Left's Unhinged Response To Trump Tax Cut Reveals Their Real Fear: What If It Works?

Terry Jones

The Investor’s Business Daily Editorial

December 24, 2017

As tax cuts become a reality, Democrats have gone ballistic, claiming that the GOP's sweeping tax plan will rob the middle class and the poor, line the pockets of the rich, and tank the economy. It's all false, class-warfare claptrap, and they know it.

Following passage of the Republican tax reform, Democrat politicians and leftist media celebrities have become nearly unhinged, and that may be an understatement.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi called the tax cuts a "scam" and "simply theft, monumental, brazen theft from the American middle class and from every person who aspires to reach it." She added that it was "not a vote for an investment in growth or jobs," but "a vote to install a permanent plutocracy in our nation." Plutocracy?

Not to be outdone, former Democratic presidential candidate and millionaire socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont called it "a great day for the Koch brothers and other billionaire Republican campaign contributors who will see huge tax breaks for themselves while driving up the deficit by almost $1.5 trillion."

Celebrity leftists fared no better. "Woman, mother, grandmother, sister, daughter, you have betrayed us all," former comedian and TV host Rosie O'Donnell tweeted at Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who voted for the tax cut plan. "Dear god, ask for forgiveness, redeem your soul tomorrow."

She even offered her $2 million in cash to vote "no."This is how desperate the left has become, and how divorced from reality. For all the talk of how tax cuts will line the pockets of the rich and destroy the economy, virtually no one in the mainstream of the economics profession, left or right, agrees.

The Tax Policy Center (TPC), a liberal think tank, noted that more than 80% of Americans will get tax cuts under the plan just passed. And the benefits will go to every income group, not "billionaires." This, by the way, is bolstered by other recent analyses by Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation and by the widely respected nonpartisan Tax Foundation.

TPC estimates an average tax cut of about $2,140 per person. By the way, some 16% of the richest Americans — those in the top 0.1% of incomes — will face an average tax increase of $387,610.

Brian Riedl of the Manhattan Institute, further crunching the TPC numbers, found that while the top 1% of incomes now pay 27% of all federal taxes, they will get just 21% of the tax cuts. The bottom 80%, including the middle class, pays only 33% of all taxes, but will take home 35% of the tax cuts.

Of the 12% who will face tax hikes, they're overwhelmingly among the rich — not the middle class.

So, no, it's not "tax cuts for the rich." That's a totally bogus argument.

For that matter, so are the arguments that tax cuts tank the economy. History is replete with examples of why that isn't true.

The tax cuts on corporations and small, pass-through businesses, along with letting companies immediately expense the cost of new equipment, should lead to more business investment. So should shrinking the death tax, which should encourage more small-business investment.

How much more is an open question, but the Heritage Foundation, which employs a widely used economic model, estimates that the tax cuts will tack on 2.2% to long-term GDP, or roughly $3,000 per household.

That estimate includes a 4.5% jump in capital investment, mainly in equipment, and a hefty 9.4% gain in business structures. Along with expected rises in both the number of jobs and hours worked, after-tax wages for the average worker will be 3.5% higher than they would have been without the tax cuts.

Others see more modest, yet still significant, gains. The Tax Foundation, for instance, forecasts a long-term permanent rise of 1.7% in GDP and 1.5% for wages. It also sees 339,000 new jobs.

These aren't pie-in-the sky guesses. As history clearly shows, growth-oriented tax cuts such as these almost always have major benefits for the economy and for average workers. During the 20th century, big tax cuts in the 1920s (Harding, Coolidge), 1960s (Kennedy) and 1980s (Reagan) all yielded major growth dividends for the U.S. economy.

What's more, those past major tax cuts were to varying degrees bipartisan. Sadly, not this time. Not one Democrat voted for them. Not one.

That's why the Democrats and progressive left have become so utterly unhinged. They've failed to stop the one thing that might deny them a chance to retake both houses of Congress in the 2018 midterm elections: an economic boom.

When the economy really begins cooking, with the economy growing close to 3%, hundreds of thousands of new jobs being created and workers seeing more in their paychecks, how will they explain that to their constituents?

Obama Lies vs. Trump Lies

How quickly NY Times forgets Obama's lies and frauds
James Bovard
The Hill
December 18, 2017

Donald Trump has been flogging the truth and twisting facts since the day he arrived in the Oval Office. But anyone who expected more candor from him as president than on the campaign trail was criminally naive. The real mystery nowadays is why the media seeks to expunge the falsehoods of prior presidents.

