenty-six mile trail over Chilkoot Pass was steep and hazardous. Most stampeders who gave up did so attempting to cross the mountains.

In the winter, stampeders struggled in blizzards, snow, frigid temperatures, and avalanches. The trail shot up about 1,000 feet in the final half mile. Stampeders climbed the “golden staircase,” 1,500 steps cut in the snow and ice, and used a guide rope for support…

Travelers did not always fare better in the summer. Stampeders struggled in rain, fog, boulders, and bogs. Without its covering of snow and ice, the trail to the summit led over giant boulders over which people literally crawled.

To move one outfit over the pass, stampeders packed and cached their goods up to forty times and hiked up to 1,000 miles. The terrain on the last four miles of the trail was too rough for pack animals. Discarded supplies littered the trail as stampeders cast unnecessary items aside. Many took three months to move their goods from Dyea to the summit.

The name “Golden Staircase” quite obviously describes the goal at the end of the arduous journey: gold. The staircase itself was made of ice and snow. But the phrase jogged a memory for me of a song lyric, and Google helped me find the sources. It’s a common metaphor for the route to heaven, in the Salvation Army hymn called “Climbing Up the Golden Stair” as well as the one with which I’m familiar, Peter Paul and Mary’s rendition of “Early in the Morning” (second verse, “won’t you guide me safely, to the golden stair”):

Dershowitz says Yates should have resigned

Posted on February 1, 2017 by neoFebruary 1, 2017

Alan Dershowitz continues his refusal to toe the Democratic party line, although I’m virtually certain he remains a Democrat:

An attorney general, like any citizen, has the right to disagree with a presidential order, but unless it is clear that the order is unlawful, she has no authority to order the Justice Department to refuse to enforce it. This order is multifaceted and complex. It raises serious constitutional and legal issues that deserved nuanced and calibrated consideration from the nation’s highest law officer.

…A blanket order to refuse to defend any part of the statute is overkill. If she strongly disagreed with the policies underlying the order, she should have resigned in protest, and left it to others within the Justice Department to defend those parts of the order that are legally defensible.

I, too, disagree, with the policy underlying the order, but I don’t immediately assume that any policy with which I disagree is automatically unconstitutional or unlawful.

There used to be more people in the Democratic Party like that. Now Dershowitz must be feeling pretty lonely. Perhaps he should give Joe Lieberman a call.

That piece appeared yesterday, but that’s not the only thing Dershowitz has said recently. There’s also today’s statements from him on SCOTUS pick Gorsuch:

Famed Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, however, said Democrats and Republicans shouldn’t play politics with the Supreme Court appointment.

“They are too important,” he said during an interview on the FOX Business Network. “This is a very distinguished judge who will serve for many, many, many years.”

Despite the initial pushback from Democratic leaders, Dershowitz said Gorsuch will likely be approved during his Senate confirmation hearing.

“I think he has to be vetted very carefully” Dershowitz added. “Everything I know about him shows that he’s qualified.”

Actually, it may be that Gorsuch is not the hill on which the Democrats will choose to fight, for reasons explained here.

What goes around comes around: they don’t call it the “nuclear option” for nothing

Posted on February 1, 2017 by neoFebruary 1, 2017

Most of us old enough to remember can recall a time when the Senate involved a fair amount of compromise, at least on presidential appointments. It pretty much boiled down to the idea that what goes around comes around. Unless an appointee was egregiously unqualified rather than merely partisan, a president ordinarily was given his nominees. That wasn’t because people were so loving and wonderful, so eager to sing kumbaya together; it was because they knew the same courtesy would be extended to them when they had the presidency.

The nuclear option was similarly avoided for the same reason. If a party did away with it, they wouldn’t have it to fall back on when the time came. They wanted to preserve minority rights to block things when they no longer held the Senate and the presidency. No one wanted to be the first to throw that away, lest they need it in the future.

So the two things worked together to create more cooperation, or at least the appearance of more cooperation, than has existed in recent years. I’m not going to go into the history of how and when this ended, but major turning points are often thought of as the Bork nomination, and a host of other events described here, with both parties involved in sometimes advocating it. The most recent and most extreme move, however, was made by the Democrats during Obama’s presidency, culminating in November of 2013:

On November 21, 2013, the Senate voted 52”“48, with all Republicans and 3 Democrats voting against, to eliminate the use of the filibuster against all executive branch nominees and judicial nominees other than to the Supreme Court. At the time of the vote there were 59 executive branch nominees and 17 judicial nominees awaiting confirmation.

