Waiting for the Police

A British soldier was decapitated a few hundred yards from a UK Army base by two men with large knives saying: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you.” The men were shot when police responded 20 minutes later. The photo above shows a scene:

This is the dramatic moment a woman appears to remonstrate with a man carrying a knife following a brutal attack in Woolwich.

The two alleged attackers are thought to have waited around for 20 minutes until Metropolitan Police officers arrived and then tried to attack them — but were swiftly shot by armed policemen, including a woman.

“Remonstrate.” Now there’s a word to conjure with. The Telegraph describes the behavior of the onlookers — the attackers asked the crowd to take their photo, which they apparently did:

“There was only a few people at first then traffic began to build up because people were getting out of their cars to shout at them they were taking no notice, they were standing there, I think they were proud of what they were doing.

“When they dumped the body in the road, these two black guys had the opportunity to hurt other people if they wanted to because there were brave women with the dead guy on the floor, they were shielding and covering him. The attackers with the knives were standing over these women.

“The guy with the gun, the tall guy with the beanie cap on, even a bus had pulled up — he was going over to the bus and asking people to take his photo.”

Then the killers allowed only women to come forward to succor the dead or dying man:

He said: “My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim.

She asked the black guys can I help him? And one of them said he was already dead but she could go.

Then one of them said ‘No man is coming near this body, only women’.”

“She was so brave, she didn’t care what happened to her — she knelt down by his side and comforted him.

She held his hand and put her other hand on his chest. I think she might have been praying.

My friend (the woman’s daughter) was crying her eyes out. The victim was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt.”

Mr. Tallant said the two men were walking up to people with cameras so they could be seen and filmed.

He said: “They wanted people to know who they were.”

The women came forward. Children in nearby schools were locked down by their teachers.

This incident illustrates, if nothing else, the endpoint of the social engineering of the West. It has been remarkably effective.

From a certain point of view, the British crowd behaved perfectly and this is the way “they” all want us to behave. The populace sheltered in place, didn’t do anything rash, talked to the perpetrators as people. They waited for the police to come and the hospital helicopter to take the corpse away. Some will doubtless get counseling to overcome their shattering experience.

And then they will congratulate themselves on how tough British society is; resilience and all that. The more caring will leave some flowers by a railing and hold a few candle vigils for healing and peace, until these wither and blow away and the news cycle washes up a new object of attention.

The attackers knew they were actors in a drama — as keenly watched in their communities as on the BBC. And in that other audience they were asking: “How will the locals behave?” We know now. And that other audience may derive an entirely different lesson from this tableau: “See? Only their women act like men. They follow orders. They are nothing anymore — these Westerners. They are a civilization whose core has been destroyed.”

And would they be right? Who will be the judge? Per C.S. Lewis:

And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more “drive”, or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or “creativity”. In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

What could go wrong?

More: 

Cameron: Attack Not Representative of Islam; Al-Shabaab: Yes It Is

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In the newest twist to the IRS saga, Politico says that Darrell Issa may regard Lois Lerner as having waived her 5th Amendment right by virtue of  giving a statement and asserting certain facts before the Congressional Committee, yet refusing to answer questions. “House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa said embattled IRS official Lois Lerner waived her Fifth Amendment rights and will be hauled back to appear before his panel again.”

“The precedents are clear that this is not something you can turn on and turn off,” he told POLITICO. “She made testimony after she was sworn in, asserted her innocence in a number of areas, even answered questions asserting that a document was true … So she gave partial testimony and then tried to revoke that.” …

Issa dismissed her from the committee room once it became clear she wouldn’t answer questions. As the hearing wound down this afternoon, Issa kept the panel in recess instead of adjourning. The move allows him to recall Lerner without issuing a new subpoena.

But not every expert agreed that Lerner had waived her rights. According to Stan Brand she just cut a corner but didn’t enter the intersection.

“I don’t think a brief introductory preface to her formal invocation of the privilege is a waiver,” said Stan Brand, who was the general counsel for the House of Representatives from 1976 to 1983 and works on ethics issues.

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The Los Angeles Times reports that a top IRS official at the heart of the inappropriate audits and harassment of the Obama administration’s political enemies will take the 5th Amendment.  She won’t talk and rather not be embarrassed with questions she won’t answer.

A top IRS official in the division that reviews nonprofit groups will invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to answer questions before a House committee investigating the agency’s improper screening of conservative nonprofit groups.

