Why despite my visceral dislike and low opinion of Trump, I’m still glad she lost:
I am sure Obama always remained ambivalent about Hillary Clinton from their 2008 contest, as he was very critical of Bill Clinton’s “triangulation” in The Audacity of Hope. Then, too, we know that Hillary’s 2008 campaign was an organizational disaster from start to finish, reflecting her own disorderly mind, arrogant manner, and presumptuous character. It appears she learned nothing from that experience as the campaign approached.
Yes. As I’ve always said, she’s an incompetent, corrupt hack, and her administration would have been a disaster on top of terrible policy.
I’d never seen this photo before. It’s a little weird, because for all I know, my father could be in the waist of one of those planes manning the radio and a gun. I don’t know what missions he flew. I wonder if there’s a way to find out?
Why did they use Tomahawks? This is a pretty good explanation. As the article says, it was low payoff, but it was also low risk, and could be done quickly without having to coordinate with allies, as symbolism.
If Nunes is telling the truth—and despite a widespread effort to make him look like a liar, he’s been right so far—then this incidental collection had nothing to do with Russian collusion charges. Why has the media shown such little curiosity about the subject matter of the collection?
Yes, reporters, we know that “unmasking” is legal. So is meeting with a Russian ambassador during a campaign. And no, it does not vindicate Trump’s tweet. Stressing the legality of the unmasking is a way to distract from the real questions: Did Rice abuse her power? Who did she share it with? Why? Did those people then leak the information for political purposes? That is illegal.
That will be pretty challenging for her, given that she seems to be as big a congenital liar as Hillary Clinton.
Michael Totten isn’t impressed with the Trump administration’s foreign-policy acumen:
…we need to get a couple of things straight here. Bashar al-Assad is not fighting ISIS in Syria. Not really. Nor are the Russians. Assad and the Russians are fighting every rebel army in the country except ISIS. Look at a map of the country. ISIS’s territory is centered on its “capital” in Raqqa in the northeast, but Assad and Russia’s theater of operations is in the west and along the coast. Only the United States has bombed ISIS in Syria, and only Kurdish militias have seriously resisted ISIS on the ground.
Assad did, however, facilitate ISIS’s rise in Syria and Iraq. Thousands of Americans and Iraqis are dead thanks to his sponsorship of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s al-Qaeda in Iraq—the precursor to ISIS—during the Iraqi insurgency.
This is hardly a secret. “We in Syria intelligence opened all the doors for [the jihadists] to go to Iraq,” Mahmud al-Naser, an intelligence officer who defected to the United States, told the Daily Beast.
Before writing off Syrian malfeasance during the Iraq war as irrelevant history, understand something else: ISIS in its current form is also a creature of the Assad regime. Assad wanted ISIS to rise. He needed ISIS to rise. He made damn sure that ISIS did rise and that it did so inside Syria.
I wish I had some reason to think that Trump has a plan.
In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”
Despite this reporting, it seemed inconceivable at the time that—given myriad legal, ethical, political, and historical concerns, as well as strict National Security Agency protocols that protect the identity of American names caught in intercepts—the Obama White House would have actually spied on American citizens. In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.
Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats—but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.