THE PAPER CIVIL WAR ON TRUMP
The original Civil War was fought by farmhands and factory workers, freed slaves and young boys turned soldiers; the new Civil War is being fought by lawyers in blue or gray suits not with bullets, but with bullet points.
From the Mueller investigation to Federal judges declaring that President Trump doesn’t have the right to control immigration policy or command the military, the cold civil war set off by the Left’s rejection of the 2016 election results has been a paper war largely waged by lawyers.
The left’s legal civil war appears to reject the authority of the Federal government. Yet despite the posturing, blue staters aren’t serious about seceding. Nor have they become newfound converts to the rights of states to go their own way when they disagree with DC.
New York and California’s #resistance apparatchiks aren’t rejecting the authority of Federal judges. They’re turning to them and relying on them. Instead they’re rejecting the authority of elected Federal officials. Their secession isn’t from the Federal government, it’s from democracy. They want a strong central government. They just aren’t willing to allow the American people to decide who gets to run it.
That’s what the Paper Civil War is about.
THE DEATH RATTLE OF OBAMA’S REPUTATION
The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual.
Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented. It is not.
James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.” He isn’t.
Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democrat president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”
It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs. As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out.
A TRUMP-REAGAN DOCTRINE FOR IRAN
Iran’s geopolitical ascent is the most significant and dangerous development in the Middle East this century.
But while the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy properly identifies Iran as among the important challenges to U.S. security interests, it doesn’t offer a concrete strategy on how to counter Iran’s growing regional power.
President Trump should follow the example of President Reagan, who pursued an offensive strategy to undermine the Soviet Union that included supporting indigenous anti-communist insurgents around the globe: the Reagan Doctrine.
Today, America should support indigenous forces that oppose – and seek independence from – Iranian domination: a Trump-Reagan Doctrine.
THE DRUG TRAFFICKING TERRORIST SPONSORING PRESIDENT
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF CHRISTMAS
I hope you had the Merriest of Christmases yesterday, Monday December 25, but according to the song, the First Day of Christmas is the day after Christmas, December 26. That’s today.
Ancient Christians celebrated Christmas starting with the day after the birth of Jesus and ending on January 6th with the visit of the Magi in Matthew 2:11 known as the Epiphany.
Start with 12/26 and end with 1/6 and you get: the Twelve Days of Christmas.
No doubt you’re really tired of hearing Christmas songs by now, including this one, yet you may still be wondering what the heck partridges in a pear tree and eight maids a-milking have to do with the birth of the founder of Christianity.
So I thought it might be entertaining, as we recover from the festivities, to take a look at the song’s origin, meaning, and myth. For all of the song’s twelve gifts are Christian symbols.
HALF-FULL REPORT 12/22/17
Welcome to the Merry Christmas HFR! Christmas 2017 is the Merriest that America has had in a very long time. Certainly the Merriest for all conservatives, patriots, and those who love America. That’s because…
For the Losers who want America to fail, it’s a Forrest Gump Christmas, because as Forrest so wisely observed, “Stupid is as stupid does.” Or as the POTUS puts it…
Welcome to the merriest, winningest, and funnest HFR in modern memory.
“YOU’RE MEN, AIN’T YA?”
At the bar, a townsman says, “Shame what this town’s come to.” Costner responds, “You can do something about it.”
The townsman is frightened at the prospect, objecting, “We’re freighters, Ralph here’s a shopkeeper.”
Costner looks at him with disgust: “You’re men, ain’t ya?”
The townsman, defensively: “I didn’t raise my boys just to see ‘em killed.”
Costner: “Well, you may not know this, but there are things that gnaw on a man worse than dying.”
At the end of Open Range, Costner and Duvall alone face the kingpin and all his henchmen. Their courage in the ensuing gunfight inspires the townspeople to join the two grazers in gunning down the evil that had plagued them.
That is what Trump is doing for America. Politics is downstream of culture, so they say. Not for Trump. As uniquely befits him, Trump is going in reverse – changing our politics will change our culture.
THE TROUT IN THE MILK
There is strong circumstantial evidence that an insidious plot unprecedented in American history was hatched within the FBI and the Obama Justice Department to help elect Hillary Clinton and defeat Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election.
And when this apparent effort to improperly influence the election did not succeed, the suspected conspirators appear to have employed a fraudulent investigation of President Trump in an attempt to undo the election results and remove him as president.
Such a plot would show that partisans within the FBI and the Justice Department, driven by personal animus and a sense of political righteousness, surreptitiously conspired to subvert electoral democracy itself in our country.
As of now, we have no proof beyond a reasonable doubt of such a plot. But we have very strong circumstantial evidence.
And as the philosopher and writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in his journal in 1850: “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
NOW, THIS IS PRESIDENTIAL OBSTRUCTION
What if a president used his power to interfere with a federal investigation involving foreign powers committing serious crimes in the United States as well as elsewhere?
Such a thing would be considered a terrible scandal and, no doubt, lead to a federal probe by a special counsel who would be expected to get to the bottom of such a mess.
But if you think this is a reference to the investigation led by Robert Mueller into possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 campaign and obstruction of justice once President Trump took office, you’re wrong.
While proof that the Trump campaign actually plotted with Russia still has yet to be presented, evidence of another scandal involving President Barack Obama and Hezbollah, Iran and the Russians has just been uncovered in an investigative story by Politico yesterday (12/18).
The tale involves an administration decision to spike Project Cassandra, a federal probe into international drug smuggling, money laundering and terrorism by Hezbollah. The conclusion is inescapable: the President of the United States willfully on purpose aided and abetted terrorists and drug-smuggling.
MIDNIGHT AT THE DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKESS CAFÉ
The Democracy Dies in Darkness Café is located conveniently near the Capitol, the Hill and the FBI headquarters. It’s open all night and I stopped in for a late-night coffee with my friend, a fiction novelist who was depressed.
“I spent a year writing about a coup attempt against an outsider who by strategic brilliance defeated the handpicked candidate of a cabal of establishment powerhouses” he explained. “It involved the highest officials of the FBI and Department of Justice. They manipulated a FISA Court into letting them electronically surveil the candidate and all who worked with him, unmasked their names, leaked what they found, and they still couldn’t beat him.”
“Sounds great,” I said, so why are you depressed?”
He sighed. “Every publisher I sent it to rejected it as being too implausible to sell to readers.”
It was hard to talk much as the place was rocking. There was a private room to the side, packed with white collar criminal defense counsels drinking champagne and downing tenderloin. Every single one of them had fat retainers to defend the accused, the top brass of the FBI and former Department of Justice officials.