Did the Media Care When Obama Fired General Mattis?

By Daniel John Sobieski https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/12/did_the_media_care_when_obama_fired_general_mattis.html
December 23, 2018

Defense secretaries come and go.  President Obama had four of them in eight years, who had some unkind things to say about his leadership or lack of it.  There was no talk of chaos or of the only adult in the room leaving.

Suddenly, the media are in a meltdown after "Mad Dog" Mattis announced his departure from the Cabinet after President Trump announced our departure from Syria:

Foreign Policy Pentagon reporter Lara Seligman wrote the press corp [sic] is contemplating suicide over Mattis' resignation, "I think I speak for all national security reporters tonight when I say I'm about ready to jump off a cliff. But at least I already wrote the "who will replace Mattis" story two months (only two months?????) ago[."]

Democrats who won't defend our southern border and who slept as Obama drew red lines with vanishing ink worry about an ISIS Obama created by a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq regaining strength and reforming in Syria and Iraq.  The general Obama fired is suddenly a man of principle whose leadership was indispensable:

House Speaker-designate Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she was "shaken and "concerned". "General Mattis was a comfort to many who were concerned about the path the Trump Admin would choose to take. His resignation letter is defined by statements of principle – principles that drove him to leave the Administration. All of us should be concerned at this time."

There was no such concern when Obama relieved Mattis as commander of CENTCOM without so much as a phone call, a factoid typical of Obama's disdain for the military, its missions, and its heroes.

[Thomas E.] Ricks says Mattis was fired because:

Pentagon insiders say that he rubbed civilian officials the wrong way – not because he went all "mad dog," which is his public image, and the view at the White House, but rather because he pushed the civilians so hard on considering the second- and third-order consequences of military action against Iran.  Some of those questions apparently were uncomfortable.  Like, what do you do with Iran once the nuclear issue is resolved and it remains a foe?  What do you do if Iran then develops conventional capabilities that could make it hazardous for U.S. Navy ships to operate in the Persian Gulf?  He kept saying, "And then what?"

There is also a belief that Mattis and Obama differed on Iran.  "A particular point of disagreement was what to do about mischief Iran is exporting to other countries.  Mattis is indeed more hawkish on this than the White House was," writes Ricks in yet another post.

Mattis is probably more hawkish than Trump as well.  Mattis and Trump disagree on strategy.  Obama and Mattis disagreed on goals and consequences.  While a liberal uproar greeted the former, utter silence greeted the latter.

No doubt, our Syrian withdrawal was a factor in Mattis's decision.  I don't agree with it, but to compare it with Obama's withdrawal from Iraq when he snatched defeat from George W. Bush's victory, as many conservatives are doing, is a tad disingenuous.

President Trump destroyed the ISIS caliphate as originally constituted in Syria and Iraq.  Obama watched it grow and facilitated its growth through inaction and indifference.  ISIS is a cancer that has spread but is currently in remission. If it comes back in force, we can deal with it.  But it is not dangerous isolationism for Trump to consider Iran the main threat and to focus on it.

It is Iran that wants its nukes to be an existential threat to Israel, Europe, and the United States.  It is Iran that is trying to build a corridor of terror from Tehran through Syria and Iraq to its Hezb'allah puppets in Lebanon.

Iran is the head of the snake.  Syria and ISIS are the tail.  Strike at the head, and you kill the snake.  President Trump is doing that by nixing Obama's nuclear deal and reimposing sanctions, including prohibitions on Iranian oil exports.  That, arguably, is a better way to deal with a very real threat than chasing random jihadis through the Syrian desert.

Critics of our Syrian withdrawal forget that under President Trump, American-backed forces liberated the ISIS capital of Raqqa.  They forget the hundreds of Russian mercenaries killed in clashes with U.S. forces.  They forget the cruise missile strikes against Syrian targets under the nose of Vladimir Putin.  Trump's moves in Syria were hardly under a white flag.

Obama, by contrast, didn't want to win anywhere and waged his own war against the U.S. military, purging it of generals, admirals, and commanders who dare to talk of victory.  President Obama began a military purge not dissimilar to those routinely conducted by third-world despots, with the goal of eliminating voices that might oppose his withdrawing from the world stage.  As Investor's Business Daily editorialized:

[W]hat has happened to our officer corps since President Obama took office is viewed in many quarters as unprecedented, baffling and even harmful to our national security posture.  We have commented on some of the higher profile cases, such as Gen. Carter Ham.  He was relieved as head of U.S. Africa Command after only a year and a half because he disagreed with orders not to mount a rescue mission in response to the Sept. 11, 2012, attack in Benghazi[.] …

From Breitbart.com's Facebook page comes a list of at least 197 officers that have been relieved of duty by President Obama for a laundry list of reasons and sometimes with no reason given.

