The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare

From Victor Davis Hanson at Real Clear Politics via H/T at Instapundit:

“When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease. But, as with his approach to racial relations, Obama’s remedies proved worse than the original illness.”

Because he is an ivory tower intellectual with no real world experience OR knowledge.

Obama administration needs to abandon its Petraeus obsession

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

In politically driven moods, the ancient Romans often wiped from history all mention of a prior hero or celebrity. They called such erasures damnatio memoriae.

The Soviet Union likewise airbrushed away, or “Trotskyized,” all the images of any past kingpin who became politically incorrect.

The Obama administration seems obsessed with doing the same to retired General David Petraeus.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is now thinking of retroactively taking away one or two of Petraeus’s four stars. The potential demotion in rank, opposed by the Army, is intended as further punishment for the misdemeanor to which he pleaded guilty last year. Petraeus accepted two years of probation and paid a $100,000 fine for allowing his mistress, Paula Broadwell, to read classified information for research on the biography she was writing about Petraeus.

So you have to ask yourself, why?

Petraeus has lost his reputation. He resigned his job as CIA director. He pled guilty to a misdemeanor. He was fined. He was put on probation.

Enough is enough with Petraeus. It is time to move on for an administration that threw away a stable Iraq — once saved by the man it still hounds.

That's it. Destroy the man who stabilized Iraq before the Administration , the Dear Leader's Regime, the one who let that victory slip away. It they manage to destroy him, his victory will be forgotten.

Still Polarizing After All These Years

From Victor Davis Hanson at PJ Media:

Polls confirm that Obama is the most polarizing president in recent memory. There is little middle ground: supporters worship him; detractors in greater number seem to vehemently dislike him. Why then does the president, desperate for some sort of legacy, continue to embrace polarization?

Because it's all about the legacy. The man's ego is such that he believes he should be among the bust on Mt. Rushmore.

California, Leading from Behind

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

California has given us three new truths about government.

One, the higher that taxes rise, the worse state services become.

Two, the worse a natural disaster hits, the more the state contributes to its havoc.

And three, the more existential the problem, the more the state ignores it.

California somehow has managed to have the fourth-highest gas taxes in the nation, yet its roads are rated 44th among the 50 states. Nearly 70 percent of California roads are considered to be in poor or mediocre condition by the state senate. In response, the state legislature naturally wants to raise gas taxes, with one proposal calling for an increase of 12 cents per gallon, which would give California the highest gas taxes in the nation.

Because oil prices have crashed, state bureaucrats apparently believe that the public won’t notice the tax increase in their fill-up costs – even though special California fuel mandates already help make gas prices 25 percent higher than the national average.

Consider California’s upside-down logic. The state wanted to discourage driving and promote hybrid vehicles by upping taxes on carbon fuels. It worked, though it cost the public dearly. People drove less and bought more fuel-efficient cars. But now, because less gas is burned, fewer taxes are collected. So the state wants to reward motorists for their green sacrifices by raising their taxes even higher to make up for missing revenue. If state motorists drive even less and cram into two-seat commuter cars, will California further reward them with even higher gas taxes?
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If California motorists are driving far fewer miles, shouldn’t roads wear out more slowly – and additional taxes not need to be raised for repairs? Could state revenues that have been diverted to the high-speed rail boondoggle instead be used for road repairs?

The State is run by a bunch of nincompoops. Why, because they are elected by a large group of nincompoops. That is why this stat is doomed.

California’s War on the Working Class

From Victor Davis Hanson at Breitbart's Big Government:

Host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon asked Hanson about the decline of California and how the political elites have sold out the state, while they immunized themselves from the devastation.

“They love high-speed rail but they just don’t want to build it,” Hanson said of California’s elite. “They love open borders, but they put their kids in prep schools so they’re not impacted by non-English speakers. They love letting all of our precious irrigation water go out to the ocean, taking it away from farmers, but they don’t dare touch the Hetch Hetchy water that comes to the Bay Area.”

Hanson further elaborated on the change that has taken place in California, especially in the Democratic Party—which is completely dominant in the population centers of coastal Bay Area and Los Angeles.

