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Always a uniter, the president has united Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham; two men who can’t stand each other. And he has united many Democrats with Republicans. And some in the liberal media are joining with right-wing scribes in almost universal condemnation of his attack on Israel. Even Debbie Wasserface is in high dungeon. For an example of liberal media scorn for the president, here’s Josh Kraushaar of National Journal;  

At his year-end press con­fer­ence, Pres­id­ent Obama said he wanted to play a lead­ing role in re­build­ing the Demo­crat­ic Party. But in a sign of how Obama’s pro­gress­ive ideo­logy blinds him to polit­ic­al real­ity, his ad­min­is­tra­tion’s fi­nal act be­fore the new year put his party in an even deep­er hole.

By de­clin­ing to veto a res­ol­u­tion con­demning Is­rael at the United Na­tions, Obama un­der­scored how out-of-step his views are from the rest of the coun­try—and on this is­sue, even with his own party. Al­low­ing the anti-Is­rael res­ol­u­tion to pass was widely con­demned, by both the in­com­ing Re­pub­lic­an ad­min­is­tra­tion and the most in­flu­en­tial Demo­crat in Con­gress, in­com­ing Sen­ate Minor­ity Lead­er Chuck Schu­mer. Jew­ish groups across the ideo­lo­gic­al spec­trum cri­ti­cized the de­cision in harsh terms, while even dovish Demo­crats such as Ohio’s Sher­rod Brown dis­tanced them­selves from the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ac­tion. Former DNC chair­wo­man Debbie Wasser­man Schultz, who sup­por­ted Obama’s con­tro­ver­sial Ir­an nuc­le­ar deal, called the U.N. res­ol­u­tion an “ir­re­spons­ible ac­tion [that] moves us fur­ther away from peace and hastens the like­li­hood that we lose the trust of our al­lies around the world.” She called the Obama ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ab­sten­tion “reck­less.” …

… At a time when Demo­crats are try­ing to win back voters that aban­doned them in this year’s pres­id­en­tial elec­tion, they can’t af­ford to ali­en­ate a bed­rock con­stitu­ency of their party. But that’s ex­actly what Obama’s last-minute slam of Is­rael threatens to do. It’s no co­in­cid­ence that Obama waited un­til after the pres­id­en­tial elec­tion to take a fi­nal slap at Is­rael, know­ing full well that it would have dam­aged Hil­lary Clin­ton’s pres­id­en­tial cam­paign. …

… Just look at the 2018 Sen­ate map to get a sense of how polit­ic­ally reck­less Obama’s de­cision could be for his party. Sher­rod Brown is one of the top Demo­crat­ic tar­gets in two years, and he is fa­cing a Jew­ish Re­pub­lic­an with close ties to the pro-Is­rael com­munity (Josh Man­del). Brown, des­pite be­ing a crit­ic of Is­raeli set­tle­ments, was one of the first Sen­ate Demo­crats to urge Obama to veto the “one-sided” res­ol­u­tion be­fore it passed. Rep­res­ent­ing a state that Trump car­ried by 8 points, Brown is ex­pec­ted to face a com­pet­it­ive reelec­tion and will need to run up his mar­gins around Clev­e­land, home base of the state’s Jew­ish com­munity. …

… Spend­ing his fi­nal weeks in of­fice at­tack­ing Is­rael is a fit­ting coda to the Obama’s second-term strategy of push­ing the Demo­crat­ic Party as far to the left as pos­sible. In­deed, it takes a lot of chutzpah for Obama to say he wants to help re­build the Demo­crat­ic Party when he’s busy burn­ing it down. His Is­rael policy will serve as a com­pel­ling case study of how the Demo­crat­ic Party in­furi­ated a cru­cial part of its base without get­ting any­thing in re­turn but ideo­lo­gic­al self-sat­is­fac­tion.

Steny Hoyer, House Democratic Whip, is fed up. Ed Morrissey with the story.

