www.dailycorinthian.com
Opinion
Reece Terry, publisher
Mark Boehler, editor
4 • Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Corinth, Miss.
Hillary, Hitler & Cold War II In assessing the motives and actions of Vladimir Putin, Hillary Clinton compared them to Adolf Hitler’s. Almost always a mistake. After 12 years in power, Hitler was dead, having slaughPat tered millions and conquered Buchanan Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Columnist And Putin? After 13 years in power, and facing a crisis in Ukraine, he directed his soldiers in the Crimea to take control of the small peninsula where Russia has berthed its Black Sea fleet since Napoleon. Still, there are parallels between what motivates Putin, a Russian nationalist, and what motivated the Austrian corporal. Hitler’s war began in blazing resentment at what was done to Germany after Nov. 11, 1918. The Kaiser’s armies had defeated the Russian Empire, and the Italians at Caporetto, and fought the Western Allies to a stand still in France, until two million Americans turned the tide in 1918. When Berlin accepted an armistice on President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, not a single Allied soldier stood on German soil. But, at Paris, the Allies proceeded to tear a disarmed Germany apart. The whole German Empire was confiscated. Perhaps this Carthaginian peace was understandable given the Allied losses. It was also madness if the Allies wanted an enduring peace. Gen. Hans Von Seeckt predicted what would happen. When we regain our power, he said, “we will naturally take back everything we lost.” When Hitler came to power in 1933, he wrote off the lands lost to Belgium, France and Italy but set out to recapture lost German lands and peoples in the East. He imposed conscription in 1935, sent his soldiers back into the Rhineland in 1936, annexed Austria in 1938, demanded and got the return of the Sudeten Germans from Czechoslovakia at Munich in 1938. He then sought to negotiate with the Polish colonels, who had joined in carving up Czechoslovakia, a return of Danzig, when the British issued a war guarantee to Warsaw stiffening Polish spines. Enraged by Polish intransigence, Hitler attacked. Britain and France declared war. The rest is history. What has this to do with Putin? He, too, believes his country was humiliated and shabbily treated after the Cold War, and sees himself as protector of the ethnic Russians left behind when the Soviet Union came apart. What did we do? Moved NATO right onto Russia’s front porch. We brought all the liberated nations of Eastern Europe into our military alliance, along with three former Soviet republics. The War Party tried to bring Georgia and Ukraine into NATO, which was established to contain and, if necessary, fight Russia. Had they succeeded, we could have been at war with Russia in 2008 over Georgia and South Ossetia, and today over Crimea. Now we hear new calls for Ukraine and Georgia to be brought into NATO. Are these people sane? Five U.S. presidents who faced far more violent actions by a far more dangerous Soviet Union -- Truman, Ike, JFK, Johnson, Reagan -- refused even to threaten force against Russia for anything east of the Elbe river. Yet, today, we are committed to go to war for Lithuania and Estonia, Obama is sending F-16s to Latvia where half a million Russians live, and the War Party wants Sixth Fleet warships moved into the Black Sea. If there is a Cold War II, or a U.S.-Russia war, historians of tomorrow will as surely point to the Bushes and Clintons who shoved NATO into Moscow’s face, as historians today point to the men of Paris who imposed the Versailles treaty upon a defeated Germany in 1919. (Daily Corinthian columnist Pat Buchanan is an American conservative political commentator, author, syndicated columnist, politician and broadcaster.)
Prayer for today Almighty God, help me to remember that “the power of character is the highest point of success,” and that thou hast put within reach of all the choice ideals of life. May I have the desire to cultivate strong purposes, and strive for high endeavors, that I may not aim for the low. Amen.
A verse to share “And Jonathan Saul’s son arose, and went to David into the wood, and strengthened his hand in God.” 1 Samuel 23:16
Legislator-lawyers get scheduling leeway BY JACK ELLIOTT JR. Associated Press
JACKSON — Mississippi law helps out lawyers who serve in the Legislature and their clients when it comes to court cases that arise while the state House of Representatives and Senate are in session. The results can be a mixed bag. Rep. Jeff Smith, a Republican from Columbus, and Rep. Bob Evans, a Democrat from Monticello, are both lawyers. Each has a case pending before the Mississippi Supreme Court. In recent motions filed with the court, both have sought delays in the cases. Each cited a Mississippi law that calls for court or administrative cases to be delayed when they conflict with a legislative session and the attorneys are representatives or senators. The law says the continuance is “predicated upon the ground that the counsel for the party making said application is a member of the Mississippi Legislature and if said application is made at a time when the Legislature is in session, either regular or extraordinary, or if said Legislature will be in
session at the time that said cause would be triable, then the continuance shall be granted in all cases.” That’s a lot of verbiage to say that legislator-lawyers and their clients are afforded special privileges when the Legislature is working, that the legislative work of the people takes precedence over the state’s justice system. Smith represents the Lowndes County School Board in a lawsuit over the firings of a local principal and a baseball coach. He asked the state Supreme Court to delay the scheduled April 2 oral argument until after the legislative session, which is scheduled to end by April 6. The court then reset oral arguments for April 14. Evans had sought the same relief for his client, Chancery Judge Joe Dale Walker, who is involved in a disciplinary proceeding with the Commission on Judicial Performance. No oral argument was scheduled in that case. The Commission on Judicial Performance had sought interim suspension with pay for Walker while its investigation continues
into alleged inappropriate actions involving a conservatorship in Walker’s court. The Supreme Court granted the commission’s request last month. The court said the request from Evans was rendered moot by the interim suspension, which was likely to leave the case pending beyond the time the Legislature adjourns. Some legislator-lawyers don’t take that route. Last year, state Rep. Ed Blackmon Jr. appeared before the Supreme Court for arguments in a case between a hospital and a medical clinic over a disputed sale. Court documents don’t show any motion by Blackmon, a Democrat from Canton, to delay the hearing because of his legislative responsibilities. The law, on the books since 1972, has been viewed with some skepticism by the state Supreme Court. In a 1980 case, the court rejected arguments from Sheldon Gooch that a trial judge made a mistake in not rescheduling his armed robbery trial while his legislator-lawyer was busy at the Capitol. Gooch argued the trial judge should have
moved the case to the next term of Circuit Court. The judge set the case for trial a few days after the legislative session was to end. In its ruling, the court said the word “continuance” was not defined in the law so the trial judge had discretion to set the date when he wished. However, the Supreme Court noted that Gooch did not question the constitutionality of the law “so we express no opinion whether it is an unwarranted invasion of the judicial power which is separate under our constitution,” wrote Justice Robert Sugg. Sugg referred to Sections 1 and 2 of the Mississippi Constitution of 1890 — separation of powers and the prohibition of one branch of government exercising the powers of another. A bill was proposed in the 2014 session to extend the continuance provision to pre-trial matters, such as motions hearings, but the proposal died in a Senate committee. (Daily Corinthian columnist Jack Elliott Jr. covers Mississippi politics and legal affairs for The Associated Press based in Jackson.)
