It’s Friday, August 11th, 2017…and here’s The Gouge!
First up, in a single edition of his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty opines on three separate subjects we’ve recently featured:
Thomas Friedman on Trump, Clintons on North Korea, Google on Diversity
First, we’re surprised the Earth is still spinning on its axis following this common-sense suggestion from the normally-nonsensical…
Thomas Friedman: Hey, Maybe Trump Has a Point on Some Issues
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls on Democrats to acknowledge President Trump makes some valid points. He picks four issues:
We can’t take in every immigrant who wants to come here; we need, metaphorically speaking, a high wall that assures Americans we can control our border with a big gate that lets as many people in legally as we can effectively absorb as citizens.
The Muslim world does have a problem with pluralism – gender pluralism, religious pluralism and intellectual pluralism – and suggesting that terrorism has nothing to do with that fact is naïve; countering violent extremism means constructively engaging with Muslim leaders on this issue.
Americans want a president focused on growing the economic pie, not just redistributing it. We do have a trade problem with China, which has reformed and closed instead of reformed and opened. We have an even bigger problem with automation wiping out middle-skilled work and we need to generate more blue-collar jobs to anchor communities.
Political correctness on college campuses has run ridiculously riot. Americans want leaders to be comfortable expressing patriotism and love of country when globalization is erasing national identities. America is not perfect, but it is, more often than not, a force for good in the world.
The problem is, this runs afoul of amnesty, kumbaya “diversity” talk, tax-the-rich-and-redistribute-the-money economic plans, and urban elites’ sense of smug superiority over those less educated. That’s pretty much the Democratic platform right there!If you take that away, what’s left?
Unlike a broken clock, Friedman was right four times in one day; given his history, this will likely prove the last such occurrence.
Regarding his last observation, here’s a case in point:
If only Loretta Lynch had thought to use the unreasoned fear her last name creates in the overly sensitive…none of whom have the slightest connection or experience with anything even approximatingACTUAL lynching…
…it mightn’t have been necessary for her to lie to Trey Gowdy under oath:
Next, Geraghty details why The Donald’s being forced to play a hand his three predecessors…though Bush II to a greatly lesser degree…so ineptly yet deliberately dealt him:
History’s Brutal Verdict on the Last U.S. Agreement with North Korea
Are the current tensions with North Korea something new, a harbinger of a new era of nuclear threats and negotiations that feel akin to blackmail? Or just the latest act in a three-decade cycle of almost regularly-scheduled provocations and demands that no longer surprise the United States and its allies?
Let’s go back to June 1994: the New York Rangers won the Stanley Cup, The Lion King opened up in theaters, O.J. Simpson was on the run in a slow white Bronco, and the world slowly recognized that North Korea was seriously pursuing nuclear weapons.
The cover of Time magazine, June 13, 1994:
A few months earlier, North Korea had declared, during “peace” talks, “We are ready to respond with an eye for an eye and a war for a war. If war breaks out, we will turn Seoul into a sea of fire.”The public didn’t know it at the time, but the United States was quite close to a major escalation that week, one that many in the Pentagon expected would lead to a Second Korean War:
It was a tense scene in the White House on June 15, 1994. [Secretary of Defense William] Perry and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. John Shalikashvili were briefing President Clinton and other top officials on three options to substantially reinforce the 37,000 U.S. troops stationed on the Korean peninsula since the end of the Korean War.
The Pentagon was advocating a “middle option” — moving 10,000 more troops, along with F-117s, long-range bombers and an additional carrier battle group to Korea or nearby.
“We were within a day of making major additions to our troop deployments to Korea, and we were about to undertake an evacuation of American civilians from Korea,” Perry recalled.
The real fear was that North Korea would read the buildup and evacuations as certain signs of an impending attack, and launch a preemptive invasion of South Korea. U.S. analysts believed the North Koreans took one main lesson from the 1991 Persian Gulf War: Don’t give the United States time to mass its forces.
Perry told Clinton all the options were unpalatable, but that not to pick one of them would be disastrous.
“My recollection is that before the president got to choose — was asked to choose — the door of the room opened and we were told that there was a telephone call from former president Carter in Pyongyang and that he wished to speak to me,” Gallucci remembered.
Jimmy Carter had been meeting as a private citizen with North Korea’s aging leader Kim Il Sung, and was calling to report a breakthrough. The White House session broke up and relieved officials watched television as Carter informed CNN by telephone of the latest development.
In other words, a conflict with non-nuclear North Korea was averted by Jimmy Carter freelancing.(A man whose ineptitude and gullibility are the stuff of legends!) By October, Bill Clinton announced the U.S. and North Korea had a deal:
I am pleased that the United States and North Korea yesterday reached agreement on the text of a framework document on North Korea’s nuclear program. This agreement will help to achieve a longstanding and vital American objective: an end to the threat of nuclear proliferation on the Korean Peninsula.This agreement is good for the United States, good for our allies, and good for the safety of the entire world. It reduces the danger of the threat of nuclear spreading in the region. (Yeah…like he didn’t have sex with that woman!)