“The Democratic Party is no longer the party of Harry Truman and the working class. Once they had equality of opportunity enshrined; they went for equality of result and that caused them problems,” Hanson said.

Obama Has Just Begun

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

Insidiously and inadvertently, Barack Obama is alienating the people and moving the country to the right. If he keeps it up, by 2017 it will be a reactionary nation. But, counterintuitive as it seems, that is fine with Obama: Après nous le déluge.

By sheer force of his personality, Obama has managed to lose the Democratic Senate and House. State legislatures and governorships are now predominantly Republican. Obama’s own favorable ratings rarely top 45 percent. In his mind, great men, whether Socrates or Jesus, were never appreciated in their time. So it is not surprising that he is not, as he presses full speed ahead.

Obama certainly has doubled down going into his last year, most recently insisting on letting in more refugees from the Middle East, at a time when the children of Middle Eastern immigrants and contemporary migrants are terrorizing Europe. What remaining unpopular executive acts might anger his opponents the most? Close down Guantanamo, let thousands more refugees into the United States, free thousands more felons, snub another ally, flatter another enemy, weigh in on another interracial melodrama, extend amnesty to another million illegal aliens, make global warming laws by fiat, expand Obamacare, unilaterally impose gun control? In lieu of achievement, is the Obama theory to become relevant or noteworthy by offending the public and goading political enemies?

An Obama press conference is now a summation of all his old damn-you clichés — the fantasy strawman arguments; the caricatures of the evil Republican bogeymen; the demagogic litany of the sick, the innocent, and the old at the mercy of his callous opponents; the affected accentuation (e.g., Talîban; Pakîstan, Îslám, Latînos, etc.) that so many autodidacts parade in lieu of learning foreign languages; the make-no-mistake-about-it and let-me-be-clear empty emphatics; the flashing temper tantrums; the mangled sports metaphors; the factual gaffes; and the monotonous I, me, my, and mine first-person-pronoun exhaustion. What Obama cannot do in fact, he believes he can still accomplish through invective and derision.

Quite a scary thought. He has nothing to lose.

The University Gone Feral

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

The strangest campus derangement is the graft of Victorian prurience onto postmodern crudity. Students who are quite sexually active, and routinely use drugs and alcohol, nonetheless revert to virginal preteens who must be shielded from rough language or mere rudeness. They demand Victorian rules of sexual etiquette, but not commensurate 19th-century notions of abstinence, housing segregated by gender, dress codes that discourage randiness, or prohibitions against drug and alcohol use. Pick-and-choose campus feminists do not wish doors opened for them, but insist that sex codes delineate the stages of arousal, from foreplay to postcoital pleasantries. How strange that “adult” students want to dress up in little kids’ costumes on Halloween, and then act like children terrified of scary things in the night.

The students on colleges across the country, with the encouragement of their professors, a living example of "Lord of the Flies."

Can California Be Saved?

From Victor Davis Hansen of National Review:

Why is California choosing the path of Detroit — growing government that it cannot pay for, shorting the middle classes, hiking taxes but providing shoddy services and infrastructure in return, and obsessing over minor bumper-sticker issues while ignoring existential crises?

The cause is political. California is a one-party state, without any serious audit of authorities in power.
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But what turned a once bipartisan and purple state bright blue?
A perfect storm of events.
Higher taxes and increased regulations have driven out lots of small-business owners. In the last few years, hundreds of thousands of disgruntled middle-of-the-road voters voted with their feet and left for no-tax Nevada, Texas, or Florida.
The state devolved into a pyramid of the coastal wealthy and interior poor — the dual constituencies of the new progressive movement.
A third of America’s welfare recipients reside in California. Nearly a quarter of Californians live below the poverty line.
Yet nowhere in America are there more billionaires. California’s long, thin coastal corridor has become a tony La-La land unto itself. Some of the highest housing prices in the nation and richest communities are clustered along the Pacific coastline, from the wine country and Silicon Valley to Malibu and Hollywood, dotted by marquee coastal universities and zillionaire tech corporations.
Meanwhile, poorer people in the interior, in places such as Madera and Delano — far from Stanford, Google, Pacific Heights, and Santa Monica — require ever more public services. The very rich don’t mind paying the necessary higher taxes, while the strapped, shrinking middle class suffers or flees.

