Victor Davis Hanson
BIDEN KILLS TRUMP’S GOLDEN GOOSE
The Pavlovian “Trump did it!” sums up Joe Biden’s fallback excuse when faced with any embarrassment and failure.
The truth is that Trump’s policies at home and abroad were neither neoconservative and interventionist nation-building nor RINO Republican country-club economics, but instead realist abroad and populist at home.
More importantly, Trump’s record was not so much ideological as practical, and led not to chaos but to achievement. Biden is daily discarding that gift and blaming Trump for his own growing self-created miseries.
THE TEN WOKE RULES FOR POST-AMERICA
[VDH has never written anything more insightful and more concise than this. Copy and send to everyone you know.]
There are 10 new Woke Rules we are now expected to live by that are changing America, maybe permanently.
1) Money is a construct.
2) Laws are not necessarily binding anymore.
3) Racism is now morally required.
It gets worse…
SKYE’S LINKS 04/01/21
The Ruling 'Crat-designed invasion of cheap labor and more 'Crat voters has just begun, but the 'Crat base doesn't like it:
Gallup CEO Warns Joe Biden: 42 Million Migrants Want Entry to U.S.
More Blue vs. Blue - Two 'Crat Senators proudly announce that they will not vote for anyone with the wrong color of their skin and the MSM goes crickets: When Wokeness Damages Democrats
When guns are outlawed, outlaws will still have guns – who knew? Glock 19 Disguised As Nerf Gun Seized In North Carolina Drug Raid
CORPORATE COMMUNISM IS REAL AND COMING FOR YOU
@Corporate communism began trending on Twitter yesterday afternoon (3/30) due to the video above of MTG (Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene) coining the term.
The freshman Republican is talking about the Xiden administration’s ambitions to buddy up with so-called private companies in creating a way to identify who has been vaccinated against the Chicom Virus.
She’s right. These “vaccine passports” would allow some combination of companies and the government to prohibit unvaccinated people from traveling, going to events or gatherings, or otherwise participating in a free and normal society.
THE INTERVIEW OF THE PRESIDENT FACEBOOK WON’T LET YOU SEE
[Facebook banned Lara Trump’s interview of President Trump last night (3/30). Here is the full 18 minute interview, followed by the full transcript. It is more than worth your time to watch and read it entire. At the end, POTUS comes very close to saying he’s running to be 47 in ’24.]
THE HORROR MOVIE DETOUR ON THE ROAD TO RECOVERY
You know the plot point in the horror film where the highway is blocked and a detour sign directs the car full of naive teens off onto a rutted track into the wilderness?
We're right there in the narrative of "The Road to Recovery": the highway that Democrat Wall Street and Media promises would be smooth and wide open is about to be detoured into a rutted track that peters out in a wilderness without any lights or signage.
You know the rest: the naive, trusting teens are picked off one by one in the most horrific fashion. Substitute naive punters in the stock market and you have the script for what lies ahead.
THE DAWN OF A NEW AGE OF TYRANNY
Woke hall monitors must screech like Donald Sutherland at the end of the 1978 version “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” whenever they see a constitutionally free and unmasked citizen daring to appear in public without a slave muzzle.
It’s a mad scramble for a Year Zero to rival those of the French and Bolshevik revolutions—the dawn of a new age of tyranny masquerading as compassion.
MAY THE SHUTDOWN GO ON FOREVER
It's hard to read the anonymous posting on the Daily Caller from a "senior Trump official" without coming to the conclusion that the current partial government shutdown should remain shut essentially forever. (It won't. I know. But hear me out.)
Putting aside whatever pro-administration bias the author might have, the article confirms everything one suspects or knows about bureaucracies, especially government ones.
“They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. ‘Process is your friend’ is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.”Well, it's not as bad as what one former Justice Department attorney told me about life inside the DOJ -- that under-utilized $200K/yr lawyers sit there all day looking at porn on their computers -- but it's bad enough.
SHOULD POPE FRANCIS LOOK IN A MIRROR TO SEE WHO IS A TOOL OF THE DEVIL?
Our civilization, and especially our country, is based on “the laws of nature and nature’s God,”—standards of right and wrong independent of earthly power—preached by the Christian churches.
