Friday, December 30, 2016

HOW GEORGE SOROS DESTROYED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

HOW GEORGE SOROS DESTROYED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY



It was the end of the big year with three zeroes. The first X-Men movie had broken box office records. You couldn’t set foot in a supermarket without listening to Brittney Spears caterwauling, “Oops, I Did It Again.” And Republicans and Democrats had total control of both chambers of legislatures in the same amount of states. That was the way it was back in the distant days of the year 2000.
In 2016, Republicans control both legislative chambers in 32 states. That’s up from 16 in 2000.
What happened to the big donkey? Among other things, the Democrats decided to sell their base and their soul to a very bad billionaire and they got a very bad deal for both.
It was 2004. The poncho was the hottest fashion trend, there were 5 million new cases of AIDS and a former Nazi collaborator had bought the Democrat Party using the spare change in his sofa cushions.
And gone to war against the will of the people. This was what he modestly called his own “Soros Doctrine”.
“It is the central focus of my life,” George Soros declared. It was “a matter of life and death.” He vowed that he would become poor if it meant defeating the President of the United States.
Instead of going to the poorhouse, he threw in at least $15 million, all the spare change in the billionaire’s sofa cushions, dedicated to beating President Bush.
In his best lisping James Bond villain accent, Soros strode into the National Press Club and declared that he had “an important message to deliver to the American Public before the election” that was contained in a pamphlet and a book that he waved in front of the camera. Despite his “I expect you to die, Mr. Bond” voice, the international villain’s delivery was underwhelming. He couldn’t have sold brownies to potheads at four in the morning. He couldn’t even sell Bush-bashing to a roomful of left-wing reporters.
But he could certainly fund those who would. And that’s exactly what he did.
Money poured into the fringe organizations of the left like MoveOn, which had moved on from a petition site to a PAC. In 2004, Soros was its biggest donor. He didn’t manage to bring down Bush, but he helped buy the Democratic Party as a toy for his yowling dorm room of left-wing activists to play with.
Soros hasn’t had a great track record at buying presidential elections. The official $25 million he poured into this one bought him his worst defeat since 2004. But his money did transform the Democrat Party.
And killed it.
Next year the Democracy Alliance was born. A muddy river of cash from Soros and his pals flowed into the organizations of the left. Soros had helped turn Howard Dean, a Vermont politician once as obscure as this cycle’s radical Vermont Socialist, into a contender and a national figure. Dean didn’t get the nomination, but he did get to remake the DNC. Podesta’s Center for American Progress swung the Democrats even further to the left. And it would be Podesta who helped bring Hillary down.
The Democrats became a radical left-wing organization and unviable as a national political party. The Party of Jefferson had become the Party of Soros. And only one of those was up on Mount Rushmore.
Obama’s wins concealed the scale and scope of the disaster. Then the party woke up after Obama to realize that it had lost its old bases in the South and the Rust Belt. The left had hollowed it out and transformed it into a party of coastal urban elites, angry college crybullies and minority coalitions.
Republicans control twice as many state legislative chambers as the Democrats. They boast 25 trifectas , controlling both legislative chambers and the governor’s mansion. Trifectas had gone from being something that wasn’t seen much outside of a few hard red states like Texas to covering much of the South, the Midwest and the West.
The Democrats have a solid lock on the West Coast and a narrow corridor of the Northeast, and little else. The vast majority of the country’s legislatures are in Republican hands. The Democrat Governor’s Association has a membership in the teens. In former strongholds like Arkansas, Dems are going extinct. The party has gone from holding national legislative majorities to becoming a marginal movement.
And the Democrats don’t intend to change course. The way is being cleared for Keith Ellison, the co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus with an ugly racist past, to head the DNC. Pelosi will oversee the disaster in the House. And Obama will remain the party’s highest profile national figure.
There could hardly be a clearer signal that the left intends to retain its donkey herding rights. Soros and his ilk have paid for the reins. That is why Pelosi, with her access to donors, will retain her position.
The left had recreated the Democrat Party and marginalized it. Much of this disaster had been funded with Soros money. Like many a theatrical villain, the old monster had been undone by his own hubris. Had Soros aided the Democrats without trying to control them, he would have gained a seat at the table in a national party. Instead he spent a fortune destroying the very thing he was trying to control.
George Soros saw America in terms of its centers of economic and political power. He didn’t care about the vast stretches of small towns and villages, of the more modest cities that he might fly over in his jet but never visit, and the people who lived in them. Like so many globalists who believe that borders shouldn’t exist because the luxury hotels and airports they pass through are interchangeable, the parts of America that mattered to him were in the glittering left-wing bubble inhabited by his fellow elitists.
Trump’s victory, like Brexit, came because the left had left the white working class behind. Its vision of the future as glamorous multicultural city states was overturned in a single night. The idea that Soros had committed so much power and wealth to was of a struggle between populist nationalists and responsible internationalists. But, in a great irony, Bush was hardly the nationalist that Soros believed. Instead Soros spent a great deal of time and wealth to unintentionally elect a populist nationalist.
Leftists used Soros money to focus on their own identity politics obsessions leaving the Dems with little ability to interact with white working class voters. The Ivy and urban leftists who made up the core of the left had come to exist in a narrow world with little room for anything and anyone else. 
Soros turned over the Democrats to political fanatics least likely to be able to recognize their own errors. His protégés repeated the great self-destruction of the Soviet Union on a more limited scale
Soros fed a political polarization while assuming, wrongly, that the centers of power mattered, and their outskirts did not. He was proven wrong in both the United States of America and in the United Kingdom. He had made many gambles that paid off. But his biggest gamble took everything with it.
"I don’t believe in standing in the way of an avalanche," Soros complained of the Republican wave in 2010.
But he has been trying to do just that. And failing.
"There should be consequences for the outrageous statements and proposals that we've regularly heard from candidates Trump and Cruz," Soros threatened this time around. He predicted a Hillary landslide.
He was wrong.
As Soros plowed more money into the left, its escalating radicalism alienated more of the country. Each “avalanche” was a reaction to the abuses of his radicals.  It wasn't Trump or Cruz who suffered the consequences. It wasn't even his own leftists. Rather it was the conservative and eventually the moderate wings of the Democrat party who were swept away by his left-wing avalanches.
The left did not mourn the mass destruction of the moderates. Instead it celebrated the growing purity of the Democrats as a movement of the hard left. It did not notice or care that it was no longer a political force outside a limited number of cities. It anticipated that voters would have no choice but to choose it over the "extremist" Republicans.
It proved to be very, very wrong.
George Soros spent a fortune to turn a national party favorable to the left into an organization that has difficulty appealing to anyone not on the left. He wanted to control a country he did not understand. And, as the left so often does, he achieved his goals and in doing so destroyed them. 

