President Barack Hussein Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have never gotten along.

In his first term, Obama walked out of a discussion with Netanyahu at the White House, went upstairs and had dinner with his family while Netanyahu and his entourage waited. It was an enormous affront from a diplomatic standpoint.

Netanyahu also publicly scolded Obama for his naiveté about Middle Eastern affairs. It turned out Obama was horribly naive, didn’t listen to Netanyahu or anyone else with more experience, and managed to take the mess in the Middle East and make it far worse than it had been in decades.

But for Obama to turn around and allow the United Nations to pass a resolution condemning Israel was taking his personal beliefs too far.

Israel now says that it has proof that the US didn’t simply abstain from the UN vote, but participated in formulating the resolution. Israel is not often wrong about such matters, since it has the best intelligence service in the world.

President-elect Donald Trump is no big fan of the UN anyway. This may be enough to push Trump over the top and stop funding the UN, which makes a lot of sense.

The UN peacekeeping forces have turned out to be anything but peacekeepers. They are now accused of sexual exploitation and extortion in a number of countries where they were supposed to be protecting people.

The UN peacekeepers brought cholera to Haiti after the devastating earthquake. Over 7,000 people in Haiti have died from cholera since UN peacekeepers introduced it to the country.

That was an accident, but an accident that has killed 7,000 people is a major accident and one that never should have happened.

The UN itself has become a cesspool, and it might operate much better if Uncle Sam wasn’t there to pick up the check.

Trump doesn’t have to do anything except insist that the US doesn’t pay more that its fair share. We should not be paying for an organization that promotes policies with which the US vehemently disagrees, and there is no room for anti-Semitism in US policy.

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It seems incredible that the US, despite being the most powerful nation in the world, would allow itself to get beat up by ISIS and slapped in the face by China. Under Obama the US has become a paper tiger.

If the US wanted the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Obama said we did, why did we allow Assad’s troops to kill thousands of civilians in Aleppo in an effort to defeat the rebels that we supported? If the US did nothing else, the very least it could have done was insist that civilians, in particular children, not be killed by indiscriminate bombing.

We did no such thing. We allowed the Syrian government troops to engage in wholesale slaughter, blowing up hospitals and buses that were supposed to have their neutrality recognized, and to use bombs to target areas where no military activity was evident.

The blood is on Assad’s hands but it is also on Obama’s because he allowed it all to happen.

The larger question is, why didn’t we assist the rebels so that they would have at least had a chance of winning. Obama said he supported the rebels but refused to give them the weapons they needed to be effective. He supported the rebels with words but not with actions.

Russia, by contrast, supported Assad with action and the result is that Russia and Assad won in Aleppo and the US and the rebels lost.

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How is it news that Obama said that if he had been eligible to run again he would have won? If a reporter had asked, Obama would have told him that, yes, it is true that he can walk on water, and, at a recent White House dinner, when Michelle was running low on wine, he turned bottles of Evian into bottles of French wine.

There appears to be no limit to Obama’s arrogance. Some of his arrogance is well deserved. He was a pothead from Hawaii who was not doing well at a mediocre college in Los Angeles who, for some unknown reason, was accepted at an Ivy League college and then to Harvard Law School.

As an adult, this part-time professor, part-time legislator, part-time lawyer managed to get elected to the US Senate, which was a pretty cool gig. It’s hard to imagine that his first real full-time job out of law school was being a US senator.

As an up-and-coming senator, you’re pretty much required to at least launch an exploratory committee for president, so Obama did, and the next thing he knew he was the most powerful man on Earth.

No wonder he’s arrogant. But the truth is that he can’t walk on water or change water into wine, and the hypothetical question, would he have beaten Trump, is just that – hypothetical.

In Trump’s favor is that he beat the best the Republican Party put up against him and then defeated what was considered the best political machine in the country.

Of course, Obama beat that same political machine. But Obama beat the Clintons by stealth and surprise while Trump beat Hillary Clinton head on.

The real insult was to Hillary Clinton. Unlike other presidents Obama actually got out on the campaign trail and campaigned hard for Hillary Clinton.

The fact that even with Obama’s strong support she lost is an indication that Obama couldn’t have beaten Trump either. Hillary Clinton was unabashedly running for a continuation of Obama’s policies, so while Hillary Clinton was the candidate who lost, it was Obama’s policies that people refused to continue to support.

Hillary Clinton was defeated by Trump, but so was Obama, and evidently that defeat really stings.

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The mainstream media’s reaction to Donald Trump’s Cabinet appointments makes me wonder if they all need some intensive therapy because the election results have scrambled their brains.

It was Trump who won the election, so it seems reasonable that Trump, not Hillary Clinton, would be appointing people who agree with him, not with the failed liberal policies of Hillary Clinton.

For instance, Trump has said he doesn’t believe that man is causing the climate to change. So he is appointing someone who agrees with that belief to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and the mainstream media have gone nuts because how can someone who doesn’t believe in global warming be head of the EPA.

If these liberal propagandists would slow down and take a deep breath, they would realize that the EPA was around before Al Gore invented global warming. If Trump is successful, maybe the idea of global warming won’t be around much longer, but there is a reason why global warming transmogrified into climate change. It is because the globe was refusing to warm like Gore said it would.

When the father of a so-called scientific movement is a career politician and the basis for the movement is his senior thesis, then you might expect to have a few problems. Fortunately for Gore, he also invented the internet, which has been a huge success.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the climate changers said that hurricanes and other violent storms were going to be much worse. This year was the first in 11 years that a hurricane has even made landfall in the US. But that lack of hurricanes was evidently also caused by climate change.

When the US has an unusually cold winter that, according to the climate changers, is caused by man; when the US has an unusually warm winter, that is also caused by climate change caused by man. When there are droughts, that is caused by climate change, and when there is flooding, that is also caused by man according to climate changers.

