Politics

When Republican senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul walked out of a military briefing Wednesday over the recent US attack that took out top Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, they were not happy about how that exchange went.Sen. Paul said the briefing was 'less than satisfying', blasting the meeting as 'insulting to logic and the Constitution'.A fiery Sen. Lee elaborated further. 'I had hoped and expected to receive more information outlining the legal, factual, and moral justification for the attack,' Lee said. 'The briefing lasted only 75 minutes, whereupon our briefers left. This, however, is not the biggest problem I have with the briefing, which I would add was probably the worst briefing I've seen, at least on a military issue, in the nine years I've served in the United States Senate.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Galileo famously said that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. But what made him so important in the history of science was his further insight that mathematics, in order to reveal the laws of nature, had to be empirically tested. Mathematical formulae described what he thought would happen; he had to clamber up the leaning tower of Pisa and drop the two balls to convince us that objects of different masses fall at the same speed. I am not sure that most modern pollsters have taken Galileo’s second insight fully on board. The modern pollster tends to be in love with his model.

‘We are not looking to start a war with Iran,’ said defense secretary Mark Esper today. ‘We are looking to finish one.’ Iran just replied by firing off at least a dozen missiles at American targets in Iraq in an effort supposedly dubbed Operation Martyr Soleimani. It doesn’t mean all out war yet — but all the Trump administration’s talk about ‘de-escalating’ the situation sounds like hot air. As I write, the details of Iran’s retaliation are unclear — we don’t know if the strikes were aimed at American troops or infrastructure. Is it a face-saving measure? A decoy? Why did Iran attack Erbil and Al-Asad, rather than more obvious US bases? Have the fortified American defenses at these bases worked?

P.G. Wodehouse once described a character as so crooked that he sliced bread with a corkscrew. Secretary of state Mike Pompeo’s behavior on the Sunday morning television shows brings to mind Wodehouse’s description. No, Pompeo wasn’t toting a corkscrew or a loaf of bread, but he offered a study in deceit. Pompeo didn’t merely reiterate the wafer-thin claim that Iran was about to pose an 'imminent' threat to American interests in the Middle East, but also claimed that President Obama and his aides had essentially been in league with the mullahs of Tehran.In responding to Jake Tapper of CNN, Pompeo was unable to explain how blowing Qasem Soleimani to kingdom come would enhance the safety of America.

Talleyrand once commented that Napoleon’s execution of the Duke of Enghien in 1804 was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. Something similar could be said about President Trump’s liquidation of Maj. Gen Qasem Soleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. No one will miss the villainous Soleimani, but killing him was the equivalent of stepping on a landmine to cure a headache. What on earth could Trump have been thinking — if he was thinking at all? Trump has in effect ceded his foreign policy to the hawks. So much for Trump the restrainer. Hello, Donald Trump neocon. Trump has launched America into the path of a war with Iran that it can win but only at a cost that is disproportionate to the terrible cost it will pay.

It’s starting to dawn on Democrats that Donald J. Trump might stand on the steps of the Capitol in January 2021 to swear his oath of office for the second time. A new Gallup poll indicates that he and Barack Obama are tied as the most popular men in America. So what are the four things that might help further smooth Trump’s oath to reelection? First, despite the preposterous pearl clutching of Freddy Gray on this website, Trump’s hardline against Iran could pay off. He’s steadily raising the military and economic pressure on Tehran. Contrary to all the naysayers, Trump could end up showing that Iran, not America, is the paper tiger.

What are the four things that can go blooey for President Trump in the next year? First, he can get mired in a new Middle East war — the very thing he promised to avoid. The much-ballyhooed pullout from Syria turned out to be none at all. Now turmoil in Iraq, not a North Korean nuclear launch, turns out to be the Christmas present Trump didn’t want to receive. American strikes against the Kataib Hezbollah militia have got Iraq and, by extension, Iran, in a hugger-mugger. Trump could be on a slope toward further escalation with Iran that is as slippery as an oil slick. The hawks in Trump’s administration will exult; his nationalist followers, blanch. Second, there’s the economy. So far it’s humming along on a sugar high of tax cuts and deficit spending.

This article is in The Spectator’s January 2020 US edition. Subscribe here. Thanksgiving Day, the most American of holidays, found President Trump performing one of the nation’s few remaining civic rites: supporting the troops. When the President secretly flew to Afghanistan to feed and thank servicemen at Bagram Air Base, he got a cheering hangar full of airmen in return. Those turkey-stuffed troops were a captive audience, of course. Still, enthusiasm for Trump among American servicemen, both active-duty and veteran, seems to be one of the more genuine things about this surreal phase of American politics. In polls, support for the president among veterans far outpaces that among Americans at large.

Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic? Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi? The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House proceedings, has suggested that she might not file the charges with the Senate. In which case, the Senate could not hold a trial. In which case, Donald Trump could neither be exonerated nor convicted. In which case, he would not have been impeached by the House, but only 'impeached'. It’s amazing what semantic potency can reside in a pair of quotation marks.

‘Dear Ellie and James,’ said Rep. Joe Kennedy in his remarks to the House of Representatives as he voted to impeach Donald Trump, ‘this is a moment you'll read about in your history books.’ Kennedy's children will leave school in less than 20 years. Is 9/11 in the ‘history’ books? The young Kennedy — a handsome but slightly goofy looking man — was struggling and straining to convey gravitas. He closed his eyes. He paaaaaaaused. His pitch rose up at the beginning of a sentence and went down as he finished it. Frankly, it was a farcical display of posturing; a botched performance that made Nicolas Cage in The Wicker Man look like Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood.

It may be only the third time in American history the president has been impeached but it’s the first time no one gives a damn, not even the Democratic party itself. If that preamble didn’t perfectly set the tone for the last Democratic debate of the decade, a bubbling labor union dispute that nearly shut down the event at Loyola Marymount University this week in Los Angeles, certainly did. Couple that with the troublemakers who vandalized the LMU hillside monogram with large ‘Trump 2020’ letters, visible from the busy Pacific Coast Highway.Also ahead of the debate, a mopey splash on CNN’s front page, one of two networks to broadcast it, bemoaned ‘the smallest and least diverse Democrat debate.

President Trump paraded his latest acquisition, Rep. Jeff Van Drew, a defector from the Democratic to the Republican party, at a meeting in the Oval Office this afternoon. Van Drew, who wore a dark blue three-button suit, crimson red tie and white shirt with gold cufflinks, not only dressed in Trump regalia but pretty much sat by mutely — other than to proclaim his 'undying loyalty' — as his new master bragged about poll numbers that he claimed showed him clobbering his Democratic rivals. Kellyanne Conway and Vice President Mike Pence were on hand as witnesses for the induction ceremony.Though he may be simmering about impeachment, Trump continues to make an outward show of bravado. All he needs, if a Washington Post report is accurate, is a 7 percent solution.