Retired four-star general and Fox News analyst Jack Keane, architect of the Iraq surge that produced the victory Obama threw away, recently spoke on Kilmeade and Friends about Obama's ongoing purge of the military of officers who oppose his isolationist and defeatist policies.

It's also a fact that a number of our general officers, not all of them but a number of them, were asked to leave before what would normally be accepted as the routine tenure for that particular position, and General Mattis is a case in point who had very strong views on Iran.  Most of us agree with those views but I know the administration did not agree with them.  General Flynn, who you know very well and had on your show, was an outspoken proponent for understand[ing] radical Islam, how dangerous this particular threat was and was trying to communicate that, he was not able to serve out his full tenure.  So yes, that's another fact that we can substantiate, that there were generals who did leave earlier than what their tenure would be and the characteristic they all shared together is they did disagree with the administration on various points."

General Mattis is an old-school warrior known for his colorful rhetoric and his commitment both to his men and to his mission.  He, along with other generals like David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, did have a problem with Obama's quest for a substitute for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As the New York Post reported:

Officially, the administration offers a nothing-to-see-here explanation for Mattis' departure, noting that his tenure in the crucial job was about average for the post.  Maybe.  But politics is at play here as well.  The brusque Mattis apparently fell afoul of National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, an Obama apparatchik.  Why?  Because Mattis says things the Obama team doesn't want to hear, especially about what might well become the next theater of operations – Iran.

Okay, maybe Mattis was saying things Trump didn't want to hear about tactics and strategies, but we have only one commander-in-chief at a time, and the one we have now is trying to rebuild the military, so we can win wars, not letting the military atrophy while generals who want to win are purged.

We have not only ISIS jihadis to worry about.  We have the Iranian nuclear threat, an expansionist China with sub-launched nuclear missiles capable of hitting U.S. cities, and a belligerent Russia developing hypersonic missiles we might not be able to stop as it negotiates with a crumbling Venezuela to base its nuclear-capable bombers on an island not far from Caracas.

So chill out, Chicken Littles of the left and right.  There is an adult in the room.  His name is Donald J. Trump.

Mueller’s Collusion Hoax Collapses

By Conrad Black|
https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/11/muellers-collusion-hoax-collapses/
December 11th, 2018|

The sudden death of the unutterable nonsense of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Russian government, announced as it was in the hand-off to the Southern New York U.S. Attorney of the shabby fruit of Michael Cohen’s plea bargaining, has divided onlookers into three communities of opinion.

The true believers in the collusion canard are left slack-jawed, like the international Left after the announcement of the Nazi-Soviet Pact: an immense fervor of faith is instantly destroyed; it is the stillness of a sudden and immense evaporation.

The professional Trump-haters, the Democratic Party assassination squads in the Congress and media, like disciplined soldiers, have swiveled with parade ground precision and resumed firing after a mere second to reload, at the equally fatuous nonsense about illegal campaign contributions. Disreputable, contemptible myth-makers and smear-jobbers though they are, they deserve credit for fanaticism, improvisation, and managing in unison to sound half plausible in the face of the crushing defeat they have suffered and the piffle and pottage they are left to moralize about.

Third, and slowest to respond, so sudden has been the change of the whole Trump-hate narrative, are those who never wavered from the requirement of real evidence of something before they would endorse the drastic act of impeaching and removing the nation’s leader. Some feel betrayed and some vindicated, but sensing no need for instant response, unlike the Trump-haters who are scrambling to try to cooper up some credibility for continuing their assault on the president, the third group is preparing with only deliberate speed to counter-attack the assassins-by-impeachment with their full and now overpowering armament of facts and law.

The Trump-haters can make a strong case that the president is an obnoxious public personality—that he is boastful, exaggerates constantly, sends out silly tweets with grade two typographical errors in them and gets into ill-tempered slanging matches with half the people with whom he comes into contact. To a great many, he is just refreshingly puncturing official self-importance.

But whatever anyone thinks of Trump, there are two points his enemies will have to face: he won the 2016 election and that can only be undone by the 2020 election, and high office-holders can only be impeached and removed from office by high crimes and misdemeanors as prescribed by the Constitution.

We may assume that the tactical battlefield commanders of the impeachment squad are now Representatives Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the incoming chairmen of the judiciary and intelligence committees. As of now, they are merely alleging criminal offenses that may not secure removal from office by the Republican Senate, but could lead to the conviction and imprisonment of the president after he has finished his term, in two or six years.