The Detroit analogy is apt — Zev Chafets of the New York Times wrote his harrowing book Devil’s Night: And Other True Tales of Detroit in 1990, nearly a quarter century before Detroit declared bankruptcy, and his descriptions match the Obama-era reports describing Detroit’s collapse. Conservatives including Ann Coulter, George Will, and Heather Mac Donald have been sounding the alarm on California’s decline for at least the last 15 years. Comparing their earlier warnings with California’s dire current state as described by VDH illustrates how thoroughly the state has declined in the years since.

That's why I plan to move away when I retire.

A Liberal’s Ten Commandments

From Victor Davis Hansen at PJ Media:

The best way for liberals to advance their various causes would be to take a pledge to live the rather progressive lives that they advocate. Here are a modest Ten Commandments to lend them credibility in the eyes of the American people.

Read the whole thing.

The Mob Is Coming For You

From Victor Davis Hansen:

The Romans knew enough about mercurial ancient Athens to appreciate that they did not want a radical democracy. Instead, they sought to take away absolute power from the people and redistribute it within a “mixed” government. In Rome, power was divided constitutionally between executives (two consuls), legislators (the Senate and assemblies), and judges (Roman magistrates).

The half-millennia success of the stable Roman republican system inspired later French and British Enlightenment thinkers. Their abstract tripartite system of constitutional government stirred the Founding Fathers to concrete action. Americans originally were terrified of what 51 percent of the people in an unchecked democracy might do on any given day—and knew that ancient democracies had always become more not less radical and thus more unstable. For all the squabbles between Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison, they agreed that a republic, not a direct democracy, was a far safer and stable choice of governance.
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What now constitutes actionable criminal behavior in the scandals at the IRS, EPA, ICE, and a host of other alphabet agencies are not treated as per se violations of the law. Rather, they are judged according to whether the offender and his crime were deemed progressive and well-intended—or reactionary and thus prosecutable. CEOs who cannot cap a leaky oil well or who sell noxious peanut products go to jail; EPA functionaries who turn white-water rivers into toxic yellow mush melt back into the coils of the bureaucracy.

Ancient Athens was a wild place—as frenetic, brilliant, and dangerous as it proved ultimately unsustainable. Yet we are becoming more like the Athenian mob than the Roman Senate. American law has become negotiable and subject to revolutionary justice, while technology has developed the power to inflame 300 million individuals in a nanosecond. Without strict adherence to republican government and the protections of the Constitution, the mob will rule—and any American will become subject to its sudden wrath.

This chaos is intentional by liberals. Most of the time, they get policies set via the courts, not through elections. Now through the use of social media, with their will accomplices in the Media, every policy now set is based on the outrage of the week, similar to the ancient Athenians. It's sets a bad precedent. And as the old saying goes, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it."

Hillary Clinton’s Empire of Dirt

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

For nearly 40 years, Bill and Hillary Clinton have crafted joint power careers. But “in the end,” what have they become? What is left but their front foundation, their Soros-funded surrogates, and their lock-step loyalists — in other words, their “empire of dirt”?
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In her Freudian calls for solutions to the sort of ethical and moral transgressions that have defined her own long career, near the end of it, Hillary Clinton seems to be asking in vain of her dissipating cadres of true believers, “What have I become?”

Answer?

As she limps along, wounded, on the campaign trail, her flat, half-hearted sermons are best translated as, “You could have it all, / My empire of dirt. / I will let you down. / I will make you hurt.”

History will look back at the Clinton's and will rate the breath and depth corruption is the same way the Tea Pot Dome scandal is remembered. They will make Nixon look honest.

Is Obamism Correctable?

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

There is not much of an idea any longer of investigative journalism. The press for the last seven years has largely chosen to become a Ministry of Truth. One reason why Donald Trump soars is that, after the press’s canonization of Obama, the public relishes Trump’s contempt for the media — and the latter have now lost the moral credibility to critique any candidate on the grounds of dishonesty, hypocrisy, narcissism, mendacity, or polarization of the electorate.

