Comey’s Overdue Departure

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 by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
If a FBI director is doing his job, we probably should neither see nor hear of him much on television.
The FBI director by his very office holds enormous power. And like the IRS director, by definition he or she must show restraint given the vast resources at his discretion and thus the potential for abuse. In other words, we want a FBI director to exude coolness, stay dispassionate, and remain professional. I don’t think that has ever been a description that fit Director James Comey.
Comey’s nadir came in the summer of 2016 when, confused over the investigatory role of the FBI and the prosecutorial prerogatives of the Justice Department, he de facto turned the FBI into investigator, prosecutor, judge, and jury in presenting damning evidence against Hillary Clinton, then nullifying it, then reopening the case, then re-reopening it and backing off — all in front of television cameras in the midst of a heated presidential campaign.
And then after doing all that, Comey confused the act with its intent, and as a veritable legislator reinvented statutes about communicating classified information by suggesting that even if one likely committed a felony, but did not intend to (not a proven assertion), then it wasn’t really a felony.
Comey’s behavior was never properly addressed. His recent performance in front of Congress likely sealed his fate. We do not expect our FBI director to whine, in teenager fashion, about being treated unfairly, as he alleged when Loretta Lynch dumped the Clinton e-mail scandal in his lap. (A good FBI director, of course, would simply have run the investigation, presented the findings to the Justice Department, and then have let them deal with it (if not Lynch, then someone else). Comey misrepresented the volume of Huma Abedin’s improper e-mails; and in general always fell back on loud assertions of FBI integrity rather than displaying it through his behavior and statements.
Nor did Comey have a reservoir of good will. Long ago, he acted bizarrely in the John Ashcroft hospitalization melodrama; he was responsible for the career of Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald who miscarried justice in the case of Scooter Libby (not to mention Fitzgerald’s own subsequent Conrad Black prosecution). His legacy is that Hillary Clinton paid no price for illegally setting up an improper e-mail server, destroying evidence, and communicating classified material in an insecure fashion.
Comey seems to think that he could freely discuss the charges of Russian collusion, but not so transparently the far stronger evidence of unlawful unmasking of Americans caught up in (or in fact targeted by) government surveillance — apparently in understandable fear that the Democrats and media posed the greater danger to his career.
Politically,Comey’s thirst for celebrity rankled his own bureau and, finally, achieved the difficult result of alienating both Republicans (who thought he was an Obama operative in service to Hillary) and Democrats (who thought he was a tool of the FBI, freelancing to sink Hillary). Usually being roundly distrusted would be a sign of disinterested non-partisanship. But in Comey’s case, the universal disdain was more likely rare unity that Comey lacked the temperament to run the FBI and had created a climate of fear that at any given moment a Comey press conference would destroy someone’s career without commensurate investigation and evidence.
Democrats, who despised Comey (see Hillary’s latest whine) and blamed him for Trump’s election, are already calling the firing cruel, mean spirited, and proof of a Trump conspiracy (why would Trump fire and set loose on the media the man who supposedly had handed him the election?); Republicans will shrug that long ago Comey should have been fired (the entire Clinton investigations, including the quid pro quo Clinton Foundation matters, were sloppy and amateurish), but the timing and methods of his firing seemed momentarily messy.
The proper analysis is probably twofold: Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — roundly praised in bipartisan fashion (please read his detailed memo critiquing Comey’s performance) — wanted to start out with a clean slate and not have a damaged-goods FBI-director albatross around his neck for the next four years — in the contexts of the past recusals of Lynch and then Jeff Sessions.
Second, the surveillance/unmasking scandal remains a potential bombshell and it was probably felt that Comey (who was loquacious about the collusion charge, but suddenly silent about likely felonious unmasking) could not be trusted to conduct a timely, fair, and prompt investigation. (Would he have had another press conference announcing that surveillance statutes had been violated by unmasking, but that “no reasonable prosecutor” would pursue such a case, supposedly given its lack of criminal intent?)
The hysteria will subside, because in the end Comey has no supporters left, and lots of critics — he will be missed by very few.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/447471/james-comey-overdue-departure