As with the Iran deal many years later, the deal with North Korea was not a formal treaty and thus never ratified by Congress.
Of course, the North Koreans cheated; the U.S. provided oil, two light water reactors, and a new electric grid, altogether worth roughly $5 billion, in exchange for promises.
U.S. intelligence agencies found evidence that North Korea was up to something; spy satellites detected massive underground excavations and construction. A.Q. Khan, father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, traveled to North Korea several times. A telling anecdote, reported in 2002:
One Western diplomat who visited North Korea in May 1998, just as world attention focused on Pakistan, which had responded to India’s underground nuclear tests by setting off six of its own, recalled witnessing an odd celebration.
“I was in the Foreign Ministry,” the official recalled last week. “About 10 minutes into our meeting, the North Korean diplomat we were seeing broke into a big smile and pointed with pride to these tests. They were all elated. Here was a model of a poor state getting away with developing a nuclear weapon.”
The Clinton administration did not let the intelligence get in the way of a happy narrative of improving relations with North Korea. By 2000, Secretary of State Madeline Albright was traveling to Pyongyang to meet Kim Jong Il and declaring the administration no longer labeled them a “rogue state.”
Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright disclosed the change in the official lexicon today when she was asked about “the rogue state” of North Korea and its “rogue leader,” Kim Jong Il.
“First of all, we are now calling these states ‘states of concern,’”Dr. Albright told a radio interviewer on the same day the administration moved to ease trade restrictions against North Korea, a former battlefield foe that is continuing to develop weapons that may one day be capable of striking the United States.
In a long history of naïve foreign policy decisions and deals, the Clinton administration’s approach to North Korea ranks as one of the worst.
By 2002, the Bush administration confronted North Korea with evidence that they had an ongoing program to develop nuclear weapons.
“We need nuclear weapons,” Kang Sok Joo, the North Korean senior foreign policy official, said, arguing that the program was a result of the Bush administration’s hostility.
[Assistant Secretary of State James] Kelly responded that the program began at least four years ago, when Mr. Bush was governor of Texas. The Americans left after one North Korean official declared that dialogue on the subject was worthless and said, “We will meet sword with sword.”
Reading about the 1994 North Korean deal today feels like watching The Usual Suspects the second time. You know who the villain is, and who is not to be trusted, and you shake your head every time you see someone naively trust the villain.
Senator Dianne Feinstein responded to the news that North Korea has successfully produced a miniaturized nuclear warhead that can fit inside its intercontinental ballistic missiles by declaring, “our policy of isolating North Korea has not worked. The United States must quickly engage North Korea in a high-level dialogue without any preconditions.”
What does she want to do in that high-level dialogue? North Korea has already demonstrated that they’re willing to lie and cheat.How likely is it that they’ll just give up their nukes and ICBM capabilities at the negotiating table?
Susan Rice, whose penchant for prevarication rivals even the Clintons, had this bit of brilliance to offer following Trump’s promise of “fire and fury”:
“History shows that we can, if we must, tolerate nuclear weapons in North Korea — the same way we tolerated the far greater threat of thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
…Rational, steady American leadership can avoid a crisis and counter a growing North Korean threat. It’s past time that the United States started exercising its power responsibly.”
In Newspeak, “rational, steady American leadership” means appeasement and abject surrender, as in shipping billions to Iran in exchange for hostages and the signing of an agreement which ensures the Mullahs development of nuclear weapons.
Or standing by while four Americans were murdered in Benghazi, then blaming an obscure video.
Or in this case, conducting an endless series of fruitless negotiations the enemy uses to secure their ends, then maintaining America’s only option is to accept the fully-preventable fruits of repeated gross dereliction of presidential duty.
In other words, these people are, quite literally, out of their minds; and they’re abysmal poker players…
…gambling with our lives!
As usual, the great Stilton Jarlsberg immediately gets to the heart of the matter:
“North Korea has apparently managed to miniaturize nuke warheads to the point that they’ll fit into ICBMs way sooner than the “experts” expected (the same “experts” who assure us that Barack Obama’s buddies in Iran are far from finishing their nukes)…”
Where would we be without “experts”…
…other than in far better shape to prevent the possibility of the above?!?
Lastly, Geraghty highlights…
The Aspect of Diversity at Google the Company Would Rather Not Talk About
Two ideas that don’t necessarily conflict: 1) Diversity is “good” in the sense that a group that has a varied set of viewpoints and experiences is likely to find better solutions and generate better ideas than one that has a uniform set of viewpoints and experiences. 2) A lot of corporate “diversity” initiatives are expensive public relations efforts that don’t amount to much, and may even worsen tensions because of their insistence upon defining people by race, ethnicity, gender, and religion instead of seeing all aspects of an individual.