In about two hours, John Kerry will deliver a speech at the State Department to outline the Obama administration’s plan for a peace settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians. Needless to say, the Israelis aren’t happy about it, Republicans are furious about it — and even some Democrats want Kerry and the White House to shut up. Rep. Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic whip, lashed out at Kerry and the Obama administration for reversing decades of American policy on peace negotiations: …

And Alan Dershowitz, previously enamored with the administration’s willingness to govern against the will of the people, like with obamacare, continues with his abuse of the president.

… The bad news is that no future president, including President-elect Trump, can undo this pernicious agreement, since a veto not cast can never be retroactively cast. And a resolution once enacted cannot be rescinded unless there is a majority vote against it, with no veto by any of its permanent members, which include Russia and China, who would be sure to veto any attempt to undo this resolution. Obama’s failure to veto this resolution was thus a deliberate ploy to tie the hands of his successors, the consequence of which will be to make it far more difficult for his successors to encourage the Palestinians to accept Israel’s offer to negotiate with no preconditions. …

… Before the enactment of this resolution, I was not in favor of Trump immediately moving the US embassy to Jerusalem. I advocated that such a move should take place in stages, over time, and with consultation among America’s Muslim allies in the region. But now that the UN has made it a continuing international crime for there to be any Israeli presence in disputed areas of Jerusalem, including areas whose Jewish provenance is beyond dispute, there is a need for immediate action by Trump, upon taking office, to untie his hands and to undo the damage wrought by his predecessor. Congress will surely approve such a move, since the overwhelming majority of its members disapproved of the American decision not to veto the resolution, and since, in 1995, Congress enacted a statute, signed by President Clinton, declaring that the “United States maintains it embassy in the functioning capital of every country except in the case of our democratic friend and strategic ally, the State of Israel” and urged “the United States [to] conduct official meetings and other business in the city of Jerusalem in de facto recognition of its status as the capital of Israel.”

Obama’s ill-advised, lame duck, and undemocratic effort to tie his successor’s hands must not be allowed to destroy the prospects for a negotiated peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Paul Mirengoff with more.

Critics of President Obama’s decision not to block (and, perhaps, to advance) the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israel say that it was solely an attempt to harm Israel — an effort motivated by vindictiveness and/or raw ideological dislike of Israel. Those who disagree with this assessment should be able to point to a positive objective Obama reasonably could think his decision might advance.

In theory, I can think of two possibilities. First, he might have thought that passage of the resolution would advance the “peace process.” Second, he might have thought that passage would at least lead to the curtailment of new building in East Jerusalem and the “West Bank,” which might eventually increase the likelihood of a peace agreement. There isn’t even the theoretical possibility that the U.N. resolution will cause Israel to tear down existing settlements absent a peace agreement, and I don’t believe that even Obama has called on Israel to do this.

It’s clear, however, that the passage of the U.N. resolution won’t advance either objective. If anything, it may retard them. Obama could have no rational basis for thinking otherwise. Thus, we must conclude that he was, in fact, motivated by vindictiveness, raw ideological dislike of Israel, or both. …

… Obama, the petulant ideologue, …

Turning our attention back to the UN, Slate’s Jonathan Katz has a history lesson on the tracking of infectious disease in the 19th century as those results provide background for methods used to find the causes of the cholera epidemic in Haiti; Which was started by UN peace keeping forces; facts hidden by the UN, the U. S. Center for Disease Control, and the current administration. This is a good example of the danger posed by the UN. Time to ask them to move their headquarters to some other country. And time to get them off the U.S. gravy train. In WashingtonLand, $8 billion is not a lot of money, but it is $8 billion less we have to borrow every year. Ten years from now we probably will have saved over $100 billion in total. As Everett Dirksen would say, pretty soon we are talking about a lot of money.

