January 5, 2015

Click on WORD oe PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Charles Krauthammer writes on the Narcissist’s Cuba feint.

Obama brought back nothing on democratization, a staggering betrayal of Cuba’s human rights crusaders. No free speech. No free assembly. No independent political parties. No hint of free elections. Not even the kind of 1975 Helsinki Final Act that we got from the Soviets as part of detente, granting structure and review to human rights promises. These provided us with significant leverage in supporting the dissident movements in Eastern Europe that eventually brought down communist rule.

If Obama insisted on giving away the store, why not at least do it item by item? We relax part of the embargo in return for, say, Internet access. And tie further normalization to serial relaxations of police-state repression.

Oh, what hypocrisy, say the Obama acolytes. Did we not normalize relations with China and get no human rights quid pro quo?

True. But that was never a prospect. The entire purpose was geopolitical and the payoff was monumental: We walked away with the most significant anti-Soviet strategic realignment of the entire Cold War, formally breaking up the communist bloc and gaining China’s neutrality, and occasional support, in our half-century struggle to dismantle the Soviet empire.

From Cuba, Obama didn’t even get a token gesture. Not even a fig leaf such as, say, withdrawal of secret police support in Venezuela. Or extradition of American criminals now fugitive in Cuba, including a notorious cop killer. Did we even ask?

Obama seems to believe that the one-way deal was win-win. A famous victory — the Cuba issue is now behind us. A breakthrough.

Indeed it is. You know how to achieve a breakthrough in tough negotiations? Give everything away. Try it. You’ll have a deal by noon. Every time.

 

 

Jennifer Rubin posts on the best of 2014.

… There is no shortage of cynical pols, biased journalists or incompetent government officials, so when we see genuine excellence and devotion to public service, we should give credit where credit is due:

Best primary preparation: Hands down, this goes to Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R), who studied, traveled, appeared countless times on TV, wrote op-eds on foreign policy and projected a serious demeanor. He handled his politicized indictment with aplomb and appropriate indignation. He showed uncommon humility. We won’t know whether he can sustain his momentum and overcome past impressions, but he and his staff set a standard for conscientious and self-reflective preparation.

Best interview: No interview this year compared to Diane Sawyer’s interrogation of Hillary Clinton. It was focused, substantive and aggressive — the first of many to reveal Clinton’s considerable shortcomings.

 

 

Power Line says the “Quote of the Year” came from President It’s All About Me.

Among the year-end lists compiled this year I have yet to see one that captures the quote of the year. Confining consideration to active politicians, I think that President Obama walks away with the honors this year.

Against all the odds in the run-up to the midterm elections in November, Obama said something useful and, even more improbably, something true (video below). In his speech at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management on October 2 — a speech larded with misleading factoids and excuses and falsehoods touting his record on the economy (including Obamacare) at Castroite length (White House text here) — Obama said: “Now, I am not on the ballot this fall. Michelle is pretty happy about that. But make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot — every single one of them.”

With his approval substantially underwater, Obama thus reminded the voters in the sixth year of his presidency that this was their last chance to express their disapproval of him. What were Obama and his strategists thinking?

Obama’s statement undermined the campaigns of Democratic Senate candidates including Mark Pryor, Kay Hagan, and Alison Lundergan Grimes, each of whom ardently advocated the proposition that the midterm elections were not about Obama or his policies. Obama stepped forward to step on their theme and proclaim: It’s all about me!

 

 

Heather Mac Donald explains De Blasio’s fateful anti-cop slander.

… Following the nonindictment of Officer Daniel Pantaleo for the lethal arrest of Eric Garner last July, de Blasio said that Garner’s death and the grand jury’s failure to indict sprung from “not years of racism . . . , or decades of racism, but centuries of racism.” The mayor worries “every night,” he said, about the “dangers” his biracial son, Dante, may face from “officers who are paid to protect him.”

In other words, de Blasio thinks that his son is at risk of injury or death from an NYPD officer every time he steps outside at night. And he sees the officers who tried to arrest a resisting Garner as the culmination of centuries of racism, even though the shopkeepers in the area who had been urging the police to clear up lawlessness were mostly minorities themselves.

It is impossible to overstate how inflammatory and ignorant de Blasio’s statements are. De Blasio’s pronouncements were merely a wordier version of the protest chants against “killer cops” and belonged to the national frenzy of cop-bashing that provoked the assassination of Officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu. …

… The real injustice occurred decades ago, when police officers across the country ignored crime in black neighborhoods. Today, the NYPD devotes the majority of its resources and energy to saving lives in poor communities. Any “danger” that Dante de Blasio might face comes overwhelmingly from black criminals, not the police, de Blasio should acknowledge.

In 2013, criminals committed 1,103 shootings, wounding or killing 1,299 victims. NYPD officers, by contrast, fired their guns 40 times, despite having been dispatched 80,000 times to investigate weapons reports and having encountered guns and other weapons in more than 30,000 arrests.

That firearms discharge number is the lowest since the department began collecting data. The police injured 17 people and killed eight — again, a record low. Almost all those victims had extensive and serious criminal records; most had threatened the officer with deadly force.

Whites were far more likely to be shot by the police than blacks when their crime rates are taken into account. …

 

 

Turning to another story that hangs around, Bacon’s Rebellion says it is time for UVA administrators to do some explaining.

… University of Virginia administrators were well aware of the gang-rape allegations long before they surfaced in the Rolling Stone article, going so far as to cite the incident in testimony to Congress. They accepted the veracity of the account and did not begin to check it until Rolling Stone’s Erdely started asking pointed questions.

Despite discrepancies between Renda’s version of the gang rape story and the Rolling Stone version of the story — which grew more detailed and horrific — UVa administrators never expressed skepticism of the narrative. Sullivan did once refer to the “alleged” gang rape when referring the case to the Charlottesville Police but proceeded as if the story was accurate.

The university leadership used the horror of the gang rape story to mobilize university opinion behind the need to change the “culture” and practices regarding sexual assault. When the Washington Post debunked the story, Sullivan essentially said that it didn’t matter.

Rolling Stone has been rightly excoriated for its catastrophic failure in reporting. Out of an excessive sensitivity toward the feelings of “Jackie,” Erdely did not seek to confirm her account either with friends or the alleged perpetrators. In so doing, the magazine perpetrated a hoax. However, little attention has been paid to the University of Virginia administration for perpetrating and acting upon the same hoax to advance its ideological agenda.

Yes, Teresa Sullivan’s agenda is highly ideological, almost identical to the White House’s sexual assault agenda, which frames the problem in black-and-white terms as an epidemic of rape and a student culture of denial — as opposed to, say, a problem stemming from the drunken party hook-up culture that results in a spectrum of undesirable behaviors from sexual assault to regret sex. …

 

 

There is some good news; we have the year’s first collection of late night humor from Andrew Malcolm.

Meyers: President Vladimir Putin has been named Russia’s “Man of the Year.” Second place went to “or else.”

Conan: Putin was named Russia’s “Man of the Year” for the 15th consecutive year. Putin got 143 million votes and his opponent got killed in a mysterious boating accident.

Meyers: Vladimir Putin says it’s “too early” to decide on re-election in 2018. But he says it’s not too early to decide how much he wins by.