“Trump’s Lies versus Obama’s” was the headline in a Sunday Review New York Times piece aiming to drive a final coffin nail into Trump’s credibility. The Times claimed Trump has already “told nearly six times as many falsehoods as Obama did during his entire (8-year) presidency.” The columnists seem so distraught that it is surprising the article is not in all caps.

But the Times’ list of falsehoods is itself a charade with gaping Montana-sized holes.

Has the Times forgotten about Edward Snowden? Obama responded to Snowden’s stunning revelations of the National Security Agency’s vacuuming up millions of Americans’ personal data by going on the Jay Leno Show and proclaiming: “There is no spying on Americans.” But NSA’s definition of “terrorist suspect” was so ludicrously broad that it includes anyone “searching the web for suspicious stuff” (maybe including presidential lies). Obama’s verbal defenses of NSA spying collapsed like a row of houses of cards.

In early 2009, Obama visited Mexico and, in a spiel calling for the renewal of the assault weapon ban, asserted that “more than 90 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States.” This vastly overstated the actual problem, since that statistic measured only firearms that Mexican authorities sent to the U.S. for tracing.

His administration then acted as if 90 percent was a goal, not a lie, launching a secret Fast and Furious gunwalking operation masterminded by the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agency, deluging Mexican drug gangs with high-powered weapons. At least 150 Mexicans were killed by guns illegally sent south of the border with Obama administration approval.

Obama’s animosity to the Second Amendment spurred some of his most farcical whoppers. In July 2016, Obama asserted: “We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.” Glocks are the Lexus of handguns, and a person could buy hundreds of volumes of used books via Amazon for the price of a Glock.

A year earlier, Obama bewailed “neighborhoods where it’s easier for you to buy a handgun and clips than it is for you to buy a fresh vegetable.” Obama never offered a single example of a locale where carrots are rarer than .38 Specials. But his false claim helped frighten clueless suburbanites to support Obama’s anti-gun agenda.

The Times column lists only one Obama falsehood on the Affordable Care Act: “If you like your doctor, you'll be able to keep your doctor; if you like your health care plan, you'll be able to keep your health care plan.” Obama’s dozens of variations and recitals of this lie were disregarded. The Times also ignored the fact that the ObamaCare legislation was carefully crafted to con Congress and the public. As its intellectual godfather, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, explained:

“Lack of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically, that was really, really critical to get this thing to pass.”

To revile Trump, the column also struggles mightily to resurrect George W. Bush’s credibility. The Times concedes that Bush sought to justify attacking Iraq “by talking about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist.” This vastly understates the role of official deceit in hustling that war.

In early 2003, Bush’s speeches continually warned, “If war is forced upon us....” There was never any truth to war being “forced upon us” (except by the White House) but that phrase helped Bush panic audiences still jittery after 9/11. The Center for Public Integrity, which has won two Pulitzer Prizes, compiled a list of 935 lies by Bush and his top appointees on Iraq. Perhaps to preserve the column’s lofty tone, the Times omitted any mention of Bush’s four years of brazenly false denials of authorizing a worldwide torture regime.

The Times’ comparison of Trump and other presidents implies that all lies are equally damnable. The Times ignored all the Obama false promises used to justify his troop surge in Afghanistan (which resulted in more than a thousand dead American troops with nothing to show for the sacrifice) and bombing Libya (which now has slave markets). But killing vast numbers of human beings should require more due diligence than assertions on federal spending for peanut subsidies.

The Times asserts that Trump is seeking to “to make truth irrelevant,” which “is extremely damaging to democracy.” But democracy has also been subverted by the media’s long history of ignoring or absolving presidential lies. For more than a century, the press has groveled the worst when presidents dragged the nation into the biggest perils.

Trump’s lies deserve to be exposed and condemned. But Bush’s and Obama’s lies help explain why only 20 percent of Americans trusted the federal government at the end of Obama’s reign. Pretending America recently had a Golden Age of honest politicians encourages the delusion that toppling Trump is all that is necessary to make the federal government great again.

James Bovard is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and many other publications. He is the author of 10 books, including “Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty” (St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 

A successful year for President Trump

In case you have not heard (and where would you hear it anyway?), President Trump has had a very successful year. Conrad Black provides an excellent summary.

Ho, Ho, Ho. Jolly Good Year Shapes Up for Trump In Defiance of Doomsayers

Conrad Black

The New York Sun

December 19, 2017

Those who are still predicting that Donald Trump will be impeached and removed from office are now like exotic and endangered creatures. It is like an absurdly slow dance, in which the steps are so infrequent and tentative that it is hard to remember how far participants have come since the music started.