President Obama’s cabinet certainly looked diverse, in terms of the number of women and racial minorities, but 22 of Obama’s first 35 appointments had a degree from an Ivy League university, MIT, Stanford, the University of Chicago, Oxford, or Cambridge. Out of more than 3,000 institutions that offer four-year degrees, thirteen institutions educated more than 60 percent of the top positions in government. The government values diversity, except for the kinds of people who go to a state university, apparently.
A point worth noting in the Google controversy: Starting in 2014, Google spent at least $264 million to improve diversity in the company; 29 percent of the company’s employees are women, 5 percent are Latino, and 2 percent are black – all largely unchanged from when the diversity initiative began. So where’s all the money going, and what are they doing with it?
But that’s a problem for Google’s stockholders.
Speaking of problems, file this one in the not-to-be-believed column:
“Google canceled a companywide meeting about diversity just before it was set to begin Thursday, citing safety concerns after right-wing commentators published the names of certain employees.
Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai had scheduled the meeting in the wake of his firing this week of software engineer James Damore, who wrote and distributed a memo that argued biological differences between men and women explain the gender gap among tech workers.
Shortly before the highly anticipated meeting’s scheduled 4 p.m. start in California, Mr. Pichai said in an email to staff that Google decided to cancel after employees expressed concerns “about their safety and worried they may be ‘outed’ publicly for asking a question in the Town Hall…”
Outed? By who?!? James Damore sure as hell wasn’t going to be sitting in on the meeting; and for some reason, we’re highly suspect of the assertion there would be a plethora of right-wing agitators in a company meeting held inside the Google compound. This smells like disinformation of the rankest variety.
Since we’re on the subject of over-the-top Progressivism, in this forward from George Lawlor, FOX News‘ Todd Starnes reports on yet another disturbing example of political-correctness run amok, as a Winchester, VA school board announces…
“I disagree that those statements mean that students will be placed in classes based on race.” – schoolboard chairman Erica Truban.
“A Virginia high school sent a disturbing letter to parents and students announcing they would be selecting students for Advanced Placement and honors classes at least partly based on skin color, a concerned parent told Fox News.Martin Luther King, Jr. must be turning over in his grave.
A parent forwarded me a copy of the letter sent from John Handley High School in Winchester. “Through our collective work, advanced classes such as AP and Honors will have proportional representation,” read the letter. “Proportional representation is 40% White, 35% Hispanic, 12% African American, 10% mixed race.”
The letter went on to explain that public schools across the country “continue to see outcomes that are disproportionate by race and social class.” “American demographic trends indicate that America will be a majority minority nation in the next 25 years,” the letter read. “Therefore, the new work of American public schools is to develop systems to address disparate outcomes.”
Interesting — I thought the work of American public schools was to teach kids how to read, write, multiply and divide…”
Evidently, not in Winchester, Virginia. Judging from school board chairman…er,…chairwoman…we mean chairperson Erica Truban’s denial of the obvious, she must assume the rest of us read as well as the vast majority of her students. As Todd Starnes puts it, “Her comment strains credulity.“
But as Elliot Kaufman suggests at NRO, with their inevitable overreach, The Left may still sow the seeds of their own demise:
“A recent Harvard-Harris poll reveals that 57 percent of Americans have an “unfavorable opinion of Black Lives Matters protests and protesters.” Broken down further, the results only get worse for the Democratic party, which has made support for the movement a litmus test for its candidates.
Over 60 percent of whites, suburbanites, rural voters, and people aged 35 and over share the unfavorable opinion of Black Lives Matters, according to the poll. Most strikingly, 60 percent of self-described “independents” and 55 percent of “moderates” join them. Hispanics, who tend to vote Democratic in large numbers, are evenly split.
This means that opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement is not just for Fox News viewers, right-wingers, or racists, as the Left likes to imply. It is a widespread view shared by voters whom Democrats need to win.
But the problems do not end there.The Democratic party’s support for the Women’s March — Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Cory Booker, and many others publicly praised and endorsed it — may prove just as damaging. Conservative media have long criticized the outrageous views and associations of the March’s organizers, especially those of Linda Sarsour, its most visible leader.But the New York Times has lately joined in…”
And if The Left’s lost The New York Times…?!?
Here’s the juice: modern Liberalism is, at its core, built upon an unholy alliance of diehard supporters of unions, Islam and infanticide.
Absent one of its three supports, the entire rotten facade must fall.
Which brings us, inappropriately enough, to The Lighter Side…
Finally, in the Sports Section, the rare instance where a cat…
…actually helped some Cardinals, as on the very next pitch…
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