To appreciate the absurdity of this, remember that the impeachable and indictable offense the Democrats have in mind is that Michael Cohen, a lawyer in the midst of the inherently corrupt plea bargain catechism classes, trading extorted and false evidence against the president with a guarantee of immunity from perjury charges, for a lighter sentence, asserts that Trump ordered him to pay off women who claimed to have had sexual relations with him over 10 years ago for their silence, to enhance his chances of election.

To evaluate the probative quality of this evidence and the gravity of such charges, we must remember that Cohen has been charged with lying to Congress, has pleaded guilty to various acts of fraud, that the women were trying to blackmail then-candidate Trump and were breaching non-disclosure agreements, that Trump paid Cohen’s legal bills, that a person can contribute to his own campaign, and that the jurisprudence is that such payment are not campaign expenses anyway. That was the finding in the John Edwards case, where there was a child out of wedlock. Here, the facts of what actually happened between Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal are disputed, and the wording of the relevant statute could just as well be interpreted as meaning that a candidate who buys mouthwash or gets a haircut or a new suit, is equally trying to enhance his likelihood of election.

Up to a point, Nadler and Schiff, egregious, obsessive Trump-haters and mud-slingers as they are, can only be accused of doing their jobs, or at least carrying out their self-assigned mission to bring down the president. Their accomplices in this foredoomed mission to self-immolation do not have the excuse of carrying out their misconceived duty. All the televised useless idiots with talking heads seem not to realize that they are now giving voice to ideas and outcomes that are so impossible and nonsensical, they are insane.

While Mueller could be represented to the malicious and the credulous as possibly having or being in the process of obtaining real evidence of cooperation by the Trump campaign with the Russian government to affect and falsify the results of the U.S. presidential election, at least the offense being alleged and which they sought to prove, would be, if it had happened, a very serious matter that would have justified the removal of the president. This was what Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, and all its immense army of media jabbering puppets claimed. It was obvious at every stage to any serious person that this was extremely unlikely, but if it had actually happened, the alarms and accusations would have been justified and vindicated, and skeptics like me would have had to recant.

When that phantasmagorically impossible mission failed, without missing a newscast the president’s enemies opened fire with the new theory. This is that a confessed criminal and accused liar could prove that the president committed crimes when he paid his legal bills, including, with or without his specific knowledge, inducements to two women not to violate agreements to keep private their own contested recollections of innocuous sexual encounters with the president ten years before the election.

The theory further holds that these supposedly criminal violations of election financing laws could cause a two-thirds majority of the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate to remove the president from office, or at the least, that a prosecutor who patiently waited until the president left office could then send him to prison for this conduct.

I was even astounded at the reaction of the Trump-haters who had been citing the Steele dossier as incontrovertible evidence of his “treason” (Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, and many others), when they had to deal with the fact that it was a smear-job commissioned and paid for and shopped to the media by the Clinton campaign. Without breaking their strides, they called this inconvenient fact “a talking point” (Washington Post), and altered the dossier’s status to “campaign information,” (Hillary Clinton).

This latest display of sangfroid is even more remarkable and ethically disturbing. All of them knew that the Russian collusion claim was defamatory fiction, and no one with an IQ in double figures or higher could believe that the election finance crime theory generated by putting the screws to a low-life like Cohen could seriously inconvenience the president. The Democrats are now on suicide watch. It is not too late to recognize that however much they may hate Trump, and however objectionable he may be to some reasonable people, he is the president and only the voters or a medical catastrophe or the passage of his constitutional term will remove him. That is as it should be.

The country noticed that the same James Comey whose bias didn’t affect his judgment, didn’t remember 245 times in his testimony last week, and then told a New York audience of the absolute necessity of defeating Trump at the next election. If the Democrats use their new majority in the House to send this campaign-finance clunker for a Senate trial, as they shut down the existing investigations into the Justice department and Clinton campaign (which will be taken up by the Senate), they will destroy themselves. That, too, is as it should be.

The disappearance of most currently visible Democratic federal politicians and opinionated journalists would be a welcome national enema. But the self-destruction of a great political party would be a gruesome and destabilizing event. Somewhere in there must be some trace of the political DNA that from Alfred E. Smith to Hubert H. Humphrey, and intermittently since then, rendered magnificent and irreplaceable service to the nation and the world.

As Christmas approaches, the thoughts of Democrats should be of resurrecting themselves, not of crucifying an enemy so maddeningly invulnerable to their murderous rage.

Checking Robert Mueller

Kimberley A. Strassel
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2018/12/14/checking_robert_mueller_461241.html
December 13, 2018

Robert Mueller has operated for 19 months as a law unto himself, reminding us of the awesome and destructive powers of special counsels. About the only possible check on Mr. Mueller is a judge who is wise to the tricks of prosecutors and investigators. Good news: That’s what we got this week.

