November 2016 — Non-Intervention

Mr. Trump, here is a worthy, perhaps final opportunity to put America First

Although Obama’s effort to help Hillary Clinton’s campaign by taking Mosul on the eve of the election failed, there is a good chance that Mosul will fall to the heterogeneous coalition that is attacking it. Be that event in six weeks, six months, or a year, the United States and its allies will rejoice over the event as if it is the death knell of the Islamic State (IS). They will be wrong to do so, showing again how deeply ignorant they are of the Islamist enemy and the religious war it is waging against them.

Now is Mr. Trump’s time for silence and counting blessings

Until inaugurated on 20 January 2017, Mr. Trump would be well advised to follow the pre-inaugural behavior of one of his predecessors, a fellow New Yorker named Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From November, 1932, until his inaugural on 4 March 1933, FDR refused to make any public statement that would tie him to the floundering policies of Herbert Hoover’s government. Roosevelt was about to undertake the monumental task of trying to get America out of still deepening economic depression and wanted no association with the administration that Americans — rightly or wrongly — perceived as the cause of their economic misery. FDR resisted requests for supportive statements from the Hoover administration and defied the bashing he received from parts of the media for not speaking out on the economy and the worsening banking crisis.

A few answers to readers’ comments on recent pieces

Let me first say how much I appreciate people taking the time to write, whether from a favorable or unfavorable view. I have learned a good deal from those who kindly take time to read what I write.

The Jewish-American media elite intends to kill the republic

There clearly is a good deal of malign foreign intervention occurring in the 2016 presidential election, but it is not coming from Russian President Putin and his intelligence services. It is coming, rather, from Israel, and it is being executed through that country’s legion of disloyal U.S. citizens, be they Israel-Firsters, Neoconservatives, AIPAC’ers, or that steadily filling sty of war-loving foreign policy gurus and general officers that hate Trump.