What Happened to the Honeymoon?: Charles Krauthammer, Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2017— The shortest honeymoon on record is officially over.
Why Trump Should Move US Embassy to Jerusalem: Kenneth Lasson, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 14, 2017 — If President-elect Donald Trump is as much a man of his word as he says he is, he’ll move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem shortly after he takes office.
It’s Open War Between the Media and Donald Trump: Michael Goodwin, New York Post, Jan. 11, 2017— An old proverb sums up how Donald Trump handled the last two days: “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.”
Canadians Will Eventually Warm Up to Trump. Until Then, Stop Treating Him Like a Monster: Conrad Black, National Post, Jan. 6, 2017 — An instant industry has developed in Canada about how to adjust to a Trump presidency, as if the nature of the United States has metamorphosed instantly and unrecognizably.
Will Trump Era Introduce a 'One State Solution'?: Ariel Ben Solomon, JNS, Jan. 16, 2017
Trump's Jews and Obama's Jews: Daniel Greenfield, Arutz Sheva, Jan. 14, 2017
Obama Wants to Tie Trump's Hands: Zalman Shoval, Israel Hayom, Jan. 9, 2017
Why Trump Shouldn’t Put All His Faith in the Dysfunctional CIA: Michael Walsh, New York Post, Dec. 17, 2016
WHAT HAPPENED TO THE HONEYMOON?
Charles Krauthammer
Washington Post, Jan. 12, 2017
The shortest honeymoon on record is officially over. Normally, newly elected presidents enjoy a wave of goodwill that allows them to fly high at least through their first 100 days. Donald Trump has not yet been sworn in and the honeymoon has already come and gone.
Presidents-elect usually lie low during the interregnum. Trump never lies low. He seized the actual presidency from Barack Obama within weeks of his election — cutting ostentatious deals with U.S. manufacturers to keep jobs at home, challenging 40-year-old China policy, getting into a very public fight with the intelligence agencies. By now he has taken over the presidential stage. It is true that we have only one president at a time, and for over a month it’s been Donald Trump.
The result is quantifiable. A Quinnipiac poll from Nov. 17 to 20 — the quiet, hope-and-change phase — showed a decided bump in Trump’s popularity and in general national optimism. It didn’t last long. In the latest Quinnipiac poll, the numbers have essentially returned to Trump’s (historically dismal) pre-election levels. For several reasons. First, the refusal of an unbending left to accept the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. It’s not just the demonstrators chanting “not my president.” It is leading Democrats pushing one line after another to delegitimize the election, as in: He lost the popular vote, it’s James Comey’s fault, the Russians did it.
Second, Trump’s own instincts and inclinations, a thirst for attention that leads to hyperactivity. His need to dominate every news cycle feeds an almost compulsive tweet habit. It has placed him just about continuously at the center of the national conversation and not always to his benefit. Trump simply can’t resist playground pushback. His tweets gave Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes screed priceless publicity. His mocking Arnold Schwarzenegger for bad “Apprentice” ratings — compared with “the ratings machine, DJT” — made Trump look small and Arnold (almost) sympathetic. Nor is this behavior likely to change after the inauguration. It’s part of Trump’s character. Nothing negative goes unanswered because, for Trump, an unanswered slight has the air of concession or surrender.
Finally, it’s his chronic indiscipline, his jumping randomly from one subject to another without rhyme, reason or larger strategy. In a week packed with confirmation hearings and Russian hacking allegations, what was he doing meeting with Robert Kennedy Jr., an anti-vaccine activist pushing the thoroughly discredited idea that vaccines cause autism?
We know from way back during the Republican debates that Trump himself has dabbled in this dubious territory. One could, however, write it off as one of many campaign oddities that would surely fade away. Not so, apparently. This is not good. The idea that vaccines cause autism originally arose in a 1998 paper in the medical journal the Lancet that was later found to be fraudulent and had to be retracted. Indeed, the lead researcher acted so egregiously that he was stripped of his medical license.
Kennedy says that Trump asked him to chair a commission about vaccine safety. While denying that, the transition team does say that the commission idea remains open. Either way, the damage is done. The anti-vaccine fanatics seek any validation. This indirect endorsement from Trump is immensely harmful. Vaccination has prevented more childhood suffering and death than any other measure in history. With so many issues pressing, why even go there?
The vaccination issue was merely an exclamation point on the scatter-brained randomness of the Trump transition. All of which contributes to the harried, almost wearying feeling that we are already well into the Trump presidency. Compare this with eight years ago and the near euphoria — overblown but nonetheless palpable — at the swearing-in of Barack Obama. Not since JFK had any new president enjoyed such genuine goodwill upon accession to office.