But clerics, including popes, cardinals, bishops, and priests have always flirted with the temptation to swap God’s laws for the rulers’ causes and prejudices. When it’s Christians versus Caesar, clerics mostly choose Caesar.
Today, a chapter in that temptation is playing out among us as America’s Catholic bishops consider how better to identify and punish some of their colleagues and the priests they supervise who have been sexually abusing adolescents, 80 percent of them boys and young men.
On November 11, 2018 under pressure from enraged parishioners, and internal resistance notwithstanding, the U.S. bishops were about to vote on some proposals better to identify and expel what, by definition, is homosexual predation. But homosexuality ranks high among the icons of progressives, robed and not. Pope Francis proceeded to denounce the accusers as “tools of the devil,” not the perpetrators themselves.
THE FBI HAS PROSTITUTED ITSELF
Let’s be clear. This is a national disgrace of unprecedented historic proportions.
Citing unnamed “former law enforcement sources and others,” the New York Times reports (1/11) that “in the days after President Trump fired James B. Comey as F.B.I. director, law enforcement officials became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests.”
The mainstream media has touted this story as major breaking news. But, to anyone who has been paying even a modicum of attention, it is crystal clear that Comey’s firing did not precipitate the FBI’s investigation of Trump.
To the contrary, the readily available record facts demonstrate that Comey’s FBI began investigating Trump and his campaign for possible Russian collusion shortly after he won the Republican Party’s nomination.
Even though the Times would have us believe that the FBI investigated Trump out of a legitimate concern for national security, those same facts prove that, in launching and directing the investigation, the leadership of Comey’s FBI was engaging in partisan presidential politics to further their own corrupt interests. Here’s why.
UNDOING THE DIS-EDUCATION OF MILLENNIALS
I teach in a law school. For several years now my students have been mostly Millennials. Contrary to stereotype, I have found that the vast majority of them want to learn.
But true to stereotype, I increasingly find that most of them cannot think, don’t know very much, and are enslaved to their appetites and feelings. Their minds are held hostage in a prison fashioned by elite culture and their undergraduate professors.
They cannot learn until their minds are freed from that prison. This year in my Foundations of Law course for first-year law students, I found my students especially impervious to the ancient wisdom of foundational texts, such as Plato’s Crito and the Code of Hammurabi.
Many of them were quick to dismiss unfamiliar ideas as “classist” and “racist,” and thus unable to engage with those ideas on the merits. So, a couple of weeks into the semester, I decided to lay down some ground rules. I gave them these rules just before beginning our annual unit on legal reasoning.
Here is the speech I gave them.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE REAL HISTORY OF THE FIRST THANKSGIVING
Intro note by Jack Wheeler:
On Thanksgiving Day, Americans gather with their family and friends to celebrate the blessings that Providence has bestowed on their beloved country.
A deep appreciation of these blessings involves understanding that they were earned. It is to understand the awesome truth of how “God helps those who help themselves” applies to the Mayflower Pilgrims and their First Thanksgiving at America’s birth.
This is an appreciation and understanding of which those on the Left are incapable – for it would mean celebrating the capitalist freedom that made that original Thanksgiving possible. That made America possible.
Thus they must distort history instead. The distortion starts in Kindergarten, with the childish make-believe of your kid’s school play portraying the noble Squanto teaching the helpless Pilgrims how to feed themselves. So let’s drop the curtain on the distortion and watch the real thing. Here it is.
The real history of the Mayflower Pilgrims was recounted by their leader, William Bradford (1590-1657) in his book Of Plymouth Plantation, completed in 1647. It is from Bradford that we learn of Squanto, who did indeed show the Pilgrims how to “set” or plant corn (a new unfamiliar crop for them).
Then we learn that the Pilgrims taught the Indians how to grow more corn than they ever had before:
“The Indeans used to have nothing so much corne as they have since the English have stored them with their hoes, and seene their industrie in breaking up new grounds therwith.”Reading the real history of the Pilgrims is so revelatory that I want you to see it at length. It is as effective a refutation of socialism and affirmation of capitalism as there has ever been.
