Trump’s Rhetorical Knockout Blow

He properly identified the crisis of untrammeled immigration.

By Conrad Black
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/2019/01/10/trump039s_rhetorical_knockout_blow_463108.html
January 9, 2019


It wasn’t Demosthenean or Ciceronian, and we could have done without the sonic evidence that the president was inhaling normally, but it was a preemptive knockout blow of the robotic tandem that followed. The president was clear, factually unchallengeable, and credible, and Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer looked and sounded like a waxworks animated illustration of the embalmer’s art and her ventriloquist, the bearer of the broadest forehead since Pericles. The president spoke of a national-security, economic, and humanitarian crisis, and they spoke of the federal employees who are about to miss a paycheck. After Tuesday night’s eight-minute speech by the president from the Oval Office, the satisfactory resolution of the impasse over the government shutdown is fairly obvious. The president cannot abandon the border-security issue now, and the Democrats think they have him in a corner. The Democrats entered into this contest for the public’s support believing that as soon as the first paycheck is skipped, the lackey national media will be in 24–7 interviews with the sick wives, children, and relatives of the 800,000 unpaid federal employees. Public opinion will heave, the Republican senators will collapse, and the president will be splendidly humiliated.

Everyone with the slightest familiarity with the issue as it has arisen has seen the Democrats go from semi-zealots of border security to vapid opportunists laser-focused on the simplest aspect of unpaid federal employees. The president reminded the country of the proportions of the illegal-immigration issue — of the humanitarian tragedy, of the drug crisis, and of the crimes of an appreciable number of the illegal immigrants. The tactical problem of the Democrats is that they are so cynical they think no one will notice that they have come down steadily from $1.3 billion for border security to zero, in their conviction that they can put the unpaid federal employees’ problems ahead of what is an immense national crisis. They evidently believe that the endlessly repeated mantra of “the wall” as immoral, like 19th-century elocution students learning to spell by repeating such triumphalist expressions of literacy as “W-A-L-L spells wall,” will distract the country from the real problem. Their proposition to “open the government” (by Trump’s total capitulation and we will go back to interminable fruitless negotiation about the real problem) won’t fly. It is indicative of the serene complacency of the Democrats that they expect their control of the national political media to remain so airtight that no appreciable share of the public will dissent from their strategy, which is to give lip service to “border security” while portraying the president as peddling, as one of their lesser spokesmen put it last week, “a medieval fifth-century solution for a 21st-century problem.” The fact that he missed the middle ages by several hundred years is a rounding error for the Democrats, as they point to the Washington Post’s claim that the president has uttered 7,600 lies since he was inaugurated.

The president must know that the media are preparing the three-hanky tear-jerking interviews now, in the tradition of Pelosi’s comparisons of quite habitable recreation centers for detained minors at the southern border with Hitler’s death camps, on the (high) heels of her references to the tax bill that has produced a full employment, non-inflationary economy as “crumbs” and “doggie-doo with a cherry on top.” Some measure should be produced now by the administration to provide partial relief for the unpaid federal civil servants: government-guaranteed credit at banks for 60 percent of their normal pay; or emergency advances for some of their normal income, the balance to be made up later; or some such device to cut the ground out from under the Democratic leadership and leave them nakedly exposed to the implications of their stance. Once the paradisiacal Democratic dream of just flaying the president for starving federal workers instead of “opening up government” has been laid to rest, and the country understands that the president who was elected largely on the issue of stopping the flood of illegal entries (now a cumulative total of 22 million people) intends to do that, the spirit of compromise will miraculously return to them.

There is no question that the country, when the issues are presented fairly, wants nothing to do with a policy of unlimited access for anyone who wishes to enter and remain in the United States, and is offended by the apparent view in much of Latin America that everyone in the hemisphere has a right to enter the United States and remain permanently — without even giving their name at the border, but with a full civic right to U.S. education and welfare benefits thereafter. The majority of Americans is appalled by the influx of violent criminal gang members and the shocking quantities of the most dangerous drugs that flow in across the southern border. The country wants a million legal immigrants a year, it wants merit-based immigration, and it wants secure borders and adequate court and detention center facilities and personnel to prevent these floods of unauthorized intruders and to prevent distressing humanitarian dramas. The last thing the country wants is the abolition of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement). Nor does the American public, when the question is posed properly, approve of “sanctuary cities” whose mayors and city councils instruct the police not to honor federal immigration laws. When the time is ripe, those responsible for this outright insurrection will have to be slapped down. Unfortunately, it is too late to hang this impudence on Rahm Emmanuel, the failed ex-mayor of Chicago, who, having declared his city a Trump-free zone, fled on foot from Chicago City Hall, that greatest of all Democratic sinecures. (This year marks 90 consecutive years that the Democratic party has had its front feet in the trough in Chicago and Cook County.)