The Democrats’ stated motivation for this change was expansion of filibustering by Republicans during the Obama administration, in particular blocking three nominations to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Republicans had asserted that the D.C. Circuit was underworked, and also cited the need for cost reduction by reducing the number of judges in that circuit…

As of November 2013, President Obama’s nominees had faced 79 votes to end debate (i.e. cloture votes), compared to just 38 during the preceding eight years under President George W. Bush. Most of those cloture votes successfully ended debate, and therefore most of those nominees cleared the hurdle. Obama won Senate confirmation for 30 out of 42 federal appeals court nominations, compared with Bush’s 35 out of 52.

Regarding Obama’s federal district court nominations, the Senate approved 143 out of 173 as of November 2013, compared to George W. Bush’s first term 170 of 179, Bill Clinton’s first term 170 of 198, and George H.W. Bush’s 150 of 195. Filibusters were used on 20 Obama nominations to U.S. District Court positions, but Republicans had allowed confirmation of 19 out of the 20 before the nuclear option was invoked.

So, why did the Democrats do it in November of 2013? It doesn’t seem as though things were all that much worse for them regarding nomination confirmations than they had been in previous administrations. I’m not sure why they did it, but I think it was that the legislative philosophy had become “if we have the power to do it, we should do it” (Obamacare being the template).

The Democrats knew that in 2014 they might lose the Senate, and at any rate they weren’t going to get 60 Democratic senators into office. So in November of 2013, when they activated the nuclear option, they only had a year left of Democratic control of both the Senate and the White House, and that’s when the nuclear option makes sense.

I’m convinced that Democrats also thought it likely that they’d always keep the presidency, or just about always. They believed that Electoral College demographics now made it almost impossible for a Republican to win that office. So in the future, after the nuclear option had been implemented, even if Democrats lost the Senate and became a minority there the nuclear option wouldn’t hurt them because of their retention of the presidency. In other words, a party ordinarily has no need to block the appointments of a president of that same party, so no need to keep the filibuster for those appointments.

One thing I really think Democrats did not envision occurring was what in fact occurred: Republican president, Republican Senate. That’s where we are now, with the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to SCOTUS. It’s certainly difficult to object if the Republicans trigger the nuclear option for SCOTUS justices, although Democrats can always argue that they themselves limited it to all executive branch nominees and judicial nominees except the Supreme Court. That argument is plenty weak—after all, if not the former, why not the latter—but right now there are other anti-Gorsuch arguments they’re mounting. The biggest one seems to be that the seat was “stolen” from them because last year the Republicans (who were in the majority at the time) blocked hearings on Obama’s appointee, Judge Garland.

I have no doubt that the theft argument appeals to a great many Democrats. But it’s awfully hard for Democrats to argue along that line to other than the party faithful, because their own determination to frustrate and block anything and everything they can in the Trump administration is so transparently clear.

The NY Times is leading the charge, as usual, with its august and oh-so-objective editors authoring an editorial today entitled, “Neil Gorsuch, the Nominee for a Stolen Seat.” I’m not going to waste my time fisking it; it fisks itself. But I will say it’s a small masterpiece of the sort of subtle and not-so-subtle misdirections and distortions in which the Times specializes. It ends this way:

Mr. Trump’s failure to choose a more moderate candidate is the latest example of his refusal to acknowledge his historic unpopularity and his nearly three-million-vote loss to Hillary Clinton. A wiser president faced with such circumstances would govern with humility and a respect for the views of all Americans.

Isnt’ that beautiful, in its own way? The harping on Trump’s loss of the popular vote, as though that has any meaning? The high and respectful tone? The implicit pretense that a Democrat would somehow rise above all that petty partisanship and show the sort of “humility and respect for the views of all Americans” the Times is demanding? The sort that its champion, President Obama, showed when Obamacare was passed and so many other unpopular measures were pushed through because, after all (as Obama himself has said): “I won.”

Well, Trump won. And no serious person expects any president, liberal or conservative, to appoint a moderate to the Supreme Court if that president’s party also controls the Senate. That happens to be the situation right now.

Let me add that two things seem to be clear at this point. The first is (and I don’t think he’s gotten enough credit from the right for this) McConnell stood firm against pressure to confirm Garland, and that has made this opportunity possible. The second is that Trump has made good on his promise to choose a conservative.

