It’s Friday, April 14th, Good Friday 2017…so before we begin, we take a moment to mark the meaning of John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son,…

…that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”  Think about it: Jesus Christ, the Son of God, loved us enough to, as Paul writes in Philippians 2:8, suffer the incomparable pain and indignity of “death…even death on a cross!”

Charles Wesley knew of what he wrote when he penned these words: “Amazing love! How can it be that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?”

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, courtesy of NRO, Mike Paulsen offers an opinion in opposition to an action most of us likely applauded:

Trump’s First Unconstitutional War

By ordering last week’s Tomahawk strike on a Syrian airbase, the president usurped Congress’s exclusive power to declare war. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

 

“Make no mistake: President Trump’s airstrikes against Syria were unconstitutional.

Military action may well have been justified from a moral standpoint. The Assad regime’s war on its own people and its use of chemical weapons required a response, arguably including a retaliatory strike to deter further such attacks. Inaction, as much as action, has profound human consequences. There is a case to be made that America should have taken military action against Assad in 2013, or even as early as 2011, in order to protect innocent Syrians from their own government.

The strikes may have been justified from a strategic standpoint, too — as a means of both advancing America’s interests in the region’s security and counteracting the perception of American weakness left by President Obama’s dithering response to past Syrian chemical-weapons attacks. A feckless, feeble United States — one that retreats from declared “red lines,” abandons the region to Vladimir Putin, creates a vacuum for the rise of ISIS, and generates a massive humanitarian and refugee crisis — is good for nobody.

But from a legal standpoint, there can be no doubt that Trump’s Tomahawk strike on the Syrian regime was a violation of the U.S. Constitution. And to let it pass, especially given this president’s authoritarian tendencies, is to invite grave danger. This act of war might be one that some are inclined to cheer. But if the principle is conceded, or the precedent set, that Trump (or any president, for that matter) can take our country to war with another — on his own, without congressional authorization, in violation of the Constitution — then there will be nothing to stop him from initiating any further wars he wants, against any foes he wants, at any time he chooses, based on his own good judgment (or lack thereof). And that should frighten Americans of all political persuasions…”

In a similar vein, also courtesy of NRO, Kevin Williamson suggests the appropriate congressional response is to…

Censure* the President

Congress must reclaim its war powers.

 

“Our so-called constitutional conservatives treat the national charter the way a certain kind of Christian treats the Bible: They like to carry around copies of it, to wave it at their rivals, to talk about it, and to treat it as a kind of magic item — but if you should suggest they actually read it or apply it, well, that sounds awfully idealistic.

It is painful, and a little embarrassing, to listen to conservatives try to rationalize President Donald Trump’s plainly illegal attack on the government of murderous Syrian caudillo Bashar al-Assad. Each rationalization is shallower and sillier than the last.

First, the Trump apologists insist that what has happened is not “war” but merely… something else; that it is — here’s one of those words people use when they want to sound smart —”measured.” Put another way: “Well, Your Honor, think of all the money I didn’t embezzle from the church’s fund for orphans.” Conservatives here are offering the same defense of President Trump that Whoopi Goldberg offered for Roman Polanski: War, but not war war. As my colleague Charles C. W. Cooke pointed out — and it shouldn’t need pointing out — there would not be any question of whether a foreign power’s firing 59 missiles into a U.S. military installation constituted an act of war. Anyone who suggested otherwise would be rightly mocked.

This matters, because the Constitution invests Congress — not the president — with the power to decide whether to go to war. This isn’t a question of some obscure provision such as the emoluments clause — it is clearly spelled out in Article I. The language is unequivocal. It is so obvious that it has reduced some conservatives to arguing that Congress’s constitutional power to declare war is no limit on the president’s power to make war. Put another way: “None of the Ten Commandments explicitly says you cannot break the Ten Commandments.” This is risible sophistry on the Clinton model…”

*Censure, as opposed to impeachment, signifying only the disapproval of one’s political action by other politicians.

