Obama and the Morsi Dictatorship
Jonathan S. Tobin 2012-11-25Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has had quite a week. He helped broker a cease-fire between his Hamas ally and Israel to the acclaim of the international community as well as the United States and his new friend President Obama. He followed that triumph up by issuing new decrees that effectively give him dictatorial powers over Egypt. In less than year in office, Morsi has amassed as much power as Hosni Mubarak had in his time in office as the country’s strongman and he has done it while getting closer to the United States rather than having his Islamist regime being condemned or isolated by Washington.
The full implications of Morsi’s ascendency are not yet apparent. But we can draw a few rather obvious conclusions from these events. The first is this makes the region a much more dangerous place and peace even more unlikely. the second is that the much ballyhooed Arab Spring turned out to be an Islamist triumph, not an opening for democracy. And third, and perhaps most disconcerting for Americans, it looks like the Obama administration has shown itself again to be a band of hopeless amateurs when it comes to the Middle East. While President Obama shouldn’t be blamed for toppling Mubarak, this episode is more proof of the gap between his foreign policy instincts and a rational defense of American interests.
The first point to be made about the cheering for Morsi’s role in brokering the cease-fire is misplaced. It cannot be emphasized too much that the reason why Hamas felt so confident about picking a fight with Israel that it could not possibly win militarily is the fact that Egypt and fellow regional power Turkey were treating it as an ally rather than as terrorist regime that needed to be isolated and controlled. While Morsi has sought to exercise some influence over Gaza by keeping the border crossings to Sinai closed (more as a result of concern over the violence spilling over into Egyptian territory than a desire to restrain terrorism), the support for the legitimacy of the illegal Hamas regime on the part of the Muslim Brotherhood government has been a game changer.
More than ever before, Hamas now has the whip hand over the Fatah-controlled Palestinian Authority. That makes the already nearly non-existent chances of peace between Palestinians and Israelis even smaller. Though it can be argued that the ability of Hamas to preserve its rule over Gaza following the last bout of fighting with Israel in January 2009 already made it clear that it was a force to be reckoned with, the backing of Egypt and Turkey and the tacit approval of the United States in the cease-fire means there can be no doubt that Hamas truly is the face of Palestinian nationalism these days as well as the owners of an independent Palestinian state in all but name. With Cairo and Ankara backing them up and Iranian missiles in their arsenal, Hamas’s strength makes the standard liberal talking point about it being necessary for Israel to make more concessions to Fatah even more absurd than ever.
If the blockade of Gaza is now to be weakened even further to allow “construction materials” as well as the food and medicine that has never ceased flowing into the area from Israel, then it must be acknowledged that Hamas is more powerful than ever and well placed to make mischief in the region whenever it likes. Rather than applauding Morsi’s role in the cease-fire, Americans should be asking why the administration has acquiesced to having one of their nation’s primary aid recipients being an ally of Hamas. They should also be wondering about what exactly it is that passed between Obama and Morsi during their phone conversations and what promises, if any, were made by the United States about future pressure on Israel.
Morsi’s consolidation of dictatorial power also should not have taken Washington by surprise, as it seems to have done. For several months, the State Department has been acting as if it bought the argument that the Muslim Brotherhood government was basically moderate in nature and more interested in economic development than pursuing ideological goals. But Morsi’s actions, in which he has sidelined every competing power base that might have acted as a check on his ambitions, makes it apparent that his real purpose is to make his movement’s control of the country permanent. Any hope that democracy was coming to Egypt or the rest of the Arab and Muslim world was misplaced. And any idea that the United States can bribe Morsi or any other Islamist into playing ball is sheer folly.
That leads us to the final point about the administration’s utter lack of skill in dealing with the realities of the Middle East.
Even if we were to concede that the president’s motives were pure and that he wanted nothing more than to bring peace to the region and democracy to Arab nations that have never known it, virtually everything that the administration has done has made the achievement of these goals even less likely than before.
The president isn’t personally responsible for the collapse of an unsustainable Mubarak dictatorship. But he did nothing to aid the cause of the few Egyptian liberals who actually want democracy. Worse than that, he undercut the efforts of the Egyptian military to act as a brake on the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead of seeking to use the billions that Egypt gets from the U.S. as a lever with which he could restrain Cairo from backing Hamas and the Brotherhood from seizing more power, Washington has embraced Morsi. That emboldened Hamas and led to the recent fighting. Though the president said all the right things about backing Israel’s right to self-defense, his diplomatic maneuvering not only helped set the stage for more violence but made it more difficult for Israel to exercise that right.