On Tuesday night Pelosi and Schumer, in their ludicrous talking duet — one glared purposefully while the other spoke vapidly — took the plunge: an interruption in the pay of 800,000 federal workers is more important than an oceanic flood of Central American farmers and families, or an influx of drug traffickers carrying with them the hard drugs that kill many thousands of Americans every year. And once the federal employees are back at work, the congressional Democratic party that has opposed and sabotaged every measure to deal with the greatest problem that has faced the nation since World War II will go back to talking about it (and doing nothing). The most irritating aspect of the problem, apart from its great gravity, is the smug self-assurance of the Democrats that they can completely humiliate the president, their false and defamatory effort to convict him of illegal collusion with a foreign power to win the election having fizzled. If the president undercuts the federal employees’ sob story, thinking on this issue will clarify and the Democrats will be hung out to dry as facilitators of what President Trump is historically correct to call an “invasion.”

This torrent of illegal migrants is not the sort of immigration that is justly celebrated at Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty, of responsible people soberly determining to make their way to a new country, to enter it legally and become civic-minded contributors to their new nationality. It more closely resembles the movement of large masses of people, en bloc, ahead of the barbarians and into the territory of the Roman Empire in the third to fifth centuries a.d. They had no interest in Rome, but were terrified by the Asiatic hordes driving them westwards. Of course, this is not exactly what we have on the southern border of the United States now, though the effluxion of millions of refugees from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa into Europe in the last decade more closely approximates that than it does conventional immigration.


For decades, Democratic politicians have ignored the effective takeover of sections of many cities by illegal immigrants, and largely Republican employers have taken advantage of the ability to engage a work force beneath the minimum wage. It has been a convenience for some Democrats also: Every few months, for years, there has been some new revelation of Hollywood socialists exploiting migrant labor to mow their lawns and roll their tennis courts. This is a perfect Trump issue: The Democratic political hacks, Hollywood hypocrites, and Republican country-club fat cats have put their own interests ahead of the country’s, and now the United States has almost as many illegal residents as comprise the entire legitimate population of the Commonwealth of Australia. As long as the administration offers something to mitigate the hardship of the unjustly furloughed or unpaid federal employees, the president can hold the Democrats’ (cloven) feet to the fire and finally get a serious reform of immigration, including a secure border. Drones and cameras can’t stop anyone from crossing a line with no obstacle on it.

The painful truth is that the American government has failed to deal with immigration, health care, infrastructure, and even abortion, though it at least managed to fumble that into the lap of the courts. It is a shambles, and the Democrats have tried to prevent Trump from dealing with any of it with this mendacious idiocy about collusion with Russia, and the nasty fantasy of removal from office by impeachment. Ultimately, the country will reward this president for getting the country’s government to function usefully, even as many regret that those elected to rule in difficult times are not always those that would be selected by typecasting studios.

Can Democrats Explain Why The Border Wall Is ‘Immoral?’

The blanket opposition to any 'wall' has a number of logical and political inconsistencies.

By David Harsanyi
http://thefederalist.com/2019/01/08/why-is-a-border-wall-immoral/
January 8,2019

“A wall, in my view, is an immorality. It’s the least effective way to protect the border and the most costly. I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea — unless this has something to do with something else,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently explained. Many other Democrats — almost all of them, in fact — claim to have, in addition to other reasons, some moral qualm about a border wall.

Whether or not the United States needs a wall — or even a pointed, slanted steel fence, for that matter — is a legitimate point of debate. I’m pretty ambivalent about the prospects of a barrier myself, and I oppose any unilateral emergency measures that allow government to more easily take private land to make it happen. But the Democrats’ blanket opposition to any “wall” has a number of logical inconsistencies that expose a different kind of agenda.

For one thing, is a wall really the “least” effective way to protect the border? I keep hearing Democrats offering this talking point on cable news without pushback. I suspect there are numerous less effective ways to secure the southern border than putting up a giant partition – like, for instance, having areas without any physical barriers. No rational person really believes that high vertical structures wouldn’t, to some extent, inhibit the movement of people.

It is true, as President Trump has claimed, that Israel’s security fence, erected after a deadly terror campaign against civilians in the early 2000s, has been effective. There was an immediate and precipitous drop in terror attacks inside Israel. And, as The New Yorker recently reported, “a razor-wire electric fence” along the border in Szeged, Hungary was all that was needed to stop refugees from flooding into the country. The European Union was angered that the Hungarians built the wall because it worked.

So it’s reasonable to believe that many Democrats simply don’t want a new wall because walls stop illegal immigration. They just won’t say the words yet. Take, for example, Rep. Adam Smith, the new chair of the House Armed Services Committee, who, echoing many other Democrats, claims that Trump’s campaign for a border wall is rooted in “xenophobia and racism.”

Even if we conceded for argument’s sake that the person driving this debate is xenophobic and racist, a barrier is meant to keep people from illegally entering the country from Mexico and Central America. Our immigration debate is ostensibly about the best way to secure our border and keep people — on both sides — safe.

How can one inanimate border fortification be more racist than another? Does Smith believe it’s functionally more racist to preemptively dissuade illegal immigrants from illegally crossing the border with a wall than to allow them to wander around in deserts and wilderness looking for water on their own?

