Once again, Hope ‘n Change is dissing a friend – and this time with malice aforethought. The administration has issued a series of peremptory demands to Israel to withdraw its plans for construction of apartments in the Jerusalem suburb of Ramat Schlomo. As summarized by Scott Johnson at Power Line, they are:
1. Investigate the process that led to the announcement of the Ramat Shlomo construction plans in the middle of Biden’s visit. The Americans seek an official response from Israel on whether this was a bureaucratic mistake or a deliberate act carried out for political reasons. Already on Saturday night, Netanyahu announced the convening of a committee to look into the issue.
2. Reverse the decision by the Jerusalem District Planning and Building Committee to approve construction of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo.
3. Make a substantial gesture toward the Palestinians enabling the renewal of peace talks. The Americans suggested that hundreds of Palestinian prisoners be released, that the Israel Defense Forces withdraw from additional areas of the West Bank and transfer them to Palestinian control, that the siege of the Gaza Strip be eased and further roadblocks in the West Bank be removed.
4. Issue an official declaration that the talks with the Palestinians, even indirect talks, will deal with all the conflict’s core issues – borders, refugees, Jerusalem, security arrangements, water and settlements.
Like Scott, I wonder how any sovereign nation would put up with such demands, delivered with such arrogance. But as Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick observes, one need only look at Hope ‘n Change’s anti-Semitic mentors to understand the mendacity of this president.
The Obama administration’s calculated decision to escalate its open attacks against Israel over a routine decision by the Jerusalem Planning and Building Board to approve 1,600 housing units in Ramat Shlomo neighborhood presents Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with an unenviable task. He has to either relinquish Israel’s sovereignty over its capital by capitulating in the face of the unprecedented American assault, or he can tell Obama and Clinton and their cohorts to go to hell. It is depressing, and let’s face it, a bit scary that the US, which has refused to raise a finger against Iran’s nuclear program or any other rogue action by any other US enemy has decided to go after Israel in this fashion. It is depressing, but not surprising.
Anyone who paid the slightest attention to who Barack [short for Barakeh in Arabic] Obama is before he was elected knew full well that this man is an enemy of Israel. He was a member of an ardently anti-Semitic church for more than two decades. His friends ranged from virulently anti-Israel and anti-Jewish like Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, William Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, Samantha Power and Susan Rice — among others — to radically post-Zionist like Arnie Wolf, Rahm Emmanuel and David Axelrod not to mention Joe Biden.
Given his pedigree, no one should have been surprised that Obama has chosen to stir up a crisis in his relations with Israel.
Bibi can tell Obama to stick it where the sun don’t shine and rally the Israeli public and Israel’s many friends in America to his side and so make it impossible for Obama to carry on doing this with immunity. Or he can lick Obama’s boots and set the clock ticking faster towards the destruction of this country.
What’s it going to be Bibi?
Like ObamaCare and most everything else, Hope ‘n Change doesn’t give a damn about public opinion, which is running 8-1 for Israel in this matter.
Hat tip to Jim Hoft on Caroline Glick’s post and the survey data.
Tagged as:
anti-semitism,
Barack Obama,
Benjamin Netanyahu,
Caroline Glick,
Israel
I’ve spent the last few days – in my free moments – reading Eugene Sledge’s classic WWII memoir With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa. It’s been on my reading list for years and now that the HBO series The Pacific is about to launch, I realized that the time to read it was now.
Sledge was a young Marine recruit who joined the 5th Marine Regiment just in time for its descent into the hell of Peleliu. Peleliu enjoys the dubious honor of being simultaneously the least remembered and one of the most horrific battles in the Pacific war. The operation to clear the small island was supposed to take but four days and instead dragged on for seventy, wrecking both the 1st Marine Division (of which the 5th Marines were a part) and the Army’s 81st Infantry Division.
Sledge’s detailed account – composed over many years and from notes he kept during his service – is written in plain but eloquent prose that reminds me of U.S. Grant’s Memoirs but reflects not a general’s viewpoint but the melancholic perspective of a Marine private.
The Battle of Peleliu marked a change in Japanese tactics from beach defense and Banzai charges to an interlocking defense in depth designed to exact the maximum number of American casualties. The Japanese would take these tactics and utterly perfect them at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. At Peleliu, Marines and soldiers under the worst conditions assaulted an enemy in deeply fortified positions in Umurbrogol Mountain – the infamous “Bloody Nose Ridge” of bitter memory. Marines and soldiers fought to the very limits of human endurance among blasted limestone cliffs in 110-degree heat, decay and indescribable filth. Everyone on the front line paid a price – in death, maiming and the type of mental anguish that time may not assuage.
For me, the Battle of Peleliu is uniquely captured by a portrait done by combat artist Tom Lea, who was present on 
the island and saw on the faces of the survivors something that came to be called the “2000-yard stare” – the blank stare of a man who’s seen too much and whose trauma continuously replays in the theater of his mind. Lea captured the look on the face of young Marine against the background of Bloody Nose Ridge. I first saw his portrait as a boy while thumbing through the old The American Heritage History of World War II. The look on the Marine’s face frightened me – as well it should have. Frankly, it still does.
Tagged as:
2000-yard stare,
Bloody Nose Ridge,
Eugene Sledge,
Marines,
Peleliu,
Tom Lea,
Umurbrogol Mountain,
With the Old Breed
Fox News is reporting that for the first time since the 1980s Social Security payments exceeded receipts by $29 billion. So the $2.5 trillion in IOUs from Uncle Sam to the Social Security Administration is coming due. Needless to say, on the margin, this means that all of this $29 billion in former IOUs will become actual Treasury Bonds which will be sold on the open-market and will most likely be bought by China. That’s right, communist China is all that stands between retirees and their monthly Social Security paycheck . . . who knew?