How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps

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By Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
Counting the ways, and Comey is not among them.
Hillary Clinton recently took “full responsibility” for her 2016 loss. Only she didn’t. Instead of explaining what the historian Thucydides once called the “truest causes” (aitiai), she went on to list at least three pretexts (prophases) for her defeat: sexism, FBI director James Comey, and the purported Russian hacking of her unsecured e-mail server and the John Podesta e-mail trove.
Clinton’s accusations also raise the larger question of why a presidential candidate wins or loses an election.
In general, there seem to be five hinges of fate: personality, positions on the issues, the general political atmosphere of the era, the quality of the campaign, and sudden and unforeseen outside events such as depression, scandal, or war. Even a biased media or lots of money pales in comparison.
The Pretexts
We can fairly dismiss Clinton’s pretexts.
Take sexism. Hillary Clinton found her sex an advantage in being elected to the U.S. Senate from New York. For a generation, among the most powerful and successful figures in U.S. politics were three progressive, multimillionaire, Bay Area women who, in a most non-diverse fashion, lived within 50 miles of one another: Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi.
From 1997 to 2013 women of both parties were in charge of U.S. foreign policy as secretary of state, for twelve out of 16 years. One could make the argument that “the first female president” was an advantageous campaigning point, not a drawback; it was certainly designed to bookend Barack Obama’s successful trumpeting of being the first African-American president.
Blaming a deer-in-the-headlights FBI director James Comey is equally problematic. His passive-aggressive pronouncements irrationally first exonerated her, then did not, then did again. Faulting the FBI for her own likely felonious behavior of sending and receiving classified communications on an unsecured server (or of Bill Clinton’s trying to leverage Attorney General Loretta Lynch on an airport tarmac) is sort of like blaming the defeat at Pearl Harbor on the Japanese — true, but hardly the whole story given America’s responsibility for its own unpreparedness.
In similar fashion, had Donald Trump lost, he might have faulted the Washington Post for airing the decade-old Access Hollywood tape that nearly destroyed his campaign, as if the clear ill will and partisanship of Jeff Bezos’s Post were not empowered by Trump’s own private, hot-mic — but nonetheless crude — statements. The Germans claimed that harsh snows and the last-minute campaign in the Balkans had delayed and thus doomed their 1941 Russian offensive, as if the Red Army did not have a say or as if Germans were a tropical people.
As far as the Russians, they are Russians — always seeking to throw wrenches into the gears of U.S. elections. The Republicans claimed that their firewalls kept the Russians out of RNC e-mail; John Podesta using “password” for his password invited them in. And, of course, no one forced Washington journalists to collude through e-mail with the Clinton campaign, and no one ordered Hillary to jerry-rig a home-brewed server. The Russian-collusion bogeyman was probably as effective a campaign prop for Clinton as the supposed Russian-inspired e-mail revelations were for Trump.

Continue reading “How to Blow an Election — in Five Easy Steps” →

Angry Reader

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From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

I don’t know anything about Stanley Baldwin, but I’ll assume your description of him is accurate. In that case, you have to stretch quite a bit to make Obama into Baldwin. For instance:

You call Baldwin a pacifist. Obama is decidedly not a pacifist. He is a Niebuhrian realist who was willing to bomb and assassinate. Just because he was given the Nobel Peace Prize and preferred diplomacy over the use of violence does not make him a pacifist or appeaser.

You claim that Obama, like Baldwin, seems “to believe that war breaks out only because of misunderstandings” that “can be remedied through more talk and concessions,” and that Obama was opposed to strategic deterrence. Is this not a simplistic and one-sided view of Obama’s actions? He readily acknowledged the evil of organizations such as ISIS and sought the most effective ways to neutralize them—not only through “soft power” that appeals to hearts and minds, but also through military alliances, training local fighters, and through a much stepped-up program of drone warfare.

You fault Obama for Iran taking 10 US sailors into custody, but you fail to mention that the sailors were in Iranian territorial waters, were therefore legally apprehended by Iran, and that Obama’s calm approach got them released quickly.

You fault Obama for the uranium enrichment agreement with Iran despite the fact that the majority of strategists have hailed this as a great success; that most analysts believe that trying to bomb Iran out of a nuclear program would not have worked and would have led to far more dangerous problems.