And yet it turns out that such auspicious beginnings are not at all predictive. We could see it this same week. Tuesday night, there stood Obama giving a farewell address that only underscored the failure of a presidency so bathed in optimism at its start. The final speech, amazingly, could have been given, nearly unedited, in 2008. Why, it even ended with “yes we can.”
Is there more powerful evidence of the emptiness of the intervening two terms? When your final statement is a reprise of your first, you have unwittingly confessed to being nothing more than a historical parenthesis.
IT’S OPEN WAR BETWEEN THE MEDIA AND DONALD TRUMP
Michael Goodwin
New York Post, Jan. 11, 2017
An old proverb sums up how Donald Trump handled the last two days: “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” The dogs of the Democratic media were absolutely howling yesterday over sordid, unverified allegations involving Russia, but the president-elect and his team put on a master class in self-defense. They hit back forcefully, with press secretary Sean Spicer calling publication of the allegations “disgraceful” and Vice President-elect Mike Pence calling it a case of “fake news” that aims to “delegitimize the president-elect.”
It was a strong warm-up, and Trump then took the stage to completely deny the charges, and repeated the denials in response to numerous questions. By the end of the press conference, he had managed to turn the spotlight away from himself and on to the lack of integrity in both the media and government intelligence agencies — where it also belongs.
That was no mean feat, and his performance was a reminder that Trump is not and never will be a pushover. He fights fire with fire and is getting increasingly more disciplined in making his case. Pulling it off was not as easy as he made it look. The run-up to his first press conference since winning the election had the air of crisis that was routine in the long campaign. Then, every week or two, many geniuses predicted that something Trump had said or done would be the final straw and he would have to drop out.
Similarly, the salacious allegations he faced yesterday packed a potential to seriously wound him before he takes office. Anything less than complete denial would have created a firestorm, but after his no-wiggle-room statements, the allegations withered, at least for now. That had to disappoint the dead-enders who hoped they had finally found the kill shot. Instead, Trump emerged intact and even stronger as he made news on two other fronts: He released extensive plans on how he is severing himself from his company and nominated a new secretary of the troubled Department of Veterans’ Affairs.
With his first Cabinet nominees getting good reviews in confirmation hearings, Trump is clearing a final series of hurdles before taking the oath. There is a sense of optimism about the economy, and his announcements on various job deals are making his transition far more meaningful than most. Yet the opposition to him, especially in Washington, remains formidable, with the latest allegations an example of how low some people are willing to go. For one thing, numerous reports say the anonymous charges were the product of opposition research paid for by Trump’s Republican opponents, with the payments then continued by Hillary Clinton supporters.
Indeed, Clinton and associates several times suggested during the race that bombshells involving Trump and Russia were coming, and her campaign chairman is publicly fuming now that the allegations did not surface before the election. It is not fanciful to wonder if Clinton operatives gave them to reporters. For another thing, the incident showed that a very thin line separates mainstream media from less reputable outlets. BuzzFeed, a liberal Web site, published the 35 pages of memos Tuesday evening that accuse Trump of numerous misdeeds even as its editor said, “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations.”
Nonetheless, in an instant, The New York Times, The Washington Post and others released stories describing the content of the memos without actually publishing them. Those and other large organizations said they had received the memos months ago and had withheld making them public because they could not verify the allegations. Yet because BuzzFeed went ahead, the others felt obliged to do their own stories lest they be scooped. Once upon a time, it was a good thing to be scooped on a bad story. And ask yourself this: Would the Times and Washington Post make the same decision if the unverified allegations were about PresidentBarack Obama or Hillary Clinton? Of course not, so their rabid anti-Trump agenda still distorts their decision-making.
Which brings us to the most troubling aspect of all — the role of the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies in the sordid affair. Trump has been feuding with them for months and plans a shakeup of the sprawling intelligence apparatus. In that context, Sen. Chuck Schumer recently warned him, “You take on the intelligence agencies — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” Is that what just happened here? Was the next president the target of our own spooks?
It is a sign of our troubled times and of Trump’s unprecedented impact even to ask the questions. But it is no secret that most if not all the intelligence leaders wanted to see Clinton in the White House, if only because she is the devil they know. That’s a plausible explanation, but not an excuse. For now, all we know is that a madness has been set loose in America and there is no reason to believe we have seen the last attempt to destroy Donald Trump.
CANADIANS WILL EVENTUALLY WARM UP TO TRUMP.