TRUMP’S DEPLORABLES ARE SIMPLY MAINSTREAM AMERICANS
There is lots of talk abo
quite new would institutionalize, define, and solidify the Trump base of aging Reagan Democrats, old Ross Perot independents, Tea Party remnants, newly disaffected Democrat workers, and a few returning libertarians and paleocons.
Certainly, together they helped to swung the election in 2016.
But what exactly would be the formal agenda of the proverbial deplorables and irredeemables? And how would it differ all that much from conservative Republicanism of generations past?
After 10 months of governance, Trump’s deregulations, a foreign policy of principled realism, energy agendas, judicial appointments, efforts at tax reform and health care recalibration, cabinet appointments, and reformulation at the Departments of Education, the EPA, and Interior seem so far conservative to the core.
More than that, the rise of the deplorables was not evidence of some new strain of xenophobia and nativism. Rather their views marked a return not just to Republican values, but also the majority position held by most Americans.
THE ULTIMATE REASON FOR VOTING FOR ROY MOORE
I can tell you one thing for sure: We don't need a liberal person in there, a Democrat -- Jones. I've looked at his record. It's terrible on crime. It's terrible on the border. It's terrible on the military. I can tell you for a fact, we do not need somebody that's going to be bad on crime, bad on borders, bad with the military, bad for the Second Amendment.The argument has little to do with Roy Moore, and even less with what is acceptable behavior.--President Donald Trump, November 21, 2017
It is about what Lenin succinctly called “who, whom?” — who can do what to whom or, as Amos ’n Andy used to say, who’s gonna be the “do-er” and who the “do-ee,” neither more nor less.
The reason why the bipartisan ruling class of officials, corporate executives, educators, the media, entertainment, etc. demand Roy Moore’s political scalp is that it fell on Moore to be the focus of a pivotal effort to detach the Republican Party from that ruling class.
It has nothing to do with what he may have done four decades ago, and everything with the threat that his election now poses to their power to run the country while de-legitimizing the rest of Americans and their culture.
Had it been anyone else, the degree of hostility would have been the same, the charges possibly different but just as fiery and equally beside the point: which sector of the population shall have its power enhanced, and which diminished?
RADICAL FEMINISTS AND PUSSYCONS IN ALABAMA
Capitol Hill’s Chief Pussycon
Radical feminist writer Kate Harding and soi-disant (self-described) conservative Peggy Noonan have a lot in common, including some fundamental values.
For one thing, neither believes that partial birth abortion—a euphemism for infanticide—is that big of a deal. Both say that they’d rather see Doug Jones, who openly supports it, than Roy Moore, who staunchly opposes it, become the next senator from Alabama.
Both rationalize their positions in terms of ends and means. For Noonan, if the means to eliminating partial birth abortion, which she acknowledges is “barbaric” even by louche European standards, is supporting a man who is facing unsubstantiated and unverifiable allegations of 40-year-old sexual misconduct, then it’s right go on killing fetuses.
Noonan is not a critical thinker, and rigorous analysis has never been her strength. Same with Mitch McConnell. Not so long ago, I wrote an article in which I called these folks “Pussycons.”
Just observe Mitch McConnell, his wattles all aquiver, pronouncing Roy Moore guilty before he even knew what the charges were. See, he is saying to the Left, I hate the Southerner even more than you do, and I’ll convict him faster and with less evidence.
ANGELA MERKEL’S FEET OF CLAY
Chancellor for how much longer?
This morning’s headlines (11/21) of the collapse overnight of negotiations to form a new German government is yet another shock to the liberal world order.
Chancellor Angela Merkel's tenure in office is now in jeopardy. It is easy to see why – the Moslem Migrant Flood is the elephant in Merkel's parlor.
The ruling Christian Democrat-Social Democrat coalition was Germany's equivalent of Washington's Swamp Fusion Uniparty and tolerated no criticism of Merkel's decision to let almost a million and a half “migrants” into German during 2016 and 2017.
Already 36% of German residents under the age of five are Moslem migrant children, and Germans seem at last ready to rebel against the demolition of Germany's national character.
