Politics

Headlines say 2016 hottest year ever. Yes, 0.01°C hotter than 2015. But working from statistics that claim a margin of error of 0.1°C! Ah, truthiness.

Good point, yes. If under Trump it’s between the symbol of a U.S. Embassy move to Jerusalem or the reality of continued building throughout the city—as it may well come down to—then the choice is clear, writes Nadav Shragai.

Ian Buruma on Brussels. I found it a pretty exciting city so when I saw this article I jumped on it (plus I vaguely remember being impressed by something else this fellow wrote) and it’s pretty sweeping and fun.

Francis Fukuyama coins and explains vetocracy. The intricacies are bamboozling—which is the point. Seems to me that fixing this is the first domino.

My current first go-to page for news: Politico’s daily diary of the Donald Trump administration transition.

Some tentative optimism from The American Interest: If the new Administration can both push infrastructure and simplify the regulatory process, “it will have proven that the Trumpian earthquake can in fact break certain decades-long patterns of bipartisan paralysis…”

Witty, prescient pre-mortem by the mendacious documentarian Michael Moore on 5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.

“The press takes [Trump] literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.’ Salena Zito in this September 23 article in The Atlantic. What a thing.

Also Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit by Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept.

And What I learned after 100,000 miles on the road talking to Trump supporters by Chris Arnade in The Guardian.

Video and transcript of Peter Thiel’s speech to the National Press Club on his support for Trump.. Government isn’t the problem, pisspoor government is.

Visiting Poland, George Weigel articulates the current civilizational crisis.

On “the Weimar aspect of our current moment”: I haven’t read Andrew Sullivan for a long time, but he seems to be hitting it here, Democracies end when they are too democratic, in New York magazine.

“The real story of this election is that after several decades, American democracy is finally responding to the rise of inequality and the economic stagnation experienced by most of the population,” writes Francis Fukuyama in Foreign Affairs [requires free registration].

“The Kemalist era in Turkish history lasted for almost 100 years, but finally came to an end in the last 18 hours.” A great balance between up-to-the-minute reports and historical background, Walter Russell Mead live-blogs the failed Turkish Coup.

A recent primer on how society can handle religion.

Possibly the world’s most important story at the moment? American middle-class impoverishment, or as the author—himself afflicted—calls it, financial impotence.

The Weekly Standard again. Trump as Burr, and what Hamilton did.

Quite the sentence, this, from Walter Russell Mead: “Products of meritocratic selection who hold key positions in the social machine, the bien-pensant custodians of post-historical ideology—editorial writers at the NY Times, staffers in cultural and educational bureaucracies, Eurocratic functionaries, much of the professoriat, the human rights priesthood and so on—are utterly convinced that they see farther and deeper than the less credentialed, less educated, less tolerant and less sophisticated knuckle-dragging also-rans outside the magic circle of post-historical groupthink.”

He has to have his China.

A week in Berlin, where all anyone can talk about is refugees, and the author observes: “All this moral unction reminds me of the reality-challenged 1920s in Europe, which gave rise to the very ugly 1930s.”

The latest Troika loan package is an “exact repeat of the self-defeating policy that caused Greek debt dynamics to spin out of control in the last two…” rues this astute, outraged commentator. What with the Iran deal as well, we seem these last couple of days to be watching the West’s self-immolation.

On decoupling homosexuality from gayness, and more interestingly, vice versa.

The United States would be better off with a parliamentary system, argues Diane Francis.

Not only isn’t the Israel Broadcasting Association listing the names of the child fatalities from the Gaza bombings but refusing to let B’Tselem pay for an ad doing so. And the Attorney General has upheld the decision. This seems to me a mistake. We must fully own these deeds.

By looking the other way and unconditionally supporting and arming Maliki, President Obama has only lengthened and expanded the conflict that President Bush unwisely initiated, argues — nay, explains — a US official who saw it all. A must-read.

It’s official: Gary Oldman loves Charles Krauthammer.

Perhaps the most frightening thing about this much-lauded essay on America’s post-WWII hegemony is that it was written at all, that our world order is receding so far so fast that we, or at least Robert Kagan, can see outside it.

An enquiry into one of Egyptians’ psychic scourges: conspiracist anti-Semitism.

Dore Gold recounts Iran’s first ‘charm offensive’: its use of the tactic of khod’eh, ie, “tricking one’s enemy into a misjudgment of one’s true position”, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini waged a successful deception campaign from exile in Paris.

Devising tailor-made rules of international law for application only where Israel is concerned undermines international law and can have an insidious and corrosive effect on the rule of law in general.

Jeffrey Goldberg imagines what Obama would really like to be doing on his visit to Israel.

Welshman Tom Doran explains why, as a liberal secular humanist, he must stand up for Israel.

Not that this article needs anybody else to promote it, as it’s also the cover story on Esquire, but it’s like watching Zero Dark Thirty through one of the other characters.

The New York Observer and New York Daily News switch to Romney.

Michael Barone predicts it’s Romney, and handily. Seems to me that Hurricane Sandy was the last opportunity for Obama’s America to demonstrate its superiority to Bush’s. Looks like it failed, so that it now seems fully prudent to give the competent-seeming turnaround artist and former governor a try.

Andrew C. McCarthy in National Review: The challenge is Sharia.

Mitt Romney invokes the spirit of Marshall in his first major speech after his crushing debate performance, and ends with a nice allusion to the Statue of Liberty. Refreshing and exciting.

Andrew C. McCarthy clarifies the Turkey situation vis-a-vis Islam and accession to the EU.

“Cheese-surrendering eating-monkeys” — apologies for giving away the most brilliant line, but Mark Steyn is back on form. I’d stopped reading because his doom and gloom about Europe just didn’t jibe with the reality I see living here. But here he expresses my misgivings just brilliantly: Americans are in many important ways less free than Europeans.

Terrific humanistic piece by David Brooks using current presidential candidate bromides as a jump-off point.

“Israel is as American as apple pie”. Walter Russell Mead explains why Mitt Romney’s Israel visit is his most important as a US presidential candidate. It’s not the Jewish vote, which is tiny and pro-Democratic.

Bret (Stephens) on what lessons to take today from the Six Day War.

On the touchy (for me) topic of Anglo accentim (or is that accentiot?) in Hebrew. Huge comments section to a short (follow-up) piece.

Alec Baldwin’s calm, grown-up, entertaining talk show, Here’s the Thing.

Enjoy President Obama’s excellent stand-up at the 2012 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. He delivered much better than the amateurish host, Jimmy Kimmel.