Another Democrat, Rep. Eric Swalwell, recently offered what I am told is a non-parody tweet, which read, “’Mr. Gorbachev, put up a wall.’ Said no President.” It is true that when socialists run a country they typically are forced to build walls to keep people inside. It’s something Swalwell might keep in mind when he votes. It’s also, and unfortunately, true that the Berlin Wall was effective. Perhaps Swalwell is claiming that the physical structure, aesthetically speaking, sends an ugly message.

Despite the preoccupation with Trump, though, the idea of a wall on the southern border is neither new nor revolutionary. A wall was once a mainstream position that most of the Democratic Party leadership supported to various extents. It was one of the few items that could garner any consensus. Many politicians who’ve voted for walls are still serving in Congress today. As far as I can tell, no one with access has asked Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer when and why a wall became immoral.

We already have around 700 miles of barriers.  Swalwell’s state of California shares a 140-mile border with Mexico, about 105 miles of which is walled or fenced, including a giant fence that juts into the Pacific Ocean. Are those walls immoral and racist, also? If so, why don’t Democrats support tearing down these nefarious structures?

The notion that Democrats — who are ready to spend trillions on every newly concocted “right” — are hesitant to lay out $5. 7 billion is risible. If a wall were really ineffective, wouldn’t a trade for legalizing younger illegal residents be a feasible and legitimate compromise? It’s more likely that the wall is non-starter because 1: Democrats don’t want to sign off on a Trump agenda item — the political consequences would be too severe; and 2: Democrats’ leftward lurch has transformed any border security into “racist” position among the base of the party.

We might not need a wall, but if a wall is inherently “immoral,” why isn’t a border or sovereignty also immoral? I’ve not heard a good explanation.

David Harsanyi is a Senior Editor at The Federalist. He is the author of the new book, First Freedom: A Ride Through America's Enduring History with the Gun, From the Revolution to Today. Follow him on Twitter.

The Democrats’ Seismic Shift on Immigration: Erasing boundaries, embracing chaos.

Jules Gomes
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2019/01/10/the-democrats-seismic-shift-on-immigration-erasing-boundaries-embracing-chaos-jules-gomes/
January 10, 2019

The Apostle James might not have thought much of Chuck Schumer or Nancy Pelosi or Dianne Feinstein or Bill Clinton or even Barack “He-Who-Can-Do-No-Wrong” Obama. They are just some of the political prodigies who change their policies as often as Lady Gaga changes her clothes—about five times a day.

James has a juicy jibe for such political pendulums. He calls them “double-minded,” warning his readers that “a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” If you are going to swing from policy to policy like Tarzan the Ape Man, at least clarify and justify your political flip-flopping.

A little over a decade ago, the Democrats were singing in four-part harmony to President Trump’s “we need another brick in the wall” anthem. “We simply cannot allow people to pour into the United States undetected, undocumented, unchecked, and circumventing the line of people who are waiting patiently, diligently and lawfully to become immigrants into this country,” belted out Barack Obama.

Cue prima donna Pelosi, 2008: “Do we have a commitment to secure the border? Yes.” Why? “Because we do need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country. We certainly do not want any more coming in.” Solo from Chuck Schumer, Georgetown, 2009: “Illegal immigration is wrong. A primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.”

In 2013, each of the 54 Democrats in the Senate voted for $46 billion in border security, which included 700 miles in border fencing. Blaring through their Marxist megaphones they pleaded the plight of low-skilled American workers whose wages were hit by cheap immigrant labor. The burden on America’s welfare state would be intolerable, they wailed.

So what are the sirens luring the Democrats to the perilous shores of open borders? Why now? Why so radically? Why display this double-mindedness in such a short span of time?

Commentators from conservative Dan Bongino to leftwing The Atlantic posit two political explanations. First, more illegals means more votes for the Democrats. Second, given the contagion of the Trump Derangement Syndrome, “Democrats hate the wall because Trump loves it” as the National Review puts it bluntly.

There is an economic explanation: globalists like George Soros, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates (the latter duo helped found the border-busting FWD.us) have made a Faustian bargain with their Democratic hangers-on. The UN and the EU are in the vanguard of an open borders agenda and the Democrats are keen to keep up with the globalist Joneses (or, in this case, Merkels) and pro-migrant Pope Francis. If not for Trump, it the US would have possibly signed up to the UN global compact on migration in December 2018.

Maybe the Democrats were lying like Pinocchio on steroids when they said a decade ago they believed in border security and immigration control. Maybe they never really changed their position but simply used taqiyya—the Islamic doctrine of deception—to consolidate their position with gullible voters.

The Democrat ideological pedigree would surely predispose its activists to share Marx’s vision of nation states collapsing and workers of the world uniting in the new egalitarian heaven on earth.