Next we will discover whether the Democrats will force the GOP’s hand and cause them to extend the nuclear option to SCOTUS in order to get Gorsuch confirmed, and whether the GOP will actually do so if pressed.

Trump’s SCOTUS pick is announced

Posted on January 31, 2017 by neoJanuary 31, 2017

And it’s Neil Gorsuch.

“I am a man of my word” says Trump.

Here’s what the WaPo had to say about Goresuch three days ago:

Indeed, Gorsuch, now 49, seems naturally equipped for his spot on President Trump’s shortlist of potential Supreme Court nominees.

There is a family connection to Republican establishment politics and service in the administration of George W. Bush. There is a glittery Ivy League résumé ”” Columbia undergrad, Harvard Law ”” along with a Marshall scholarship to Oxford. There is a partnership at one of Washington’s top litigation law firms and a string of successful cases.

There is a Supreme Court clerkship; Gorsuch was hired by Justice Byron White, a fellow Colorado native, who shared him with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy…

… [T]hose who know Gorsuch and have studied his decade of solidly conservative opinions on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit say he more resembles the man he would replace ”” the late Justice Antonin Scalia ”” than the more moderate Kennedy.

Like Scalia, Gorsuch is a proponent of originalism ”” meaning that judges should attempt to interpret the words of the Constitution as they were understood at the time they were written ”” and a textualist who considers only the words of the law being reviewed, not legislators’ intent or the consequences of the decision.

Critics say that those neutral considerations seem to always lead Gorsuch to conservative outcomes, a criticism that was also leveled at Scalia…

Kagan is among many who have praised Gorsuch’s lucid and occasionally lyrical writing style.

But those who know him say he lacks Scalia’s combustible, combative style.

“He has very strong opinions, but he just treats people well in every context,” said Melissa Hart, a University of Colorado law professor. She is a Democrat who clerked for Justice John Paul Stevens, who retired in 2010.

At 49, Gorsuch could have a long tenure.

Good appointment, I think. It will be hard for the Democrats to make any case against this pick unless it’s a completely political one: that they don’t like his conservatism.

[ADDENDUM: Gorsuch graduated from Harvard Law School in the same class as Obama.]

More on thought and action (and Trump, of course)

Posted on January 31, 2017 by neoJanuary 31, 2017

Without any thought at all, “action” can be spinning your wheels. Unless one is reacting quickly in an emergency, thought is (or should be) the engine for action, particularly political action.

But when you call someone a “man of action” (as I did in a previous post) you don’t mean the person literally doesn’t think, has no thoughts at all. It’s about the person’s primary mode of conceptualizing him/herself and presenting him/herself to the world.

For political action, it helps to have a coherent conceptual philosophy and to be able to articulate it well. Ronald Reagan, for example, was very good at that and it was one of his tremendous strengths, although he was no slouch at action either. Donald Trump path to action doesn’t seem to come from that sort of coherently expressed political philosophy, although his supporters don’t care and don’t expect it of him.

That lack in Trump does not mean, however, that he can’t be effective as president. And it doesn’t mean that he acts completely without thought or reason. But it makes him hard to predict and hard to understand for a great many people—even people in the GOP—and it certainly feeds the fear of those who oppose him. It has the advantage, however, of making it difficult for those who want to fight him to predict what he’ll do (although so far he’s pretty much been doing exactly what he promised). There is also the fear of those who genuinely think he’s a loose cannon or crazy and capable of doing just about anything.

A political philosophy and the ability to express it matters when people (on either side) are trying to evaluate someone, particularly someone lacking a record of action in public office, as Trump did prior to his inauguration. All we had from Trump was our perception of his words, and his actions as a private individual. Evaluating those words was especially hard with Trump, who during his campaign (and previously, as well) was fond of over-the-top utterances, nasty tweets, jokes, and statements that contradicted other statements he’d made. All politicians are sometimes given to hyperbole, but if we know their basic political orientation and conceptual framework from their political record, we are less likely to get confused by that fact, or even by promises they can’t keep.

Understanding more clearly where a politician or officeholder is coming from also helps to predict what he or she will do in the future, particularly with new events or issues. It helps the person’s opponents plan a strategy, too, so there’s something to be said for not knowing. But it helps voters decide whether they support that person, and I think Trump’s lack of this ability during the campaign confused and put off some people who otherwise might have voted for him.