The tragic mess of 2009–2016 is ending, and soon the cleanup will begin — accompanied by stupefaction as to just how much will have to be thrown away.

He may have just explained the Trump phenomena better than anyone else.

America's Descent Into Lawlessness

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

In the eight-plus years since the Libby trial, the Obama administration has blown up the law as we have known it for centuries.

Barack Obama once warned Latino activists that he had no legal authority to suspend enforcement of federal immigration law, stop deportations, and offer de facto amnesties.

But that caution was only a campaigning talking point. After his re-election in 2012 and the midterm elections in 2014, Obama made a mockery of immigration law.

Hundreds of liberal sanctuary cities have announced that federal immigration law does not apply to them. That scary, neo-Confederate idea of legal nullification was sanctioned by the Obama administration — in a way it never would have been if a city had suspended the Endangered Species Act, emissions standards, or gun-control legislation.

As a result, once-detained and later-released immigrants with criminal records have murdered innocent American citizens.

America is becoming analogous to the mess in lawless contemporary Venezuela. When the law is suspended or unevenly applied for politically protected individuals and groups, then there is no law.

So we are now seeing the logical descent into the abyss of chaos.

Read the whole article. It may take decades to repair the damage to the system by the Dear Leader.

Is the West Dead Yet?

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review via H/T at Instapundit:

Not yet, but Obama's trying.......

Immigration is a one-way Western street. Those who, in the abstract, damn the West — as much as elite Westerners themselves do — want very much to live inside it. The loudest anti-Western voices in the Middle East are usually housed in Western universities, not in Gaza. Jorge Ramos is a fierce critic of supposed American cruelty to illegal immigrants — so much so that he fled Mexico for America, became a citizen (how is that possible, given American bias against immigrants?), landed a multimillion-dollar salary working for the non-Latino-owned Spanish-language network Univision, and then put his kids in private school to shield them from hoi polloi of the sort he champions each evening. Now that’s the power of the West.
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But it is worse than that: Western elites deny their own exceptionalism, and deny any reason for their own privilege other than the easy private guilt of citing the Holy Trinity of “race/class/gender.” . . .

The first casualty in a bored and would-be-revolutionary society is legality. And certainly in the West the law — whose sanctity built Western civilization — has become a joke. New Confederate-style nullificationists in San Francisco demand that federal immigration statutes not apply to their sanctuary city, even as they insist that a minor clerk in Kentucky be jailed for nullifying a Supreme Court edict allowing gay marriage. Kim Davis should indeed be jailed for obstructing a federal mandate, but only after the neo-Confederate nullificationist mayor, Board of Supervisors, and sheriff of San Francisco ..........

Virtually every American must palpably sense the country’s rapid decline since President Obama assumed office. It’s not just economic stagnation; it’s a moral, religious, cultural and legal free fall that turns the stomach. That’s why the 2016 presidential election isn’t so much about needing an “experienced” politician (i.e., someone who cares more about being a member of the D.C. club than listening to Americans living outside D.C.), or even the candidates’ positions on particular issues.

It’s about a desperate, visceral longing for someone who believes that America is the greatest force for good on earth, that it occupies a special position of power that in large part determines the stability and prosperity of the globe, and that its own goodness and quest for fairness should not be used against it by those who plot to destroy it from within.

As we free fall from the Obama era of weakness and indecision, Americans’ top priority seems to be avoiding career politicians whose well-rehearsed, mellifluous, politically correct words instinctively smack of arrogance, weakness, guilt, insincerity or paternalism. D.C. has turned into the Capitol city portrayed in the Hunger Games–corrupt, privileged, arrogant, condescending, manipulative, shallow, materialistic, weak, and utterly ignorant of the needs of those who live beyond its borders.

The political class has forgotten who is actually “boss” in our constitutional republic– We the People outside of D.C. The boss is now interviewing presidential candidates to ascertain who understands this basic principle, and accepts that the job description entails being the leader of ordinary (not merely elite) Americans, and a staunch defender of American interests.

The political elites in this country are apoplectic that their “insider” candidates are doing so poorly. The rest of the country is enjoying the fact that they have choices other than candidates who espouse the same old interchangeable, predictable, politically correct B.S.