Islam, in some sense, shares the Left’s doctrine of open borders. Especially potent in the West over the last decade, Islam’s dream is a universal Caliphate that will bulldoze national borders and unite the Umma—the international Muslim community—under the rule of Shariah. Moreover, Muslims are seeking to migrate to Western countries to push their proselytizing agenda. “Muhammad mapped a migration master plan centuries before Merkel,” is how I put it.

A boundary demarcates a nation. Tear down borders and you wipe a nation off the map—never mind casting cartographers into outer darkness! Marriage between a man and a woman demarcates a family—the basic unit of society. Destroy marriage and you destroy the family. If a family can mean anything—from serial orgies to sologamy—a family will ultimately mean nothing.

Just before the Democrats changed their position on geographical boundaries—they did a 180 on the boundary protecting marriage and family. The anarchist U-turn on marriage by the Democrats defies a number of the above explanations that explain this flip-flop with political or economic explanations.

Above all, Trump wasn’t the tectonic factor when Democrats made a seismic shift from heterosexual to gay marriage.

In September 1996, US Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The law defined marriage as a strictly opposite-sex institution. Not a single Republican senator voted against the legislation; in the House of Representatives only Republican Steven Gunderson voted against it.

Democrats strongly supported the legislation (Nancy Pelosi an exception among leading Democrats) with House members voting in favor by a nearly two-to-one margin (118-65) and Senate Democrats surpassing that mark (32-14). President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law.

By the time America’s first legal same-sex marriage took place in 2004, the Democrats had dramatically reversed their position. In the same year, House Democrats vigorously opposed the Marriage Protection Act by a 176-27 margin. Darel Paul in From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites brought America to Same-Sex Marriage documents the “tremendous collapse of support within the party’s House caucus for a traditionalist definition of marriage, from 64% in 1996 to a mere 13% in 2004.”

He notes: “In the 1990s even the most liberal Democrats avoided clear public endorsements of same-sex marriage” but by “2004 all three minor Democratic candidates for president were calling openly for national same-sex marriage.”

There is a fundamental parallel between the volte-face on immigration and on marriage by the Democrats. Both have to do with distinctions—and making distinctions is a biblical imperative that goes back to the archetypal story of creation in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.

I first spotted this when studying intermediate Hebrew. I was memorizing Genesis 1 in Hebrew but hit the brakes when I reached verse 4b: “And God separated the light from the darkness.” ‘Separate’ was a funny verb! But it recurred again and again in the chapter. Later I discovered commentator and biblical scholar Dennis Prager’s stunning exposition on distinctions in the Torah, explaining how separations are God’s signature tune in creation. God himself creates separations or distinctions or barriers or boundaries, says Prager.

The deep-rooted problem with the Democrats is not political, economic or even Donald Trump. It is spiritual. Radical secularization has led to a radical removal of all boundaries—beginning with feminist bulldozing of the boundary between man and woman and culminating paradoxically with the gender fluidity non-existence of this boundary—much to the outrage of some radical feminists.

Laws are predicated on boundaries. If Democrats no longer believe in markers that distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, lawful from lawless, order from anarchy, electing them as lawmakers can only be self-defeating at best, suicidal at worst.

There is, of course, one great benefit to be had from a complete erosion of borders and boundaries—whether in the area of immigration or in the realm of the family.

In biblical religion, God’s boundaries in creation keeps order in place: the sea and the land; light and darkness; day and night; human and animal; etc. The separations serve to sustain creation and prevent it from backsliding into primeval chaos.

In the religion of Leftism, the great monster of chaos is a prelude to the Leviathan of the State emerging and subduing the chaos with a view to establish its own idolatrous hegemony.

If this is the ultimate goal of the Democratic Party, the Chuck Schumers and Nancy Pelosis of this world might not be so double-minded or unstable after all. On the contrary, they will be pursuing their master plan of achieving totalitarian State control with remarkable and ruthless single-mindedness.

The Ironies of Illegal Immigration

Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2019/01/10/the-ironies-of-illegal-immigration-by-victor-davis-hanson/
January 10, 2019

Estimates suggest that there are 11 million to 13 million Mexican citizens currently living in the United States illegally. Millions more emigrated previously and are now U.S. citizens.

A recent poll revealed that one-third of Mexicans (34 percent) would like to emigrate to the United States. With Mexico having a population of about 130 million, that amounts to some 44 million would-be immigrants.

Such massive potential emigration into the United States makes no sense.

First, Mexico is a naturally rich country. It ranks 19th in the world in proven oil reserves and is currently the 12th-largest oil producer. Mexico certainly has significantly more natural advantages than do far wealthier per capita Singapore, Taiwan or Chile.

Mexico also is one of the world’s most popular tourist destinations and earns billions in foreign exchange from visitors. It enjoys a temperate climate, is rich in minerals, and has millions of acres of fertile farmland and a long coastline.

In addition to being strategically located as a bridge between North America and South America, Mexico has ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

It is not an overcrowded country: Mexico ranks in the lower half of the world in population density. Too many people and too little land are certainly not the reasons why millions of Mexicans either emigrate or wish to emigrate to the United States.

