8/14/20: I’m not going to deny that President Trump sometimes gets policies right. It’s mostly dumb luck.
But
he does.
Attorney General Bill Barr - or a banana cream pie? |
____________________
Trump in line for
second Nobel Peace Prize!
____________________
The
decision to stop a shipment of Iranian oil headed for Venezuela this week was a good one. The
four tankers halted by the U.S. Navy were carrying 1.1 million barrels of oil.
That sanctioned oil will be forfeit and sold, with proceeds earmarked to go to
victims of Iranian terror attacks.
At first glance, it also looked like a good deal when Israel and the United Arab Emirates, with U.S. diplomats pushing for an agreement, moved to normalize relations. The UAE would recognize Israel’s right to exist. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin “I Am Not Corrupt Up to My Eyeballs” Netanyahu would pause annexations in the West Bank, keeping a two-state solution alive.
Team Trump was so excited by developments that talk began of Donald Trump getting a second Nobel Peace Prize.
National
Security Adviser Robert O’Brien appeared on Sean Hannity’s show to make the case. The president “brought forth
the...vision for Middle East peace to get an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan
back in play and he’s brought peace to Afghanistan, at least between the U.S.
and the Taliban,” O’Brien said. “We haven’t lost a soldier in Afghanistan since
February 29 in combat and we’re going to be down to 5,000 troops in
Afghanistan. And now he’s brought peace to Israel and the UAE.”
Alas, this award may prove as ephemeral as the one Trump “won” in 2018, when he convinced North Korea to give up all its nukes.
(The North has since given up exactly 0 nuclear weapons. Rather, they built a few more for fun.)
As always, diplomacy in the real world can be a bitch. Mr. O’Brien seems to forget. For starters, the U.S. might be getting out of Afghanistan. Our Afghan allies are stuck. The bloodshed is unabated. You don’t win a Nobel Peace Prize for quitting a war you can’t figure out how to win.
Trump’s “vision for Middle East peace” also lacks an essential component: Palestinians. They took one look at the new agreement and accused the UAE of “betrayal.” To make that point clear, they recalled their ambassador to the Emirates and asked for an emergency meeting of the full Arab League.
Netanyahu then cast a pall over the deal, saying that he had not
agreed to end annexations in the West Bank – only to suspend them.
*
IN OTHER NEWS, the president did manage to squeeze in a visit at the hospital, with his ailing younger brother. Then it was off to Bedminster, N.J. again. A round of golf, and a hard day as president was ended.
The CDC reported another 56,397 new cases of coronavirus for the day. Friday, another 1,229 Americans died. Since the start of the pandemic, 134,397 healthcare professionals have been infected and 628 have perished. The national tally of dead, according to CDC has reached:
167,546.
*
THE GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY
OFFICE announces that the two top officials at the Department of Homeland
Security are not serving legally in their posts. Neither Chad
Wolf, the acting head of DHS, nor Ken Cuccinelli, acting deputy head, has been
confirmed by the U.S. Senate, as required by the U.S. Constitution.
Cuccinelli is actually
serving in two positions, without being confirmed for either. He’s also acting
director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.
The virtue of ignoring
the Senate and sticking whomever you like in top roles in government (if you
can get away with it) is you could put suck-ups and sycophants in places of
power and … oh … maybe break a few laws while they ignored what you were
doing. You could reward toadies by giving them important positions and you could
just say, f**k it, and appoint your son, Don Jr., as Secretary of Defense and
appoint a banana crème pie to be the next Attorney General.
(Actually, a crème pie
might not be as bad as Bill Barr, the current occupant of that position.)
POSTSCRIPT: Sen.
Mitt Romney offered biting assessment of President Trump’s handling of the
coronavirus crisis this week. “Short
term, I think it’s fair to say we really have not distinguished ourselves in a
positive way by how we responded to the crisis when it was upon us,” he said in
an interview Friday. “And the proof of the pudding of
that is simply that we have 5 percent of the world’s population but 25 percent
of the world’s deaths due to covid-19.”
“And there’s no way to spin that in a positive light,” he added.
(See: 8/16/20.)
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