You claim that when Assad “called Obama’s bluff” about the red line of using chemical weapons, that Obama “did nothing other than call … Putin to beg Assad to stop killing civilians with chemical weapons.” That’s not my memory of events. My memory is that the US was on the very brink of war with Assad when, during a news conference, Secretary of State Kerry was asked if there was anything that could prevent the beginning of US bombing. Kerry replied that Syria would have to immediately destroy all of its chemical weapons—something Kerry didn’t believe Syria would do. It was at that moment that Russia offered to destroy all of Syria’s chemical weapons. Obama, on balance, decided that was a better option than widening a destabilizing war with an uncertain outcome. Trump’s recent correct decision to bomb a Syrian airfield because of Syria’s recent use of chemical weapons was made possible by Obama’s red-line stance. Syria clearly violated the agreement, and Russia was exposed as a fraudulent actor.

North Korea building more and better missiles (and nuclear bombs) was not due to Obama’s policies. On the contrary, that was due to the blundering of Bush. Bill Clinton was in the process of a negotiated settlement with North Korea to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, but the Bush administration then torpedoed those efforts and instead threatened North Korea. There is no military solution to North Korea arming itself with nuclear weapons short of exposing South Korea and the North Korean population to mass nuclear carnage. North Korea will continue to pursue nuclear weapons on ballistic missiles as long as it feels threatened. If you have found some other magical solution, I’d like to hear it.

I’m not saying Obama made every right decision in Syria or elsewhere. He almost certainly did not. It may be he was too hesitant to use force in some situations. But that is a far cry from the blanket assertions you make in your column. And time may vindicate him rather than fault him. It may be that his complex strategy of diplomacy and military action was about as good as we could have done under the circumstances. In any case, I urge you to be more accurate, knowledgeable, and nuanced about the uses of diplomacy. 

Ryan Ahlgrim

Richmond, VA

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Ryan Ahlgrim,

When I listed various attributes of Stanley Baldwin’s agenda, I ended with “Obama, the Nobel peace laureate and former president, resembles Baldwin.” And then I listed the areas of commonality, and most certainly did not include Baldwin’s pacifism as an Obama trait. Did you really read the column?

But that said, Obama’s targeted assassinations via drones and bombing of Libya had nothing to do with maintaining deterrence, which was largely lost after slashing the defense budget, appeasing Iran, letting ISIS, Syria, and North Korea fester, and offering various apologies and morally equivalent rationalizations to our increasingly bellicose enemies.

I suggest, Ryan, that it is not in your argument’s interest to invoke “ISIS”—given that Obama wrote the growing terrorist cabal off as a “jayvee” organization, and allowed it to sprout in Iraq and thrive in Syria, by foolishly pulling all U.S. peacekeepers out of a largely quiet Iraq in December 2011. No need to elaborate on Obama’s Syria policies or his “redline”; the genocide speaks for itself. One can read Ben Rhodes’s interview about an “echo chamber” and a “know nothing” media that was easily manipulated for a taste of how foreign policy was conducted. I don’t think the foreign policy of Ben Rhodes, John Kerry, and Susan Rice (as opposed to that of Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster) was anything but extremely dangerous.

With all due respect, your assertion that Obama’s false redline empowered Trump’s bombing of a Syrian airfield is unhinged. Obama, John Kerry, and Susan Rice bragged that all chemical weapons were destroyed and that there were none left in Syria—as if they had any way of knowing, at best, and, at worse, must have known that assertion was untrue. Such statements were no more accurate than were Benghazi’s being caused by a video-maker, or Bowe Bergdahl being a POW who served with honor and distinction as alleged by Susan Rice.

Obama’s redline not only eroded U.S. deterrence (giving confidence to rogue states like North Korea and Iran to call our bluff), and led to hundreds of thousands of civilian dead in Syria, but also ushered in Russia’s return to the Middle East after a near half-century hiatus.

Ditto North Korea where you display the same historical ignorance. Bill Clinton bragged that his “settlement” would shortly lead to the dismantling of all North Korea’s nuclear weapons. Nothing of the sort happened.

During the Bush term, it became clear that North Korea had stealthily used Clinton’s naiveté to rush toward nuclearization; Bush did not threaten North Korea with force, but rather suggested that if it were to continue its trajectory, its behavior might lead to the nuclearization of Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea.

North Korea does not starve its own people and build nukes because it feels “threatened” but because it has hit on a two-decade long winning strategy of getting a few nuclear weapons, acting deranged, and demanding bribe money—and it has worked brilliantly in winning attention, cash, and influence for an otherwise failed and genocidal state.