John Yoo offers a different view, what Williamson referred to as a “rationalization”…though it hardly seems shallow or silly:

Trump’s Syria Strike Was Constitutional

The Framers gave presidents broad powers to take the lead in matters of national security, and they gave Congress the power to cut off funding.

 

“In ordering Friday’s strike on a Syrian airbase, President Donald J. Trump sent the U.S. military into combat without Congress’s blessing. He has punished the Assad regime for its use of sarin nerve gas on its own people and only begun to correct the mistakes the Obama administration made when it allowed the Syrian civil war to metastasize into a conflict that is destabilizing the Middle East.

For its troubles, however, the Trump administration has come under fire from his conservative flank. Libertarian senator Rand Paul demands that Trump seek congressional authorization, while distinguished conservative law professor Mike Paulsen and National Review editor Kevin Williamson (both featured above) argue in these pages that the strikes violate the Constitution. Their arguments add to the outrage of Trump supporters, such as Ann Coulter, who tweeted: “Those who wanted us meddling in the Middle East voted for other candidates.”

This time, President Trump has the Constitution about right. His exercise of war powers rests firmly in the tradition of American foreign policy. Throughout our history, neither presidents nor Congresses have acted under the belief that the Constitution requires a declaration of war before the U.S. can conduct military hostilities abroad. We have used force abroad more than 100 times but declared war in only five cases: the War of 1812, the Mexican-American and Spanish-American wars, and World Wars I and II.

Without any congressional approval, presidents have sent forces to battle Indians, Barbary pirates, and Russian revolutionaries; to fight North Korean and Chinese Communists in Korea; to engineer regime changes in South and Central America; and to prevent human-rights disasters in the Balkans. Other conflicts, such as the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, and the 2003 Iraq War, received legislative “authorization” but not declarations of war. The practice of presidential initiative, followed by congressional acquiescence, has spanned both Democratic and Republican administrations and reaches back from President Trump to Presidents Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington.

Common sense does not support replacing the way our Constitution has worked in wartime with a radically different system that mimics the peacetime balance of powers between president and Congress. If the issue were the environment or Social Security, Congress would enact policy first and the president would faithfully implement it second. But the Constitution does not duplicate this system in war. Instead, our Framers decided that the president would play the leading role in matters of national security.

…A radical change in the system for making war might appease critics of presidential power. But it could also seriously threaten American national security. In order to forestall another 9/11 attack, or take advantage of a window of opportunity to strike terrorists or rogue nations, the executive branch needs flexibility. It is not hard to think of situations where congressional consent cannot be obtained in time to act. Time for congressional deliberation, which can lead to passivity and isolation and not smarter decisions, will come at the price of speed and secrecy.

The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully to prevent serious threats to our national security. Presidents can take the initiative, and Congress can use its funding power to check presidents. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the Framers left war to politics. As we confront the new challenges of terrorism, rogue nations, and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to introduce sweeping, untested changes in the way we make war.”

While there’s an argument to be made Bashar al-Assad doesn’t pose a serious threat to our national security, there’s no denying the validity of Yoo’s view by striking Syria, Trump has “only begun to correct the mistakes the Obama administration made when it allowed the Syrian civil war to metastasize into a conflict that is destabilizing the Middle East”.  And the Tomahawk attack may be the first step to curing the malaise with which Barack Hussein Obama infected America.

Regardless, though we certainly respect other genuine Conservative opinion, we’re in Yoo’s camp on this one; perhaps because we’ve always been of the mind it’s oftentimes far easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission. 

Since we brought up the subject of the most pestilential President in history, writing at Townhall.com, the great Victor Davis Hanson accurately observes…

Obama is America’s Version of Stanley Baldwin

 

“Last year, President Obama assured the world that “we are living in the most peaceful, prosperous and progressive era in human history,” and that “the world has never been less violent.” Translated, those statements meant that active foreign-policy volcanoes in China, Iran, North Korea, Russia and the Middle East would probably not blow up on what little was left of Obama’s watch.

