Posted on 11/20/2018 11:13:23 PM PST by UMCRevMom@aol.com
[Rabbi Dov Fischer is an attorney and adjunct professor of law, a Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, congregational rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and holds prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations. He has been Chief Articles Editor of UCLA Law Review, clerked for the Hon. Danny J. Boggs in the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, and served for most of the past decade on the Executive Committee of the Rabbinical Council of America. His writings have appeared in the Weekly Standard, National Review, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, Jerusalem Post, American Thinker, Frontpage Magazine, and Israel National News. READ ON!]
Everyone Is Smart, Except Trump
By Rabbi Dov Fischer
It really is quite simple. Everyone is smart except Donald J. Trump. That's why they all are billionaires, and all got elected President. Only Trump does not know what he is doing. Only Trump does not know how to negotiate with Vladimir Putin. Anderson Cooper knows how to stand up to Putin. The whole crowd at MSNBC does. All the journalists do.
They could not stand up to Matt Lauer at NBC. They could not stand up to Charlie Rose at CBS. They could not stand up to Mark Halperin at NBC Nor up to Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic, nor Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone, nor Michael Oreskes at NPR, at the New York Times, or at the Associated Press. But — oh, wow! — Can they ever stand up to Putin! Only Trump is incapable of negotiating with the Russian tyrant.
Remember the four years when Anderson Cooper was President of the United States? And before that — when the entire Washington Post editorial staff jointly were elected to be President? Remember? Neither do I.
The Seedier Media have never negotiated life and death, not corporate life and death, and not human life and death. They think they know how to negotiate, but they do not know how. They go to a college, are told by peers that they are smart, get some good grades, proceed to a graduate degree in journalism, and get hired as analysts. Now they are experts, ready to take on Putin and the Iranian Ayatollahs at age 30.
That is not the road to expertise in tough dealing. The alternate path is that, along the way, maybe you get forced into some street fights. Sometimes the other guy wins, and sometimes you beat the intestines out of him. Then you deal with grown-ups as you mature, and you learn that people can be nasty, often after they smile and speak softly. You get cheated a few times, played. And you learn. Maybe you become an attorney litigating multi-million-dollar case matters. Say what you will about attorneys, but those years — not the years in law school, not the years drafting legal memoranda, but the years of meeting face-to-face and confronting opposing counsel — those years can teach a great deal. They can explain how to transition from sweet, gentle, diplomatic negotiating to tough negotiating. At some point, with enough tough-nosed experience, you figure out Trump's "The Art of the Deal" yourself.
Trump's voters get him because not only is he we, but we are he. We were not snowed flaked-for-life by effete professors who themselves had never negotiated tough life-or-death serious deals. Instead, we live in the real world, and we know how that works. Not based on social science theories, not based on "conceptual negotiating models." But based on the people we have met over life and always will hate. That worst boss we ever had. The coworker who tried to sabotage us. We know the sons of bums whom we survived, the dastardly types who are out there, and we learned from those experiences how to deal with them. We won't have John Kerry soothe us by having James Taylor sing "You've Got a Friend" carols.
The Bushes got us into all kinds of messes. The first one killed the economic miracle that Reagan had fashioned. The second one screwed up the Middle East, where Iraq and Iran beautifully were engaged in killing each other for years, and he got us mired into the middle of the muddle. Clinton was too busy with Monica Lewinsky to protect us from Osama bin Laden when we had him in our sights. Hillary gave us Benghazi and more. And Obama and Kerry gave us the Iran Deal, ISIS run amok, America in retreat. All to the daily praise of a media who now attack Trump every minute of every day. So let us understand a few things:
NEGOTIATING WITH NATO
NATO is our friend. They also rip off America. They have been ripping us off forever. We saved their butts — before there even was a NATO — in World War I. They messed up, and 116,456 Americans had to die to save their butts.
Then they messed up again for the next two decades because West Europeans are effete and so obsessed with their class manners and their rules of savoir-faire and their socialist welfare states and their early retirements that they did not have the character to stand up to Hitler in the 1930s. Peace in our time. So they messed up, and we had to save their butts again. And another 405,399 Americans died for them during World War II. And then we had to rebuild them! And we had to station our boys in Germany and all over their blood-stained continent. So, hey, we love those guys. We love NATO. Nato Leaders. Who is paying their fair share?