A president who says he wants peace and democracy in the Middle East is now acting as if the Islamists that run Turkey and Egypt are his new best friends while continuing to treat the head of the only democracy in the region as a nuisance. In doing so, President Obama has helped make the world a lot more dangerous than it might otherwise have been.
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Obama and the Morsi Dictatorship
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Glibness at the Grammys
The price of myopia.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-29
The tectonic force that unearthed hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse and harassment and swept from the public square as many prominent alleged abusers has largely left the music industry unscathed. Largely, but not entirely. The music producer Russell Simmons, for example, faces claims from at least six women involving alleged abuse or assault over a quarter century. Confronting those allegations–and the fact that he was once honored by the Grammy Museum and hosted well-attended industry parties around the awards show–would be hard. It would be far easier to wear a symbolic white rose in solidarity with the victims of abuse and neglect. Guess which course last night’s Grammy attendees took?
Of course, the recording industry did not entirely miss this unique historical moment. There was speechifying. Despite the fact that the music industry’s old oaks have largely withstood the cleansing fires of this new age of candor, artists like Janelle Monáe confirmed that her business was not without its predators and victims like Kesha enjoyed earned prominence. But displays of valid indignation today only serve to emphasize how pervasive the institutional pressures that kept the preyed upon from speaking out once were. In many ways, those old pressures persist, but in ways that are visible only from a distance.
The “Me Too” movement has become about more than exposing and condemning sexual harassment and violence. It has become a movement dedicated to burying the notion that the powerful can escape censure from their peers if their public persona is agreeable enough or if they have the right politics. In that way, the Grammys failed spectacularly to meet the measure of this moment.
Undeniably, the most talked-about segment of Sunday night’s Grammys telecast was also its most ill-considered: a skit centered on the “spoken-word auditions” for the audio version of Michael Wolff’s dubious Washington tell-all, Fire and Fury. Reading from this factually-challenged account of the earliest days of the Trump White House gave recording artists an opportunity to cast aspersions on the president, but the sketch’s participants might come to regret it. The book’s author had appeared on HBO with Bill Maher on Friday where he strongly insinuated that the president was having an affair. Because this claim lacked any substantiation, he couldn’t put it in his already thinly-sourced book, which should have told everyone all they needed to know about the allegation. Wolff told viewers to seek out a specific reference in his book for clues to his riddle, and they dutifully obliged. The scavenger hunt led observes to conclude that Trump’s supposed paramour was United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Haley was compelled to spend the weekend insisting to reporters that she did not, in fact, sleep her way to the top, but was respected and valued by her colleagues in the White House based on her merit alone. She insisted that, again, Wolff got not only the headline but the basic supporting facts wrong. Haley had every right to publicly lament the politicization of the awards ceremony, particularly considering her ordeal.
The trivialization of Haley’s experience tainted this sketch, but it did not alone cast it in poor taste. It was the sketch’s payoff that should have led cooler heads to eighty-six the bit before it ever aired.
After a cavalcade of celebrities had read aloud from and riffed on Wolff’s book, the sketch reached its crescendo when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appeared as the final guest star. Clinton’s appearance held obvious political and comedy value, but it cheapened the night’s thematic condemnations of predatory men and their enablers.
Only 48 hours earlier, the New York Times revealed that Hillary Clinton herself intervened on behalf of a 2008 campaign staffer—her faith advisor, Burns Strider—who was accused of improper conduct involving a young woman. Strider was alleged to have repeatedly sexually harassed his subordinate and, when this came to the attention of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, she immediately took it to the candidate and recommended Strider’s dismissal. But Hillary Clinton overruled her campaign manager. Instead, she docked her faith advisor’s pay and sent him off to counseling. His accuser was reassigned. After the campaign, Strider went to work for Clinton ally, David Brock, to prepare for the former secretary of state’s 2016 bid. Strider’s career was cut short, however, when he was again accused of harassing the young female aides in his orbit.
This sketch had no higher purpose than getting under the president’s skin, which isn’t a difficult task. In the process, however, it undermined the moral authority associated with yet another industry’s efforts to get right with its past and atone for the silences that were maintained in the pre-“Me Too” era. The Grammys should have scrapped the sketch, but misjudgment on the part of these entertainers is forgivable. It’s the malpractice on Hillary Clinton’s part that is not.