Last Friday, a friend doing research at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta sent me a photo of a (map on) display at the CDC’s in-house museum. She thought I’d be interested because it had to do with the cholera epidemic in Haiti, which I lived through at its beginning and have been reporting on ever since. …

… Now let’s go to the second map, the inset at the bottom right—the little beige street grid:This is the most famous map in the history of public health and one of the most important in the history of science. It was drawn in 1854 by John Snow, a Victorian anesthesiologist and polymath who, faced with one of the many catastrophic cholera outbreaks that plagued London in the 19th century, decided to figure out what caused it, scientifically. (At the time, most people thought cholera—a bacterial disease—was a product of either bad odors, moral and physical weakness, or the wrath of God.)

To do so, Snow went to Golden Square in the working-class Soho neighborhood and took a census of how many people had died in each house from cholera. Then he put them on the street map: one bar for each death. He found a pattern: The bars (deaths) were all clustered in one area, and as you got closer to the center of that area, the bars got longer. Most of the longest bars were next to a water pump on Broad Street, marked here: …

… In fact, despite making the direct analogy between Snow’s map and the Haiti map, the CDC display does not indicate a source of the epidemic at all.

Why not? A spokeswoman for the CDC says in an email that the Haiti map was devised “to optimize response activities on the ground.” Mapping the origin of the epidemic, she says, “was not germane to the purpose.”

That’s one answer. Another is that the CDC knows as well as anyone else that the source—that unidentified spot beside the red triangle, the Broad Street pump of Haiti—was a U.N. peacekeeping base. This one:… 

The U.N. soldiers at that base had just arrived from their home country, Nepal, where a cholera outbreak was underway. Thanks to negligent sanitation practices, such as the open dump pits above, there was a multiplicity of ways that their choleraic feces could have gotten from the base into the river, including latrine pipes leaking over a drainage canal that emptied into the river.

However it happened, from that very spot, that cholera strain—the same strain found in Nepal, which had never been seen before in Haiti, ever—spread throughout the country. By January 2011, the date given for the map, it had been well-established—mainly through my reporting and the work of French epidemiologist Renaud Piarroux—that this was the case. 

Since the first days of the epidemic, the U.N. has tried to cover up what it did. …

… The CDC, a U.S. government agency, discouraged journalists from asking about the epidemic’s origin, telling them that pinpointing the source, Dr. Snow–style, was “not productive,” “not central,” and would likely never happen. Its epidemiologists did provide a key detail early on, when they identified the strain in Haiti as having a recent South Asian origin—meaning it could have come from Nepal and not from South America, Africa, or anywhere else cholera was circulating at the time. But after that, the CDC refused to take environmental samples from around the base or test the soldiers during the small window when doing either would have been worthwhile. All of this detailed in a damning new book by Ralph R. Frerichs called Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-Up in Post-Earthquake Haiti. …

… The U.N. itself has never accepted any responsibility for the outbreak. The head of the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Haiti at the time, Edmond Mulet, has been continuously promoted, even as he dissembles publicly about the facts of the case. He is now Ban Ki-moon’s chief of staff. …

… In fact, the epidemic continues in Haiti. Neither the U.N. nor its donors are anywhere close to raising the $2.27 billion it says is required to build the clean water and sanitation infrastructure needed to end it. Meanwhile, a lawsuit against the U.N. itself, in which Ban and Mulet are named defendants, is wending through U.S. federal court. The U.S. Justice Department has appeared at each session to argue on behalf of the U.N., against the Haitian victims. …

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What he has done for the Democrat party, the president might have done for the United Nations. He has now given us the reason and opportunity to kick that festering sore out of the country.  Roger Simon thinks the Prez’s vendetta is a good kick off for the Trump administration to start defunding the cesspool that is the UN. And the headquarters? Perhaps Donald Trump has some ideas for what could be done with the building.

We live in a world of unintended consequences and Barack Obama, in his overwhelming zeal to exact last-minute personal vengeance on Bibi Netanyahu in particular and Israel in general with Friday’s Security Council vote, opened the door to the defunding and serious diminution of the United Nations itself.