Lois Lerner, the head of the exempt organizations division of the IRS, won’t answer questions about what she knew about the improper screening – or why she didn’t reveal it to Congress, according to a letter from her defense lawyer, William W. Taylor 3rd….

Since Lerner won’t answer questions, Taylor asked that she be excused from appearing, saying that would “have no purpose other than to embarrass or burden her.” There was no immediate word whether the committee will grant her request.

The entire agency appears to be clamming up. ABC News reporters in Cincinnati found themselves shadowed by an armed Federal office as he attempted to speak to someone in the IRS building.

As we traveled the public hallways of the building – watched over by security cameras – an armed uniformed police officer with the Federal Protective Service followed us. We were looking for a particular office—of someone who would not want to be seen talking to reporters–but chose to bypass it because of our official babysitter.

Asked why we were being escorted in a public building, the officer identified himself as Insp. Mike Finkelstein and said he was only trying to make sure that the newsmen were not a “nuisance.” He brushed aside further questions. The cop said a supervisor would call to explain.

The supervisor never called to explain. As with the mother of the embassy staffer who was assured by officials that someone would call her to tell her how her son died, the return call will be a long time coming.

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The digital revolution has left no part of the world untouched. But each country has adopted technology in its own particular way. In the Philippines cellphones are used to transfer small sums of money among criminal gangs. In Boston phone cameras were used to track terrorists down. And all over the world millions of abstracted people are glued to their smart phones and tablets making their dates, finding their way or just watching stuff. But in some countries the digital revolution has taken a particular form. Russia for example, is the world capital of the dash cam video.

The question is why.

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It’s them low-level officials acting up again. The Blaze reports another leak.  “The U.S. has apologized to Israel for leaking details of the attack in Syria. Senior administration officials said to their [Israeli] counterparts that they are examining the issue and that low-level [officials] were responsible for the leak. US officials told that they [will] review the matter. The leak forced Assad to react harshly.”

Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center, told TheBlaze, “It requires the Syrians to react officially rather than deny that it happened or that it was an accident. It forces Syria and Hezbollah and Iran to react officially and say they want to seek revenge, which makes things more dangerous for Israel.”

“Can you imagine if things were reversed and somebody did that to the U.S.?” he added.

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One trivial but often underappreciated fact about the battle of Midway was that for Spruance to hit Nagumo he had to expose his carriers to reciprocal damage. Once you close with an opponent he closes with you. Risk is often symmetric. Nimitz understood this well, and it lies at the heart of his order to the carriers on that occasion. He told Spruance, “you will be governed by the principle of calculated risk, which you shall interpret to mean the avoidance of exposure of your force to attack by superior enemy forces without good prospect of inflicting… greater damage on the enemy.”

The Bob Woodwards of the future will have their hands full examining whether Barack Obama understood this principle as well as Nimitz.  Jean Kaufman at PJMedia has an incisive piece titled “Obama, the Betrayer” which indirectly addresses this very point. She argues the Obama’s past political triumphs were essentially achieved by pre-emptive strikes on his foes, none of whom had the temerity to retaliate effectively. Perhaps for Obama as for Nagumo there developed the conceit of the Gaishu Isshoku — “one touch of the iron gauntlet” — which was all it took to win the day. Kaufman describes the genesis of Obama’s style:

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Perhaps the most incisive comment on the Obama administration’s plague of scandals comes from the National Journal. It argues that the scandals will hurt the Republicans “by enraging the base and strengthening the faction least willing to compromise with Obama, the IRS and Benghazi affairs could hurt a GOP shot at the presidency.”

In other words the scandals could so damage trust in the system among some conservatives that they’ll simply opt out of the party game. Sickened by the slow motion, kid-gloves complicity and apparent incompetence of the establishment GOP, a critical mass of Republican supporters may just stay home, like a viewer who’s finally decided that the sport of wrestling is rigged and not worth watching.

This will impede “deal making” according to the National Journal; and deprive the GOP of the juice to put together the coalition necessary to take their turn at the trough. Once they permanently exit the game then by default only the Democrats will keep the field.

There is another danger facing Republicans which the National Journal doesn’t directly address. It can be described thus: if the scandals go too far at unearthing the administration’s rot then even the most craven Republicans will be compelled to do something about it. Like a man in a saloon card game who’s caught someone cheating at cards either they call him out and take what comes or pretend the game is still honest. It’s either ignore the cheating or get ready to clear leather.