And for all of those deficit hawks out there, forget about it. Every dollar that D.C. shaves off the deficit (as if we are all holding our breath on that one) will now be offset by the (growing) Social Security deficit. Is it just me, or is that debt vortex over D.C. getting bigger?
Tagged as:
budget deficit,
China,
social security
This past week, George Will weighed in on Hope ‘n Change’s eerie channeling of Woodrow Wilson’s theology of the progressive administrative state. By way of welcoming Will to a party in progress, I’ve republished my own essay on Wilson and the Administrative State from March 2009.
_____________________________________________________
As we’ve seen in previous posts, Woodrow Wilson was impatient both with natural law and the untidiness of a limited government of separated powers and, indeed, with the entire disheveled business of politicking itself. He was deeply influenced by the ‘dirtiness’ of the Tilden-Hayes compromise in the election of 1876 and felt at the time that politics was no longer a suitable occupation for upstanding young men.
And Wilson most certainly felt himself to be an upstanding Christian man in an age that believed that progressive humanity could finally remake even the intractable human heart. And a progressing humanity required an apolitical and more ’scientific’ way to administer day-to-day government, which was inextricably interwoven with Congressional politicking and tainted by deal-making with the ’special interests’.
Reduced to essentials, Wilson wanted Congress to stop exercising its legislative powers and delegate its constitutional functions to administrators who would be both professional and beyond politics. As a man who never doubted his own rectitude, he believed that similar men could be found to administer the government without fear or favor according to scientific principles.
Wilson placed a premium on expertise. Therefore, this new class would be the experts, the people with mastery over all the ‘principles and details’. Educated specialists who were possessed of insight beyond the masses and certainly beyond that of mere politicians.
And with the earnestness for which he became famous, Wilson devoted himself early on to the study of administration and in 1887 published his famous essay ‘The Science of Administration’ in Political Science Quarterly. The essay is probably his best-remembered piece of political writing and exhibits the same European influences characteristic of his thought in general.
For Wilson learned administration under the tutelage of Richard Ely at Johns Hopkins who had himself studied under European specialists such as Bluntschli at Heidelberg. And the intellectual tradition in which he studied was both Hegelian and historicist. In the ‘Study’, Wilson was quite candid about the novelty of his ideas, confessing that the science of administration ‘is a foreign science, speaking very little the language of English or American principle. . . . It has been developed by French and German professors.’
And these professors, like Hegel, viewed bureaucrats as the apolitical guardians of the public good as expressed through the organic state. To the extent that politics and administration conflicted with one another, politicians must inevitably give way to the administrators. Should public opinion intrude itself into administration, it must be accommodated ”efficiently’ without becoming ‘meddlesome’. The people’s sovereignty must be managed, in Wilson’s view, by elite leadership who thoroughly understood what ‘progress’ requires.
But the real novelty of Wilson’s ’science’ is not administration itself but the idea that, in Ronald Pestritto’s words, administration is ‘an authority distinct from politics and outside of political control’ with the American tradition being ‘corrected by German state theory.’ As Pestritto has observed:
Wilson recognized that his proposed system was predicated on a novelty in American constitutionalism: namely, that there are legitimate state powers beyond those granted by the constitution to the political branches of government. These powers are administrative, and their exercise independent from politics requires a transformation in the traditional understanding of American institutions.
And for Wilson, as for Hegel, the educated experts populating the bureaucracy would ’see more clearly than the people themselves the objective public will, and were to know best the administrative means necessary to achieve it.’
And who can deny that Wilson’s views have largely prevailed?
Tagged as:
Administrative State,
progressivism,
The Science of Administration,
Woodrow Wilson
That’s the partial title of a rather funny – and tragic – essay by Victor Davis Hanson at Pajamas Media. A California native and UC grad himself, Hansen keeps all the aggrieved fundraising letters he receives from his alma mater which, like most everything else in the Golden State, is facing a budgetary axe.
Yet all the pleas and demands for salvation seem to have a fantasy-land tone that Greek civil servants would immediately recognize. It’s an idea that “they” are somehow holding out on “us” coupled with an absolute blindness to the simple reality facing the state and country: that there is simply no money. The protests and demands provide a unique – if convoluted – window into the collective soul of a system that has no comprehension of any reality larger than itself.
I have talked with a few students and employees over the last year and I think the angst behind the protests runs something like this. In sum, apparently state employees, teachers, and students believe that there is either (a) a “stash” of money somewhere that is unspent and could easily ease their pain (e.g.,” they” have all sorts of money and are lying to us about its undisclosed location); (b) we could raise income, sales, and gas taxes to even more record highs and encourage perhaps 4,000 a week to leave in consequence (e.g., why do some need BMWs or private planes when “we” need cheaper tuition?); (c) the 1% who pay about 50% of the state income tax burden could easily pay 80-90% of it (e.g., I get along on $50,000, so why can’t someone who makes $300,000 give $250,000 of it to meet “our” needs?); (d) we could renounce our debts to state bond holders (if they have excess cash to buy bonds, why are they so greedy not to give “us” some of it?) and use the savings for more subsidies, entitlements, and salaries (without my job at the DMV, prison, school (fill in the blanks), the rest of you could not survive.)
Note lost in the present “I accuse” acrimony (cf. Greece) is any serious, concrete plan of how to make up the budget shortfall. Completely absent is any recognition that we are the highest taxed state populace in the country, and yet have some of the most dismal infrastructure and schools to show for it. And that is logical, not a paradox.
Tagged as:
California,
University of California,
Victor Davis Hanson