Former national security adviser Mike Flynn a year ago pleaded guilty to one count of lying to the Federal Bureau of Investigation about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S. Mr. Flynn’s defense team this week filed a sentencing memo to Judge Emmet Sullivan that contained explosive new information about the Flynn-FBI meeting in January 2017.

It was arranged by then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe, who personally called Mr. Flynn on other business, then suggested he sit down with two agents to clear up the Russia question. Mr. McCabe urged Mr. Flynn to conduct the interview with no lawyer present—to make things easier.

The agents (including the infamous Peter Strzok) showed up within two hours. They had already decided not to inform Mr. Flynn that they had transcripts of his conversations or give him the standard warning against lying to the FBI. They wanted him “relaxed” and “unguarded.” Former Director James Comey this weekend bragged on MSNBC that he would never have “gotten away” with such a move in a more “organized” administration.
The whole thing stinks of entrapment, though the curious question was how the Flynn defense team got the details. The court filing refers to a McCabe memo written the day of the 2017 meeting, as well as an FBI summary—known as a 302—of the Flynn interview. These are among documents congressional Republicans have been fighting to obtain for more than a year, only to be stonewalled by the Justice Department. Now we know why the department didn’t want them public.

They have come to light thanks to a man who knows well how men like Messrs. Mueller and Comey operate: Judge Sullivan. He sits on the U.S. District Court in the District of Columbia, and as he wrote for the Journal last year, he got a “wake-up call” in 2008 while overseeing the trial of then-Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska. Judge Sullivan ultimately assigned a lawyer to investigate Justice Department misconduct.

The investigator’s report found prosecutors had engaged in deliberate and repeated ethical violations, withholding key evidence from the defense. It also excoriated the FBI for failing to write up 302s and for omitting key facts from those it did write. The head of the FBI was Mr. Mueller.

Judge Sullivan has since made it his practice to begin every case with a Brady order, which reminds prosecutors of their constitutional obligation to provide the defense with any exculpatory evidence. On Dec. 12, 2017, days after being assigned the Flynn case, Judge Sullivan issued such an order, instructing Mr. Mueller’s team to turn over “any evidence in its possession that is favorable to defendant and material either to defendant’s guilt or punishment.” Had any other judge drawn the case, we likely would never have seen these details of the FBI’s behavior.

It’s clear that something has concerned the judge—who likely sees obvious parallels to the Stevens case. The media was predicting a quick ruling in the Flynn case. Instead, Judge Sullivan issued new orders Wednesday, demanding to see for himself the McCabe memo and the Flynn 302. He also ordered the special counsel to hand over by Friday any other documents relevant to the Flynn-FBI meeting.

Given his history with the FBI, the judge may also have some questions about the curious date on the Flynn 302—Aug. 22, 2017, seven months after the interview. Texts from Mr. Strzok and testimony from Mr. Comey both suggest the 302 was written long before then. Was the 302 edited in the interim? If so, by whom, and at whose direction? FBI officials initially testified to Congress that the agents did not think Mr. Flynn had lied.

Judges have the ability to reject plea deals and require a prosecutor to make a case at trial. The criminal-justice system isn’t only about holding defendants accountable; trials also provide oversight of investigators and their tactics. And judges are not obliged to follow prosecutors’ sentencing recommendations.

No one knows how Judge Sullivan will rule. His reputation is for being no-nonsense, a straight shooter, an advocate of government transparency. Whatever the outcome, he has done the nation a favor by using his Brady order to hold prosecutors to some account and allow the country a glimpse at how federal law enforcement operates. Which is the very least the country can expect.

History Gives George Bush His Due, by Peggy Noonan

As America’s mystique has faded, we’ve grown to miss the skill and steadiness we once took for granted.

I feel it needs to be said again: George Herbert Walker Bush should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his leadership during the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was an epic moment in modern world history, and a close-run thing. “One mishap and much could unravel,” former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney said, in his eulogy, of those days when the wall was falling, the Warsaw Pact countries rising and the Soviet Union trying to keep its footing as it came to terms with its inevitable end. Patience and shrewdness were needed from the leader of the West, a sensitive, knowing hand.

