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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. …