Second, popular progressive narratives in both Mexico and the United States cite America for all sorts of pathologies, past and present. The United States is often damned for prior colonialism and imperialism, as well as current racism and xenophobia.

Why, then, would millions of people south of the border leave their own homeland and potentially risk their lives to encounter a strange culture and language, to live in such a purportedly inhospitable place, and to adapt to an antithetical system based on supposedly toxic European and Protestant traditions?

The answers to these two paradoxes are as obvious as they are politically incorrect and therefore seldom voiced. Life in Mexico is relatively poor, dangerous, and often unfree. In contrast, the United States is rich, generous, and secure.

Mexico—unlike, say, Japan or Switzerland, which are far less naturally endowed and yet far wealthier—has never fully adopted Western paradigms of free-market economics, constitutionally protected free speech, due process, gender equity, private property rights, an autonomous press, government transparency, an independent judiciary, and religious diversity and tolerance.

To the degree that Mexico can make strides toward these goals, its population will stabilize and become more affluent—and also become less likely to emigrate.

More importantly, millions of Mexican citizens recognize (at least privately) that the United States is not the bogeyman of mostly elite critiques. Instead, it is one of the world’s rare multiracial, equal-opportunity societies. It is generous with its entitlements even to those who cross its border illegally, and far more meritocratic than most of the world’s highly tribal societies.

Maybe that is why millions of impoverished people from Mexico have left their homes in expectation that they will be treated far better as foreign, non-English speakers in a strange land than they will at home by their own government.

Indeed, if the United States treated immigrants in the fashion that Mexico does, then Mexican citizens would probably never come here.

In sum, illegal immigration is both logical and nonsensical.

After all, the Mexican government is quick to fault the United States, but it is rarely introspective. It does not explain publicly why its own citizens wish to flee the country where they were born—or why they are eager to enter a country that is so often ridiculed by the Mexican press and government.

Mexico apparently does not take care of its own citizens. But once they arrive inside the United States, Mexico suddenly becomes an advocate for their welfare. No wonder: Mexican expatriates send back an estimated $30 billion a year in remittances.

Real and would-be emigrants themselves also act ironically.

On both sides of the border, they often fault the United States and demand that U.S. immigration law be suspended—but only in their case.

Emigrating Mexican citizens wave Mexican flags at the border as they try to enter America, while their counterparts inside the United States do the same when they protest being sent back home.

Apparently, no one in Mexico or in the U.S. ever wishes to admit that Mexican citizens really like the United States—apparently far more than they do their own homeland.

A cavalcade of lies

By Ted Noel MD
http://noqreport.com/2019/01/01/a-cavalcade-of-lies/
January 1, 2019

Yesterday, USA Today published an op-ed by David Rothkopf so incredibly fact-free that it can serve as a guide to most of the slanders the Left pushes about President Trump. Let’s go line-by-line.

“A corrupt and fraudulent family foundation.”

You can be excused for thinking he should be talking about the Clinton Foundation, which was a pay-for-play Clinton enrichment scheme. But he’s not. He’s talking about the Trump Foundation, which paid out the vast majority of its funds to various charitable causes.

“Hush money to mistresses to help swing an election — felony violations of campaign finance laws.”

There’s no doubt that Trump paid women to be silent (which they did not do). But there’s no evidence that they were mistresses. The best the Left has is a “he said/she said” allegation. As for the payments, they were perfectly legal. Wealthy men are often targets of false allegations like these. They pay the women off because it’s cheaper than pursuing a slander suit, and the slander suit itself would create the false publicity and family damage they are trying to avoid. Then it gets interesting.

The payment to Karen McDougal happened in 2014, a year before Donald Trump became a candidate. Making that into a campaign finance violation boggles the imagination. The payment to Stephanie Clifford did happen while Trump was a candidate, but we have to recall the fundamental fact that if it helped the campaign (recall that there were multiple other similar allegations), it also served private purposes. And it wasn’t paid out of campaign funds, to which Trump could legally add unlimited amounts from his own pocket. Two former FEC Commissioners, Bradley Smith and Hans von Spakovsky have pointed out that this “dual use” makes the campaign finance charge into nonsense.

“Seeking and embracing the help of an enemy to win an election.”

This persistent argument is a classic case of Herman Goebbels’ “Big Lie.” “Tell a lie loud enough and often enough, and people will believe it.” To date, not a single piece of evidence has surfaced that Donald Trump sought out the Russian government for assistance in the election. And no person has presented evidence that Russian actions resulted in the compromise of a single vote that was legitimately cast.

“Repeatedly obstructing justice to cover up those crimes.”

Please explain how this is even possible! Article 2, section 1, sentence 1 of the US Constitution states, “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.” This gives him plenary authority over the executive branch, of which the Department of Justice and the FBI are a part. He has the authority to fire the Director of the FBI (James Comey) for any reason or even for no reason at all. But even the Left will have to admit that he did nothing to stop the investigation or to force the staff of investigators to even be balanced politically.