It was Hillary Clinton’s complicated legacy on matters involving accusations of infidelity, imbalanced power dynamics in relations involving subordinates, and the character of Bill Clinton’s accusers that rendered her unable to make Donald Trump’s indiscretions a campaign issue. Her continued presence on the political stage compels her fellow Democrats to strike a cautious balance on the subject of sexual assault. In the process, they water down their message and come off sounding more mealy-mouthed and opportunistic than righteous. Hillary Clinton cannot be expected to exercise the discretion necessary to help her fellow Democrats move forward in the Trump era, and so it will be up to them to see what works and what doesn’t. The inconsistency on display at the Grammys did not work.
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If You Don’t Obstruct Justice, Did You Obstruct Justice?
Podcast: #MeToo and Mueller
John Podhoretz 2018-01-29Grammys. Mueller. Trump. Rosenstein. Memo. Nunes. Midterms. Polls. You know, the usual stuff. Podcast. Podhoretz. Rothman. Ahmari. Greenwald. Give a listen.
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Democrats Are Being Outmaneuvered
Flirting with incoherence.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-26
A fair scoring of the Trump presidency’s first year would have to hand 2017 to Democrats. The opposition party exploited the Trump-led GOP’s mistakes and excesses and translated them into victories both on Capitol Hill and at polling places around the country. But that was then and this is now. Democrats remain married to tactics that have not served them so well in the New Year. Democrats are not winning this moment. They don’t know it yet.
Not even the most optimistic Republican could have anticipated the reaction that markets and large employers have had to the first significant overhaul of the tax code in over 30 years. Since that bill was signed into law on December 19, firm after firm has announced its intention to share the windfall with its employees in the form of raises, bonuses, and 401(k) hikes. Manufacturers ranging from Chrysler to Apple are repatriating capital and factories they had parked overseas. Even the minimum wage is on the rise for several major employers, including Walmart and financial institutions like Wells Fargo, U.S. Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
Democrats had argued that the Republican tax code reform plan would benefit only the wealthy and, despite the strong economy and tight labor market, corporations were unlikely to reinvest their new capital. The Democratic message has not adapted along with changing conditions. They feel obliged to undermine the good news surrounding tax code reform, but they’ve gone about it in a spectacularly tone-deaf fashion.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said the $1,000 bonuses that a variety of firms had provided their employees in the wake of tax code reform amount to “crumbs” and “pathetic” gifts designed to purchase cheap loyalty. Rather than invest in their employees, she added, these firms should “invest in infrastructure.” Pelosi later called these bonuses and wage hikes “cute,” but ultimately insulting to the American worker because they are not commensurate with the advantage corporate tax reform provides employers. “Some of them are getting raises, and the rest are getting crumbs,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer agreed. When “you spread $1,000 over the course of the year,” former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz pondered, “I’m not sure that $1,000 (which is taxed, taxable) goes very for almost anyone.”
If the Democratic Party is trying to convince voters that the GOP is detached from the concerns of average Americans, demonstrating you have no idea how far $1,000 goes is a bad way to go about it. For a family making the median household income (as of September of last year), $1,000 is more than 20 percent of their monthly income.
Democrats might hope to trade on lingering antipathy toward the tax bill they successfully fomented in the run-up to its passage, but the narrative that worked in December is going to start yielding diminishing returns. The headlines speak for themselves; even just the anticipatory effects of this tax bill are not being enjoyed exclusively by the wealthy. The longer Democrats ask voters to believe them over their lying eyes, the more they will find that they are only preaching to the converted.
Similarly, the GOP has boxed the Democratic Party in on the issue of immigration reform.
On Thursday night, the White House revealed the outlines of what amounts to a skinny immigration reform package. The one-page memo outlined a plan to provide a pathway to citizenship not just for the roughly 700,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which expires in March, but some 1.8 million DACA-eligible immigrants—approximately half the estimated population of immigrants who were taken into the U.S. as minors. In exchange, the White House requested $25 billion for security at both the Mexican and Canadian borders. Furthermore, the White House requested curbs on family migration, limiting the extended family that these formerly illegal immigrants could bring with them into the U.S.
This is a reasonable initial offer. The administration, having just secured an unambiguous victory over Democrats following a failed legislative gambit that resulted in a brief government shutdown, could have pressed their luck. Instead, the White House barely budged off its initial request for border security funding. Meanwhile, the administration made a big step toward resolving the status of nearly two million illegal immigrants, which has enraged some in the president’s immigration-hawk base. In fact, the White House reportedly had a difficult time trying to sell immigration restrictionists on the plan. “Lots of them hate the proposal,” Axios reporter Jonathan Swan related. Mark Krikorian, the executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, summed up his fellow hawks’ thoughts succinctly: “Time to start burning your #MAGA hats.”