The 10 sailors, incompetently led, amateurish, and poorly trained, were experiencing mechanical problems in their tiny flotilla, were unfamiliar with the environs of Farsi Island, and wandered into the waters off an Iranian island in the middle of the Persian Gulf. What followed was a propaganda coup, as they were blindfolded, told to put their hands up, humiliated, video-taped and interviewed. The incident was emblematic that the Obama Defense Department was not on full alert in the Persian Gulf, that the Iranians assumed that the U.S. would not demand that the sailors be immediately released, and that Iran saw no downside to an iconic act of humiliation—part of their larger publicity offensive during the tragic Iranian negotiations, whose full details were hidden by the Obama administration and are only now leaking out.

Given recently released information about secret side-agreements and concessions in the Iran Deal, the 2016-2017 aggressiveness of North Korea, the use of chemical weapons in Syria, and Putin’s post-reset assertiveness, I don’t think it is wise to praise Obama’s foreign policy. And I stand by my obvious and unoriginal statement that Obama appeased enemies, and made the world a less safe place, especially for his own country.

Lead from behind foreign policy was, in fact, like Stanley Baldwin’s (read up on the well-meaning naïf), who left office self-satisfied after ensuring the world would blow up under the watch of his successor Neville Chamberlain.

In any case, I urge you to be more accurate, knowledgeable, and nuanced about the nature of deterrence and European history of the 1930s.

Victor Hanson

Selma, California

Potemkin Universities

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by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review

Behind the facades, universities have broken faith with a once-noble legacy of free inquiry.

College campuses still appear superficially to be quiet, well-landscaped refuges from the bustle of real life.

But increasingly, their spires, quads, and ivy-covered walls are facades. They are now no more about free inquiry and unfettered learning than were the proverbial Potemkin fake buildings put up to convince the traveling Russian czarina Catherine II that her impoverished provinces were prosperous.

Continue reading “Potemkin Universities” →

How the Obama Precedent Empowered Trump

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By
American Greatness.com
April 27th, 2017

Donald Trump was elected president by sizing up the Electoral College, and the voting public, and then campaigning accordingly. A number of the things that explain Trump’s election also point to unique opportunities to overturn the Obama legacy. This, in turn, explains why the Left is understandably upset about the unprecedented scope of the presidential landscape they bequeathed to and therewith empowered Trump. Continue reading “How the Obama Precedent Empowered Trump” →

You Gotta Lie

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 by Victor Davis Hanson// National Review
Oh! What a tangled progressive web we weave . . .
Red/blue, conservative/liberal, and Republican/Democrat mark traditional American divides. But one fault line is not so 50/50 — that of the contemporary hard progressive movement versus traditional politics, values, and customs.
The entire menu of race, class, and gender identity politics, lead-from-behind foreign policy, political correctness, and radical environmentalism so far have not won over most Americans.
Proof of that fact are the serial reliance of their supporters on deception, and the erosion of language on campus and in politics and the media. The progressive movement requires both deceit and euphemism to mask its apparently unpopular agenda.
What the Benghazi scandal, the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and the Iran Deal all had in common was their reliance on ruse. If the White House and its allies had told the whole truth about all these incidents, Americans probably would have widely rejected the ideological premises that framed them.
In the case of Benghazi, most Americans would not fault an obscure video for causing scripted rioting and death at an American consulate and CIA annex. They would hardly believe that a policy of maintaining deliberately thin security at U.S. facilities would encourage reciprocal local good will in the Middle East. They would not agree that holding back American rescue forces was a wise move likely to forestall an international confrontation or escalation.
In other words, Americans wanted their consulate in Benghazi well fortified and protected from seasoned terrorists, and they favored rapid deployment of maximum relief forces in times of crises — but, unfortunately, these were not the agendas of the Obama administration. So, to disguise that unpleasant reality, Americans were treated to Susan Rice’s yarns about a spontaneous, unexpected riot that was prompted by a right-wing video, and endangered Americans far beyond the reach of U.S. military help.

Continue reading “You Gotta Lie” →

Trump’s Cultural Optics

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By |American Greatness.com
April 9th, 2017

 

Every movement president is soon accused of selling out to the establishment and drowning in Washington’s permanent and deep swamp.“Let Reagan be Reagan” was an early lamentation of conservatives, fearing their godhead was being watered down by Jim Baker and diluted by George H.W. Bush centrists.