The only way that the President could obstruct justice would be to suborn perjury or block an investigation into actual crimes he has committed (18 U.S. Code § 1503). Oh. I forgot. There’s no evidence that a crime was committed. Further, the Mueller investigation is into “collusion,” which isn’t even a crime.

Whew! We’ve finished the opening paragraph. It’s four sentences long, and each sentence is a major falsehood. USA Today is obviously not being careful to publish the truth. But is is an op-ed, someone else’s opinion, so they are OK to print it. Let us continue.

“Selling out American interests to patrons overseas.”

Once again, you could be excused if you thought he was talking about Hillary Clinton and Uranium One, or Hillary Clinton and the Clinton Crime Family Foundation, but he’s not. Presumably this refers to the fact that Trump has business interests all across the globe. But the author isn’t going to be specific enough to allow us to show in detail how wrong he is.

“Profiting from the presidency.”

 In fact, Donald Trump’s net worth has declined each year in office. It reminds me of the old saw about making a small fortune. You start with a large fortune.
“Helping foreign murderers cover up the murder of an American permanent resident.” This is obviously the Jamal Khashoggi incident. But one has to ask how the President has covered this up when it’s all over the news. I thought a cover-up kept the media from learning about something. What he has done is to state that the information about who ordered the killing is not clear. And no one in the media has access to the security service sources that the President has. You can suspect, but you can’t know. Of course, the op-ed writer knows.

“Attacking our allies. Destroying the international architecture that has been the foundation of our strength.”

This time it took two sentences to complete another lie. Many NATO countries weren’t paying their share for defense. NATO has specific requirements, and the President said that members should live up to their obligations. The response has been for the other countries to start paying up. This has made America stronger by reducing our costs, and has made NATO stronger by increasing the mutual commitment to defense.

We’ve gotten through two paragraphs. Rothkopf goes on for five more paragraphs of outrageous lies. You’d quit reading if I went through them all. It’s really quite stunning that the Left is so bereft of critical thinking skills that they accept all this drivel. They believe, as USA Today says, that “Trump stole the office with the aid of our enemies, and he has done grievous damage to this country ever since.”

One has to wonder what planet these people live on. We have the lowest unemployment in history, with this extending to even black teens, the worst off under Obama. We have an economy growing at a steadily rising rate over 3%, when under Obama we were told by Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times contributor Paul Krugman that we needed to get used to 2% or less as the “new normal.”

The problem is that the Left believes these lies. For the hard Left, there is no possibility of convincing them of their errors. All we can hope to do is to show, much as Tucker Carlson does on a nightly basis, how stupid they look when matched up against the facts. Then perhaps the middle will realize that what the Left really wants is to control every facet of their lives and take us into a brave new Venezuela. Defeating them at the ballot box will be easy then.

Our Exhausted American Mediocracy

By Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2018/12/31/our-exhausted-american-mediocracy-by-victor-davis-hanson/
December 30,  2018

The unlikely 2016 election of Donald Trump—the first president without either prior political or military office—was a repudiation of the American “aristocracy.” By “rule of the best” I mean the ancien régime was no longer understood to suggest wealth and birth (alone), but instead envisioned itself as a supposed national meritocracy of those with proper degrees, and long service in the top hierarchies of government, media, blue-chip law firms, Wall Street, high tech, and academia.

The 2016 election and refutation of the ruling class did not signal that those without such educations and qualifications were de facto better suited to direct the country. Instead, the lesson was that the past record of governance and the current stature of our assumed best and brightest certainly did not justify their reputations or authority, much less their outsized self-regard. In short, instead of being a meritocracy, they amount to a mediocracy, neither great nor awful, but mostly mediocre.

This mediocracy is akin to late 4th-century B.C. Athenian politicians, the last generation of the Roman Republic, the late 18th-century French aristocracy, or the British bipartisan elite of the mid-1930s—their reputations relying on the greater wisdom and accomplishment of an earlier generation, while they remain convinced that their own credentials and titles are synonymous with achievement, and clueless about radical political, economic, military, and social upheavals right under their noses.

Remember the “new normal”? Our economic czars had simply decided anemic economic growth was the best Americans could expect and that 3 percent annualized GDP growth was out of the realm of possibility. Big government incompetence combined with Wall Street buccaneerism had almost melted down the economy in 2008. Recent presidents had doubled the debt—twice.

Few could explain how recent agreements such as the Paris Climate Accord or Iran deal could ever have achieved their stated aims, much less were in America’s interest. War planners had not translated interventions in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya into strategic advantage—much less lasting victory—and never offered reasons to be in such places that appealed to half the country.

Most elites had assumed the deindustrialized red-state interior was doomed to a sort of preordained and irreversible decline, much of it supposedly self-induced. In more candid moments, elites jested that red-state losers might be better replaced by new immigrants, both legal and illegal.

Our ruling classes either could not or would not defend American traditions and civilization in our colleges, in our government, and in our popular culture—and they were increasingly accepting of the globalist consensus that America had a flawed past requiring some sort of reparatory future.