But for all the administration’s overtures toward Democrats, the responses have been hyperbolic and inflexible. Senator Dick Durbin said Trump had taken DREAMers “hostage” and was on a “crusade to tear families apart.” “The White House is using Dreamers to mask their underlying xenophobic, isolationist, and un-American policies,” wrote Democratic Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham. Pelosi called Trump’s proposed restrictions on extended family unification represent “an unmistakable campaign to make America white again,” which aligned with sentiments in the liberal grassroots. A statement by the activist organization United We Dream called Trump’s immigration proposal “a white supremacist ransom note.”
This means Democrats are again handing the keys over to the party’s activist base just days after the party’s activists drove them into a ditch. Democrats spent months insisting that they wanted a “clean” bill to restore long-term funding for the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). When they got it, they voted against it—sacrificing their claims on CHIP in the process. Now, the White House has made a good faith attempt to find common ground on DACA, only to be called racist for the effort. This is a remarkably short-sighted and parochial strategy.
By insisting that $1,000 constitute “crumbs” and giving citizenship to nearly 2 million illegal residents is racist, Democrats are flirting with utter incoherence. These claims might enliven their base, but they risk turning off every other sentient voter capable of an objective thought. Moreover, unreasonable polemics have a habit of activating the opposing side’s partisans at a time when reliable Republican voters have been staying away from the polls. The risks of the Democratic Party’s present course seem to outweigh the rewards.
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Integrity Matters
Conspiracies kill credibility.
Noah Rothman 2018-01-25
For Republicans, the Trump presidency has been one long test of faith. The truest believers in Trumpism are compelled to demonstrate their commitment to the cause by publicly defending obvious falsehoods with as much zeal as they can muster.
Thus, former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer endorsed the claim that Trump drew “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,” an assertion he now regrets defending. Thus Trump campaign officials contended that crime in America is trending up, not down, contrary to federal statistics, and then credited Trump for ending a crime wave that never existed. Thus, the administration wasted federal resources establishing a legally dubious commission designed to ferret out the millions of illegal voters who supposedly robbed the president of a popular vote victory, only to quietly dissolve under the weight of its own contradictions. Thus, Trump’s fans in conservative media latched onto the odious theory that a 27-year-old DNC staffer’s tragic murder was, in fact, a political assassination; payback over his alleged role in leaking files to WikiLeaks, which conveniently absolved Russia of culpability for the hacking of Democratic targets in 2016.
This was all so much bunk, but these claims were based on grains of truth. Of course, violent crime remains a problem, particularly in the nation’s gang-plagued urban centers, and violent crime has recently been on the rise. Voter fraud is not a myth, Democratic claims to the contrary notwithstanding. The WikiLeaks hacks and Russian active measures targeting U.S. institutions is not a partisan issue; Republicans, too, were reportedly victims of cyber espionage by Russian sources. These are real issues that desperately need sober and serious advocates who command enough authority to be heard over the partisan din. Sadly, the president seems to demand that his allies sacrifice their credibility amid conspicuous displays of loyalty. This administration would rather have unflinching soldiers on its side than accuracy and trustworthiness.
Of all the scandalous sacrifices of authority in the Trump era, “text-gate” might be the worst of the lot, if only because of the collateral damage it has wrought. In the frenetic effort to cast a preemptive veneer of doubt over whatever Robert Mueller’s probe may find, Trump’s advocates across the Republican political spectrum grasped onto the December revelation that a member of that probe—a ranking official formerly with the FBI’s counter-espionage unit—had shared anti-Trump text messages with his mistress. Upon that discovery, Agent Peter Strzok was reassigned from the Mueller probe and dumped into the FBI’s purgatorial human resources department to languish. Since he served on the probe for fewer than two full months, it is likely that Strzok’s influence was limited. Still, the discovery of an anti-Trump voice in the independent investigation provided the probe’s critics with a way to discredit the investigation, and many jumped at the chance.