In “A World Transformed” (1998), Bush described his public approach as being marked by “gentle encouragement.” It caused him some trouble: “I had been under constant criticism for being too cautious, perhaps because I was subdued in my reaction to events. This was deliberate.” He didn’t want to embarrass or provoke. He reminded Mikhail Gorbachev, at the December 1989 Malta summit, that “I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall.”
It was Bush’s gift to be sensitive even to Soviet generals who were seeing their world collapse around them. He knew a humiliated foe is a dangerous foe—and this foe had a nuclear arsenal. He slowly, carefully helped ease Russia out of its old ways and structures, helped it stand as its ground firmed up, and helped divided Germany blend together peacefully, fruitfully.

You’d think the world would have been at his feet, and the prizes flying in from Oslo. It didn’t happen. Why

Here’s a theory: Bush’s achievement wasn’t seen for what it was, in part because America in those days was still going forward in the world with its old mystique. Its ultimate grace and constructiveness were a given. It had gallantly saved its friends in the First World War, and again in the Second; it had led the West’s resistance to communism. It was expected to do good.

Having won the war, of course it would win the peace. It seemed unremarkable that George Bush, and Brent Scowcroft, and a host of others did just that.
Bush was the last president to serve under—and add to—that American mystique. It has dissipated in the past few decades through pratfalls, errors and carelessness, with unwon wars and the economic crisis of 2008. The great foreign-affairs challenge now is to go forward in the world successfully while knowing the mystique has been lessened, and doing everything possible to win it back.

Bush came to be somewhat defensive about his reticence in those days. As a former aide I respected his caution, his sense that the wrong move could cause things to go dark at any moment. But I saw it differently: This was a crucial event in the history of the West, and its meaning needed stating by the American president. There was much to be lauded, from the hard-won unity of the West to Russia’s decision to move bravely toward new ways. Much could be said without triumphalism.

It is a delicate question, in statecraft as in life, when to speak and when not to. George Bush thought it was enough to do it, not say it, as the eulogists asserted. He trusted the people to infer his reasoning from his actions. (This was his approach on his tax increase, also.) But in the end, to me, leadership is persuasion and honest argument: This is my thinking. I ask you to see it my way.

Something deeply admirable, though: No modern president now considers silence to be an option, ever. It is moving to remember one who did, who trusted the people to perceive and understand his actions. Who respected them that much.

To the state funeral in the Washington Cathedral: Its pomp and ceremony served to connect Americans to our past and remind us of our dignity. In a way, it was a resummoning of our mystique. It was, for a moment, the tonic a divided nation needed.
There was majesty—the gleaming precision of the full-dress military, the flag-draped casket coming down the aisle, the bowed heads and hands on hearts, the bells tolling, the dignified solemnity.

For those of us in the pews there was none of the sadness and anguish that accompanies the leaving of a soul gone too soon, or tragically. This was a full life happily lived, and we were there to applaud, to see each other and say, “Remember that time?”

There was a sense of gratitude that the old man had, the past week, gotten his due. For decades the press and others had roughed him up—“wimp,” “lapdog.” His contributions had not been fully appreciated. Now they were. We were happy but not triumphalist.

We were reminded: History changes its mind. Nothing is set. A historical reputation can change, utterly. Sometimes history needs time and distance to see the landscape clearly.

And history is human. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the senior most world leader, was there. Back home her party was in the middle of a battle to choose her successor, and she couldn’t afford to be gone. But when she heard of Bush’s death she said she had to come to Washington. She told reporters that without Bush, she “would hardly be standing here.” She had grown up in East Germany.

There was something else. She had told Bob Kimmitt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, that Bush had treated her “like a somebody when I was not.” Meeting with the obscure junior minister in the Oval Office in 1991, the president treated the young woman with great personal and professional respect. And so there she was this week, because history is human and how you treat people matters.

Two other points about the funeral. Its unembarrassed religiosity and warmly asserted Christianity were beautiful, and refreshing. The burial rite was from the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, and it was a great and moving moment when the presiding bishop, Rev. Bruce Curry, met the flag-draped coffin at the Great West Doors and said: “With faith in Jesus Christ, we receive the body of our brother George for burial.” Such simple, humble, egalitarian words. “Our brother George.” The frozen chosen done themselves proud.

And there was a consistent message in the speeches. George Bush in his 94 years asked for and received everything—a big, loving family, wealth, position, power, admiration. But the lesson of that life was clear: He worked for it, he poured himself into it. He gave it everything he had. He made sacrifices to be who he was.

We gave a lot of attention to his life this week, in part because we want to remind ourselves that such fruitful lives are possible. We want to show the young among us what should be respected and emulated, and that public service can be a calling, and that calling brilliantly met.

This was a good man, a brave one who proved himself solid when major edifices of the world were melting away. He was kind and gentle.And he loved America.We were lucky to have him—the steady one, the sensitive one. The diplomat.


By Peggy Noonan
Wall Street Journal
December 6, 2018