Our leadership accepted a world in which America’s misdemeanors were the source of global outrage, while China’s felonies were largely exempt from criticism. China’s global hegemony was seen as assumed and fated. Efforts to derail it were near inane or retrograde.

Most Americans figured that those who lectured them on television, in op-eds, and throughout popular culture about guns, open borders, green mandates, fossil fuels, and the public schools, had the money, desire, and clout to live in desirable neighborhoods, sometimes behind walls, with ample taste for fine cars, jet trips, and private academies for their children.

Earned Hypocrisies?

The charge of hypocrisy against the elite was considered juvenile—given that exemptions were needed for the ruling class to serve us all the better.
How could Al Gore save us from our carbon emissions without his private jet? How could Nancy Pelosi craft drastic climate change legislation without flying to a Kona resort over the holidays?

How could Eric Holder stop prejudice without a jet junket to the Belmont Stakes with his kids? How could our Malibu elite nobly sermonize about their loyal gardeners and dutiful maids without walled estates?

How could Silicon Valley wizards pontificate about the evils of charter schools and the need for teacher unions, without private academies for their own? And how exactly could the heads of our intelligence agencies and justice department officials track down the crimes of Donald Trump without committing greater ones themselves?

Much of the Trump agenda, although nominally embraced by the Republican Party after the July 2016 convention, was largely crafted in antithesis to the bipartisan status quo that either could not or would not end illegal immigration, secure the border, call China out on warping world trade, seek greater reciprocity with allies, curtail optional military interventions, massively deregulate, expand fossil fuel production, and return the federal judiciary to a constitutional and constructionist framework.

If such a nontraditional agenda had been advanced by an “acceptable” outsider or billionaire such as Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, or Michael Bloomberg, it would have been seen as eccentric but nevertheless not blasphemous. However, Donald Trump advertised himself as a renegade whose own notorious apostasy was inseparable from his message, and who felt no allegiance to the political protocols and customs that had prepped past presidents. Trump’s often crude demeanor at times seemed to suggest that he was not just interested in revoking the results of status quo policymaking, but the very premises of the status quo itself.

It is easy to suggest that much of the unprecedented hatred shown Trump is the poisoned fruit of his alleged toxic persona. And yet it is hard to calibrate whether any president has faced, from the moment of his election, the level of venom shown Trump by both political parties, and by the elite media, and the centers of progressivism on Wall Street, in Hollywood, Silicon Valley, Washington, and New York.

A country that once banned for life a clown from a state fair for wearing in puerile fashion a Barack Obama mask now ritually talks of impeaching, committing to an institution, overthrowing, or beating, burning, decapitating, blowing up, and shooting the elected president.

Certainly, we have never seen anything like the constant anti-Trump media hatred, the efforts since the election to remove Trump, in slow-motion coup style, by seeking to warp the Electoral College, to invoke the 25th Amendment and the Emoluments Clause, to unleash special counsel Robert Mueller with an unlimited budget, a toadyish media, a team of partisan lawyers and investigators, and prior help from the top echelons at the Obama Department of Justice, the FBI, the National Security Council, and the CIA.

The argument of these elites and their institutions has been not just that Trump is incompetent or inexperienced, but that he is corrupt, perverse, treasonous, criminally minded, and to such a degree that the results of the 2016 should be overturned before the 2020 election. And such an end to Trump’s elected governance is justified not merely by his toxic person, but also by the racist, sexist, nativist, xenophobic Americans—the counterfeit half of the country—who elected him.

A Case Against Trump?

If these arguments of the American aristocracy were valid, we would have to accept three arguments of the best and brightest:

1) There is a clear moral, legal and popular prerogative to remove Trump.
Yet for all the efforts of the professional politicians, the lockstep media, and the elite academic, legal, and financial communities, there is neither a rational nor legal basis to remove Trump. Instead, he enjoys about the general level of support as did many past presidents at this juncture in their administrations. He has survived his first midterm in better fashion than did either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama who were both later easily reelected.

No one has yet argued that the tenures of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, or Bill Clinton—still enshrined in the progressive pantheon—were marked by less crudity. The record of the Department of Veterans Affairs, Environmental Protection Agency, General Services Administration, IRS, CIA, and FBI between January 2009 and January 2017 does not qualify as “scandal free.”

It’s unlikely Trump will be convicted of any crimes as outlined by the Mueller collusion investigation. It is more likely he will prove to be the most investigated, probed, and audited president in history. And even more likely, top officials at the Justice Department, CIA, and FBI will be facing eventual legal exposure for unethical and illegal efforts to damage the Trump candidacy, transition, and presidency.

2) Trump has failed.

For all the perceived chaos and disorder in the Trump Administration, it certainly has so far achieved a stronger economic record than did his predecessors, whether adjudicated by GDP growth, unemployment, energy production, or deregulation.