Tuesday, December 27, 2016

Victor Davis Hanson: The Trump Nail In The Media's Coffin

Victor Davis Hanson: The Trump Nail In The Media's Coffin

President-elect Donald Trump probably will not often communicate with the nation via traditional press conferences. Nor will Trump likely field many questions from New York/Washington journalists.
What we know as "the media" never imagined a Trump victory. It has become unhinged at the reality of a Trump presidency.
No wonder the fading establishment media is now distrusted by a majority of the public, according to Gallup — and becoming irrelevant even among progressives.
Once upon a time in the 1960s, all the iconic news anchors, from Walter Cronkite to David Brinkley, were liberal. But they at least hid their inherent biases behind a professional veneer that allowed them to filter stories through left-wing lenses without much pushback.
When Cronkite returned from Vietnam after the 1968 Tet Offensive and declared the war stalemated and unwinnable, no one dared to offer the dissenting viewpoint that Tet was actually a decisive American victory.
The mainstream-media narrative in 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald, the Castroite, communist assassin of President John F. Kennedy, was a product of right-wing Texas hatred was completely crazy — but largely unquestioned.
That old monopoly over the news, despite the advent of cable television and the internet, still lingered until 2016. Even in recent years, Ivy League journalism degrees and well-known media brand names seemed to suggest better reporting than what was offered by bloggers and websites.
Soft-spoken liberal hosts on public TV and radio superficially sounded more news-like than their gravelly-voiced populist counterparts on commercial radio and cable news.
Yet the thinning veneer of circumspection that had supposedly characterized the elite liberal successors to Cronkite and Brinkley was finally ripped off completely by a media meltdown over Trump.
Journalists such as Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN said that they could not — and should not — be neutral reporters, given their low opinion of Trump.
When the press is unashamedly slanted, even its benefactors want even more partiality — media heartthrob Barack Obama included.
In his last press conference as president, Obama attacked pet journalists for reporting on WikiLeaks' release of John Podesta's emails, supposedly at the expense of his own legacy and Hillary Clinton's accomplishments.
The WikiLeaks trove certainly proved another disaster to the media — but only because it revealed that mainstream journalists conspired with the Clinton campaign.
CNN's Donna Brazile leaked possible debate questions to Clinton. One op-ed columnist, Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, even asked Clintonites for research to help him attack Trump.
Politico's Glenn Thrush sent a story to the Clinton campaign team to be audited before publication. He begged to keep his collusion quiet and admitted that he had become a "hack" for such journalistic impropriety. Thrush may have been rewarded for his predictable left-wing bias, recently being hired by the New York Times as a White House correspondent.
Last week, New York Times op-ed columnist Paul Krugman grotesquely suggested via Twitter that Trump might welcome another 9/11-like attack, given that such a human catastrophe supposedly helped win support for George W. Bush.
Recently, another Politico reporter, Julia Ioffe, used Twitter to relay a news story about the possibility that Trump's daughter, Ivanka, would get an office at the White House. In her tweet, Joffe suggested that Trump was either having incestuous relations with his daughter or skirting nepotism laws.
Politico fired Ioffe — sort of. She had already announced that she was moving from Politico to the Atlantic.
Yet the Atlantic announced that it would not rescind her hire — suggesting that her political bias, despite the accompanying unprofessionalism and uncouthness, could almost be interpreted as a plus.
In today's media, all of this progressive distortion serves as an insurance policy for lapses of personal integrity like those of Thrush and Joffe.
MSNBC anchor Brian Williams sermonized about the so-called "fake news" epidemic. Williams failed to remind us that he was removed as NBC's evening news anchor for serving up all sorts of fake details about his supposedly brave trips abroad in search of edgy news stories.
After the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the co-hosts of the show "CNN Newsroom" collectively put up their hands in "hands up, don't shoot" solidarity — echoing a narrative of police murder later proved to be completely false by a lengthy federal investigation.
Decades-long journalistic one-sidedness was apparently tolerable when there were no other news alternatives. Mainstream-media monopolies once were also highly profitable, and long-ago liberal news people were at least well-mannered.