My first thought of the Capitol in The Hunger Games was Washington DC.

Glad to know I'm not the only one.

Hillary’s Campaign Has Already Begun to Derail

From Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review:

Hillary Clinton’s second race for the presidency is only about a quarter through, but she already seems to be causing general fatigue.

The lurid revelations about the Clinton Foundation proved that it was not so much a charity as a huge laundering operation. Quid pro quo donations from the global rich and powerful fueled the Clintons’ jet-setting networking.

In between political campaigns, the foundation provided sinecures for out-of-work Clinton politicos. This is hardly proof of Hillary’s grass-roots progressivism.

Then came Clinton’s e-mail fiasco. No one knows how the current investigation of her alleged misuse of e-mail accounts, servers, and classified information will end up. But most people accept that it was an unnecessary and self-induced scandal, brought on both by her paranoia and habitual expectation of being exempt from the law.

Drip, drip, drip!

Are Hillary’s first four and a half months of campaigning a glimpse of the next 14?

If so, the Democratic party — and the country — are going to be utterly exhausted.

Nope, they will have a new candidate.

How Illegal Immigration Finally Turned Off the Public

From Victor Davis Hanson at PJ Media:

It is alleged that Donald Trump is a demagogue who whips the ignorant up. Perhaps. But on matters of immigration he came late and often in antithesis to his own former positions. The truth is that the illegal-immigration lobby was its own worst enemy, its message couched in racism, illegality, untruth — and finally incoherence. People are tired of being called racists by racial chauvinists, of being dubbed insensitive by unfeeling opportunists, and of being called politically naive by political manipulators.

If there were not a Donald Trump, he would likely have had to have been invented.

Looks like the American Public has reached the turning point about a "path to citizenship" for criminals.

The Democrats -- Too Old and Too White?

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

Leftwingers’ taunts in 2008 and 2012 have come back to haunt them.

In the jubilation of the Obama election victories of 2008 and 2012, the Left warned Republicans that the party of McCain and Romney was now “too old, too white, too male — and too few.” Columnists between 2008 and 2012 ad nauseam berated Republicans on the grounds that their national candidates “no longer looked like America.” The New York Times stable crowed that the Republicans of 2008 were “all white and nearly all male” — not too long before McCain chose Sarah Palin as his running-mate. In reaction to the defeats of McCain and Romney, Salon and Harper’s ran stories on the “Grand Old White Party” and “Angry White Men.”

For Democratic progressives, Hawaiian Barack Obama could not be of mixed ancestry and decidedly middle class, but simply “black” or “African American” — as if he had shared the Jim Crow experience of Clarence Thomas. Nor was there any allowance that race itself had become hard to sort into neat categories in a nation of immigration, intermarriage, and assimilation, in which millions of Americans were one-half this and one-quarter that.
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On the Republican side, there is plenty of diversity as defined by liberals — Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio.

And on the Democratic side? The only representative of “diversity” is Hillary Clinton, who counts by virtue of being female, but who is white and soon to be 68, a fixture on the national political scene for more than a quarter of a century.

yep, the rest of them are a bunch of old, white guys, just like McCain and Romney.

As the EPA and IRS Have Shown, with Big Government Comes Little Accountability

From National Review:

Social observers from Aristotle and Juvenal to James Madison and George Orwell have all warned of the dangers of out-of-control government. Lately, we have seen plenty of proof that they were frighteningly correct.

The Environmental Protection Agency spilled 3 million gallons of toxic sludge into a tributary of the Animas River in Colorado. The stinky yellow flume of old mine waste — rife with cancer-causing mercury and arsenic — threatens to pollute the drinking and recreational water of three states.

Had a private oil company acted so incompetently and negligently, it would have been fined billions of dollars by the same EPA. The company’s top executives might have been subject to criminal prosecutions. The business’s reputation would have been tarnished for years. Just ask BP officials what the Obama administration did to the corporation after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico.

But who will police the green police at the EPA?

Well, it supposed to be Congress, but with weak leadership and a hostile media, they aren't doing their jobs.