Two years ago, virtually the entire commentariat, and most of its readers and listeners, were splitting their sides at the gigantic impending farce of the Trump candidacy for the Republican nomination. Eighteen months ago, those same people had almost entirely shifted their immense mirth to the mighty Hillary Clinton avalanche that was already starting to rumble down whatever it was that President Obama renamed Mount McKinley.

The BBC was asking itself (i.e., its viewers, including any Americans watching its World Service) whether Mr. Trump was going to pull out then, to avoid the unprecedented thrashing he was about to receive at the polls (which none of the polls, even the more rabidly anti-Trump polls, then predicted). Wacky leftist filmmaker Michael Moore, with the unshakeable confidence in mind-reading that seems never to desert such people, announced that Trump would quit because he never wanted or expected to be nominated, and it was all a joke that had got out of hand.

These were not unrepresentative opinions. Mr. Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama, the national press, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley. Of course the Trump campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.

On Election Night, Nobel prize-winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.) The alarms about effective Russian intervention in the election and the confected creation of the Trump collusion myth were born with indecent haste.

The ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mark Warner of Virginia, was soon solemnly announcing that there had been a thousand Russian agents actively assisting the Trump campaign in key swing states and that they had delivered Wisconsin, a complete fabrication (if he really believed this whopper, I have some oceanside property in Oklahoma to sell him).

A year ago, efforts were still underway on recounts, especially in Wisconsin (which resulted in increasing Trump’s margin of victory by 131 votes), and there was national television advertising, costing millions of dollars, directed at the 306 people who had been chosen to cast Electoral College presidential votes for Trump, to break their pledges. (Seven electors did so and voted for third candidates, but five of the defectors were from Mrs. Clinton.)

Plans were underway to disrupt the inauguration, and engage in widespread civil disobedience; the new Democratic National Committee chairman pledged “scorched earth” obstruction; Bruce Springsteen, singing to bemused Antipodeans in Perth, Australia, crooned, “We are the Resistance”; Madonna (who had generated a slight rise in Trump’s poll numbers by promising to fellate wavering male voters who went for Hillary Clinton) spoke of wanting to “blow up the White House.”

Veteran black-activist congressman John Lewis said President Trump was “illegitimate,” and the ancient and unfeasible congresswoman Maxine Waters screamed “Impeach 45,” for causes that would become apparent as the process proceeded. Talk shortly turned to that option.

As the president and his wife and party left Washington on May 19 for Saudi Arabia, Israel, the Vatican, and Brussels, ABC political commentator Nate Silver rated the chances of impeachment at between 25% and 50%, and David Gergen — a former assistant to Presidents Reagan and Clinton, and a knowledgeable man until he joined CNN and was infected by acute Blitzeritis — said, “We are moving into impeachment territory.”

A long sequence of crises was fanned by the Trumpophobic press: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer and the Statue of Liberty were (according to Mr. Schumer) weeping over the fate of Yemenis and Libyans not allowed onto aircraft bound for the United States. The president’s expressed thought over the Charlottesville riot — that Antifa and the extreme section of Black Lives Matter that applauded the killing of white policemen might be as odious as the Klan and American neo-Nazis — was proof that Mr. Trump was a quasi-genocidal racist and apologist for slavery.

Mr. Trump virtually dismantled NATO by not specifically mentioning the collective-security clause in his speech there; was signing the death warrant of the planet when he pulled out of the asinine Paris Climate Agreement; was going to blow up the world with Kim Jong Un; and so forth, ad nauseam.

All the while, the Russian-collusion fraud festered and grew, born of Clintonian denial and frenzied finger-pointing, and reinforced by the Steele dossier — a pastiche of scurrilous gossip and malice from the most dubious sources, including in the Kremlin, cited by Mrs. Clinton in her absurd memoir of the election as proof of her opponent’s treason.

Mrs. Clinton writes how she was betrayed by the country and most people in it, but not by the husband with whom she has enjoyed a storybook Pleasantville marriage. It only emerged after the publication of her book that Mrs. Clinton’s campaign had commissioned the Steele dossier, and had spent $10 million on it from Democratic campaign funds. (According to former party chair Donna Brazile, Mrs. Clinton had rigged the nomination from her rival Bernie Sanders.)

The Clinton campaign desperately shopped the Steele dossier to the American press in the last days of the campaign. This was the all-time dirty trick of U.S. political history, and when the rock was lifted and she was exposed as the sponsor of it, Mrs. Clinton instantly switched gears and called it “campaign information.”

This last year, after the year of his nomination and election, has been the second round of Donald Trump’s war to crush and expel the American political establishment. This year he has won over the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to toil in the enactment of his program.

Together they have achieved the greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80 percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4% GDP growth next year.