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At a dinner not long ago someone described the wonders of a new product which uploaded your vital signs to the Cloud, a process that was so much more accurate than having to take it yourself and write it down on a piece of paper. It’s a great idea and there are an increasing number of such services which plan to offer that feature such as this, which proclaims “doctors can now establish online CarePods™ to assemble extended care teams, share medical records, collect and analyze real-time clinical information, and coordinate treatment plans with patients, their families and health providers.”

One thing that may give a customer pause, however, are headlines like this: “IRS Official in Charge During Tea Party Targeting Now Runs Health Care Office.”

The Internal Revenue Service official in charge of the tax-exempt organizations at the time when the unit targeted tea party groups now runs the IRS office responsible for the health care legislation.

Sarah Hall Ingram served as commissioner of the office responsible for tax-exempt organizations between 2009 and 2012. But Ingram has since left that part of the IRS and is now the director of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office, the IRS confirmed to ABC News today.

The American economy increasingly runs on information. That also means that it increasingly runs on trust. Peggy Noonan, writing about the IRS scandal, says: “As always it comes down to trust.” She is right, but doesn’t go far enough. The level of trust that Noonan talks about is simply whether the president can be trusted in the ordinary political sense:

Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? … The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice.

The assertion that Obama knew nothing of his underlings’ actions seems almost an obvious lie. But do lies still matter? Kimberley Strassel, writing in the Wall Street Journal, asks the same question as Noonan but with a different slant. The way Strassel puts it: “What did the president say?” Can we determine the content of the administration’s policy from what the president says, or do we have to decrypt it by breaking into a “second channel” where the real signal is sent?

Was the White House involved in the IRS’s targeting of conservatives? No investigation needed to answer that one. Of course it was.

President Obama and Co. are in full deniability mode, noting that the IRS is an “independent” agency and that they knew nothing about its abuse. The media and Congress are sleuthing for some hint that Mr. Obama picked up the phone and sicced the tax dogs on his enemies.

But that’s not how things work in post-Watergate Washington. Mr. Obama didn’t need to pick up the phone. All he needed to do was exactly what he did do, in full view, for three years: Publicly suggest that conservative political groups were engaged in nefarious deeds; publicly call out by name political opponents whom he’d like to see harassed; and publicly have his party pressure the IRS to take action.

Mr. Obama now professes shock and outrage that bureaucrats at the IRS did exactly what the president of the United States said was the right and honorable thing to do. “He put a target on our backs, and he’s now going to blame the people who are shooting at us?” asks Idaho businessman and longtime Republican donor Frank VanderSloot.

Listen to the “dog whistle,” Strassel seems to say, don’t listen to the fancy, eloquent speeches. That’s just for show. The real goodies are inside the wrapper.

Lee Smith raises the exact same question not in regards to the IRS, but in respect to the president’s nuclear containment policy. If you were a foreign president, what should you believe when the president talks? Smith raises the possibility that the Iran policy was doubletalk all along. Smith cites the case of a think tank which, after years of tirelessly assuring the public that Obama would never let Iran get the bomb, now argues that we should start thinking about what to do when it does:

On Monday, the Center for New American Security published an 84-page report, called “If All Else Fails: The Challenges of Containing a Nuclear-Armed Iran.” The subject matter is particularly noteworthy given the report’s provenance. CNAS is a think tank close to the Obama administration that, among other things, advised the White House early in its first term on Afghanistan policy. Several of its scholars joined the administration, including CNAS founder Michelle Flournoy who served as undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009-2012; and Colin Kahl, formerly the Obama administration’s deputy assistant secretary of defense for the Middle East, who is lead author of this latest CNAS report.

…

Kahl’s CNAS report asserts that prevention is still the policy. Obama, the paper argues, has “made clear that, on matters of war and peace, ‘I don’t bluff.’ There are good reasons to believe Obama means what he says.”

Sure, Obama believes it, but what if he can’t make his belief a reality? What happens, asks the CNAS paper, if the administration has to move to containment? “This is not because the United States wants to find itself in a situation in which containment becomes necessary,” the report says. “But rather because prevention – up to and including the use of force – could fail, leaving Washington with little choice but to manage and mitigate the consequences of a nuclear-armed Iran.”

The Obama administration may be the first since World War Two to attempt a new and innovative policy best described as “trust me to lie to you.” If you were astute, then you wouldn’t believe us. If you were sophisticated you would make the default assumption that the Iran policy was for public consumption, since only rubes and simpletons could have possibly believed that the Obama administration was telling the truth.