Donald Trump — who is seeking to spend a ton of taxpayer money on rebuilding our military and infrastructure — is undoubtedly looking for places to save. Nowhere would be better to start than that moribund center of international corruption and megaphone for tin-pot dictators, the United Nations. …

 

… why is Samantha Power, our current UN ambassador and putatively an expert in genocide, spending her time criticizing largely peaceful Israeli settlements while, just a few hundred miles away, soldiers of Iran’s Republican Guard are gunning down women and children in the streets of Aleppo in true genocidal fashion? Hypocritical?  Oh, well, that’s Iran — Obama’s protected class.

Enough already!

Donald, you’re on. You were able to negotiate with Carrier, Boeing, and Lockheed, so these clowns shouldn’t be all that difficult. Although, in this case, it would be useful to negotiate the entire institution out of existence, or at least impoverish it to the degree it will have to decamp from Manhattan and leave that pricey TurtleBay real estate for better purposes. (I understand there’s a lot of empty space in Yemen.)  And — just think — it would get rid of all those double-parking, cheapskate diplomats cluttering New York streets! They don’t even pay their parking tickets.

I wouldn’t doubt you would have all your deplorables solidly behind you in this negotiation/defunding and a lot more of the country as well, once they get full knowledge of exactly how much we’re actually paying for this insanity. As with most things, they haven’t been told by our media, who have no interest in informing the public on anything that might disrupt their narrative.

If ever some tweets were called for, this is it.  Go to it, Donald.  Scare the pants off them now. You made a good start when you tweeted, “As to the U.N., things will be different after Jan. 20th.”

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line linked to an essay by Anne Bayefsky.

The vicious condemnation of Israel at the UN Security Council on December 23, 2016 is a watershed moment in U.S.-UN relations – albeit not as President Obama hoped. Following the vote of fourteen in favor and one American abstention, Palestinian representative Riyadh Mansour and American Ambassador Samantha Power exchanged a telling handshake. Evidently, President Obama believes that he has put one over on Israel, Prime Minister Netanyahu and the incoming Trump administration. But here’s another possibility: treachery at the UN will not be cost free. …

… At its core, this UN move is a head-on assault on American democracy. President Obama knew full well he did not have Congressional support for the Iran deal, so he went straight to the Security Council first. Likewise, he knew that there would have been overwhelming Congressional opposition to this resolution, so he carefully planned his stealth attack.

He waited until Congress was not in session. Members of his administration made periodic suggestions that nothing had been decided. There were occasional head fakes that he was “leaning” against it. He produced smiling photo-ops from a Hawaiian golf course with no obvious major foreign policy moves minutes away. Holiday time-outs were in full-swing across the country. And then he pounced, giving Israel virtually no notice of his intent not to veto.

Profound betrayal of a true democratic friend of the United States is the only possible description. …

… The Security Council and President Obama leave a trail of devastation across the planet, with evil empowered and good forsaken. But their record does not have to be our future. Today’s vote reminds us of what it takes for evil to triumph.

Doing nothing is not an option for our new President and our incoming Congress. The time has come to undertake an urgent and full review of America’s relationship to the United Nations, and to suspend financial support until that review can identify how best to use American dollars in the interests of peace, security and human dignity. The perfidy of Barack Obama will not be the last word.

And WSJ Editors weigh in. 

The decision by the United States to abstain from a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Israel over its settlements on the West Bank is one of the most significant, defining moments of the Obama Presidency.

It defines this President’s extraordinary ability to transform matters of public policy into personal pique at adversaries. …

… Mr. Obama’s animus toward Prime Minister Netanyahu is well known. Apparently Mr. Obama took it as an affront that the President-elect would express an opinion about this week’s U.N. resolution.

It is important, though, to see this U.S. abstention as more significant than merely Mr. Obama’s petulance. What it reveals clearly is the Obama Administration’s animus against the state of Israel itself. No longer needing Jewish votes, Mr. Obama was free, finally, to punish the Jewish state in a way no previous President has done.

No effort to rescind the resolution, which calls the settlements a violation of “international law,” will succeed because of Russia’s and China’s vetoes.