SILENCE ON SLEAZE-BOB MENENDEZ
I pronounce Democrat leaders, left-wing feminists and Beltway journalists guilty of gross negligence and hypocrisy over a dirty rotten sleazeball in their midst.
For the past 11 weeks, Bob Menendez has been on trial for 18 counts of bribery, fraud and corruption involving nearly $1 million in gifts and donations. The jury remained deadlocked as of today (11/16).
A new Media Research Center analysis reported that ABC, CBS and NBC devoted 40 times more of their morning and evening TV newscast coverage this past week to Alabama GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore's alleged sexual assault accusers than to the ongoing federal trial of one of the Democrats' most powerful, visible and entrenched figures on Capitol Hill.
Four years ago, when the FBI raided the Florida home of creepy Democrat donor and eye doctor Salomon Melgen, Menendez suddenly remembered that he had failed to pay back his "hermano" $60,000 for private-jet flights to the Caribbean -- where Melgen owns a tony home in the private Casa de Campo resort.
As government investigators discovered, the "friendship" entailed much more than backslaps and beach nights. Melgen was convicted this spring on 67 counts of massive Medicare fraud totaling $90 million.
Prosecutors allege Menendez and his staff pulled strings and put pressure on public officials to back off Melgen's billing blow-up. And that’s just one example of how sleazy Sleaze-Bob is.
A YEAR OF FRENZY AND MADNESS
The Left today is ruled by the goddesses of madness, frenzy, and rage
America is in another of its Salem moments. Frenzy is almost a living, breathing monster. It moves from host to host, fueled by rumor, gossip, and self-righteous furor.
The Greeks knew well of the transitory nature of these mass panics. They claimed such fits were inspired by the Maniae, the three daughters of Night who were the goddesses of insanity, rage, and crazed frenzy. We’ve seen all three of them in action throughout the past year.
Let’s review the tragic series of madnesses with which America has been plagued since last November.
WHY ANY FRIEND OF ISRAEL MUST SUPPORT TRUMP
President Trump's Middle East policy is simple: Back our friends and scare the hell out of our enemies, and negotiate where possible with our competitors like Russia and China.
By and large it's working, unlike the catastrophically failed policies of the previous two administrations. Trump did what he said he would do and succeeded. You wouldn't know that from the #fakenews media.
Both George W. Bush and Obama tied up Israel’s hands, sandbagging her against her enemies – Obama in particular, while Hillary would have been disastrously worse.
So let’s review why anyone who claims to be a friend of Israel must support Trump against the alternative. One can criticize Trump all day with justification, but the existential issue of Israel's survival requires Jews to support him. Jewish never-Trumpers are infected with what our rabbis of antiquity called "baseless hatred."
THE TIME FOR EXCUSES IS OVER – NOW IS THE TIME FOR STRENGTH
[This is the full text of the magnificent speech the President gave to the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea in Seoul on Tuesday November 7. Full video follows.]
Assembly Speaker Chung, distinguished members of this Assembly, ladies and gentlemen: Thank you for the extraordinary privilege to speak in this great chamber and to address your people on behalf of the people of the United States of America.
In our short time in your country, Melania and I have been awed by its ancient and modern wonders, and we are deeply moved by the warmth of your welcome.
On this peninsula, we have watched the results of a tragic experiment in a laboratory of history. It is a tale of one people, but two Koreas.
One Korea in which the people took control of their lives and their country, and chose a future of freedom and justice, of civilization, and incredible achievement. And another Korea in which leaders imprison their people under the banner of tyranny, fascism, and oppression.
That other Korea has interpreted America’s past restraint as weakness. This would be a fatal miscalculation. This is a very different administration than the United States has had in the past.
Today, I hope I speak not only for our countries, but for all civilized nations, when I say to the North: Do not underestimate us, and do not try us. We will defend our common security, our shared prosperity, and our sacred liberty.
THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO TRUMP FOR AMERICA’S FUTURE
We are in a veritable war of competing visions. The strife inside the two parties is irrelevant—when compared to the larger existential war for the soul of America.
Like it or not, Donald Trump in fits and starts has chosen not to accommodate the progressive vision. And yet, warts and all, the Trump presidency on all fronts is all that now stands in the way of the completion of what was started in 2009.