Even a shaky stock market is still much higher than it was when Trump took office. Likewise, abroad, for all Trump’s supposed unpopularity, privately most Americans and many so-called experts agree that the Iran Deal was fatally flawed, the Paris Accord was a charade, the “Palestinian” problem was ossified, a radically new policy toward China was overdue, the Pentagon needed to be recalibrated, and old American partnerships were in dire need of recalibration from NATO to NAFTA.

3) There is a logical and systematic antithesis to Trumpism.

If so, will either primary or general election candidates run on open borders being preferable to secure ones? Eliminating ICE is better than maintaining it? Defense cuts are necessary? Far more gun control? Medicare for all?

There is too much American natural gas and oil production? The economy would be better off with higher unemployment and slower growth? Food stamps need to be increased not reduced by over 3 million recipients?

We are too harsh on Iran and too accommodating of Israel? Taxes are too low, government too small, and entitlements too few? Did Trump appoint too many unqualified strict constructionist judges? Were John Bolton and Mike Pompeo incompetent?

Whom Are We To Trust?

As we look to our celebrities, billionaires, intellectuals and senior statesmen, a sort of American pantheon, do we to find sources of reassurance in Hollywood, perhaps in the statements and behavior of the last two years of Cher, Barbra Streisand, Robert De Niro, Johnny Depp, or Madonna? Do the Oscars, Tonys, and Emmys showcase the expertise, competence, and professionalism of our entertainers?

Do the recent statements of the elite marginalized—a LeBron James, Alice Walker, or Tamika Mallory—remind us to reset our ethical bearings, or do they instead suggest that intersectionality can at times exempt, rather than serve as an impediment to, anti-Semitism? Has Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez shown us superior erudition and common sense?
Perhaps Harvard, now facing allegations that it systematically discriminated on the basis of race, can reassure us of progressive values in these tough times? Can its first Native American professor Elizabeth Warren help us endure Trump? Or maybe Google, Facebook and Twitter can show us the way to protect our civil liberties, free expression, and non-partisanship?

Do the heads of our major entertainment and news organizations, a Harvey Weinstein and Les Moonves, offer sources of refuge in these supposedly dark Trump years? Have trusted journals like The New Republic or Der Spiegel been reliable beacons of truth?

Perhaps we can look to the elite of the media, to the careers of Dan Rather, Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, or Mark Halperin, or stellar writers such as Leon Wieseltier, Glenn Thrush, or Garrison Keillor to help us recover our moral bearings. Could a wide array of our best intellectuals, politicians, and activists help find our way home in in the age of Trump, perhaps truth tellers such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, Al Franken, or Dianne Feinstein?

Could not Joe Biden weigh in on the evils of plagiarism, Cory Booker cite the dangers of fabulism, Harry Reid warn of racial stereotyping, or Kamala Harris on the perils of religious bigotry?

Maybe the elites of government will be our touchstones. Trump critic, James Comey, the director of the FBI, has told Congress on 245 occasions during a single appearance that he does not know or cannot remember the answers when asked questions.

The cable television critic and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper had lied under oath to Congress and fabulously claimed that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt was largely secular.

John Brennan, another cable television consultant and the former CIA head, has trumped Clapper by lying twice to Congress. Brennan also claimed that jihad was little more than a personal introspective religious journey.  Are these our watchtowers of sobriety in these dark times?

Both Hillary and Bill Clinton, by education, careers, and service, are advertisements of the ruling class. Yet, she was the godmother of the disastrous Libyan incursion, knee-deep in scandal from cattlegate to Benghazi to Uranium One, and hired a foreign national during the 2016 election to find dirt on her political opponent through the paid services of foreign sources. Bill was impeached and somehow ended up worth well over $100 million largely by selling influence on the premise he and his spouse would one day be back in the White House. The Clinton Foundation is synonymous with corruption.

So do the most acerbic critics of Trump and iconic members of our aristocracy inspire confidence?

Former National Security advisor Susan Rice, to take just one recent example of a prominent critic in the news, lied repeatedly about the Benghazi attacks, about the Bowe Bergdahl swap (the Army deserter  served, she said, “with honor and distinction”), about the sordid details of buying back hostages central to the Iran deal (“And we were very specific about the need not to link their fate to that of the negotiations”), about the elimination of weapons of mass destruction in Syria (“We were able to get the Syrian government to voluntarily and verifiably give up its chemical-weapons stockpile,”) and about the unmasking of names surveilled through FISA court warrants (“I know nothing about this”).

The point of this tour of our elite is not to excuse Trump’s often retaliatory crassness or bombast, but to remind us that our self-righteous anti- and pre-Trump aristocracy was so often a mediocracy. It had assumed status and privilege largely on suspect criteria. Its record abroad and at home inspired little confidence. Doing mostly the opposite of what elite conventional wisdom advocated since January 2017 has made the nation stronger, not weaker.

Strangest of all, the elite’s furious venom directed at Trump, couched in ethical pretense, has had the odd effect to remind the American people how unethical and incompetent these people were, are, and likely will continue to be.