Left wing protests only strengthen the Right

By: Eli Verschleiser

Our country seems more sharply divided today than it has been for generations.

With a new president in the White House, only 14 percent of Democrats approve of his performance, compared with 90 percent of Republicans. The Pew Research Center has found that Americans of both parties are increasingly disapproving of a president of the opposite party, and that at the height of the election campaign 81 percent of Donald Trump supporters viewed life in America today as worse than it was 50 years ago, compared with just 11 percent who said it is better.



Among Hillary Clinton supporters’ 19 percent said life is worse, compared with nearly six-in-ten (59 percent) who said it is better.

Those divisions have been on sharp display since Trump won the election, with mass protests across the country. While mistakes have been made by the president and his staff during the breaking-in period (we can’t exactly call it a honeymoon) there have been calls for his impeachment, or worse. The media pounce on his every word and mistake.

“Not my president,” the protesters declare, while the Democrats in Congress, with their minority numbers in both houses tried feebly to block the appointment of the new Cabinet members.

Clearly, despite the loss of Congress and the White House, the Democrats have failed to learn the lessons from the populist victory of 2016. In different areas of the country, there were localized concerns but a few things united citizens in the 37 states in which a majority voted against Hillary Clinton.

Millions of Americans want to feel good about their country and want government to stay out of their lives except to provide a strong economy, protect their rights and defend them from harm. They also want borders that mean something and a prevailing sense of law and order, not condemnation of the cops and excuses for criminals.

As much as some moderate Democrats might like to take this into consideration and steer the party at least to the middle, the party is in the process of moving even further left. As the Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 22, the Bernie Sanders wing of the party “has engaged in an intramural fight to remake the party in a more populist, liberal mold.” The goal of Sanders’ Our Revolution movement of five million, forged from Sanders surprisingly powerful presidential bid is “making party officials and elected Democrats more accountable to activists, and replacing them if they aren’t.”

That means the crowds that often take to the streets berating the police, waving Palestinian flags, supporting illegal immigration and occasionally turning violent will be steering the ship.

Will Tom Perez as newly minted leader of the party have a better clue to why so many voters find this abhorrent than his predecessor, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.)?

Paul Gigot, editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal said after the Democrats chose their new leader that the selection of Perez shows the party isn’t ready to do any “soul searching about what happened in 2016,” but rather wants to “bring the Sanders people and their energy into the party.”

The difference between Perez and runner-up Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.) in that race, Gigot said, was not ideological but rather a choice of “insider vs. outsider,” since Perez was an Obama Cabinet member. Ellison, with his troubling history on Israel and past support of Louis Farrakhan, is now the deputy party chairman.

Trump critics say they’re outraged over rising anti-Semitism, yet they have no problem raising the banner of hate against the Jewish state by calling for either its outright destruction or its severe weakening via economic sanctions and boycotts they think will pressure Israel into relinquishing territory to the Palestinians. The same voices never seemed as perturbed when anti-Semitism rose during the Obama years.

“Where are the liberal leaders when Jewish cemeteries are desecrated and campuses are painted with swastikas and racial slurs?” asked Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat, in a statement. “How are the leaders of the Democrats communicating with and reining in their followers when these crimes are committed? It’s simple. They’re not. Instead they’ve found an easy answer: Blame Trump.

“Should the President of the United States do more to stop these crimes? Absolutely. But to blame these anti-Semitic incidents on the Trump presidency is absurd. Anti-Semitic crimes were up 9 percent from 2014 to 2015. Does former President Obama own that?”

The continued protests weeks after the inauguration are appalling, at best. Are there that many people without jobs that have so much free time on their hands?

The president should be given a chance to articulate his agenda, set the country on a new path.

So President Trump is a reality TV star, yes we knew that. But I find myself less outraged at him and his policies than I am at the relentless critics who did not want to see Barack Obama go and wanted to continue socialist policies by electing Senator Bernie Sanders, or Hillary Clinton.

It has been nearly 30 years since a president handed the White House over to someone of the same party.

We only get one president at a time, and so the protesters should step back and acknowledge that people like me are more likely to look at what they are doing and move further to the right, not the direction they advocate.