All of those assumptions are no longer true. News outlets such as The New York Times and NBC have no more credibility than most websites or the National Enquirer.
Is it any surprise that we are witnessing the funeral for traditional journalism as we once knew it?
  • Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of "The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern".

Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts, Looking Back

COLUMNISTS


Thomas Sowell: Random Thoughts, Looking Back

Any honest man, looking back on a very long life, must admit -- even if only to himself -- being a relic of a bygone era. Having lived long enough to have seen both "the greatest generation" that fought World War II and the gratingest generation that we see all around us today, makes being a relic of the past more of a boast than an admission.
Not everything in the past was admirable. Poet W.H. Auden called the 1930s "a low dishonest decade." So were the 1960s, which launched many of the trends we are experiencing so painfully today. Some of the fashionable notions of the 1930s reappeared in the 1960s, often using the very same discredited words and producing the same disastrous consequences.
Sowell_ThomasThe old are not really smarter than the young, in terms of sheer brainpower. It is just that we have already made the kinds of mistakes that the young are about to make, and we have already suffered the consequences that the young are going to suffer, if they disregard the record of the past.
If you want to understand the fatal dangers facing America today, read "The Gathering Storm" by Winston Churchill. The book is not about America, the Middle East or nuclear missiles. But it shows Europe's attitudes and delusions -- aimed at peace in the years before the Second World War -- which instead ended up bringing on that most terrible war in all of human history.
Black adults, during the years when I was growing up in Harlem, had far less education than black adults today -- but far more common sense. In an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges are producing artificial stupidity, among both blacks and whites.
The first time I traveled across the Atlantic Ocean, as the plane flew into the skies over London I was struck by the thought that, in these skies, a thousand British fighter pilots fought off Hitler's air force and saved both Britain and Western civilization. But how many students today will have any idea of such things, with history being neglected in favor of politically correct rhetoric?
You cannot live a long life without having been forced to change your mind many times about people and things -- including in some cases, your whole view of the world. Those who glorify the young today do them a great disservice, when this sends inexperienced young people out into the world cocksure about things on which they have barely scratched the surface.
In my first overseas trip, I was struck by blatantly obvious differences in behavior among different groups, such as the Malays and the Chinese in Malaysia -- and wondered why scholars who were far more well-traveled than I was seemed not to have noticed such things, and to have resorted to all sorts of esoteric theories to explain why some groups earned higher incomes than others.
There are words that were once common, but which are seldom heard any more. The phrase "none of your business" is one of these. Today, everything seems to be the government's business or the media's business. And the word "risque" would be almost impossible to explain to young people, in a world where gross vulgarity is widespread and widely accepted.
Back when I taught at UCLA, I was constantly amazed at how little so many students knew. Finally, I could no longer restrain myself from asking a student the question that had long puzzled me: "What were you doing for the last 12 years before you got here?"
Reading about the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, and the widespread retrogressions of Western civilization that followed, was an experience that was sobering, if not crushing. Ancient history in general lets us know how long human beings have been the way they are, and dampens giddy zeal for the latest panaceas, despite how politically correct those panaceas may be.
When I was growing up, we were taught the stories of people whose inventions and scientific discoveries had expanded the lives of millions of other people. Today, students are being taught to admire those who complain, denounce and demand.
The first column I ever wrote, 39 years ago, was titled "The Profits of Doom." This was long before Al Gore made millions of dollars promoting global warming hysteria. Back in 1970, the prevailing hysteria was the threat of a new ice age -- promoted by some of the same environmentalists who are promoting global warming hysteria today.