Obama is the U.S. version of Stanley Baldwin, the suave, three-time British prime minister of the 1920s and 1930s. Baldwin’s last tenure (1935-1937) coincided with the rapid rise of aggressive German, Italian and Japanese fascism. Baldwin was a passionate spokesman for disarmament. He helped organize peace conferences. He tirelessly lectured on the need for pacifism. He basked in the praise of his good intentions.

Baldwin assured fascists that he was not rearming Britain. Instead, he preached that the deadly new weapons of the 20th century made war so unthinkable that it would be almost impossible for it to break out.

Baldwin left office when the world was still relatively quiet. But his appeasement and pacifism had sown the seeds for a global conflagration soon to come.

Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin. Both seemed to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings that reflect honest differences. Therefore, tensions between aggressors and their targets can be remedied by more talk, international agreements, goodwill and concessions.

Ideas such as strategic deterrence were apparently considered by both Baldwin and Obama to be Neanderthal, judging from Baldwin’s naive efforts to ask Hitler not to rearm or annex territory, and Obama’s “lead from behind” foreign policy and his pledge never to “do stupid s–t” abroad.

Aggressors clearly assumed that Obama’s assurances were green lights to further their own agendas without consequences.

…In other words, as was true of Europe between 1933 and 1939, the world grew more dangerous and reached the brink of war. And like Stanley Baldwin, Obama was never willing to make a few unpopular decisions to rearm and face down aggressors in order not to be forced to make far more dangerous and unpopular decisions later on.

Baldwin was popular when he left office, largely because he had proclaimed peace, but he had helped set the table for the inevitable conflict to be inherited by his successors, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill. Obama likewise ignored rumbling volcanoes, and now they are erupting on his successor’s watch.

In both cases, history was kind while Baldwin and Obama were in office — but not so after they left.“

Though we acknowledge Hanson’s point, from where we sit, there are two stark and significant differences between Baldwin and Barry: (i) to the best of our knowledge, Baldwin didn’t detest the West, let alone his own country; and (ii) Baldwin never attempted destroy Great Britain’s economy and social fabric from within.  That and the fact even Lucy Baldwin…

…was infinitely more attractive…

…than Moochie!

Speaking of rumbling volcanoes The Dear Misleader left for his successor to quiet, here’s a case in point, courtesy of the WSJ‘s Jason Riley:

Baltimore Lets Criminals Have a Say About Cops

Despite an objection from the U.S. attorney general, a dangerous city weakens the hand of law enforcement.

 

“Attorney General Jeff Sessions has expressed “grave concerns” about an agreement—one devised by his predecessor and approved last week by a federal judge despite Mr. Sessions’s objections—to overhaul Baltimore’s police department. The rest of us ought to be worried as well.

Mr. Sessions fears that the consent decree will reduce “the lawful powers of the police department,” resulting in one of America’s most violent cities becoming even more dangerous. “Baltimore has seen a 22 percent increase in violent crime in just the last year,” he said in a statement on Friday. “While arrests in the city fell 45 percent based on some of these ill-advised reforms, homicides rose 78 percent and shootings more than doubled.” After eight years of attorneys general who wanted to focus on the conduct of police, it’s nice to have one who wants to prioritize the conduct of criminals.

Unfortunately, the Baltimore consent decree makes that more difficult by weakening the hand of law enforcement to various degrees. It bans officers from approaching people who are illegally loitering or trespassing unless someone has called the police to lodge a complaint. It prohibits police from using “an individual’s geographic location, such as presence in a high-crime area or proximity to the scene of suspected or reported crimes” as a basis for stopping and questioning a person. Nor can a police stop be based on someone’s “response to the presence of police officers, such as an individual’s attempt to avoid contact with an officer” or “an individual’s presence in the company of others suspected of criminal activity.”

