Congress is so irrelevant in this game. Thank Truman and his Cold War congress for that.

It's the Age of Trumpism.

We are now in a place where the president can pull a Truman anywhere and anytime he wants and get away with it.

No one will stop him.

This is their only try, and it will fail.

Who needs a Cold War to justify an imperial presidency?

Congress Slaps down Trump-Saudi War on Yemen

The House of Representatives voted Thursday 247 to 175 to end the US involvement in supporting the Saudi-led war effort in Yemen. 

16 Republicans voted with the Democratic majority.

The Senate had already passed the act, invoking the War Powers act for the first time since it was enacted in 1973 after the Vietnam War.

The legislation now goes to Trump for his signature. 

The likelihood is that the president will veto it, even though he campaigned on getting out of the Middle East and ceasing the hemorrhaging of money being spent on America’s Forever Wars.

Remember when we were told that H. Clinton would be a warmonger and that Trump was the isolationist who would get the US out of the Middle East?

. . . .

Congress will likely be over ruled by Trump’s veto, and does not have the two thirds majority in both houses to overturn that veto. 

Obama, lying fellow-traveler, hearts Ho

I cannot say how disappointing it is to see this very smart man play dumb to no conceivable good purpose.

Ho's move was pure propaganda aimed at the most stupid with entirely deceptive intent and publicly accepted both then and thereafter by lying or stupid (or both) fellow-travelers, radicals with both eyes well open, and liberals glad of any way to undermine the cold war by downplaying the ugly realities of communism.

Obama was not forced by diplomatic circumstance to reluctantly nod at this canard.

What should he have done when Truong Tan Sang, president of communist Vietnam, handed him that mendacious letter from Ho to the American President, laying claim to both the American and French Revolutions?

He should have burned it on the spot before the man's eyes.

Well, all right.

He should at any rate not have let the brief press conference after the meeting pass without politely mentioning the incident and, also politely, denouncing the letter as a propaganda ploy and a lie.

Instead, he did the exact opposite.

He seized the chance to make this lie his own, flaunting his Bill Ayers side.

In the approving and even enthusiastic words of the President, that he most certainly did not have to say, “Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson.”

One has to wonder.

Did he skip the revolutionary festival in Havana the other day only because of scheduling conflicts?

BBC: Various fellow-travelers of Latin America celebrate socialismo in Havana

Conservative media are quite reasonably pointing to this as proof of the president's inner radicalism, though one has to wonder why they bother or what they hope to gain by this.

Radosh in WSJ

Tom Blumer at Newsbusters: The press has amnesia. Some of it is perhaps genuine.

Still, one fellow writing in NRO, of all places, evidently fell for it, just like a useful idiot of the old days.

The only conceivable defense against the charge he is a complete moron is to plead the ignorance of youth for whom the Vietnam War is an ugly episode of ugly Americanism, thankfully of long ago.

Sterling Beard: It's "factually true" that Ho was inspired, etc.

At least some liberals have joined their forebears along with Obama in this offensively stupid lie.

MoJo: Obama was right and Ho was inspired by Jefferson and the American Revolution

Steve M: It's an objective fact!

A new generation of liberals with the same soft spot for the reds that so many of them had, back in the day.

How many liberals are really "radicals" - that is to say, reds, in disguise?

Obviously, Obama is not the only one.

Exactly this sort of manipulation of US opinion in order to support inflection of US policy in favor of red regimes is what the "crazy right-wing looonatics" meant by "subversion," by the way, during the cold war.

God almighty.

No wonder I voted Republican in 1972.

And did not regret it either during or after Watergate.

Did Obama never understand why the Jewish State is in Palestine and not, say, Madagascar?

Reactions in Israel

First, there is and has been all along the purely religious conviction of an ancient, divine land grant that justified conquest, genocide, and religious tyranny at the time and justifies forcible re-possession today.

Second, there is and has been all along a secular, moral conviction that a national state more than 2,000 years in the past justifies forcible re-creation of another for the same nation in the same territory, even at the cost of conquest and forcible removal of a civilized community established some 1300 years ago.

And, last, there is and has been since the end of The Second World War a conviction abroad in America mightily encouraged by American liberals and especially Jewish American liberals that gentile Europe and America have a moral obligation to support and defend Israel because of the Holocaust that much of Europe joined Germany in perpetrating and the rest, along with America, failed to prevent.

The first two define the enterprise of Zionism, and have done so from the beginning.

The last is the hook still in the mouths of America, the nations of Western Europe, and Germany.