Smith wonders how this will work with allies:

If the White House’s containment policy is a consequence of the failures of the American intelligence community and the U.S. armed forces, why would regional partners, as the report recommends, make “commitments not to pursue independent nuclear capabilities” in exchange for protection under a “U.S. nuclear umbrella”? What kind of “U.S. nuclear guarantee” would convince Israel that the administration really intended to keep its word this time around? In short, why would allies entrust their national security to a president whose policy represents an accommodation with failure?

There is no good reason one can think of. The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price.

The most striking characteristic emerging from accounts of the IRS audits of the administration’s political enemies is the sheer, unbridled malevolence of them. It was, like a friend told me over dinner, as if we had suddenly awoken “in the middle of the third Obama term” to find everything that could never happen, all that was said to be impossible — indeed unthinkable — suddenly upon us. I ate another mouthful of pizza before realizing that, in fact, the events now being decried had happened in his first term.

The IRS inquisitors even demanded printouts of Facebook pages, the minutes of meeting back to whenever, a detailed description of every statement, political or otherwise, under penalty of perjury.

Some of the letters asked for copies of the groups’ Web pages, blog posts and social media postings — making some tea party members worry they’d be punished for their tweets or Facebook comments by their followers…. And each letter had a stern warning about “penalties of perjury” — which became intimidating for groups that were being asked about future activities, like future donations or endorsements.

Moreover, there was a kind of capriciousness about the pattern of inquisition that defied rational explanation. One Catholic professor — an eminent but hardly a household name — was audited in 2010 by the IRS, which demanded to know what her politics were.

Someone at the IRS was even passing the content of conservative application forms to liberal NGOs.

It sounded like people were running wild, doing what they wanted because they could.

And unsurprisingly, nobody can remember nothing about nothing. Eric Holder could not for the life of him recall who might have authorized such a wide-ranging investigation into the Associated Press. The seizure of an entire news agency’s phone records seemed like a dime someone had mislaid; a trivial something that happened “a long time ago,” like Benghazi, and ‘can you remind me,, Congressman, what that was about again?’

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A friend in D.C. with whom I was having a conversation remarked on the timing of our discourse with words to the effect of: “It’s a hot time in the old town tonight.” The headlines are definitely interesting: Benghazi, the IRS selective investigation of conservatives, plus a whole host of other issues — any of which would be front-page news by itself — are jockeying for a position above the fold.

It’s that crowded; almost like the planets were lining up. The ancients had a word for this kind of alignment of celestial objects: disaster – meaning “ill-starred.” The headlines look like The Onion on steroids:

“A Saudi man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after federal agents said he lied about why he was traveling with a pressure cooker, according to a court documents filed Monday.” — Reuters.

“FBI surrounds house of Saudi student after sightings of him with pressure cooker pot.” — Daily Mail

Obama calls controversy over Benghazi talking points a “sideshow” — L.A. Times

“Abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell found guilty of murdering three babies” — Chicago Tribune

“‘You don’t want the IRS ever being perceived to be biased and anything less than neutral in terms of how they operate,’ said President Obama.” — Politico.

The Onion, except they’re real.

And then there’s the big one about the wholesale seizure of an entire news agency’s phone records by the administration to find a leak:

The Justice Department used a secret subpoena to obtain two months of phone records for Associated Press reporters and editors without notifying the news organization, a senior department official tells NBC News, saying the step was necessary to avoid “a substantial threat to the integrity” of an ongoing leak investigation.

Yep, it’s a hot time in the old town tonight. So my first reaction in the conversation was to wonder whether these were “emergent events,” or just happenstance. ”Emergent events”: a fancy way of saying that several different elements have come together in an unexpected way and now the whole shebang is going critical, like a reactor running out of control. The alternative is to posit coincidence and simply believe fate conspired to release six months’ worth of scandals in the same week.

Fortunately, we won’t have to speculate for long. If this malevolent alignment of stars is the karma all coming together, then the next few weeks will feature an increasing spate of these things. Like a building in the process of collapse, first one beam goes, then two, then three, and before you know it the whole tower is gone. That will be noticeable, even in the glittering and impressive District of Columbia. If it’s coincidence, then after this big spurt of news, the Washington Post will go back to reporting local crime.

There’s a good chance it’s emergent for the simple reason that it is difficult to think it is the handiwork of Republicans.