The Obama apologetics that a flatlined economy with a shrunken work force and a burgeoning multitude of Medicaid-sedated idleness was the new normal has been debunked; it is the abnormal recent past.

For all of these and many similar reasons, the assertions of even fair-minded and perceptive commentators that Mr. Trump has done poorly in holding only between 37% and 40% popular approval is mistaken. Considering the sustained assault of 90% of the press, in which the normal honeymoon for a new president has been replaced by a daily press assassination squad, he has done well.

In the post-Watergate era of the criminalization of policy differences, instead of waiting a while before firing the nuclear option as accusers had with Nixon, Reagan, and President Clinton, Mr. Trump’s enemies fired this blockbuster after a few months. Undismayed, he has ripped open the facade of the Justice Department and the FBI and exposed morally corrupt hacks within, while heaping praise on the FBI rank and file.

At year’s end, his enemies, battered and almost unrecognizable from reruns of their gamecock assurance of a year, let alone two years, ago, are reduced to the shabby jobbery of claiming he is about to fire the special counsel. Mr. Trump has cooperated entirely with the special counsel, who has illegally seized evidence from the General Services Administration, recruited and tolerated hysterically anti-Trump people on his staff, and relied on the unspeakable Steele dossier, while a senior Justice Department official has been caught red-handed in improper contact with Steele, with whom the official’s wife worked during the election preparing the anti-Trump dossier.

Donald Trump was a joke until nominated, unelectable until elected, incompetent until he succeeded on most fronts, and about to be impeached until he debunked the collusion nonsense; he has had a very successful year. His enemies have been weighed in the balance and they have been found wanting. They shall have their reward. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all readers, especially the president and Mrs. Trump.

Irwin M. Stelzer

The Weekly Standard

July 9, 2017

Why Do the Europeans Hate Trump?

America, the New York Times groans (chortles?), was "ostracized" by the other G20 countries at the recently concluded meeting in Hamburg. And with Angela Merkel leading the band of ostracizers. And on not one but three issues: immigration, climate change, and trade. These are all worth examining in turn.

Let's start with immigration. Led by Chancellor Merkel (and contrary to the wishes of many members of the European Union) Germany welcomed 1 million largely Muslim immigrants—many with no identification, some with forged passports, most in need of all the welfare state could provide.

The resulting clash of civilizations has made it unsafe in major German cities for women to enjoy an unmolested evening stroll, or a street celebration on holidays. It seems that the immigrants' attitude towards women, or at least the attitude of enough of them, is not quite consistent with the values Ms. Merkel preaches. And the unity of the European Union is fractured by the fact that, having rolled out the welcome mat, its partners-in-union have left Italy to bear most of the costs.

Compare that with President Trump's efforts to bring illegal immigration into the United States to an end, and to prevent terrorists from entering. Better to be ostracized for that than to follow Merkel's policy of putting her citizens at risk.

Being ostracized for having withdrawn from the Paris climate deal seems a price worth paying: The deal is unenforceable. The signatories can change the plans to which they have agreed at any time. And even if they all keep to their promises—something Germany and most other NATO countries have refused to do when it comes to funding their obligations—the effect on emissions and temperatures will be insufficient to prevent the predicted disasters.

All of this while China continues to increase its emissions and fund coal plants all over the world, some 700 of them, Germany's emissions rise, and Merkel's fatherland relies increasingly on lignite to keep the lights on. America, on the other hand, has decided on an energy policy that is allowing the market to do what regulation could not, or at least not as efficiently. Thanks to investor and consumer groups, and to the federal system established by our Founding Fathers, thousands of private sector players and local and state government are finding ways to reduce emissions, efficiently.

Finally, Trump has caused us to be ostracized by Merkel & Co. by adopting a protectionist trade policy. That policy consists of calling for renegotiation of antiquated trade agreements, and perhaps imposing penalties on imported steel, which the European Union also alleges is being dumped. Meanwhile, Germany continues to run large trade surpluses, in part because for it the euro is an undervalued currency that is immiserating the south of Europe and allowing its manufacturers to steal a march on competing countries.

To be ostracized by a group that has forfeited civil peace so that its well-protected elites can bask in the glow of its kindness to immigrants, and, of course, have access to cheap labor; that extols the virtues of the Paris accord while increasing emissions; that has a leading member that makes China's currency manipulation look like small-time trade distortion? It's more of an honor than an embarrassment.

The G20 that wants nothing to do with us, that finds our president so offensive, that finds its values so superior to ours, might want to replace the emergency auto-dial White House number with some other number the next time Vladimir Putin gets stroppy. After all, the European Union has three presidents of its very own—in Italy, Poland and Luxembourg. Surely they'll be able to take the call.