Like it or not, Trump is now the central figure in resisting a full-scale dismantling of the idea of the uniquely individual, free, and outspoken American.
For now, the unlikely Trump is the only road bump left on the progressive expressway to a medieval world of masters and peasants with few in between. Let’s understand why.
THE NARRATIVE CARTEL OF THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns," Ben Rhodes gloated. "That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
Rhodes, the White House’s “Obama whisperer,” was explaining how he had pulled the wool over the media’s eyes on the Iran Deal to a journalist. The media responded to the story by attacking the journalist who reported it, not Rhodes for viewing them as easily manipulated useful idiots.
The media knew that it knew nothing. And it didn’t care. It just didn’t want outsiders to know it.
What ties together the debate about Russian collusion, fake news and Fusion GPS is the implosion of the media. Much of the media is really in the business of ‘story laundering’ by rewriting talking points, smears and hit pieces from organizations like Fusion GPS. The readers get talking points served to them without ever knowing who actually produced them.
WHY PUTIN DOOMS THE RUSSIAN MILITARY
Russia’s only aircraft carrier is a rusting smokebucket
Soon after coming to power in 1998, Vladimir Putin made a colossal mistake. Not only has he refused, almost 20 years later, to correct his misjudgement, he has compounded it on many levels. Here’s why this is doom for the Russian military.
SAUDI ARABIA GETS ITS FIRST REAL GOVERNMENT
Why does the US, Russia, China, and Israel like this man?
A senior Chinese official complained to me a while ago that the Saudi royal family funds every radical madrassa in Xinjiang province, where Muslim Uyghurs of Turkish ethnicity form the majority.
I asked our Chinese hosts why they didn’t remonstrate with the Saudi government. The Chinese official said:
“We talk to the Saudis all the time, and they say they will have nothing to do with it. But this is not a government. It is a family! Some crazy cousin is always sending money to terrorists through informal finance channels.”Now it appears that Saudi Arabia has a government, thanks to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s weekend purge of the royal family (11/04). It is probably the only political event in recent memory that has the support of Washington, Moscow and Beijing, not to mention Berlin, London, Paris and Tokyo — as well as Jerusalem. Here’s why.
THE LEFT IS ON THE SIDE OF MOSLEM TERRORISTS NOT AMERICANS
Moslem Terrorist Sayfullo Saipov where he belongs
Earlier this year, a final settlement was reached in the war on the NYPD’s counterterrorist Islamic surveillance.
The Manhattan courtroom where the lawfare effort to dismantle the NYPD’s ability to stop terrorist attacks was heard is blocks away from the site of the latest Islamic terrorist attack in New York. I.e., yesterday, Oct 31.
The attack by the Moslem settler from Uzbekistan was almost identical to previous Car Jihad attacks in Europe. Right down to using a fake firearm. But New York City had avoided the non-stop terror wave that engulfed Paris and other European cities thanks to the hard work of the NYPD.
But every time the NYPD broke up an Islamic terror plot, the media and its leftist allies would howl that the racist police had entrapped another innocent mentally ill Moslem. Why are they on the terrorists’ side – always – and not America’s?
IS MUELLER RUNNING SCARED?
Yesterday (10/30) was quite the news day. Mueller indicted Paul Manafort, Richard Gates, a Manafort business partner, and George Papadopoulos. The latter two men are completely unknown to most Americans, very minor characters in this bit of political theater, akin to the fairy servants of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
After nearly a year, this is Mueller's big play? The results of a multi-million dollar "investigation" (witch hunt)? Sixteen hardcore Democrat lawyers on his staff and this is it? A big nothing that is essentially, as Andrew McCarthy wrote yesterday, "...not much there, a boon to Trump."
This is most likely just an overture. Mueller and his gang of lefty thug lawyers play hardball and will use every trick in their bag to get these men to betray others.
But what if there is nothing to betray? What if the only crooks are among the Democrat left? And one of them is Bobby Mueller himself?
TRUMP VINDICATED ON PARIS ACCORD SCAM
The United Nations has officially confirmed what many of us, including President Trump, knew already: the Paris climate accord was a complete waste of space.