Are Public-Employee Pension Funds Now Too Big To Fail?

Are Public-Employee Pension Funds Now Too Big To Fail?

Pensions: California, which is known for its earthquakes, just had a major one. Didn't feel it? You will. This quake isn't the earthshaking kind, but rather the state's decision to recognize reality when it comes to its insolvent public-employee pension fund.
Last week, the 85-year-old California Public Employees' Retirement System, or CalPERS, slashed its official investment forecast going forward, meaning that state and local governments, police and sheriffs departments, and even school districts will have to spend billions of dollars more to CalPERS to support their future retirees. And, no doubt, it will mean higher taxes for all.
Sadly, this move won't be enough. For years, the state has projected steady investment returns of 7.5% for CalPERS, the largest pension fund in the nation. But returns have been below that. So now CalPERS is trimming its return to 7% per year. But, given the pension fund's mismanagement and poor performance, even that may be too high. Today the fund is a little over 60% fully funded, meaning it will have to raise billions of dollars more to be solvent. That means higher contributions for government workers, and higher taxes for average citizens.
It's no accident. "CalPERS has ... steered billions of dollars into politically connected firms," wrote Steve Malanga in City Journal, back in 2013. "And it has ventured into 'socially responsible' investment strategies, making bad bets that have lost hundreds of millions of dollars. Such dubious practices have piled up a crushing amount of pension debt, which California residents — and their children — will somehow have to repay."
That's happening now. California's famous Highway Patrol, for instance, has grossly underfunded its pensions. So it got the state to agree to a $10 hike in car registration fees to help make up the shortfall. No doubt, it will be asking for more soon.
It's not just California. Across the country, pension funds have been underfunded, mismanaged and in some cases looted by managers. Today, according to the Fed, pension funds across the country are $2 trillion in the red — after being overfunded as recently as the year 2000. That means tax hikes are coming, like it or not.
In a scathing, just-released report, the American Legislative Exchange details how "rather than investing to earn the best return for workers, (politicians and fund officials) use pension funds in a misguided attempt to boost their local economies, provide kickbacks to their political supporters, reward industries they like, punish those they don't and bully corporations into silence and behaving as they see fit."
It's quite an indictment. It's time for a national commission to look into the misconduct and mismanagement — which pose a clear danger to the financial system — and answer the scariest question of all: Have public employee pension funds become too big to fail?
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Tuesday, December 20, 2016

Obama’s initiatives -Obama’s initiatives

 

From an Angry Reader:

Re: Obama’s initiatives
What a horrible president and yet, 57% approval rating! Wow! How is that possible! I think he did quite well considering that Republicans vowed on the first day not to work with him and never did!
 Connie Knapp
Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:
Dear Angry Reader Connie Knapp,
Irony noted.
Obama, I think as of this weekend had a 53% approval according to the realclearpolitics.com average. But in just a year, yes, he has jumped 10 points. Why?
No one quite knows, but I will suggest 5 reasons:
1) Obama understood that he was unpopular in the flesh and popular in the abstract. So when the primaries started in early 2016 he simply disengaged and we rarely saw or heard him much, as two unpopular candidates, Trump and Clinton, by mid-summer were sliming each other and driving their approval ratings down and in contrast and by default the absent Obama’s up. Seeing Obama wave from the links is one thing, having him lecture that “you didn’t build that” or “punish our enemies” is another.
2) He is now a lame duck, and again the reality of a soon to be gone Obama made him popular in a way that an eight-year long tenure of Obama left him unpopular. The popularity of houseguests rises in the hours of their departure.
3) He has bailed on offering the hard medicine to treat the $10 trillion in additional debt he ran up, or to deal with the implosion of Syria, Iraq, and Libya on his watch, or his failed Russian reset, or the looming disaster of Obamacare. Instead his attitude is more or less “stuff happens” as he exits the door to a lucrative post-presidency, and welcomes others to deal with de facto zero interest rates, sluggish growth, record labor non-particiaption, crises in racial relations, etc. It is easy to lose deterrence, but dangerous and hard to regain it—as we shall soon see.
4) The media has sanctified Obama in the manner it has demonized Trump.
5) We do not yet know what the ultimate approval rating of Obama will be; it may stay strong or gyrate. Truman left with 25% approval and yet his administration is now considered a success.
As for your assertion, “I think he did quite well considering that Republicans vowed on the first day not to work with him and never did!”, it was irrelevant what the Republicans said or thought, because Obama entered office with both the House and a super-majority in the Senate.
He rammed budgets and Obamacare through without a single Republican vote. When Obama lost the House and his supermajority in the Senate, Harry Reid simply adopted the nuclear option and ended most filibusters (to the regret now of Democrats).
When he lost the Senate as well, Obama turned to “pen and phone” executive orders and simply ignored Constitutional give and take and bypassed the Congress (amnesties, non-immigration enforcement, EPA fiats, picking and choosing which part of Obamacare he enforced, etc.)—again to the chagrin of Democrats who now fear that Trump might do what Obama did with executive orders.
We forget the alphabet scandals of the last eight years: Lois Lerner and IRS, the NSA mess, the GSA boondoggles, the horrific record at the VA, the crazy EPA director and her fake email persona and the EPA’s unconstitutional fiats, the Wikileaks/Hillary emails/Clinton Foundation pay for play at the State Department, the abrupt departure of Hilda Solis at Labor, the strange career and departure of Petraeus at the CIA, the Sibelius firing at HHS after the surreal startup of Obamacare, and on and on and on.
Obama entered with record good will, both houses of Congress, an upswing in the states, and a likely chance to alter the Supreme Court; he leaves with the strongest Republican position in 100 years, from governorships and state legislatures to the Congress and presidency. The Supreme Court could soon tilt 6-3 or 7-2.
Such was the epitaph to “hope and change”—the greatest gift to the Republican Party in a century.
Sincerely, VDH

VDH on Obama Foreign Ploicy

From An Angry Reader:

Victor
 Your gloating and myopic column pillorying President Obama’s foreign policy legacy was simple minded and juvenile. Why write something so stupidly one sided?????
 When Obama came into office we were losing 100 service people per month in a stupid war and as he leaves office, this number is down to one or two. This is a great result and legacy.
 He worked with Iraqi leaders to build an Army capable of retaking Mosul … and also improved cooperation between the different militias there. You didn’t mention this.
 Real experts on Iran are touting the multi-lateral agreement closing down Iran’s ability to produce nuclear material and weapons….they say this agreement will give legitimacy to a country that simply wants to be a player in the middle east and whose impact result in greater stability in this area.
 Under Obama we have not committed troops in the Syrian conflict …. one so complex and far from our national interest that this merits praise.
 He has also been allowing the CIA to conduct covert operations to stabilize Ukraine and punish the Russians for Crimea.
 Why be so unnecessarily one sided that you come off as just another right-wing ass?
 John G. Schuiteman, Ph.D.
Ashland, VA 23005