The Jewish conquest of Palestine began at the end of the 19th Century and has continued since then without interruption.

Those who support Israeli expansion today are only supporting continuation of a process that was not even significantly interrupted, let alone ended or completed, with the UN creation of Israel in 1948.

In the nature of the case, that process can end only with the complete establishment of a Jewish State extending over pretty much the whole territory of the ancient Jewish state, at its high point.

However much Israel has in common with the general run of European settler states created by the wave of European colonialism and imperialism that began in the Age of Columbus, it's really something different in important ways.

And it's that difference that is the basis for an Israeli intransigence putting in the shade the comparatively flaccid wills of the French in Algeria, the Brit colonists in Kenya, or the white tribe of South Africa.

All the same, Americans and others who pin their hopes on partition and establishment of a Palestinian state in the belief that the so-called two-state solution might actually solve anything and end the conflict, bringing about Muslim acceptance of the Jewish State and real peace in the region do not understand the issue.

The Muslims vis-à-vis the Jewish State are in the position of the Muslims vis-à-vis French Algeria, or the local Africans vis-à-vis English settler Kenya or white South Africa.

They did not aim at partition but at re-conquest of settler states by the local peoples.

Israel’s Muslim opponents don’t aim at partition, now, but at the re-conquest and erasure of the Jewish State.

Still, though I would obviously not be pleased to see the Jewish people of Israel wiped out or driven into the sea by genocidal Muslim irredentists in a reversal of the Spanish Reconquista, I don't see how any of this is really our problem.

Truman was wrong to endorse the creation of Israel and he was wrong to commit the US to its defense.

America is wrong today to waste its treasure and its blood trying to make the Middle East safe for this anachronistic renewal of the ancient Jewish State.

We should end all our guarantees to Israel and all our aid.

If the EU or the UN or anyone else wants to step in and support Israel in our place, let them do so.

Not our problem.

No more than Rwanda.

Oh, and I would likewise not agree with any demands that America somehow undo establishment of the State of Israel, join in its destruction, assist in removal of the Jews from Palestine, or ever pay a penny in so-called compensation or reparations for our support of Israel for all this time.

Assuming we aren’t somehow blackmailed or bullied into it.

Pat Buchanan talks sense when, and only when, it doesn’t hurt his party

Come Home, America—and Republicans

That’s more often than nearly anybody, but still.

And even his history is both tendentious and mendacious.

Why, after all, didn’t Eisenhower do it himself instead of telling JFK to get out of Europe?

Talk is cheap, they say.

And it’s really easy.

And what are we to think of PB’s citing MacArthur, the man who wanted to invade China and whom Truman could not control or trust and so had to fire, as a dove to JFK’s hawk?

Really, now.

Hoist with their own petard?

Fox News Flash: Progressives Despise War! Oh, The Horror.

There seems to be some concern a conservative court will use entrenched liberal dogma (baloney) about the 14^th Amendment to outlaw affirmative action, a cherished liberal policy goal riddled with holes, over the years, by federal and state courts, voters, and others not so liberal as all that.

Doesn’t have anything to do with Truman’s directive, actually.

And her arguments are loaded with apples-to-oranges comparisons and other silly moves.

“Twelve hundred years of combined service”?

Really?

Oddly, it looks like Newsbusters and Fox were silent on the actual issue under discussion, affirmative action, choosing instead to gloat that she had revealed that liberals despise the US military.

Yup.

That’s what she said.

Not just that liberals despise war.

That liberals despise the US military.

Anyway,

Supreme Court take new look at affirmative action

Oh,

Petard.

A failure waiting to happen

UK urges US 'decisive' lead on Mid-East

This is not a problem just waiting for the healing touch of an American president.

The two-state solution is long out of reach and really was never acceptable to enough important players on the Arab or the Israeli side.

As for a one-state solution, well, the Palestinians and Israelis have opposite one-state solutions in mind, and neither one has anything to do with that idea according to post-nationalist, secularist American and European liberals.

There simply is no middle ground on which the two sides can meet and there never has been.

The idea that a slice of Palestine taken from the Arabs against their well-known and well-entrenched public will by an international body cooked up by the great powers and serving as their cat’s-paw could provide the Jews a safe haven in a dangerous world was absolutely idiotic and doomed from the beginning.

As a great many people said.

Truman was not a man to listen.

Do you really think UN recognition of a Palestinian state encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza strip, and East Jerusalem - and how is that even possible against a US veto? - could bring peace?

Sure, just as the UN recognition of Israel in 1948 has brought peace.