As UN Environment admits in its latest Emissions Gap Report (10/31), even when you add up all the CO2 reduction pledges made by all the signatory nations at Paris, it still comes to only a third of what is supposedly necessary to stop the world warming by more than 2 degrees C by the end of this century.
According to UN Environment’s head Eric Solheim, the world is heading for disaster:
“One year after the Paris Agreement entered into force, we still find ourselves in a situation where we are not doing nearly enough to save hundreds of millions of people from a miserable future. Governments, the private sector and civil society must bridge this catastrophic climate gap.”Another way of looking at it, though, is that President Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris accord is now fully vindicated. He has saved America from the catastrophe the eco-fascists dream of.
INVESTIGATING THE INVESTIGATORS
Two culprits in need of investigation and prosecution
Despite having both an expansive budget and a large legal team, Special Investigator Robert Mueller likely will not find President Trump culpable for any Russian collusion—or at least no court or congressional vote would, even if Mueller recommends an indictment.
That likelihood becomes clearer as the Trump investigators—in Congress, in the Justice Department, and the legions in the media—begin to grow strangely silent about the entire collusion charge, as other scandals mount and crowd out the old empty story.
This news boomerang poses the obvious question—was the zeal of the original accusers of felony behavior with the Russian collusion merely an attempt at deflection? Was it designed to protect themselves from being accused of serious crimes?
The entire fiasco has boomeranged upon the Clintons, James Comey, Obama Admin officials Susan Rice and Samantha Power, Obama himself, and Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. Increasingly, it is turning out that they are the ones in need of being investigated.
THE LEFT’S HATRED OF MASCULINITY IS HATRED FOR CIVILIZED LIFE
The new film Only the Brave recounts the story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots, an elite unit of firefighters. Nineteen of this unit died fighting the Yarnell Hill fire in Arizona in 2013.
The men who sign up to be Hotshots train hard for the job of wildfire suppression. It is a grueling job, and the training for it is punishing. It is also a science; these men have to be both tough and smart. They choose to do it; they want to do it, and they take enormous pride in their work, especially their successes – saving homes or a thousand-year-old tree. They travel the country if needed.
When not working, the men are everything the American left abhors. But when there is a wildfire to be fought, they show up ready to risk their lives to save homes and forests. Their experience and their expertise are unique and probably grossly underappreciated, because most of us have never been aware of such teams of extraordinarily brave and well trained men.
Watching the film, it was hard not to think of Gen. John Kelly's remarks about the ridiculous media storm over President Trump's call to the widow of one of the soldiers killed in Niger.
SULTAN ERDOGAN AND HIS JIHADIST JANISSARIES
Western Europe and Washington are reluctant to fess up to this unfortunate fact:
Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan has long ago given up even the pretence of being a democratic polity and is openly pursuing policies detrimental to democracy, the rule of law and Western security considerations.
In short, Turkey has become an Islamist dictatorship every bit as inimical to Western interests as Iran, except for being allowed by the West to maintain the charade that it is still a member of NATO and the western community of nations.
The key to spreading Erdogan’s Islamist message is an organization called Diyanet, the Turkish directorate for religious affairs that is directly subordinated to him. Few if any western leaders have ever heard of it despite its importance. Here’s what you need to know. For the bottom line is that Turkey is now the key actor funding the radicalization of European Muslims.
ROAD RUNNER TRUMP VS. WILE E. COYOTE DEMOCRATS AND MEDIA
The Democrat Party, as it did after Hubert Humphrey’s close loss in 1968, seems still to be misdiagnosing its 2016 defeat.
Promoting Black Lives Matter and open borders, promising free tuition and tax hikes, opposing fracking and pipeline construction, pushing single-payer health care and an ever-expanding transgender agenda as well as abortion—these are not majority positions.
Neither will embracing Hollywood, the media, or the NFL protests win over voters. Thinking (or hoping) that President Trump will implode, quit, be jailed, sicken, die, or be impeached is not an agenda.
Barack Obama both weaponized and exempted Trump with the precedent of “pen and phone” executive orders and sermonizing on social and cultural issues and doing pop culture, from Ferguson and Trayvon Martin to the Final Four and GloZell. Trump wades into a controversy, tweets, outrages, and then moves on to the next day’s “controversy” or supposedly career-ending spat.