Now we’ve had a flurry of rapid-fire action. Now we know more of what Trump is likely to do and to be as president. So far, he’s not only a man of action, he’s a man of conservative action. This is driving the left crazy, and it’s even upsetting some more moderate Republicans. But it’s important information, and tonight when he names his pick for SCOTUS, we’ll get even more information.

Chimp violence

Posted on January 31, 2017 by neoJanuary 31, 2017

Anyone who has read Jane Goodall’s books knows that chimpanzees can be very very violent to others of their species. It came as a shock to Goodall, who had lived with the animals for years before she observed the violence:

The outbreak of the war came as a disturbing shock to Goodall, who had previously considered chimpanzees to be, although similar to human beings, “rather ‘nicer'” in their behavior. Coupled with the observation in 1975 of cannibalistic infanticide by a high-ranking female in the community, the violence of the Gombe war first revealed to Goodall the “dark side” of chimpanzee behavior. She was profoundly disturbed by this revelation…

To Goodall’s credit, she reported on the violence and didn’t try to hide it, at a time when she was pretty much the only one doing this sort of research. The question arose, however, whether the violence was partly an artifact of human disturbance of the natural habitat and social interactions of the chimps who were being observed. Recent research indicates this is usually not the case.

Which brings us to this story of the murder of a former alpha leader by his previous followers. The tale doesn’t just illustrate violence among the chimps, however. It touches on other issues that I find greatly interesting. One is whether chimps are aware of death. The other is loyalty among chimps; even when the chimp who was subsequently killed had become chimp non grata in the group, one of his former allies remained loyal to him. Another issue raised by the story is competition for females when females are scarce, and how it might lead to violence among the males. And it seems that the shortage of females in the area where this occurred might indeed have been the result of human intervention: poachers.

The unremarkable firing of Sally Yates

Posted on January 31, 2017 by neoJanuary 31, 2017

Donald Trump fired acting AG Sally Yates after she refused to defend his recent executive order on immigration. Why do I call the firing “unremarkable,” when it’s the news du jour? Because any president in his position would have done so.

Trump is famous for saying, “You’re fired!” to people on a well-known TV reality show. But this is no reality show; it’s reality. And in real life an AG advises a president on the law, but if that AG refuses to enforce an order that has been “approved as to form and legality by the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel,” then any president would fire him or her.

The proper remedy, if Yates simply could not in good conscience enforce that order, would have been to resign. But Yates apparently wanted to force the issue and get herself fired, and my suspicion is that she knew the visuals would be better that way and she’d be more likely to become a hero to the liberal/left. Most people had never heard of Yates before. But nearly everyone has heard of her now, and she will be feted for quite a while by Democrats for this action.

The Times reports Yates’ motivation this way:

Ms. Yates, like other senior government officials, was caught by surprise by the executive order and agonized over the weekend about how to respond, two Justice Department officials involved in the weekend deliberations said. Ms. Yates considered resigning but she told colleagues she did not want to leave it to her successor to face the same dilemma.

The Times has a certain amount of contempt for its readers if it thinks they will buy that, because it makes no sense on the face of it. Surely Ms. Yates knew she’d be fired as a result of this action; it’s merely common sense. And surely she understood that her successor would almost certainly face the same dilemma as she, whether she resigned or was fired.

Speaking of our friends at the Times, I am often in awe of the delicate nuances of their writing, designed to sway the reader without the reader understanding the mechanisms by which that’s happening. Consider, for example, the very first paragraph of their Yates-firing story:

President Trump fired his acting attorney general on Monday night, removing her as the nation’s top law enforcement officer after she defiantly refused to defend his executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees and people from predominantly Muslim countries.

Sounds rather straightforward, doesn’t it, if you’re just reading it and taking it in passively. But let’s take it phrase by phrase. It’s only a single sentence, and not an especially long one at that, but there’s a lot packed into it.

“his acting attorney general”—This is certainly technically true, if “his” means “acting under him.” But Yates is an Obama appointee, acting as AG only until Jeff Sessions is confirmed, and hearings on that very confirmation are going on even as I write this. In other words, Obama-appointee Yates only became acting AG on January 20, 2017, when Trump was inaugurated. She is being fired 10 days later, shortly before her more permanent successor is appointed, a person you can really say is “his” (i.e. Trump’s) AG. However, you can read that entire lengthy Times article without learning from them that Yates is an Obama appointee until the very last paragraph [CORRECTION: I just noticed that the Times does mention early on that Yates “served under Obama”]. Touché, NY Times!