Bill Clinton used to trot Hillary Clinton out to play the flaming campus progressive of old to quiet rumors that an evil pollster Dick Morris—promoting liberal heresies such as school uniforms and “100,000 new policemen”—had snuck in the service entry to the White House to brainwash Clinton back to the center.

Few diehard Obama zealots in summer 2008 ever imagined that by February 2009 there would be party hacks like a Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel. Continue reading “Trump’s Cultural Optics” →

Angry Reader

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From an Angry Reader:

Mr. Hanson,

 

Did you volunteer or were you drafted (like so many of us) to fight in Vietnam? Did you know “we” lost that war to those so called “commies” and now those “commies” make Trump brand shirts and ties?

 

Also, are you willing to pay for increased US military involvement throughout the world with more tax cuts as the US did in the never ending wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? Cutting spending for meals on wheels, planned parenthood, health insurance benefits for Americans, clean air and water, might not be enough to pay for all your munitions or even meet payroll for a lowly paid non drafted military. At least US tax dollars paid for our napalm in Vietnam. What are you willing to sacrifice in Syria, Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. etc. etc. to “make America great again?” Perhaps your own life or limbs again?

 

Perhaps reading a little more George Santayana might help balance your thirst for blood. And perhaps a “proportionate” bombing of an air base before warning Russia and Assad before time might actually be actually a bit more equal in “proportions” to scare your enemies. And as a veteran and historian try to remember how many bombs, and napalm, and bullets, and killings of the enemy and our own troops it took in that classic military loss. Revenge may be sweet but it doesn’t always go as planned, even for those willing to pay for the effort with massive tax cuts. As a historian, that is one thing you should know by now.

 

Happy Easter.

 

Sincerely,

 

Jimmy Gorman

Chicago Tribune Subscriber

 

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Dear Angry Reader Jimmy Gorman,

 

I registered for the draft the day that I was eligible, and received a lottery number in 1972 at a time when the draft then shortly ended and less than 25,000 Americans were left in Vietnam at year’s end—and when U.S. combat operations on the ground were largely over in Vietnam.

 

Do you eat food? If so, would you be competent and morally qualified to comment on food policy, given the likelihood that you have never farmed or shared the life of a farmer, and have no first-hand experience with tractor work, peach pruning, or fertilization—or the work of others that brings your food to your table? I also did not live in ancient Greece and therefore should not write about the Peloponnesian War? I cannot adjudicate the success or failure of a past ruptured appendix operation because I am not a surgeon? Continue reading “Angry Reader” →

Will 2020 Be Another 1972 for Democrats?

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by Victor Davis Hanson//National Review

Going hard to the left was the wrong lesson to learn from their narrow loss in 1968, and they could repeat the mistake.

Forty-nine years ago, Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate for president.

The year 1968 was a tumultuous one that saw the assassinations of rival candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy and civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. Lyndon Johnson’s unpopular lame-duck Democratic administration imploded because of massive protests against the Vietnam War.

Yet Humphrey almost defeated Republican nominee Richard Nixon, losing the election by just over 500,000 votes (43.4 percent to 42.7 percent). Continue reading “Will 2020 Be Another 1972 for Democrats?” →

victorhanson

From an Angry Reader:

Dear Continually Angry Reader Steve Faddy

Hey Vic,

I understand you are a historian, but please write a timely piece, maybe touching on the brilliant incoherence of the foreign policy of the Mad King Don. Obama is no longer the President. Write something relevant to the present populace instead of another pedantic vitriolic anti-Obama rant. That piece may even be apt. Seriously you can do better, I suspect you are relatively intelligent. I have even read your books. Thanks. Your friend, Steve

Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:

Hey Steve,

Sometimes unpredictability is far more effective in a leader than scripted impotence. Obama is no longer president, yes—but his legacy of appeasement with Iran, North Korea, and Russia, as well as the messes in Syria, Libya, and Iraq remain. Even his supporters now say that they wish he had honored his redline in Syria, which might have deterred Assad from gassing additional children.

I follow the following formula: I do not mention Obama for four columns, and on the fifth may if his legacy is in the news. He is fading from the national conscious, but we still are stuck with a doubling of the debt, the ACA, and a world at the brink.

Thanks. Your friend, Victor

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