Instead, the resolution will live on as Barack Obama’s cat’s paw, offering support in every European capital, international institution and U.S. university campus to bully Israel with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. …

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Now we see the president’s true colors. We wrote March 3rd on the Passive/Aggressive Prez; 

“It’s been more than a week since the refusal of the president to attend Scalia’s (funeral) service and it still rankles. It was a perfect chance for a passive aggressive personality; without lifting a finger, he was able to flip the bird to millions of Americans.” 

Tom Cotton, Senator from Arkansas, summed up the president’s most recent betrayal of Israel;

“President Obama is personally responsible for this anti-Israel resolution. His diplomats secretly coordinated the vote, yet he doesn’t even have the courage of his own convictions to vote for it. This cowardly, disgraceful action cements President Obama’s richly deserved legacy as the most anti-Israel president in American history. …”

” President Obama vetoed a similar, but less anti-Israel resolution in 2011—back when he still needed pro-Israel voters for his reelection. …”

Jonathan Tobin in Commentary posts;

… This lame duck stab in the back of America’s only democratic ally in the Middle East should only further encourage President-elect Donald Trump to make good on his promise to move the U.S. embassy to Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and let the world know that the new administration not only repudiates his predecessor’s betrayal but that the alliance is as strong as ever.

That will have to wait until January 20th and Obama’s exit from the White House. In the meantime, this is a moment for Democratic friends of Israel to apologize for eight years of excusing and rationalizing Obama’s growing hostility to the Jewish state. Though some will disingenuously argue that the president is trying to save Israel from itself, today’s vote must be seen for what it is. Freed of political constraints, the president finally showed his true colors by throwing Israel to the wolves at a United Nations where anti-Semitism and anti-Israel bias is integral to the culture of the world body. …

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air posts on the Washington Post Editors calling the UN abstention a “dangerous parting shot.” Morrissey goes into important, but mostly forgotten, background when the administration funded efforts to defeat Netanyahu in last year’s Israeli elections.    

“… The stunt at TurtleBay is all the more self-serving, because Obama and John Kerry torpedoed any chance of working with Netanyahu. Obama has spent a lot of time and effort decrying alleged Russian influence in our election, but almost two years ago, the State Department under Obama and Kerry actively attempted to do the same thing in Israel to force Netanyahu out of office. …”

 

“… The media coverage of this UN vote has almost entirely missed this particular point. They have noted Netanyahu’s defense of settlements and supposed intransigence on the peace process without ever noting that his US partner tried to push him out of office — the same partner who’s currently in high dudgeon over hostile governments attempting to do the same thing here. The purpose of this interference was to get an Israeli prime minister who would adopt Obama’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rather than one who represents the Israelis.

Instead, Netanyahu won a surprise victory, and Obama ended up with egg on his face. It’s difficult to see this stunt at the UN as anything more than a final, impotent, petulant tantrum. This was Obama’s final opportunity to humiliate Netanyahu regardless of the danger it might present to Israelis. It’s one last shameful act in a series from this administration, and it can’t hit the exits fast enough.

American Interest notes how even the Dems are turning on the president. 

… Obama is truly the great uniter. First he united the Arabs and Israelis in a repudiation of his Middle East policies, now he’s united Republicans and Democrats in a repudiation of his policies at home. Almost everywhere you look, the gap between Obama’s stirring rhetoric and his underwhelming accomplishments is immense. One of the biggest failures was his inability to make the Democrats competitive in every state.

This stems from many things, but one is his apparent indifference to state government. He seems to think of the Federal government as the only level of government that really matters. It is especially telling that he has been missing in action while his home state of Illinois drifted into a state of advanced decay due to a worsening pension problem. Ditto his home city of Chicago, where racial polarization and financial decline have proceeded while the Obama White House was largely uninvolved. Great U.S. Presidents, and even good ones, are usually rooted in local politics. They are citizens of real places, and they carry the concerns and the insights of those places into office. Obama was a member of the New York Times tribe, people for whom an absence of local loyalties is a sign of enlightenment. …

Cartoons are good today.