“she defiantly refused”—This is certainly true as well. It’s an interesting phrase, though, because it is both unnecessary (of course it was defiant) and can be interpreted in several ways. “Defiance” can be considered insubordination by those who disagree with it, but the liberal/left will certainly consider Yates’ defiance not only laudable but the proper position they all should take, a sort of guide to future defiant action in the name of righteousness (or self-righteousness).

“his executive order closing the nation’s borders to refugees and people from predominantly Muslim countries”—The purposely misleading nature of that statement is obvious. Any “closing” of the borders is temporary, a fact unmentioned in the article. Even more importantly, Trump’s immigration EO’s temporary “closing” does not apply to many many “refugees and people from predominantly Muslim countries.” In fact, it does not apply to the countries with the largest number of Muslims—Indonesia, Pakistan, India, and Turkey—as well as many other countries with very large Muslim populations.

Yes, the countries targeted by the Trump EO are indeed “predominantly Muslim.” But their predominantly Muslim nature is not the reason they were chosen, since far larger numbers of Muslims are being allowed in as long as they are from countries not presently designated as being at high risk for terror. The countries involved in the EO were chosen (by the Obama administration, I might add, although the Times leaves that fact out as well) because terrorism is very active in them, and because the current vetting system for people from those countries is being evaluated and fine-tuned.

But the Times is very effective in misinforming its readers in the manner it thinks is best for them. In fact, I have already had conversations with friends who seem to lack any real notion of what the Trump EO is and what it does, except that they are convinced that it is a step along the road to Hitlerian awfulness.

One more thing—the Times reports that its two DOJ informants say that Yates and others at the DOJ were “caught by surprise by the executive order.” I grant that they may have been surprised by its speed, but if they were surprised by the order itself, than they are either stupid or have not been paying attention.

Details yet to emerge in Quebec mosque shooting that killed six

Posted on January 30, 2017 by neoJanuary 30, 2017

We don’t know much yet about the perpetrators in a horrific and deadly attack on a Quebec mosque that left six dead and many wounded. Reports are that there were two and perhaps three shooters, but we know that such reports can be erroneous. At first it was said there were two in custody, one with a French name and one Moroccan, but the latest reports are that it’s only the man with the French name who is the suspect, and the other man was a witness.

Reports at the moment also indicate that the one perpetrator they have in custody is somewhat of a Dylan Roof type of hater, but even that is subject to revision. Who the other or others might be is completely unknown. But since the alleged perp is in custody, it shouldn’t be long before we learn more.

Oh, and already lots of people are blaming it on Trump, of course.

Just ten days out…

Posted on January 30, 2017 by neoJanuary 30, 2017

…and Obama can’t refrain from praising the protests against his successor.

No surprise there. He does it through a “spokesman,” of course, rather than directly. Here’s the text of the statement:

“President Obama is heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country. In his final official speech as President, he spoke about the important role of citizen and how all Americans have a responsibility to be the guardians of our democracy–not just during an election but every day,” Kevin Lewis, Obama’s spokesman, said.

“Citizens exercising their Constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake.”…

“With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion,” Lewis added.

Of course, no one discriminated against anyone because of that person’s faith or religion, but this is pure MSM-type obfuscation of the actual issue.

Obama himself has said:

“As an American citizen who cares deeply about our country, if there are issues that have less to do with the specifics of some legislative proposal or battle, but go to core questions about our values and our ideals, and if I think that it’s necessary or helpful for me to defend those ideals, then I’ll examine it when it comes,” Obama said.

And of course, it’s so often “necessary or helpful” for Obama to mouth off, even though previous presidents have respected their successors and/or the office of the presidency itself enough to have desisted. Not Obama.

So, would the press have done this to any Republican president?

Posted on January 30, 2017 by neoJanuary 30, 2017

All answers are speculative, of course, but my answer is a resounding “yes.”

Commenter Yancey Ward writes:

One of the issues some on the Right keep bringing up here is paraphrased this way: “Trump should have better explained this EO, or should have executed it better.”