The agreement directs police to get not only verbal but also written consent to search an individual. Cops must seek permission from a supervisor before arresting a suspect for, among other things, disorderly conduct, resisting an officer, failure to obey an officer, and making a false statement to an officer. Whether the police department is complying with the consent decree will be determined in part by an annual public survey that will include the opinions of “detained arrestees.” So criminals will have a say in whether Baltimore police are doing their jobs properly. Oh joy.

“Yo! Heah dat comment form yo axed me foh!”

Federal interference in local policing matters is supposed to be rare, but the Obama administration tried to make it commonplace. Some 14 such consent decrees are currently active, according to the Justice Department, and the suspicion is that many of the more recent ones were driven by politics…

…The Obama administration’s affinity for disparate-impact analysis, which equates differences in group outcomes with systemic bias, allowed the Justice Department to find patterns of abuse wherever it looked for them. It could pretend that the disproportionate number of encounters between blacks and police had nothing to do with the disproportionate amount of crime committed by blacks and everything to do with racist police behavior. But even where these consent decrees are warranted, said Mr. Otis, it’s important to note that they will come at a cost that will not be borne evenly: “When you make the police more cautious, it’s not like nothing happens. Criminals become emboldened, you get more crime, and low-income minority communities suffer the brunt of it. They get it first and worst.”“

Along with every law-abiding, tax-paying, hard-working, risk-taking business owner, be they small…

….or large…

…whose enterprise happens to be in the path of a marauding mob their government declines to disband.  Which is only in keeping with the results of every other Progressive policy ever enacted.  Presented for your perusal, the complete failure and utter insanity of modern Liberalism in a nutshell.

For more on the impact of contemporary Progressivism on the body politic, we turn now to the Follow-Up segment, as NRO‘s David French, echoing our sentiments expressed on Wednesday, provides us his perspective on what he terms…

United 3411 and the Flight from Reason

When people decide they have rights or authority on their side, they too often forget about the Golden Rule.

 

“…All told, the airline’s failure to sell one of its passengers a travel voucher led to a cascading series of failures that have ultimately cost it tens of millions of dollars in negative publicity, and that number is rising every minute.

Can we back up for a minute, however, and talk about how everyone involved abused either his legal or moral authority? How each relevant person apparently decided that whatever authority they had was to be exercised in the most unreasonable fashion possible?

First, United certainly had the contractual power to remove the passengers from the plane, but it was unreasonable to exercise that power after raising the asking price to only $800.

Second, security officials had the legal authority to use at least some degree of force to move the passenger (after all, a person can’t defeat the law merely by squatting in place), but they used so much force that they injured a man who wasn’t a physical threat to the officers or any other person on the plane.

Third, when the passenger was treated unfairly by the airline, he certainly achieved that coveted state in American culture — victim status — but that didn’t relieve him of his own responsibility to act reasonably. He had no legal right to stay in the seat. He should have gotten up. When the officers laid hands on him, he should have moved. He shouldn’t have started screaming like a maniac. All of those things were unreasonable.

Finally, we’ve defined expectations so far down that I can almost see how a corporate PR flack would believe that he could get away with some artful wordsmithing rather than a simple, sincere apology. Munoz’s sin wasn’t the spin — everyone wrongly expects that, and our low expectations only empower more spin — his sin was that he was comically inept.

And so here we are, a series of events that seems to compress our loss of manners, kindness, and honesty into a single viral story. Imagine if just one — just one — of the individuals in this entire chain of affairs had stopped obsessing over their rights and power and instead had asked themselves, “If I was in their shoes, how would I like to be treated?”

You’d offer more money for volunteers or give the doctor an opportunity to explain to other passengers why he needed to be back home (so that someone else may have been moved to offer their seat). Your methods to remove an obviously angry and distressed passenger would have been more respectful. Or, if you were the passenger, you’d do like the other bumped passengers did and remove yourself from a seat you had no legal right to occupy. Finally, if you were the CEO of United, you’d simply say, “We’re sorry. We’ll make this right.”