The truth is that the climate is constantly changing and was changing before men discovered fire, and it is still changing today. If there were proof of climate change caused by man it would be on the front page of every newspaper in the country. But the proof is that some scientists believe it is true, and even the percentage of scientists who believe it is true is a made-up number.

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As Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

An editorial in The New York Times states that the Supreme Court justice that Trump is about to appoint to replace the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was “stolen” from Obama.

That isn’t true. Steal means, “take (another person’s property) without permission or legal right and without intending to return it.”

Nobody stole the appointment from Obama. What happened was Obama made his nomination, which then had to be approved by the Senate. The Senate didn’t like his nominee and didn’t like it so much that not only did the Senate not vote it down, the Senate refused to consider it at all, which constitutionally the Senate has every right to do. Nobody stole anything from Obama.

If Obama had been a little smarter, he would have nominated a moderate Republican, one who would be really difficult for Republicans to oppose. A pro-choice, pro-gun control Republican with a strong judicial record would have put the Republicans in the Senate in a tight corner. When the nomination was made everyone assumed that Hillary Clinton would win the presidency and be making the next appointment if Obama’s appointment wasn’t approved. Even conservative Republicans would have had a hard time not supporting a fellow Republican who leaned left.

But Obama is not that smart and he nominated the typical far-left liberal, making it easy for the Republicans to oppose the nomination.

But nothing was stolen. When Obama vetoed a bill he didn’t steal the bill from the people. When Congress takes the president’s proposed budget and revises it beyond all recognition, they aren’t stealing it.

But The New York Times announced this fall that it was no longer a newspaper but had decided to be a propaganda machine for the left. After Trump was elected, the publisher of The New York Times realized that, from a business standpoint, that probably was not the best move and he sent out a letter saying they were going back to being a newspaper now that their candidate had lost. But evidently nobody told the troops.

The reporters are still reporting on Trump like he is some kind of enemy general who has taken over the country by force and we are in for four years of military dictatorship.

It’s sad to see a great newspaper lose its mind over one political candidate. Presidents come and go but The Times had always been the newspaper of record. With Trump headed for the White House the once great newspaper has lost its way.

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Consumer confidence according to one poll is the highest it has been since 2001.

That’s great news because consumer confidence is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If people feel good about the economy and think it’s improving, they go out and spend money, which causes the economy to improve.

The problem is when you don’t have consumer confidence it is also a self-fulfilling prophecy because people are worried about the economy, they don’t spend money and the economy doesn’t improve even though it might have if consumer confidence had been higher.

One factor that has kept the US from recovering from the Great Recession is that consumer confidence has been low.

Obama doesn’t know squat about the economy. Back when newspapers were doing real articles about Obama and had not resigned themselves to writing puff pieces like they have for the past couple of years, it was widely reported that Obama’s economic advisors were shocked at how little he knew or understood about the economy.

When Obama took office he signed a massive government stimulus plan to spend about $1 trillion to pull the country out of the recession, and much of this money was to be spent on “shovel ready” government projects. Nobody in the Obama administration knew, or perhaps no one wanted to tell Obama, that there is no such thing as an unfunded shovel-ready government project. Governments don’t do all the planning and engineering to get a project started until they have the funds to complete the project. So there was billions of dollars available for projects that didn’t exist.

But because it was Obama, the mainstream media overlooked the idiocy at the heart of the stimulus program.

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I read with wonder an article about how Trump is not a good manager.

It is like saying that Mike Krzyzewski is not a good basketball coach. You can say you don’t like Krzyzewski and you don’t agree with his coaching methods, but you can’t say that he is not a good coach, because the test of whether someone is a good coach or not is whether or not they win games. Krzyzewski wins more games than other coaches, so he is, by definition, a good coach.

Trump has made billions of dollars creating and managing his business. You can say that you don’t like the way he manages his business and you can even say that you don’t think his style of management will work in the White House, but you can’t say that he is not a good manager because the goal of managing a business is to make money and he has made billions of dollars.

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The mainstream media are in disarray because they spent the last year doing everything in their power to get Hillary Clinton elected president, and in a few short weeks Donald Trump will be president. And if this country has any luck at all, we won’t hear from the shrill, ill-tempered, self-important candidate Hillary Clinton again.

Things are so bad between the mainstream media and Trump that there is serious concern that the media will be thrown out of the White House. I personally think it would be a great move, but it probably isn’t going to happen.

The current White House press corps seems to think that they work for the White House and not for their readers. Maybe if the government threw them out, they would realize that their jobs are not simply to repeat whatever lies the White House is telling but actually do some reporting.

However, with Trump in the White House, you can rest assured that the White House press corps will no longer appear to be an old dog asleep at the president’s feet. The days of the White House press corps asking question planted by the White House are definitely over.

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I wrote last week about actions that can be used against a country such as China when they do something like steal an underwater drone that don’t involve the military and that most people never even know are in place, and I realized I was once caught up in just such an action against the US.

In the 1980s, I was denied permission to leave Haiti because Haiti was mad at the way the US was treating Haitian refugees.   In response, Haiti demanded that US citizens have all their paperwork in order before they were allowed to leave Haiti.

Since no one who had been in Haiti more than a couple of weeks had their paperwork in order, it meant no Americans could leave without running around Port-au-Prince getting various documents signed and stamped.

I knew somebody who knew the ropes and it still took a full day of dashing from one office to another getting the proper paperwork in order, and I met an American who had been trying to leave for three weeks and was turned away once again on the day I left.

It was a huge hassle for a relatively few Americans, but in a couple of months or so the countries had ironed out their difficulties and things went back to normal, where instead of having the proper paperwork you put a $10 bill on the counter at the airport, your passport was stamped and you were on your way.