This is delusional at best. It didn’t matter how Trump worded or explained this EO. The reaction from the media would have been exactly the same. The reaction would have been exactly the same if the EO hadn’t put a temporary halt to the entry of people from these 7 countries, but had instead just announced the same terms Obama had already put into place.

This has been a long-running problem for Republicans at all levels of government- thinking they can placate the media by any actions whatsoever.

I agree with Yancey. And yet I also disagree.

I agree that the MSM would twist his/her words, lie, and use a double standard towards any GOP president. But some charges stick more than others, and some GOP leaders are more susceptible to criticism than others. Each has his/her strengths and weaknesses. It behooves each and every one of them to be as clear as possible—and as loud as possible, in the sense of reaching the public directly and explaining him/herself—in an attempt to get ahead of the news. That’s true of the politician and it’s true for his/her aides and spokespeople. The more they pre-empt the media’s message and make their own crystal clear, the better.

Trump sometimes is good at that and sometimes isn’t. His use of Twitter, for example, is his attempt to do that. Someone like Kellyanne Conway, who ordinarily is extremely sharp and extremely clear and articulate, is another. Sometimes, though, the communications are murky or non-existent, such as on the signing of the EO on immigration. A chance to explain and get ahead of the inevitable distortions was missed, to the administration’s detriment.

However, Trump has two general advantages that previous GOP presidents have not had (maybe Reagan was an exception; I’m not sure about that). The first is that he has a lot of supporters who will forgive him anything, almost literally anything. The media has been trying to get him for a long time and they really haven’t drawn serious blood yet. The second is that Trump has explicitly framed his campaign and now his presidency as a fight against a mendacious media. So, any time he’s vague about something and they either misunderstand it or lie about it (or both), and are later proven to have been wrong or mendacious, that feeds the Trump narrative and makes more people suspicious of the media itself. Which is a win for Trump.

Trump’s most fervent supporters won’t turn on him almost no matter what he does. His most fervent opponents won’t approve of anything he does no matter what it is. But there’s a vast group in the middle that could go either way. I happen to think that he’d do well to explain himself clearly and succinctly and get ahead of the news cycle as well as responding to the news attacks. The more consistently right he is, the more he can appeal to that group and override the constant anti-Trump hue and cry in the MSM.

The press gets the vapors over Trump’s executive order on immigration

Posted on January 29, 2017 by neoFebruary 3, 2017

And when the press gets the vapors, so do its obedient readers. And yes, there are still plenty of those.

Another thing that happens is that I’m sometimes moved to violate my Never On Sunday rule and write a Sunday post. As you can see.

Every day there are certain internet sites that I check. One of them is memeorandum, which highlights a bunch of articles the memeorandum-powers-that-be have decided are the important must-reads of the day. I certainly don’t read them all, but I skim the headlines to get a rough idea of what’s being talked about, and if anything seems especially interesting I’ll read it.

Here’s memeorandum right now, as I’m writing this. You can see how very many stories there are—nearly all negative—about Donald Trump’s executive order regarding a temporary and limited halt to immigration from seven countries (countries which are not mentioned in the order; see this for a fascinating discussion of that) in which terrorism is rife. The coverage is so hysterical that one would think he had announced he would deport every Muslim in America. And in fact, quite a few of the article headlines disingenuously call it a “Muslim ban” (sometimes at least using the scare quotes, but sometimes not, as in this NY Times editorial entitled “Trump’s Muslim ban is cowardly and dangerous,” without any scare quotes at all).

Let’s see what the Times has to say:

First, reflect on the cruelty of President Trump’s decision on Friday to indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. It took just hours to begin witnessing the injury and suffering this ban inflicts on families that had every reason to believe they had outrun carnage and despotism in their homelands to arrive in a singularly hopeful nation.

The first casualties of this bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating policy were detained early Saturday at American airports just hours after the executive order, ludicrously titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” went into effect. A federal judge in Brooklyn on Saturday evening issued an emergency stay, ordering that those stuck at the airports not be returned to their home countries. But their future and the future of all the others subject to the executive order is far from settled.

It must have felt like the worst trick of fate for these refugees to hit the wall of Donald Trump’s political posturing at the very last step of a yearslong, rigorous vetting process. This ban will also disrupt the lives and careers of potentially hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been cleared to live in America under visas or permanent residency permits.