Lawrence Meyers

Townhall

July 5, 2017

Why They Hate Trump So Much

One of the reasons the Leftists are so angry at President Trump isn’t so much because he won, even though Leftists are incapable of being gracious losers. It’s that they were told that the Second Coming of Typhoid Mary would occur, and like all children, are mad that Papa CNN and Mama MSNBC were wrong.

See what I did there? They aren’t angry that CNN and MSNBC and the entire Democrat Media Complex lied to them, but that they were wrong. Which is, of course, how they are still able to hold their Parental Media Betters in high regard, even as CNN implodes.

Every day since the election, then, Leftists have tried everything under the sun to de-legitimize a duly-elected president. He didn’t win the popular vote! “Not My President”! Find faithless electors! Impeach him! More than 50 classless Democrats boycotted the inauguration. And, of course, the “Russian hacking” claims.

(Which reminds me, what exactly are those claims? That the Russians somehow interfered with the election? You mean the way Barack Obama did in Israel, or some other way? It’s also a bit odd because I should think Putin would have been on Team I’m With Her, because her failures as Secretary of State would make her a pushover compared to a dealmaker like Trump.)

Thus, we witnessed the first stage of the Kübler-Ross grief cycle, hallmarked by avoidance of the truth (he won), confusion (that he won), fear (that he was Hitler and would club baby seals), numbness (the faces on network anchors were gold), and blame (those stupid Americans, like 83,000 unemployed coal workers, who voted for him).

The hate being blasted at Trump is partially the result of stage two: anger. Oh, the frustration, anxiety, and irritation are non-stop. Leftists and the media are calling him every name in the book. They focus on every single thing he says or does, in a way they never did with George W. Bush, and certainly never did with Dear Leader.

Yet it’s more than just the stages of grief that Leftists are exhibiting. Another major reason they hate him is because he fights back. Not only that, he is skilled at media jiu-jitsu, and fights back in an effective manner. And when he does so, all they can do is call him even more names, and that his tweets are “un-presidential”

What did they expect? Trump is a New Yorker, who didn’t build an empire by wearing a pink pussy hat to every real estate closing. Trump has always been a pugilist. He’s always been crass. Why would anyone expect him to suddenly change? This is the behavior that got him into the White House, and will keep him there, for better or for worse.

Remember that scene in “The Untouchables”, where Sean Connery is educating Kevin Costner on how to get Al Capone? “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue”. That’s Trump, and Leftists are mad that they keep ending up in the morgue.

Look at the brilliant CNN-WWE tweet. CNN was caught red-handed in yet another hilariously embarrassing bust by James O’Keefe. CNN isn’t even pretending to not be the ultimate Fake News Network anymore. And Trump crushed them. It was a knockout punch, judging by the hysteria (the foam-at-the-mouth-why-so-serious-hysteria), especially at CNN.

They scream and yell, “how can a president say such a thing?”

Well, because you’ve called him Hitler, fascist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, man-child – and there are a lot more. However, Trump is so hated that when I tried to Google “nasty things said about Trump”, I get scores of results about the worst things Trump has said. Nice to see that Google isn’t manipulating results. That fine. Here’s what “comedian” Samantha Bee has said. Oh, and here’s a delightful list from the Mad-Pussy-Hatters at Jezebel. May as well throw these in for good measure.

Leftists call his wife a “whore”, and run around with signs saying “rape Melania”. They hold up his bloody and severed head as a “joke”, call for his assassination as a “joke”, call his 10-year-old son a rapist and autistic and a homeschool shooter, and they are suddenly claiming the moral high ground?

This is why they hate him so much. Because despite doing everything they can think of, Trump is still standing. Then he punches back. His blows are surgical and hilarious. They take next to no effort, while the Left is literally expending all its energy and having no impact. He’s using the media’s own tools against it. He’s using social media – the Great Equalizer – against them. He’s using Alinsky against them. He’s kicking them when they’re down.

And the more he fights back, the more the Left rages…and the more the media exposes themselves as being utterly corrupt, and how truly hateful the Left has become. Nor is this a fringe element. This is the Left. They are putting on a show for all to see, and are too stupid to realize that everyday Americans are paying attention. You think Democrat losses in 2016 were bad? Just wait.

I can only hope that stage three – depression and detachment -- will never arrive. It will be much less entertaining if the Leftist all just shut up.

Some thoughts not often heard or expressed

The Conservative ‘Resistance’ Is Futile

The right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

By David Gelernter

Wall Street Journal

July 5, 2017

Democrats, in their role as opponents of President Trump, have taken to calling themselves “the resistance.” But I was startled a few days ago when a thoughtful, much-admired conservative commentator used the same term on TV—casually, as if “the resistance” was just the obvious term. Everyone is saying it. It’s no accident that the left runs American culture. The right is too obsessed with mere mechanics—poll numbers and vote counts—to look up.