And yet they still rip us off. We pay 4% of our gigantic gross domestic product to protect them, and they will not pay a lousy 2% of their GDP towards their own defense. Is there a culture more penny-pinching-cheap-and-stingy than the delicate constituents of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization? These cheap baseborn prigs will not pay their fare. They are too cheap. They expect America to send boys to die for them in one world war, then another — hundreds of thousands — and then to pay for their NATO defense even a century later. And then they have the temerity to cheat us further in trade
Long before Trump, they set up tariffs against us for so many things If the average American knew how badly Europe has been ripping us off for decades with their duties, no one in this country would buy anything European again. We would say, as a matter of self-respect and personal pride, "I no longer will buy anything but American, no matter what it costs."
Every American President has complained about the cheating and imbalance — the NATO penny-pinching-cheapness, the tariff and trade imbalances. In more recent years, the various Bushes complained about it. Even Obama complained about it. But they all did it so gently, so diplomatically. They would deliver the sermon, just as the pastor predictably tells the church-goers on Sunday morning that he is against sin, and the Europeans would sit quietly and nod their heads — nodding from sleeping, not from agreeing — and then they would go back out and sin some more. Another four years of America being suckered and snookered. All they had to do was give Obama a Nobel Peace Prize his ninth month in office and let Kerry ride his bike around Paris.
So Trump did what any effective negotiator would do: he took note of past approaches to NATO and their failures, and correctly determined that the only way to get these penny-pinching-cheap baseborn prigs to pay their freight would be to bulldoze right into their faces, stare them right in their glazed eyes with cameras rolling, and tell them point-blank the equivalent of:
The Nations of Nato
"You are the cheapest penny-pinching, miserly, stingy, tight wadded skinflints ever. And it is going to stop on my watch. Whatever it takes from my end, you selfish, curmudgeonly cheap prigs, you are going to pay your fair share. I am not being diplomatic. I am being All-Business: either you start to pay or, wow, are you in for some surprises! And you know what you read in the Fake News: I am crazy! I am out of control! So, lemme see. I know: We will go to a trade war! How do you like that? Maybe we even will pull all our troops out of Europe. Hmmm. Yeah, maybe. Why not? Sounds good. Well, let's see."
So Trump stuffed it into their quiche-and-schnitzel ingesting faces. And he convinced them — thanks to America's Seedier Media who are the real secret to the "Legend That is Trump" — that he just might be crazy enough to go to a trade war and to pull American boys home. They knew that Clinton and Bush x 2 and Kerry and Hillary and Nobel Laureate Obama never would do it. But they also know that Trump just might. And if they think they are going to find comfort and moderating in his new advisers, John Bolton and Mike Pompeo, alongside him. Nuh-uh.
So CNN and the Washington Post and all the Seedier Media attacked Trump for days: He is destroying the alliance! He attacks our friends!
Baloney. Obama was the one whom the Left Echo Chamber… Chamber… Chamber — never called out for attacking our friends — Israel, Britain, so many others — while cozying up to Hugo Chavez, bowing to dictators, and dancing the tango for Raul Castro. Trump is just the opposite: He knows who the friends are, and he wants to maintain and strengthen those friendships.
It is no different from a parent telling a 35-year-old son: "I have been supporting you for thirty-five years I put you through college by signing four years and $100,000 PLUS in Loans. You graduated college fifteen years ago. For fifteen years I have been asking you nicely to look for a job and to start contributing. Instead, you sit home all day playing video games, texting your friends on a smartphone I pay for, and picking little fuzz balls out of your navel. So, look, I love you. You are my flesh and blood. But if you are not employed and earning a paycheck — and contributing to the cost of this household — in six months, we are throwing you out of the house." That boy is NATO. Trump is Dad. And all of us have been signing for the PLUS Loans.
NEGOTIATING WITH PUTIN.
Putin is a bad guy. A really bad guy. He is better than Lenin. Better than Stalin, Khrushchev, Kosygin, Brezhnev, Pol Pot, Mao. But he is a really bad guy.
Here's the thing: Putin is a dictator. He answers to no one. He does whatever he wants. If there arises an opponent, that guy dies. Maybe the opponent gets poked with a poisoned umbrella. Maybe he gets shot on the street. Maybe the opponent is forced to watch Susan Rice interviews telling the world that Benghazi happened because of a YouTube video seen by nine derelicts in Berkeley and that Bowe Berghdal served with honor and distinction. But, one way or another, the opponent dies.
Trump knows this about Putin. And here is what that means: If you insult Putin in public, like by telling the news media just before or after meeting with him that he is the Butcher of Crimea, and he messed with our elections and is an overall jerk — then you will get nothing behind closed doors from Putin. Putin will decide "To heck with you, and to heck with the relationship we just forged." Putin will get even, will take intense personal revenge, even if it is bad for Russia — even if it is bad for Putin. Because there are no institutional reins on him.