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Schuiteman,
It is angry letters like yours that seem to sow dissension since you are, I fear, at times intellectually dishonest.
I never wrote or implied the description “simple minded” or “juvenile”; Obama certainly has a vision and sought to implement it—one gleaned from his memoirs, his past associations, his apology tour, his Cairo speech, his various interviews, and his actions.
I was not “gloating” or “myopic” but rather factual in describing an Obama legacy—reset with Putin, abrupt withdrawal in late 2011 from a quiet Iraq, the Libya/Benghazi violence, the Iran deal, the Syrian calamity, estrangement from Israel, outreach to Cuba—that even in the eyes of many Democratic observers has not worked, at least from the view of enhancing global and U.S. security. But from Obama’s standpoint of scaling down U.S. influence, it has been a smashing success.
You are not factual in your letter. Obama came into office on January 2009; the fatality rate in Iraq that month was 16 deaths—not “100.” By December of 2009 it was 3 a month—less than the monthly accident rate in the U.S. military. No wonder Biden (who flipped on the war and, when a presidential candidate, opposed it) suddenly called the quiet in Iraq possibly the administration’s “greatest achievement.” By December 2010, 1 soldier had died that month, and when Obama finished pulling out in December 2011 (as he praised Iraq’s stability) it was 0 deaths. That decision was perhaps analogous to a hypothetical Eisenhower in late 1955 up for reelection like Obama, promising to get out of the Korean War that he did not “start,” and therefore yanking all U.S. troops out by election day 1956 from a relatively quiet Korea. What would Seoul look like today—something akin to Mosul or Baghdad?
Again, when Obama pulled all U.S. troops out there were 0 fatalities in December 2011. That ensuing vacuum resurrected radical Sunni Islamic terrorists under the new ISIS imprimatur, brought in Iran, collapsed Iraq, was a catalyst of the destruction of Syria, and 500,000 dead—and promoted now a steady reinsertion of U.S. troops.
Are you now bragging that, after yanking all troops out of a quiet Iraq as a good thing, it was a better thing that he put some back in to stabilize a now violent Iraq?
You become completely myopic when you write that Iran “simply wants to be a player in the middle east (sic) and whose impact result (sic) in greater stability in this area.”
Iran has little actual need for a nuclear program, given its vast fossil fuels reserves, but a great need if it wishes to acquire a bomb and to spread its influence throughout the region and expand its Shiite/Iranian/Assad/Hezbollah arc. If the deal is not overturned, a rich and influential Iran will set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, if it has not already. If the deal was transparent, why did we send cash at night on a pallet to the Iranians? Has their anti-Western rhetoric or action scaled down after the agreement? Are they working for peace in Syria? Reaching out to Israel? Praising Obama for his compromise? Respecting ships in the Gulf?
Iran’s terrorism has been evident worldwide. There is no stability “in this area.” Obama’s Iran deal has had one good result: it created a new alliance between moderate Sunni regimes, such as Jordan, Egypt, and some Gulf states, and Israel, whose mutual fears of a nuclear Iran and the American-sponsored deal have brought them together.
Yes, we did not commit troops into Syria nor send aid to an ephemeral anti-Assad, anti-ISIS opposition, but we did threaten military action if WMDs were used (Obama’s “redline”); when they were used and we did nothing, we all but invited the Russians in for the first time since they were expelled by the Egyptians over 40 years ago. Our failure to provide aid to non-ISIS groups, or to create sanctuaries for refugees in the Syrian hinterland helped spur mass death and mass migrations to Europe —which may well be the straw that breaks the back of the European Union.
I would not bring up “punishments” for Ukraine and Crimea, which I do not think registered much with Putin. Obama’s own supporters have criticized his strange passive-aggressive reset with Putin, in which after empowering him (the silly plastic reset button, cancelling missile defense with the Poles and Czechs, trashing Bush’s readjustment to Putin over Ossetia, the open mic post-election promises to be “flexible,” the pass given years of Russian cyber attacks, the attack on Romney’s warning about Putin, etc.), Obama then ridiculed Putin in puerile fashion (class cut up, into macho displays for domestic consumption). Sadly talking trash and carrying a twig is a bad combination; yet we see just that mixture again with his most recent threats to China over stealing a drone, and his promises to hit back at Putin’s alleged cyber crimes. I fear they both will either laugh or cry at our braggadocio.
Obama has set a precedent: you can with impunity swallow whole countries, build artificial island bases, take U.S. ships or drones, hack government agencies, but don’t ever be even accused of hacking in a manner that in theory could hurt a liberal candidate—this for Obama is tantamount to a cause for war.
Victor D. Hanson, Ph.D.
Selma CA 93662