The discovery that thousands of text messages between December 2016 and May 2017 had gone missing added a tantalizing element of mystery to the nefarious allegations of bias in the Mueller probe. Was the entire Bureau in on this operation? What could have been said? After all, the suspect text messages that hadn’t been deleted were seriously disquieting. In 2016, Strzok texted his mistress, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, about his intention to have an “insurance policy” in the event that Trump won the White House. Later, it was revealed that Page stated her intention to form a “secret society,” presumably, of like minds.
Senator Ron Johnson alleged that this society was “holding secret meetings off-site,” according to an informant. Rep. Bob Goodlatte insisted that the texts “illustrate a conspiracy on the part of some people” to undermine the president. “These are the elements of a palace coup that was underway to disrupt President Trump,” claimed Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz.
You didn’t have to be a professional cynic to think that it was unlikely for FBI counter-intelligence operatives to be plotting the sabotage of a presidency on their government-issued cell phones. A review of all the text messages Strzok sent, including the mitigating material, further undercut the idea that he was an anti-Trump saboteur wrecking the administration from within. But lawmakers threw caution to the breeze, and they surely regret it today. When ABC News discovered the infamous “secret society” text, it was exposed as entirely banal. Republicans like Johnson have since backed off the claim that Strzok and his mistress were engaging in anything other than playful bluster.
This was a credibility sapping debacle, and no one should be more livid at the Republicans who sacrificed their honor to it than those who believe in limited and good governance. House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes allowed himself to be used last year by the White House to corroborate the president’s baseless claim that he was personally spied upon by Obama-era law enforcement officials. As a result, he sacrificed his credibility and was forced to recuse himself from Russia-related investigations. But there was a FISA warrant granted to investigate the Trump campaign, and no one knows the extent to which flimsy and political evidence was used to grant that warrant. Trump administration officials were swept up in that surveillance, and subsequently “unmasked” by unknown sources when the transcript of that reconnaissance was improperly related to journalists. That, too, is an abuse of power about which only Republicans seem to care. These are serious causes that require equally serious advocates. Unfortunately, those advocates are all busy throwing their integrity away so that Trump can win a news cycle or two.
Impugning law enforcement professionals in service to a political narrative is unconscionable. Republicans should be equally frustrated by the willingness with which their allies are so willingly discrediting themselves. If they don’t start vocally demanding better, Republicans will soon find themselves bereft of credible advocates. They’ll have no one to blame but themselves for that condition, of course, but that should prove no obstacle to finding a scapegoat somewhere.
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Nancy Pelosi’s Crumbs Will Power the Economy
A prisoner of the narrative.
JOHN STEELE GORDON 2018-01-25
Nancy Pelosi dismissed the bonuses associated with recently enacted tax cuts for middle-class individuals as “pathetic” and mere “crumbs.” For someone who lives in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco (the most expensive neighborhood in the United States), when not relaxing at her vineyard in the Napa Valley, the financial benefits associated with tax code reform are, to be sure, no more than rounding errors. But for the average citizen–a demographic the Democratic Party claims to represent–they are very real.
Forbes reports that, with the new withholding tables just out from the IRS, a family of four with an income of $120,000 a year will see paycheck increases totaling more than $3,578, or almost $300 a month. Even a single person with an income of $40,000 will have at least $1,023, or $85 a month, more to spend. For the citizens of “fly-over country” and the vast middle-class suburbs around major cities, if not for the denizens of Pacific Heights, that’s real money.
And Veronique de Rugy, an economist at the Mercatus Center, a free-market think tank, sees a tightening labor market as at least partially responsible for the spate of bonuses and pay increases that immediately followed the passage of the tax bill. (Home Depot has just joined the list of companies giving bonuses to hourly workers). Wages have been stubbornly “sticky” during the slow Obama recovery, but that would change with a tight labor market. We’re at 4.1 percent unemployment right now, and 4 percent is considered full employment. Moody’s is predicting unemployment at 3.5 percent by the end of the year; a very tight labor market.
And Bloomberg expects the 4th quarter of 2017 to be the third in a row to see more than 3 percent growth in GDP, the first time that’s happened since 2005. (The figures will be out on Friday.) Since 70 percent of the economy is household consumption, and the disposable incomes of the middle class are going up and promise to go up further in coming months, the economy could grow at around 3 percent for the foreseeable future.
Oh, and Apple is bringing $252 billion in profits it has had parked overseas to this country (paying a tax bill of $39 billion in the process) and will “put some of the money it brought back toward 20,000 new jobs, a new domestic campus, and other spending.”
Even Nancy Pelosi would consider $252 billion in new capital to be invested in the American economy as real money.
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