Fresh episodic targeting serves two purposes. Trump is a sort of Road Runner: gone to reply to the next provocation by the time his Wile E. Coyote critics can put their hands around his long-gone neck. The pushback against him is usually yesterday’s news drowned out by tomorrow’s new melodrama.
MUELLER MUST RESIGN AND WE CANNOT TRUST THE FBI ANYMORE
At the end of their lengthy editorial Tuesday (10/17) regarding the new Uranium One revelations -- "Team Obama's stunning coverup of Russian crimes" -- the New York Post editorial board writes:
“Until September 2013, the FBI director was Robert Mueller — who’s now the special counsel probing Russian meddling in the 2016 election. It’s hard to see how he can be trusted in that job unless he explains what he knew about this Obama-era cover-up.”
I'll go the Post one better. Virtually whatever Mueller has to say about his involvement or non-involvement in this metastasizing scandal, he must recuse himself immediately for the most obvious reasons of propriety and appearance.
Frankly, it's outrageous that he, Ron Rosenstein, or anyone who even touched the Uranium One investigation now be involved with the current probe -- unless the real name of the FBI is actually the NKVD (Stalin’s Secret Police). This is not how a democracy is supposed to work, even remotely. Forget transparency -- this was deliberate occlusion.
HOW DEEP IS MUELLER INVOLVED IN THE CLINTON-RUSSIA SCANDAL?
Contrary to the Left's favorite narrative, any Russia scandal has always been worse for Hillary Clinton than for Donald Trump. Recent revelations confirmed this Tuesday (10/17), and even implicated the special prosecutor at the center of the Trump-Russia investigation, former FBI director Robert Mueller.
In 2010, the Obama administration approved a controversial deal giving Russian company Rosatom partial control of Canadian mining company Uranium One (and with it 20 percent of U.S. uranium), just as Russians paid former president Bill Clinton for speeches and Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State.
To make matters worse, the FBI had already gathered evidence of Russian corruption in the U.S. but kept it secret just when it would have mattered most, The Hill reported Tuesday.
A confidential U.S. witness working in the Russian nuclear industry helped federal agents gather financial records, make secret recordings, and intercept email starting in 2009 that showed Moscow had compromised U.S. trucking company Transport Logistics International, in violation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Officials also acquired documents and an eyewitness account corroborating earlier reports that Russian officials had routed million of dollars into the U.S. to benefit the Clinton Foundation just as Hillary Clinton served on the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which endorsed the Uranium One deal.
FBI Director Mueller sat on all the damning information and did nothing. And the information is damning in the extreme.
HARVEY WEINSTEN EPITOMIZES LIBERAL VALUES
Of all the sordid details to emerge thus far from the burgeoning Harvey Weinstein scandal, there’s one that creeps me out above all else.
Not all the revolting scenes of sexual abuse. I mean the one right near the beginning of the scandal, where he announced how he was going to make everything better:
“I am going to need a place to channel my anger so I’ve decided I’m going to give the NRA my full attention.”
Let us pause awhile to relish that moment, because I don’t think history will ever provide us with a better example of what’s wrong not just with Hollywood in particular, but with liberalism in general.
I’m not in any way wishing to play down the awfulness of the suffering experienced by those young women. But what I am saying that their individual stories of hardship are a drop in the ocean when set against the damage that powerful figures like Weinstein and the “liberal” agenda they represent have done to our broader culture.
On race, on gender, on sexual politics, on the Constitution, on the environment, on welfare, on immigration, on the economy, there’s not a corner of human existence in the U.S and beyond that hasn’t been meddled with and changed for the worse by the liberal “values” so aggressively championed by people like Weinstein.
THE GAMES PUTIN IS PLAYING
The decision of United States President Donald Trump not to certify the fact that Iran is duly implementing the provisions of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) has brought to light the Byzantine games Putin is playing regarding Iran, Saudi Arabia, the EU, Ukraine, North Korea and of course with America.
He thinks he can leverage Trump’s decision to his great benefit. He sees himself as a master geostrategist. But it may all backfire. Here’s why.