UNTIL THEN, STOP TREATING HIM LIKE A MONSTER
Conrad Black
National Post, Jan. 6, 2017
An instant industry has developed in Canada about how to adjust to a Trump presidency, as if the nature of the United States has metamorphosed instantly and unrecognizably. Almost all of this concern is unnecessary. Donald Trump has never expressed any grievances against Canada, and his limited experiences here, from skiing in the Laurentians to putting his name on a few buildings for a good fee, (which some local idiots have threatened to take down and have made the subject of demonstrations), have been agreeable. Canada actually runs a modest trade deficit with the United States, and Trump has made it clear that his objections to North American Free Trade are to the large trade deficit with Mexico, not to the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement that preceded it by some years. Approximately nine million Americans are substantially dependent on trade with Canada. This has been a constant of over two centuries — President Jefferson had to declare all New England in a state of insurrection when he embargoed trade with Britain and Canada. The president-elect does not construe the post he has won as a licence to inconvenience and financially imperil his countrymen, or to harass and irritate the country with which, on balance, the United States has been friendlier than any other, these 150 years.
The most vacuous of these confected states of agitation are those based on analysis of the personality of the president-elect, as if he were an extra-terrestrial monster whose conduct was unlikely to have any connection to the rational self-interest of the United States. Some of the explanation for this concern is fairly explicable: Trump is that type of American who puts his views forcefully and speaks plainly, though he is very courteous in person and almost never coarse. He has been elected by 65 million Americans who were disgusted at the inability of the outgoing president and his party’s candidate this year to utter the words “Islamic terrorism” or “Islamic extremism,” and the current president’s reference to the massacre of innocents in San Bernardino, California by Jihadists as “workplace violence.” His is essentially the charm of John Wayne, including the implicit possession of a hard power option for the resolution of disputes, made more worrisome to some because what we are about to watch in Washington is not a film. But nor will it be the frothings and thrashings about of a madman.
Many Canadians and some other foreigners, and many apprehensive Americans, have been startled by the stylistic contrast of Donald Trump with his predecessors as major party presidential candidates. In the United States and other sophisticated democracies, candidates for the highest office have either progressed through serious public offices or held a high military command and been recruited by the grandees of one of the major parties. (In the 21 U.S. presidential elections from 1824 to 1904, distinguished military officers were presidential candidates in all except 1844, 1860, and 1884, and on four of those 21 occasions, both parties nominated military candidates. Most were citizen soldiers and the concept of patriotic service, proven leadership capacities and personal bravery are more esteemed than most political arts, though some of these officers were adept at those too.)
Donald Trump is the first person elected president of the United States who has never sought or held public office or military command (though he did graduate from a military academy). He is also the oldest and wealthiest person and the only business executive, and the only person to pay for his own campaign, to be elected president, and will be only the fourth not to collect the president’s salary (after Washington, Hoover, and Kennedy). The reason he was able to be such an unusual candidate and employ such unusual, and to many, grating, tactics, was precisely because of the unprecedented circumstances in which the U.S. has found itself. The combination of the prolonged commitment of most of the country’s conventional ground-force military capability in the Middle East, where the forces were victorious but the result was a strategic disaster, the disintegration of countries, empowerment of Iran, spread of international terrorism and an immense humanitarian crisis; the obscene housing debt bubble and Great Recession; the illegal entry of 12 million unskilled people into the country, the evaporation of 10 per cent of the American workforce, a 125 per cent increase in seven years of the national debt accumulated in the previous 233 years of American independence to produce one per cent economic growth; the mockery of the Obama Red Line in Syria, the nuclear and sanction giveaway to Iran, and the displacement of the U.S. by Russian influence in the Middle East with only 50 Russian warplanes and not a brigade of soldiers, has shocked and demoralized American opinion.
These things are hard to quantify, but the impression is that of the first period of relative and absolute decline in American history. Unlike the principal European and Asian nationalities, Americans are not accustomed to any such downward fluctuations in their place in the world, and do not assimilate such a turn of events equably. That is part of the strength of America. Because George Bush Sr. was next to President Reagan when his term limit came, Bush succeeded him, and because he allowed his party to fragment, Bill Clinton succeeded him. Because Bush was the only American president to have politically ambitious sons since Theodore Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton was the only president to have a wife with political aptitudes since Franklin D. Roosevelt, one member or other of these families was president, vice president, or secretary of state from 1981 to 2013, and both families sought their parties’ presidential nominations in 2016. The country took control of the Congress away from Bill Clinton in 1994, (and gave it to Newt Gingrich), from George W. Bush in 2006 (and gave it to Nancy Pelosi), and from Barack Obama in 2010 (and gave it to John Boehner). Nothing worked, and generally things got worse…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
WHY TRUMP SHOULD MOVE US EMBASSY TO JERUSALEM
Kenneth Lasson
Jerusalem Post, Jan. 14, 2017
If President-elect Donald Trump is as much a man of his word as he says he is, he’ll move the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem shortly after he takes office. There are good diplomatic and constitutional reasons for him to do so.
Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act in 1995, which firmly asserted that “Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel” and that our embassy should be established there “no later than May 31, 1999.” (The vote was 93-5 in the Senate and 374-37 in the House.) But the law was never implemented – because presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama all came to view it as a congressional infringement on the executive branch’s constitutional authority over foreign policy, and consistently exercised a built-in presidential-waiver clause based on their perception of national security interests.
These waivers, which must be and have been signed every six months, have always been defended in terms of protecting the bedrock constitutional principal separating the executive and legislative powers. Despite the fact that two of the past three presidents (Clinton and Bush) had vowed during their campaigns to move the embassy – Clinton said he’d “always wanted to” and Bush promised to start the process on his first day in office – both later reneged. Their so-called Middle East experts had convinced them that doing so would prejudge negotiations for a final settlement between Israelis and Palestinians. All three missed the forest of Middle East reality for the trees of diplomatic denial and intransigence.
The Founding Fathers were heavily influenced by French philosopher Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, most notably in connection with the separation of powers. In his The Spirit of Laws (1748), Montesquieu warned that “Were the executive power not to have a right of restraining the encroachments of the legislative body, the latter would become despotic; for as it might arrogate to itself what authority it pleased, it would soon destroy all the other powers.”
James Madison was an ardent though rational advocate for such separation. In one of the Federalist Papers he wrote that “An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among the several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.” A key but often-ignored operative word there was “balanced.”
John Adams, in his Thoughts on Government, opined that “A representative assembly, although extremely well qualified, and absolutely necessary, as a branch of the legislative, is unfit to exercise the executive power, for want of two essential properties, secrecy and dispatch.” In the openly and everlastingly analyzed Palestinian-Israeli dispute, there has seldom if ever been such “secrecy and dispatch.”
The Jerusalem Embassy Act noted that every country in the world has had the right to designate the capital of its choice, with Israel the lone exception. It noted that “Jerusalem is the seat of Israel’s President, Parliament, and Supreme Court, and most of its ministries and cultural institutions.” It recognized since the reunification of the city in 1967, religious freedom has been guaranteed to all. Yet since the celebration of the 3,000th anniversary of King David’s declaration of Jerusalem, in 1996, as the capital of the Jews, there’s been no progress in the physical relocation of the US Embassy.
The root of the State Department’s long-standing heavy-handed reluctance to offend Arab populations in the region is a willful ignorance of history and reality. In 1948, president Harry Truman ignored its strong objections and enabled the US to become one of the first countries to recognize Israel. Even though Israel won all of Jerusalem in the 1967 war, even though no Israeli government nor popular referendum would ever allow another city to be designated its capital, even though the Arab-Palestinian peace process countenances no other place for that purpose – in the view of the State Department, Jerusalem remains no-man’s land.
The issue remains so delicate that the Obama administration went to the Supreme Court to block a law passed by Congress that would allow American parents of children born in Jerusalem to list Israel as their birthplace on their passports. When Obama traveled to Jerusalem in September for the funeral of president Shimon Peres, the White House initially released a transcript of his eulogy as having taken place in “Jerusalem, Israel” – and a few hours later “corrected” it by crossing out the word “Israel.”…
[To Read the Full Article Click the Following Link—Ed.]
Will Trump Era Introduce a 'One State Solution'?: Ariel Ben Solomon, JNS, Jan. 16, 2017—In the aftermath of Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech defending the United Nations Security Council resolution against Israeli settlements and the Obama administration’s refusal to veto the resolution, Israeli political figures are increasingly mulling the idea of annexing the West Bank and implementing a “one-state solution” during the incoming Donald Trump era.
Trump's Jews and Obama's Jews: Daniel Greenfield, Arutz Sheva, Jan. 14, 2017—Seen from above, the 2016 electoral map of New York City is blue with dots of red. Trump’s home district is blue, but across the water a red wedge slices into Brooklyn. Around that red wedge are districts where Hillary won 90 percent of the vote and Trump was lucky to get 5 percent. Inside it, he beat her in district after district.
Obama Wants to Tie Trump's Hands: Zalman Shoval, Israel Hayom, Jan. 9, 2017—On Dec. 31, The New York Times' Michael D. Shear wrote: "Only two days after the election, President [Barack] Obama sat by President-elect Donald J. Trump's side in the Oval Office and declared that the No. 1 priority in his last days in the White House would be ensuring a smooth transition of power. What Mr. Obama did not say was that he also intended to set up as many policy and ideological roadblocks as possible before Mr. Trump takes his oath of office on Jan. 20."
Why Trump Shouldn’t Put All His Faith in the Dysfunctional CIA: Michael Walsh, New York Post, Dec. 17, 2016—One of the strongest criticisms leveled against President-elect Donald Trump is his alleged indifference to the work of America’s intelligence community, including his disinclination to receive daily intel briefings as he prepares to take office.