“Resistance” is unacceptable in referring to the Trump opposition because, obviously, it suggests the Resistance—against the Nazis in occupied France. Many young people are too ignorant to recognize the term, but that hardly matters. The press uses it constantly. So when a young innocent finally does encounter the genuine French Resistance, he will think, “Aha, just like the resistance to Trump!” And that’s all the left wants: a mild but continuous cultural breeze murmuring in every American ear that opposing Trump is noble and glorious. Vive la Résistance!

This abuse of “the resistance” happens everywhere. Many Republicans hate Mr. Trump and love to denounce him—which lets them show their integrity and, sometimes, a less-praiseworthy attribute too.

Many intellectuals think Mr. Trump is vulgar. That includes conservatives. They think he’s a peasant and talks like one. Every time he opens his mouth, all they hear is a small-time Queens operator who struck it big but has never had a proper education, and embarrasses the country wherever he goes, whatever he says. It never dawns on them that the president can’t stand them any more than they can stand him. Yet they expect him to treat them with respectful courtesy if he ever runs into them—as he should, and on the whole does. Conceivably they should treat him the same way.

Conservatives regret the collapse of authority, dignity and a certain due formality in the way Americans treat each other. They are right to complain when any president diminishes his office. Mr. Trump ought to think more seriously about what he owes the great men among his predecessors, and the office itself. But it’s not clear that commentators make things any better when they treat the president himself like a third-rate clown.

I’d love for him to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative intellectuals insist that Mr. Trump’s wrong policies are what they dislike. So what if he has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, re-established solid relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, led us out of the Paris climate accord, plans to increase military spending (granted, not enough), is trying to get rid of ObamaCare to the extent possible, proposed to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement? What has he done lately?

Conservative thinkers should recall that they helped create President Trump. They never blasted President Obama as he deserved. Mr. Obama’s policies punished the economy and made the country and its international standing worse year by year; his patronizing arrogance drove people crazy. He was the perfect embodiment of a one-term president. The tea-party outbreak of 2009-10 made it clear where he was headed. History will record that the press saved him. Naturally the mainstream press loved him, but too many conservative commentators never felt equal to taking him on. They had every reason to point out repeatedly that Mr. Obama was the worst president since Jimmy Carter, surrounded by a left-wing cabinet and advisers, hostile to Israel, crazed regarding Iran, and even less competent to deal with the issues than Mr. Carter was—which is saying plenty.

But they didn’t say plenty. They didn’t say much at all. The rank and file noticed and got mad. Even their supposed champions didn’t grasp what life under Mr. Obama was like—a man who was wrecking the economy while preaching little sermons, whose subtext was always how smart he was, how dumb they were, and how America was full of racist clods, dangerous cops and infantile nuts who would go crazy if they even heard the words “Islamic terrorism.” So the rank and file was deeply angry and elected Mr. Trump.

Some conservatives have the impression that, by showing off their anti-Trump hostility, they will get the networks and the New York Times to like them. It doesn’t work like that. Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

So go ahead, proclaim it from the rooftops: the anti-Trump opposition is a virtual French Resistance! If we’re not going to fight anyway, let’s surrender and get it over with.

Mr. Gelernter invented Lifestreams, the first social network.

The Battle Continues

Trump Is Winning His War on Washington

Conrad Black

The National Interest

June 14, 2017

It is easy to forget that the credibility battle between President Trump and James Comey is just the latest round in Donald Trump’s long struggle to overwhelm, single-handedly at first, the entire national political power structure. No one who followed closely really believed that the war was over on election night. The Democrats contested some local results, very unsuccessfully, and then, in their stark disbelief, took out television advertisements reaching tens of millions of people to ask some of the 538 people elevated to the electoral college to break their pledges and vote for Hillary Clinton instead of Donald Trump. It was an absurd fiasco. Democratic Senate leaders Chuck Schumer and Richard Durbin made prodigious efforts to block virtually every nominee of the incoming administration to high office. Apart from knocking down Trump’s first candidate for labor secretary, their only achievement was delay and harassment.

From the day after the election, Clinton fabricated the contention that, first among all those responsible for her defeat (among whom she never counted herself) were the Russians. This wild allegation was first advanced by John Podesta, the Democratic campaign chairman. It was then amplified by former Senate leader Harry Reid, and then Clinton got the bit in her teeth. Alleging collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign quickly became the favorite theme of Democratic leaders in Congress and the vast gallery of Never Trump fanatics in the national media, their ranks swollen and made more raucous by the self-exiled snobs of the intellectual conservative movement.