I’m reminded of a popular quote of unknown provenance, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden.” Or perhaps we can boil it down to two words: “Be reasonable.” In an era of entitlement, reason is kind. Really, it’s just implied from the Golden Rule. “So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them.” It’s an effective rule of human behavior, one with a pedigree several millennia old. United should try it. The screaming doctor should try it. We should try it. Only Twitter thrives in a culture of pettiness, unreason, and malice. Our nation surely does not.“

By the way, if you believe Dao’s lawyer’s account of his injuries, we have some land in the Okefenokee we’d like to sell you.

In a related item detailing things America surely doesn’t need, Townhall.com‘s Kurt Schlichter recognizes…

Academia Is Our Enemy So We Should Help It Commit Suicide

 

“The purpose of universities long ago stopped being education, yet Big Edu and its liberal supporters keep pushing the lie that the only way to prepare young Americans for the future is to tie an anchor around their necks. America’s student loan debt now totals a staggering $1.4 trillion carried by 44 million Americans, and 2016 grads are weighed down with an average $37,712 each. And what do they get for it? Nothing but fouryears older and considerably dumber.

Record numbers are using their degrees in Papuan Feminist Literature and Genderfluid Break Dance Therapy as gateway credentials into the exciting field of brewing caffeinated beverages for grown-ups who didn’t still live on the futon in their mom’s spare bedroom at age 33.

But even sucking the lifeblood out of Millennials is not enough to feed the greedy academic beast. The bright new idea – one embraced by that commie from New England, that other commie from New England who tricked her college into thinking she was an Indian, and that firewater aficionado who lost the election – is “free college.” Let’s set aside the fact that community college exists to give everyone the opportunity to get some higher education; today, it’s job is to occupy high school students for a few extra years by intermittently teaching them the things the incompetence of unionized teachers ensured they didn’t learn in public high schools. The “free college” idea offers those of us who have already paid for our own education the opportunity to pony up for someone else’s. As the grade-inflated bastions of higher learning say to pretty much anyone who hands them a check and keeps his mouth shut about liking America, “Pass.”

If traditional colleges performed some meaningful function that only they could perform, then there might be a rationale for them in the 21^st Century. But there’s not. What do four-year colleges do today? Well, they cater to weenies who feel “unsafe” that Mike Pence is speaking to their graduates. Seventy-some years ago, young people that age were feeling unsafe because the Wehrmacht was trying to kill them on Omaha Beach.

At our nation’s most prestigious university, students are emotionally incapacitated by the fact that other Americans elected someone they dislike. Their reaction is to form a “resistance” that they refer to as “Dumbledore’s Army.” What a bunch of wand-stroking. But there is one good thing about this mortifying childishness – perhaps now, when you meet a grad, he, she, or xe will hesitate for a couple minutes before telling you it went to Harvard.

And in their quest to ensure their students’ perpetual unemployment, colleges are now teaching that punctuality is a social construct. Somewhere, a Starbucks manager is going to hear from Kaden the Barista that, “I like, totally couldn’t get here for my shift on time because, like intersectionality of my experience as a person of Scandinavianism and stuff. I feel unsafe because of your racist vikingaphobia and tardiness-shaming.”

Academia is pricing itself out of reach even as the antics of its inhabitants annoy and provoke those of us whose taxes already pick up a big chunk of the bill even without the “free college” okie-doke. This is where the fortuitous coincidence of two phenomena collide to give us an opportunity to fix our problem. We’re woke to the scam, and we now have a federal government dominated by conservatives that can use the law and the power of the purse to tame the beast…”

Here’s the juice: with rare exceptions, outside of engineering and any of the sciences other than the environmental disciplines, a college degree these days amounts to nothing more than…

Which brings, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…

Magoo