Hope Starts To Bud For the New President

By Conrad Black, NY SUN

[…]

No one expects that the attack last week will reform Mr. Assad’s behavior (it is only seven years since Hillary Clinton called him “a reformer”), but it has sent the message that the long night of delusional altruism and deliberate weakness in American foreign and security policy is over. It has also helped create the only circumstances in which relations between the United States and Russia can be put back on a sound foundation after the shambles of the Obama-Biden-Clinton “reset.”

I wrote here several weeks ago of the promising meeting of the chairmen of the joint chiefs of staff of the United States, Russia, and Turkey, on March 9, and of the emerging policy of Turkey replacing Iran as a power in Syria and of a division of government within Syria between Assad and the Western-sponsored secular moderates. For this to have any possibility of success, Russia will have to grasp the fact that the goodwill and cooperation of the United States is worth more to it than its obscene friendship with Iran, insofar as such a quarrel among thieves could be so described.

The basis of such an arrangement would likely be the joint effort against ISIS, expulsion of Iran from Syria, a partition between Assad-ruled areas and Western-sponsored government zones, resettlement of refugees, recognition of Russian occupation of Crimea, the end of sanctions on Russia, a complete end of Russian harassment of Ukraine, and a joint guarantee of Ukraine’s borders. Ukraine would refrain from entering NATO but would be able to join the European Union when its progress at self-government made it eligible.

Practically, the airstrike did not accomplish much, but psychologically and tactically it sent a uniformly clear message to all relevant centers of opinion, foreign and domestic. It did attract broad public and political support. Some of the highbrow conservative Never Trumpers, such as William Kristol, acknowledged the appropriateness of the measure. Some of the rabidly hostile press rallied admirably, such as Fareed Zakaria, a die-hard Obama enthusiast, who said that Mr. Trump had behaved like a president.

Of course the incorrigibles continued; Rachel Maddow on MSNBC found a guest to estimate at somewhere between 2% and 50% the chances that the entire raid was rigged up between Presidents Trump and Putin. I didn’t catch his name and shortly after his lips began moving I determined that I did not want to know his name. It is hard not to wonder where Ms. Maddow finds such people and what level of maladjustment she must have achieved in order to inflict such nonsense on the diminutive knot of her viewers.

The apparently civilized meeting with the president of China and the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, all on the same day, restored the impression of a determined president moving quickly. It is a distinct step forward to be done with the filibuster, an antediluvian invention of southern Democrats to prevent the passage of anti-lynching laws, and a procedural obstacle that has been terribly abused for decades.

All 52 Republicans held for Justice Gorsuch, three Democrats defected, and the new justice will ensure, among other things, the failure of the putsch the Democrats mounted — with the assistance of carefully shopped, flaky, left-wing West Coast judges — to emasculate the president’s powers in matters of immigration.

There cannot be much left of the campaigns to represent Mr. Trump as a sexist or racist or autocrat or isolationist, or as someone about whom the New York Times’s ineffable Nicholas Kristof detected “a whiff of treason,” over the nonsensical Russian allegations. It is hard now to remember the march of angry women when President Trump was inaugurated or even to remember what they were angry about, or why Madonna wanted to “blow up the White House,” or Representative Maxine Waters wanted to impeach Mr. Trump. The famous headgear for the mass women’s demonstrations, which sold for $20 at the time to the saps at the marches, is now being remaindered at 95 cents.

The discomfort of the Democrats over the cloudy but persistent evidence of surveillance of Trump Tower has seriously muted their previous affected militancy on the bogus issue of Trump–Russia collusion. It has all become absurd, as chairman Devin Nunes of the House Intelligence Committee has dutifully stepped aside to permit an inquiry into the propriety of his informing the public and the president of evidence of improper surveillance of the president’s campaign.

So there is now an investigation of Mr. Nunes’s investigation of the Obama investigation and surveillance of the Trump campaign’s fictitious collusion with Russia. These investigations, so fatuously hyped by most of the media, have been piled on top of each other even though there is no evidence to embarrass the president.

In the spirit of the season, I embrace the hope that the whole thunderhead of confected indignation will dissolve soon, that the Democrats will stop boycotting the administration and help to make the system work after these 20 lean years, and that Donald Trump will be able to enact the program that he promised, addressing decades of stagnation in many public-policy areas.

Taxes and whatever is feasible in health care should be next. The country and the world need to see that the American system works after all. Perhaps I am intoxicated by the anticipated scent of the magnolias, but I dare to hope that even infected elements of the national press may rediscover the joys of professionalism and of practicing their craft with integrity. This is now the American dream — effective government reported by a responsible press, after a prolonged agony of depressed sleeplessness.