Since Trump had gone to war against all factions of both parties—Hollywood, Wall Street, the national media, academia, the lobbyists and the bureaucracy—there could not be a honeymoon, merely a few pleasantries on Inauguration Day, like a Christmas truce on the Western Front in World War I, followed by the resumption of hostilities. The outgoing Obama administration helpfully conducted surveillance of Trump Tower, and unmasked and leaked to the press the names of prominent Republicans that had arisen in these dubious practices, but no evidence was found.

The Russians jubilantly exploited the near anarchy among Washington’s political and media elites through an imaginative campaign of disinformation. Meanwhile, the upper reaches of the Washington civil service became spigots of malicious and almost certainly criminal leakage to the Trumpophobic press.

Every charge, no matter how fantastic, against the incoming president was given immense play by the morally bankrupt, unrelievedly partisan mainstream media, led by the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and NBC. All of these outlets had gagged on election night, and all of them refused to accept the legitimacy of the new administration.

There had never been an argument to reelect the Democrats on the merits of the largely failed Obama administration, so their entire campaign was a smear job on Trump. This continued with the Russian collusion scam and as soon as the administration was in place, with the nonsense about racism over the partial travel ban. (The Supreme Court will almost certainly take immigration back from the district and circuit courts and restore it to the president.) Donald Trump hardly made his task easier by some of the bumptious and tasteless comments that he made as this war unfolded. He has generally held the support of his followers, who understood that his assault upon the political establishment was so comprehensive that it would require a full term to implement. Those well acquainted with the key Democratic personalities in Washington confirm that they realize they have absolutely nothing to work with for an impeachment, but are aiming at the immobilization of the regime until the midterm elections of 2018, when the Democrats will try to retake at least part of the Congress against a do-nothing, blustering government.

Trump has fought like a fearless but calculating fighting bull. His greatest problem is not spurious charges or media hostility, which is not uniform and provokes a heavy backlash, but the cowardice of congressional Republicans. Most of them are in the Washington sleaze factory Trump initially attacked, but they owe their majority and the House’s repeal of Obamacare to the president. Speaker Paul Ryan was unable, as the appointment of a special counsel was announced, even to allow the president a presumption of innocence, and confined himself to declining “to prejudge” the outcome. Soon, they will have to realize that the anti-Trump campaign is just a mudslide, and that their only chance of retaining control of the Congress is to pull together and put through the president’s radically sensible program.

The firing of FBI director James Comey (apparently for needlessly dragging out the Russian collusion business), his appearance before the Senate intelligence committee last week and Trump’s press conference the following day have all torqued up the war to new heights of acrimony. But Trump is finally winning: even relatively unbiased commentators have failed to note how one-sided the exchange has been, though the comparisons with Richard Nixon’s firing of Archibald Cox—like the collusion charge itself, the complaints of an attempted back channel between the Russians and the president’s son-in-law, and the charge of misuse of Israeli intelligence (denied by Israeli prime minister Netanyahu)—have vanished, almost forgotten.

Comey conceded that he did not object when former attorney general Loretta Lynch told him to refer to the Clinton investigation as the Clinton “matter.” He admitted—as Trump had claimed, Comey had not previously acknowledged and the press failed to publish—that even after many months of investigation, Trump was not suspected of collusion with the Russians. He acknowledged that while Russia had tried to interfere with the election, there was no evidence that their efforts had changed any votes. He admitted that he had leaked his hotly contested version of a conversation with the president, about the investigation of former national security advisor Gen. Michael Flynn, in order to prompt the appointment of a special counsel. He did attack the media, and generated a retraction at CNN and extreme evasions by the New York Times.

No one is satisfied with Comey’s explanation of why he took it upon himself as a police chief to recite Clinton’s likely offenses with her emails, and then declare that she should not be prosecuted, which was not his decision to make; nor why he reopened and then quickly closed the “Clinton matter” in the last week of the campaign.

In all of these areas, there is little argument that Comey exceeded the powers of his position, and compromised the political impartiality and integrity of the bureau.

The chief takeaways are that the Russian collusion argument against Trump is dead, and that the obstruction argument is reduced to trying to claim, as no sane prosecutor would, that the president’s unwise and inconsequential expression of a hope that Flynn would not be prosecuted constituted an obstruction of justice. The chances of getting any traction on this issue are also zero. Even the endless brayings of Schumer, and Adam Schiff and Mark Warner, (the sanctimonious congressman from Hollywood and the vice chairman of the Senate intelligence committee), may have to be modulated—to the acoustical relief of the nation. There is little chance that Special Counsel Robert Mueller will find anything that significantly embarrasses the president.