When the IRS hounds citizens about their taxes, can Americans inform the agency that they are invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to answer out of fear of self-incrimination — and expect to face no criminal consequences?

No? Why, then, was high-ranking IRS official Lois Lerner able to sign off on the excessive scrutiny of some conservative nonprofit groups, lie about it, and then invoke the Fifth — without any legal consequences?

There is some hope that there will be a Lois Lerner Perp walk.

There is no California

From Victor Davis Hanson at Townhall:

How to explain the seemingly inexplicable? There is no California, which is a misnomer. There is no such state. Instead there are two radically different cultures and landscapes with little in common, each equally dysfunctional in quite different ways. Apart they are unworldly, together a disaster.

A postmodern narrow coastal corridor runs from San Diego to Berkeley, where the weather is ideal, the gentrified affluent make good money, and values are green and left-wing. This Shangri-La is juxtaposed to a vast impoverished interior, from the southern desert to the northern Central Valley, where life is becoming premodern.

On the coast, blue-chip universities like Cal Tech, Berkeley, Stanford and UCLA in pastoral landscapes train the world's doctors, lawyers, engineers and businesspeople. In the hot interior of blue-collar Sacramento, Turlock, Fresno and Bakersfield, well over half the incoming freshman in the California State University system must take remedial math and science classes.

In postmodern Palo Alto or Santa Monica, a small cottage costs more than $1 million. Two hours away, in premodern and now-bankrupt Stockton, a bungalow the same size goes for less than $100,000.

In the interior, unemployment in many areas peaks at over 15 percent. The theft of copper wire is reaching epidemic proportions. Thousands of the shrinking middle class flee the interior for the coast or nearby no-income-tax states. To fathom the state's nearly unbelievable statistics -- as the state population grew by 10 million from the mid-1980s to 2005, its number of Medicaid recipients increased by 7 million during that period; one-third of the nation's welfare recipients now reside in California -- visit the state's hinterlands.

But in the Never-Never Land of Apple, Facebook, Google, Hollywood and the wine country, millions live in an idyllic paradise. Coastal Californians can afford to worry about the state's trivia -- as their legislators seek to outlaw foie gras, shut down irrigation projects to save the 3-inch delta smelt, and allow children to have legally recognized multiple parents. But in the less feel-good interior, crippling regulations curb timber, gas and oil, and farm production. For the most part, the rules are mandated by coastal utopians who have little idea where the gas for their imported cars comes from, or how the redwood is cut for their decks, or who grows the ingredients for their Mediterranean lunches of arugula, olive oil and pasta.

This kind of division in the State is what drove the proposition to split the State into 6.

Joel Kotkin (presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and a contributing editor to the City Journal) wrote an article in the DailyBeast how California has been divided up. Not along racial or political lines, but more like class. See this previous post.

Obama -- Tougher on Congress than on Khamenei

From Victor Davis Hanson at National Review:

The speech was mean-spirited and dishonest ─ and may have been counterproductive.

President Obama’s speech last week advocating congressional approval of the Iran deal was mostly made-up history mixed with invective. Indeed, he talked far more roughly about his congressional partners than he did about our Iranian enemies, who have worked so hard to kill Americans over the last 35 years.
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 Obama claimed that the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in Iraq was “a preference for military action over diplomacy.” Yet the Iraq War was authorized by both houses of Congress, with a majority of Democratic senators voting in favor, and the resolution contained 23 writs of action — all following up, in the post-9/11 climate, on the regime-change and liberation acts signed into law by former president Bill Clinton. The Bush administration spent months at the United Nations seeking to persuade Security Council members France and Russia (each enjoying valuable oil concessions from Saddam Hussein) to authorize military action in order to enforce U.N. sanctions. In contrast, Obama went to war in Libya without congressional approval. By bombing Moammar Qaddafi into extinction (as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it, “We came, we saw, he died”), Obama exceeded the U.N. authorization, which limited U.S. action to humanitarian support and no-fly zones.

The Dear Leader has shown more willingness to negotiate with the Mullahs in Iran than his opponents in Congress.

The Dear Leader negotiated with the Taliban for the return of the Deserter Bo Bergdahl, but not John Boehner or Mitch McConnell over the budget.