WHY COLUMBUS SAILED
[This is an interview of Dr. Carol Delaney, renowned Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Stanford University, with Columbia Online regarding her book, Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem: How Religion Drove the Voyages that Led to America on Oct. 6]
You argue that most people misunderstand the purpose of Columbus’ voyage. According to your research, what were his motivations?
Everybody knows that Columbus was trying to find gold, but they don’t know what the gold was for: to fund a crusade to take Jerusalem back from the Muslims before the end of the world.
A lot of people at the time thought that the apocalypse was coming because of all the signs: the plague, famine, earthquakes and so forth. And it was believed that before the end, Jerusalem had to be back in Christian hands so that Christ could return in judgment.
The popular view today is that Columbus is responsible for countless atrocities against the native peoples. In your opinion, is this a fair assessment?
No, not at all. The late 20th century brought a lot of critique about him from the perspective of the natives, and Columbus has become a symbol for everything that went wrong. But the more I read of his own writings and that of his contemporaries, my understanding of him totally changed.
His relations with the natives tended to be benign. He liked the natives and found them to be very intelligent. Columbus strictly told the crew not to do things like maraud, or rape, and instead to treat the native people with respect. There are many examples in his writings where he gave instructions to this effect.
TRUMP TO CEASE OBAMA’S STUPID, JOB KILLING, CLEAN POWER PLAN
President Trump is to take his first step towards scrapping President Obama’s “stupid” and “job killing” Clean Power Plan, an aghast New York Times reports.
The Trump administration will repeal the Clean Power Plan, the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s effort to fight climate change, and will ask the public to recommend ways it could be replaced, according to an internal Environmental Protection Agency document.
The draft proposal represents the administration’s first substantive step toward rolling back the plan, which was designed to curb greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector, after months of presidential tweets and condemnations of Mr. Obama’s efforts to reduce climate-warming pollution.
But it also lays the groundwork for new, presumably weaker, regulations by asking for the public and industry to offer ideas for a replacement.
WHY THE MEDIA COVERED FOR HARVEY WEINSTEIN
Best friends Meryl Streep and Harvey Weinstein
Everyone knew Harvey Weinstein was a bad guy. The bloated, greasy movie mogul slimed his way through countless ballrooms, suites and restaurants trailing lies, threats and promises.
But he had the right politics.
At the 100th anniversary of Planned Parenthood, honoring Hillary Clinton, the recently defeated candidate, drinks named “Toxic Masculinity” were being served. Also on the scene was Harvey Weinstein. And Harvey had his thick wallet open to the tune of $100K for the abortion organization.
Harvey was sitting with Hillary. Not to mention Meryl Streep and Shonda Rimes. The A-list celebs in attendance knew exactly what and who Harvey was. His habits were no secret.
But his money was good. And his connections were even better. Does anyone even need to ask why nobody would run the story?
THE GUN CONTROL CONVERSATION
After Vegas, the gun control memes and myths come out. It doesn't matter how wrong they are, they will echo in the mediasphere and then the talking points will leak into everyday conversations.
“Guns are uniquely lethal.”
Last year, a Muslim terrorist with a truck killed 86 people and wounded another 458.
Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, the Tunisian Muslim killer, had brought along a gun, but it proved largely ineffective. The deadliest weapon of the delivery driver was a truck. Mohammed, who was no genius, used it to kill more people than Stephen Paddock would with all his meticulous planning in Vegas.
Do we need truck control?
WHY PUTIN’S GOAL FOR RUSSIA IS STAGNATION
Saudi King Salman and Putin at the Kremlin
The “historic” trip of King Salman bin Abdulaziz al Saud to Moscow, last week (October 4–7) was an affair long on ceremony, featuring a massive delegation, but rather uncertain regarding the real results.
The first ever royal visit (which had been rescheduled several times) was supposed to have great significance for relations between Russia and Saudi Arabia, at least in terms of removing mutual reservations against often incompatible political ends and paving the way for expanding economic ties.
In fact, the meeting achieved nothing whatever of significance – other than demonstrating the shocking degree to which Mr. Putin has given up taking Russia into the 21st century, and has chosen stagnation for Russia as his goal.