But if you go in public and tell everyone that Putin is a nice guy (y’know, just like Kim Jong Un) and that Putin intensely maintains that he did not mess with elections — not sweet little Putey Wutey (even though he apparently did) — then you next can maintain the momentum established beforehand in the private room. You can proceed to remind Putin what you told him privately: that this garbage has to stop —or else. That if he messes in Syria, we will do "X." If he messes with our Iran boycott, we will do "Y." We will generate so much oil from hydraulic fracturing and from ANWR and from all our sources that we will glut the market — if not tomorrow, then a year from now. We will send even more lethal offensive military weapons to Ukraine. We can restore the promised shield to Eastern Europe that Obama withdrew. And even if we cannot mess with Russian elections (because they have no elections), they do have computers — and, so help us, we will mess with their technology in a way they cannot imagine.
Tump knows from his advisers what we can do. If he sweet-talks Putin in public — just Putin on the Ritz — then everything that Trump has told Putin privately can be reinforced with action, and he even can wedge concessions because, against that background, Putin knows that no one will believe that he made any concessions. Everyone is set to believe that Putin is getting whatever he wants, that Trump understands nothing. In that setting, Putin can make concessions and still save face.
Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin
That is why Trump talks about him that way. And that is the only possible way to do it when negotiating with a tyrant who has no checks and balances on him. If you embarrass the tyrant publicly, then the tyrant never will make concessions because he will fear that people will say he was intimidated and backed down. And that he never will do. Meanwhile, Trump has expelled 60 Russians from America, reversed Obama policy and sent lethal weapons to Ukraine, and is pressing Germany severely on its pipeline project with Russia.
THE BOTTOM LINE
At the end of the day, Donald Trump is over seventy years old. He has made many mistakes in his life. He still makes some He is human. But Trump likewise has spent three score and a dozen years learning. He has seen some of his businesses go bankrupt, and he has learned from those experiences to be a billionaire and not let it happen again. No doubt that he has been fooled, outsmarted in years past. And he has learned from life.
Trump is a tough and smart negotiator. He sizes up his opponent, and he knows that the approach that works best for one is not the same as for another. It does not matter what he says publicly about his negotiating opponent. What matters is what results months later.
In his first eighteen months in Washington, this man has turned around the American economy, brought us near full employment, reduced the welfare and food stamp lines, wiped out ISIS in Raqqa, moved America's Israel embassy to Jerusalem, successfully has launched massive deregulation of the economy, has opened oil exploration in ANWR, is rebuilding the military massively, has walked out of the useless Paris Climate Accords that were negotiated by America's amateurs who always get snookered, canned the disastrous Iran Deal, exited the bogus United Nations Human Rights Council. He convinced Canada and Mexico that he would walk out of NAFTA if they didn't negotiate a new and fair trade agreement (they did), and he has the Europeans convinced he would walk out of NATO if they don't stop being the cheap and lazy parasitic penny-pinchers they are
He has slashed income taxes, expanded legal protections for college students falsely accused of crimes, has taken real steps to protect religious freedoms and liberties promised in the First Amendment, boldly has taken on the Lyme-disease-quality of a legislative mess that he inherited from Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama on immigration, and has appointed a steady line of remarkably brilliant conservative federal judges to sit on the district courts, the circuit appellate courts, and the Supreme Court.
What has Anderson Cooper achieved during that period? Jim Acosta or the editorial staffs of the New York Times and Washington Post? They have not even found the courage and strength to stand up to the coworkers and celebrities within their orbits who abuse sexually or psychologically or emotionally. They have no accomplishments to compare to his. Just their effete opinions, all echoing each other, all echoing, echoing, echoing. They gave us eight years of Nobel Peace Laureate Obama negotiating with the ISIS JV team, calming the rise of the oceans, and healing the planet.
We will take Trump negotiating with Putin any day.
Good article.
Need another 6 years of Trump.
Then 8 with Pence as POTUS.
You would think people would see success and prosperity and be happy with it. Lost too many seats (some outright stolen) in the House. MSM complex needs to be dismantled.
Great article. I’d love to see this guy, McCain, Sowell, Coulter, Schlicter, West, Boortz and Hanson on a debate team against any 50 that the Left can put up.
As far as NATO goes....
They expect America to send boys to die for them
I’m not saying we need to or should pull out of NATO, though I wouldn’t lose any sleep if we did, but we need to put our assets where they are wanted and where our goals are aligned with their goals. So, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Italy, and the Czech Republic get the assets. Everyone else can suck it.