Originally Published: The Hill

Bibi On Capitol Hill - The Politics of Survival

By: Eli Verschleiser

It’s surprising that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, in trying to undermine the credibility of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would bring up the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush,” Kerry said at a House Committee on Foreign Affairs hearing late last month. “We all know what happened with that decision.”



Wait. Wasn’t his proclamation in 2004 that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion [for war in Iraq and Afghanistan] before I voted against it," the flip-flop that heavily damaged his presidential bid that year? “Did he really want to bring that up?

But no-holds are barred in the current tussle between the U.S. and Israel over nuclear talks with Iran, as Netanyahu’s address to Congress was unwelcome by the White House.

Netanyahu has many reasons to be suspicious, not the least of which is apparent weakening of resolve by the U.S. on this matter. In June, 2013, United Nations envoy Samantha Power told a gathering of U.S. Jewish leaders that when it comes to thwarting Iran’s nuclear program “No deal is better than a bad deal. We will not accept a bad deal.”

Just days later the negotiating parties emerged from meetings in Geneva with the framework of an understanding, and a month later Iran agreed to roll back parts of its program, limiting its uranium production to below weapons grade (for now), in exchange for relief from sanctions. The latest version of the deal would kick the can down the road for 10 years, allowing the world’s biggest sponsor of terrorism to ramp up its nuclear production over time.

At that point, of course, it will be too late to get tough. For Netanyahu and a large share of his electorate, it’s a zero sum game. No amount of nuclear power can be entrusted to a country led by fanatics who support global terror and regularly telegraph their hatred of Israel. Who would make sure Iran behaves? Why, international monitors, of course.

A group of former Israeli generals said Sunday they fear the dust-up over the address to Congress, tinted as it is with U.S. and Israeli politics, will signal so much disarray in the process that it will embolden the Iranians to take a hard line in the talks.

But the U.S. and Israel have faced bumps in the road before. Remember when Secretary of State James Baker in 1990, frustrated by lack of peace-talks progress, read the number of the White House and told then-prime minister Yitzhak Shamir to call when he is serious about peace?

The current mess seems worse because President Barack Obama on the face of it does not like Netanyahu, and the feeling is may be mutual, not so much because of personalities or politics but because Obama has consistently fallen into the trap of equating apartments built by Israelis with rockets launched by Hamas. That’s no way to show that you fully understand the existential threat felt by Israelis, which got Netanyahu elected. Obama likely worries that Netanyahu’s address will only bolster the right wing in Israel and make it more difficult to pursue any progress in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks before he leaves office in 2017.

It is a legitimate worry that the spectacle of Netanyahu speech to Congress at the invitation of Obama arch-rival John Boehner, the Republican House speaker, will eclipse the more appropriate and pressing issue of whether opposition to a deal that might one day allow Iran to hand over a nuke to Hezbollah should be blocked by Congress, in its role as a check against the power of the executive branch.

“Congress has every right to invite, even over the president’s strong objection, any world leader or international expert who can assist its members in formulating appropriate responses to the current deal being considered with Iran regarding its nuclear-weapons program,” former Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz wrote in The Jerusalem Post.

But as a result of the White House face-off with both Netanyahu and the Republicans, the address will be seen as the kind of partisan fracas that leads to perennial gridlock on The Hill, rather than a key matter of international security.

This should not have become an international political spectacle; it should have been an important speech (to those who thought it was) by the one democratic country in the world that has been threatened to be annihilated by Iran its neighbor dozens of times. It is an embarrassment that U.S. and Israel politics – the president says he must keep arms’ distance from a foreign leader in the weeks before an election -- have not only crept into the process but dominated the issue.

Of course, Netanyahu is a savvy politician who will use the spotlight he gains here to score points in his bid to stay in power. But keep in mind that, perhaps more than any other country, Israel has the most to lose by picking the wrong leader.

That includes one who places too much faith in the protection of allies and international monitors, who have far less to lose.

In the end we can all at least agree on one thing, Bibi is a powerful and brilliant speaker.

Originally Published: The Times of Israel