Donald Trump has won this round, but the war will continue for a while longer.

One more sign that liberals have lost their mind

Powerline Blog - POSTED ON APRIL 4, 2017 BY JOHN HINDERAKER

The White House has just released an official portrait of Melania Trump. It is beautiful, in my opinion. But the left-wing Boston Globe somehow found something sinister in what any normal person would consider a lovely portrait:

The White House released an official portrait of Melania Trump. So what’s with the crossed arms? http://bos.gl/kZspjrx Yeah, what’s with the crossed arms? How weird can you get? No other White House would dream of putting out an official oil or photo portrait of someone with his or her arms crossed. We all know what that means! Right, fellow Democrats? RIGHT??Oops. Never mind...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2017/04/one-more-sign-that-liberals-have-lost-their-minds.php

One way or another, confirm Judge Gorsuch

Chicago Tribune - April 5, 2017

Judge Neil Gorsuch, a thoughtful conservative who is President Donald Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, likely wins Senate confirmation this week. The question is under what terms: conventional or nuclear? With American democracy unscathed or, um, scathed?

Our hope, now fading, is that Gorsuch gets to the high court the old-fashioned way — confirmed with the support of at least 60 senators, including several Democrats. There's something assuring, not to mention refreshingly constitutional, about senators from both sides of the aisle coming together to fulfill their responsibility to provide "advice and consent" on judicial nominations. Since Gorsuch, who's been on the federal bench for a decade, clearly is qualified, he should be confirmed — by Republicans and Democrats.

If only. In Washington, Republicans and Democrats will go to extremes to win their battles and damage the other side, even if that means attacking the ideal of compromise that should define effective bipartisan governance. The Gorsuch nomination is a crucial test for the Senate because there's more at stake than a vote on an individual Supreme Court seat. There is also the preservation of an honorable system for doing the people's business. The Senate stands at the brink of abandoning this important democratic practice of reasonable cooperation on judgeships.

Here's why: When the full Senate votes on confirmation, Gorsuch appears set to receive all 52 Republican votes, but his nomination has no direct path to a super-majority of 60 because there are not eight Democratic and independent senators willing to join. That fact became clear Monday when the Senate Judiciary Committee approved Gorsuch's nomination on a party-line vote but the 41st Democrat came out against the nominee.

Without 60 votes for confirmation, Democrats can filibuster, effectively icing the Gorsuch nomination — unless Republicans invoke the extreme measure of changing Senate rules governing Supreme Court confirmations. Under this so-called nuclear option, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell could push through a straight majority vote to deliver the high court seat to Gorsuch. That's probably what he'll do.

They don't call this the "nuclear option" for nothing, though. The Senate has never experienced a partisan filibuster to block a Supreme Court justice, so there's never been a case of a majority party blowing up Senate rules to circumvent minority party opposition to a high court appointment. Supreme Court nominations have been withdrawn, and the 1987 nomination of Judge Robert Bork was defeated, but when the vote's up for grabs, the Senate has found a way to do the responsible thing. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, an arch-conservative whose seat Gorsuch would fill, was confirmed with 98 votes. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal, got 96 votes. Those were the days: politics, the art of the possible.

This sorry confrontation over Gorsuch has direct roots in a 2013 action by Senate Democrats. Then-Majority Leader Harry Reid deployed the nuclear option to crush Republican dissent over some presidential nominations. President Barack Obama endorsed Reid's move, blaming Republican obstructionism that "just isn't normal." Funny how hyper-partisanship is starting to look more normal every day.

Democrats say Gorsuch doesn't deserve the Supreme Court seat because they believe he'll allow his political convictions to color rulings from the bench. He gave a strong defense of his judicial philosophy and commitment to the Constitution, but of course declined to discuss specific cases to avoid accusations of being prejudicial. Democrats characterized his caution — similar to that of several sitting justices during their confirmation hearings — as evasiveness. The Democrats weren't ever going to go easy on Gorsuch, though, and much of that blame sits with Republicans. Last year they refused to even hold a nomination hearing for Judge Merrick Garland, Obama's choice to succeed Scalia.

This time it's a Republican president whose legitimate pick for the Supreme Court is hung up by Democratic rancor. If the only option is nuclear, the Republicans will take it. And you can bet Democrats won't forget. That's how we got here: revenge instead of compromise, destruction over cooperation, an escalating cycle of win-at-all-costs cynicism.

Senators, all of you know that Gorsuch will be a good justice. He deserves to be confirmed — and likely will be. If you also quash the filibuster, that's on you.