Monday, December 19, 2016

Teddy's Tit for Tat with Soviet's (33 yrs ago)

When Democrats Wanted Moscow's Political Help

The Clinton Machine is unable to maintain online security and it supposedly is Russia's fault. Well, Hillary Clinton obviously needed some excuse for twice failing to grab the political prize that her ostentatiously unfaithful husband snatched on the first try. Moscow is as good as any.
If there was evidence of Russian tampering with voting machines, thereby literally stealing the election, then bring it on. But the claim that Moscow originally got the emails that eventually were released by Wikileaks, exposing the sleaze that we always knew surrounded the Clinton operation? That was a public service and media scoop.
Anyway, Democrats were not always so sensitive about relying on Moscow's political assistance. In 1983 the party was down on its luck. So what to do? Call on the Soviet Union for assistance!
To be fair, we really don't what happened 33 long years ago when Sen. John Tunney, a California Senator and a Sen. Ted Kennedy intimate, passed a message to KGB head Viktor Chebrikov. All we have is the memo from the latter to Communist Party General Secretary Yuri Andropov, the former KGB head. Still, there really is no innocent explanation.
Back when the Evil Empire finally collapsed, the Soviet archives were opened for a time. Tim Sebastian, a reporter with the British Times, found the Chebrikov memo and wrote about it. Grove City College's Paul Kengor included the document in his book "The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism." Since then a few conservatives have written about the event.
It's a story worth repeating. According to Chebrikov, "(Ted) Kennedy's close friend and trusted confidant J. Tunney" was visiting Moscow and had a message for Andropov. "Senator Kennedy, like other rational people, is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations." The situation could become more dangerous, mainly due to "Reagan's belligerence, and his firm commitment to deploy" midrange nuclear weapons to Europe.
Unfortunately, from Kennedy's point of view, the economy was improving. There was still hope for "a new economic crisis," but, noted Chebrikov, "there are no secure assurances this will indeed develop." Thus, a better strategy to defeat Reagan in 1984 might be the peace issue. Yet, "according to Kennedy, the opposition to Reagan is still very weak."
So Kennedy offered several "steps to counter the militaristic politics of Reagan and his campaign to psychologically burden the American people."
First, Andropov should invite the esteemed senator to Moscow so the latter could "arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearance in the USA."
Moreover, reported Chebrikov, "to influence Americans" Andropov should appear in televised interviews in America. If Moscow approved, "Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interview."
Of course, it would be tragic if this was seen as propaganda. Explained Chebrikov, "The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side."
Similarly, Kennedy urged TV interviews with other Soviet officials, "particularly from the military." The Soviet guests would "have an opportunity to appeal directly to the American people about the peaceful intentions of the USSR."
Lest we think this approach had something to do with Kennedy's political ambitions — he was hoping to run in 1988 and thought the desperate Democratic Party might turn to him in 1984 — Kennedy explained that he wanted to "root out the threat of nuclear war." Toward that end, noted Chebrikov, "Kennedy is very impressed with the activities of Y.V. Andropov and other Soviet leaders, who expressed their commitment to heal international affairs, and improve mutual understandings between peoples."
Criticism of Reagan's foreign policy and approach to the Soviet Union was perfectly legitimate. Indeed, after reform Communist Mikhail Gorbachev came to power, conservatives more often were upset with the administration.
But treating Andropov & Co. as tragically misunderstood peaceniks was bad enough. To plan the entire exercise in an attempt to undermine Reagan's re-election chances and promote Kennedy's long-shot presidential ambitions was frankly outrageous.
Yet today the left is upset because Russian hackers allegedly released information about the malfeasance of America's would-be leaders.
Love or hate The Donald, he won because so many Americans were angry, frustrated, and fed up. Moreover, his chief opponent embodied just about every flaw of the country's ruling class.
Russia's alleged role in the email leaks is a distraction. The most important issue is the development of Trump's policy agenda for the next four or eight years.
  • Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.