The Times goes on to a Holocaust reference, and then on and on and on in the same vein as that beginning. Remember that his ban is about delaying entry for people from suspect nations for between 90 and 120 days until better rules are put in place. That’s it. It’s not a ban on Muslims; it’s not even a ban. But the Times is misleading, and it is purposefully so. Believe me, most of the people I know will be talking about this and thinking about this as though it’s a Muslim ban.

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump fan. I also think this was a flawed presentation, especially the fact that there was not an exception for people already in transit. That had the effect of creating tailor-made visuals for the press to focus on, and undermined the policy in that way. I support the policy of introducing ideological vetting, however, and have for a long time—long before Donald Trump adopted the idea.

What’s more, I am firmly convinced that if, say, a President Cruz had announced something similar (and I believe he would have), and if he’d done it with an exception for people in transit and had also exempted those with green cards, that the press would have managed to give him equally negative coverage. That’s no reason that Trump had to play into their hands.

Actually, we can look at history to tell us that when President Obama put visa restrictions on individuals who had traveled to those countries, the reaction was crickets chirping. Or when Jimmy Carter banned travel from Iran during the hostage crisis:

Fourth, the Secretary of Treasury [State] and the Attorney General will invalidate all visas issued to Iranian citizens for future entry into the United States, effective today. We will not reissue visas, nor will we issue new visas, except for compelling and proven humanitarian reasons or where the national interest of our own country requires. This directive will be interpreted very strictly.

I don’t recall a hue and cry or accusations of “Hitler” back then. And I bet there may have been people stuck in transit, too. But Carter was a Democrat, so it didn’t matter. What’s more, the country hadn’t yet lost its mind.

Some of the criticism of the executive order centers on Trump’s supposed selection of these countries and his lack of selection of countries such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia from whence many of the 9/11 hijackers hailed. But not only is that disingenuous because Trump didn’t name the seven countries; Obama did, but also because much has changed since 9/11. 9/11 was an event that helped to get America’s attention about terrorists’ intentions towards us, but since then terrorism’s major sites have changed somewhat and spread out.

On the question of whether the executive order applies to green card holders, it appears that it doesn’t, although early reports said it did. I’m basing that idea on this:

News reports suggested the White House overruled the Department of Homeland Security’s recommendations on excluding green-card holders from the executive orders. Preibus, on Meet the Press, denied that, then appeared to suggest that the order won’t affect permanent residents going forward, but when pressed appeared to contradict himself.

“We didn’t overrule the Department of Homeland Security, as far as green-card holders moving forward, it doesn’t affect them,” he said. But when pressed by Chuck Todd, the show’s host, on whether the order affected green-card holders, he replied: “Well, of course it does. If you’re traveling back and forth, you’re going to be subjected to further screening.”

So it seems it will “affect” them, but the mechanism will be that they will be asked some more questions during transit—not that any ban will affect them. Here’s another article about the Priebus interview:

[Priebus] also suggested the executive order could come to encompass more than the current seven countries included in the ban, and that the order focused on people coming from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen because those were identified by Congress as “being the seven most-watched countries in regard to harboring terrorists.”

“Perhaps other countries needed to be added to an executive order going forward ”” but in order to do this in a way that was expeditious, in a way that would pass muster quickly, we used the 7 countries” already identified by Congress, he said.

Priebus added that the order was rolled out quickly because “this is all done for the protection of Americans, and waiting another three days, waiting another three weeks is something that we don’t want to get wrong.”

“President Trump is not willing to get this wrong which is why he wants to move forward quickly and protect Americans,” Priebus added.

You know what would have been a good idea? As this was announced, in addition to this long, complex, and rather legalistic press release, President Trump should have given a much shorter speech highlighting and explaining exactly what the order is and what it isn’t, and why it was being done so quickly. That way at least he would have made the press’s self-appointed job of obfuscation somewhat more difficult, although they would have probably been up to the task anyway.

[ADDENDUM: By the way, the NY Times has reported on the clarification about the green cards issued by the administration. But in doing so, the paper chooses the headline, “White House Official, in Reversal, Says Green Card Holders Won’t Be Barred.” But this was not some big reversal. In fact, the original report that green card holders would be banned was based on an email sent by Gillian Christensen, acting Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman. But very quickly the matter was clarified by another spokesman (on Saturday), declaring that green card holders would merely undergo “routine rescreening.” That was somehow missed yesterday, and the whole thing is being treated by the Times as some enormous reversal announced today by Priebus.]