Obama mistaken in belief that others see what he sees Solipsism. It’s a fancy word that means that the self is the only existing reality and that the external world, including other people, are representations of one’s own self and can have no independent existence. A person who follows this philosophy may believe that others see the world as he does and will behave as he would. It’s a quality often found in narcissists, people who greatly admire themselves -- such as a presidential candidate confident that he is a better speechwriter than his speechwriters, knows more about policy than his policy directors and is a better political director than his political director. If that sounds familiar, it’s a paraphrase of what President Obama told top political aide Patrick Gaspard in 2008, according to the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza. More recently, Obama’s narcissism has been painfully apparent as the United States suffers one reversal after another in world affairs. But it has been apparent ever since he started running for president in 2007. Candidate Obama campaigned not just as a critic of the policies of the opposing party’s president, as many candidates do, but
Reece Terry
Mark Boehler
publisher rterry@dailycorinthian.com
editor editor@dailycorinthian.com
Willie Walker
Roger Delgado
circulation manager circdirector@dailycorinthian.com
press foreman
he portrayed himself repeatedly as someone who, because he “looks different” from Michael other presiBarone dents, would make AmerColumnist ica beloved and cherished in the world. Plenty of solipsism here. Obama’s status as the possible -- and then actual -- first black president was surely an electoral asset. Most Americans believed and believe that, given the nation’s history, the election of a black president would be a good thing, at least in the abstract. But that history has less resonance beyond America’s borders. Obama must have been surprised to find, on his trip to his father’s native Africa, that he was less popular there than George W. Bush, thanks to Bush’s program to combat AIDS. Obama was also mistaken in thinking that his election and the departure of the cowboy bully Bush would make the United States popular again among the world’s leaders and peoples -- though it had that effect in the faculty lounges and university neighborhoods
Obama had chosen to inhabit. In the wider world, the United States, as the largest and mightiest power, is bound to be resented and blamed for every unwelcome development. American presidents for more than a century have been characterized as crude and bumptious by foreign elites. Moreover, as Robert Gates argued persuasively in his 1996 and 2014 memoirs, there is more continuity in American foreign policy than domestic campaign rhetoric suggests. From Guantanamo to Afghanistan, Obama found himself obliged more to carry on than to repudiate Bush’s policies. Where he has clearly changed course, he has done so solipsistically. A reset with Russia was possible, he reasoned, because Vladimir Putin, insulted by Bush’s mulishness, was ready to cooperate with a president in mutually advantageous win-win agreements. So in the past week, Obama has insisted that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine’s Crimea was not in his own interest. No doubt most in the faculty lounge would see it that way. But Putin clearly doesn’t.
World Wide Web: www.dailycorinthian.com To Sound Off: E-mail: email: news@dailycorinthian.com Circulation 287-6111 Classified Adv. 287-6147
Obama’s solipsistic narcissism extends even to the mullahs of Iran. This goes back again to the 2008 campaign: The problem was Bush’s refusal to negotiate. Speak emolliently, send greetings on Muslim holidays and ignore the Green Movement protesters, and Iranian leaders would see that it is in their interest to halt their nuclear weapons program. Most Americans, conservative as well as liberal, would be delighted if Putin, the Palestinians and Ayatollah Khamenei believed and behaved as we would. They would be pleased to see an enlightened American leader bridge rhetorical differences and reach accommodations that left all sides content and at peace. That, unhappily, is not the world we live in. Being on the lookout for common ground is sensible. Assuming common ground when none exists is foolish. And often has bad consequences. (Daily Corinthian columnist Michael Barone is senior political analyst for The Washington Examiner, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel contributor and a coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics.)
How to reach us -- extensions:
Newsroom.....................317 Circulation....................301 news@dailycorinthian.com advertising@dailycorinthian. Advertising...................339 Classifieds....................302 com Classad@dailycorinthian.com Bookkeeping.................333
Editorials represent the voice of the Daily Corinthian. Editorial columns, letters to the editor and other articles that appear on this page represent the opinions of the writers and the Daily Corinthian may or may not agree.