Bet not. My son from Arizona swears he’s a conservative, but hates DJT. No policy reason just that Donald is an asshzol and me too cause I don’t see it we will agree to disagree or not. Too much CA in AZ to my mind but AZ is gone.
Correction....wish there was an edit button....
I meant....Cain...as in Herman Cain....certainly not McCain even if he was alive.
I was just saying the other day to my missus (the only one who will feign listening to me) that it is easy to negotiate with people if you already know their position, temperament and bottom line. That is why Trump is the best he is unpredictable to linear thinkers but has a reason for everything he does!
Every moron Democrat at Yahoo think they’re smarter than President Trump. They truly are a pathetic, crybaby, snowflake bunch of idiots.
PFL
I really do not think the “trade war” is an act.
Some people who have been selling America out, are on the wrong side.
Just saying.
The US economy holds practically all the cards, they’re all very dependent upon exports to the US. Therefore, the US will ultimately win any trade war initiated by either side. They know this. Our side has repeatedly capitulated for decades, because our leadership have been true transnationalist believers, globalists. Trump may be many things, not all of them good, but a globalist he is not. But China, they say. China is a house of cards. Transnationalists have taken over every large multinational corporation, they’ve basically sold their souls to get into China, blinded by dollar signs. They don’t own their manufacturing facilities there, any intellectual property or technical advancements they possessed, are now possessed by China, which cares not about intellectual property laws. But, China too is utterly dependent upon exports, with the US predominating. So, any trade war initiated by either side will be won by the US there, too. Fracking, that’s been quite the miraculous thing, now the primary leverage over the US is considerably weakened if not gone entirely. We’re verging upon being the world’s largest oil producer if we aren’t already. If the US needs to become an economic island again, it can. Ball’s in their court. Trump knows this, and is concerned about the benefit of his own country and his own people, first and foremost. Does this automatically mean trade war is inevitable? No, it does not. It means unfair treaties and unfair trade policies need to be renegotiated, hopefully to the benefit of all, but the free ride is over as far as taking the US for a ride. That’s where we are, that’s in large part why Trump is so hated by so many figures in high places around the world. He’s dared to notice that the emperor is naked.
What a great read.
Thank you for posting it.
Best thing I’ve read in a long time......take this and stuff it down the MSM throats..........
China’s stock market is down 30%.
Ours is up 30%. Even with the recent losses.
I want to see it exposed that China owns the Democrat party. They obviously have a vested interest in stopping Trunp.
Sad thug is people exit CA because the Dems are turning it into a hellhole.
They move to other states and ... vote in Democrats.
You really have to be stuck on stupid to vote for liberals.
Yet, our fellow citizens continue to consent to be governed by the nincompoops endorsed by the idiots in the media.
Our youngest daughter, until recently has been dating a young German man, who at 28 has never held a job. He’s been on the German Government Dole “getting his education.” To do that he had been, for a year here in a continuing education program at Lawrence Berkeley Lab ( the place where our nuclear weapons were developed under the direction of Dr. Edward Teller). He already has a Masters in Nuclear Physics. Thanfully, she’s decided he’s not her “cup of tea,” but the bull$hit he fed her about the “wonders of German Society,” turned her head, for a few months against her country.
From my perspective this guy is just a prime example of what we have allowed the European Countries that make up NATO to promulgate, essentially using our money.
So I am tickled to death that they have broken up and he’s gone back to Germany.
Beyond that, I personally say f*ck you to all of the European Countries in NATO. You have traded on our good nature, and our money for more than 70 years, and it’s long past time for ALL OF YOU to “pony up NOW, or suffer the loss of both our military as well as financial support. This useless pr!ck talked trash about our country while he was here sucking off our science tit, and while his “fatherland” used the money that we were paying to keep it safe, to put together a welfare state on our dime! Again, F*CK ALL OF THEM! The Limeys, Frogs, Belch, Spaniards, and especially the f*cking Krauts. Tax their Nazi Thunderbirds (Mercs, Pooches, BMW bowel movements, and Audis) and the rest of the $hit they sell us. Trump needs to see their cash or we really do need to pull out and let them battle with the Russians by themselves. I am done with us being the world’s piggy bank! And I won’t break my heart if all of them loose their freedom, because they deserve to have it taken from them.
Good find!
The good Rabbi nailed it.
Thanks for posting it.
L
What gets me is they take our money for defense and invite the Muslim slime to occupy their land and call us racist because we refuse to do the same.
If they want to self exterminate let them do it on their own dime.
The most common sense thing I have read in a while.
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