The Marx Brother

Bernie Sanders clings to socialism, ‘rivals laugh.’

By James Freeman
The Wall Street Journal
June 12, 2019

Having parted ways with some non-Marxists who managed to infiltrate his 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders will attempt to clarify this afternoon that he is not like other candidates seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020. Edward-Isaac Dovere notes in the Atlantic that Mr. Sanders will be speaking in Washington this afternoon on “How Democratic Socialism Is the Only Way to Defeat Oligarchy and Authoritarianism.” Mr. Dovere reports that the speech topic is sparking laughter among Democratic rivals as Mr. Sanders “leans into socialism.”

Adds Mr. Dovere:

Aides say the D.C. setting is an attempt to convey his seriousness on the subject. They want this to be a major signpost in his 2020 campaign, an opportunity for Sanders to lay out why he’s running with an argument no one else can or would make as forcefully, and to dare the rest of the field to oppose him. They believe this speech has the potential to re-center the dynamics of the race around him, and that the other candidates will regret any of their laughter and questioning...

Many readers may find it laughable that Mr. Sanders would attempt to position himself even further to the left than he did in 2016. But as a Journal editorial noted in April, there’s nothing funny about the extreme commentary from people who are now members of the Sanders 2020 operation. For example, current Sanders speechwriter David Sirota once wrote an op-ed titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle”. And Mr. Sirota isn’t the only Sandernista who has lauded the Chavistas.

Assessing the current Sanders team, the Journal observed:

Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.

Mr. Dovere writes today in the Atlantic:

Sanders’s inner circle is now committed to democratic socialism in a way that some senior members of his 2016 campaign team were not, though he did deliver a speech about the topic back then as well. This new speech, aides tell me, will go much deeper. Sanders and his aides see this as a moment to reach for the revolution that he’s been dreaming of since he was an angry, underemployed writer in the 1970s, paying his bills through essay writing while being an activist.

Given the long history of Mr. Sanders’ friendly relations with communist thugs, one must be optimistic to assume his brand of socialism would remain “democratic.” How many Americans want to live through a revolution dreamed up by an angry, underemployed writer anyway? Fortunately, as Mr. Dovere notes, the citizens of our democracy don’t necessarily want exposure to the full Bernie:
Not everyone believes the message will penetrate. “There is zero electoral evidence that voters support hard socialism or care about the fights the left relitigates every day on Twitter,” one frustrated former 2016 Sanders aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to freely criticize the current campaign, told me.

Who knew we’d be looking back with admiration at the relative moderation of the Sanders 2016 staff?

As for the members of the current Sanders staff, one would hope they would look back in horror at their admiring commentary on the Venezuelan regime, but today’s speech suggests not. Attendees at today’s Sanders event can expect him once again to urge U.S. adoption of the same health care guarantee that’s been made for years by the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela.

The results have been appalling. Last month Vivian Sequera of Reuters reported on the “Venezuela healthcare collapse” and focused on 11-year-old Erick Altuve, who died “from respiratory problems while being treated for stomach cancer at the Jose Manuel de los Rios public hospital.” According to the Reuters report:

For the past six months, Altuve had not received his medication, his mother, Jennifer Guerrero, said, because of widespread shortages of drugs and medical equipment that have devastated Venezuela’s health system...

Children have paid an especially heavy price from the collapse in Venezuela’s healthcare system as the economy has shrunk by over a half during six years of recession.

The most recent figures from Venezuela’s Health Ministry show that infant mortality, covering children age 1 and below, rose 30% to 11,466 cases in 2016 from the year before. There is no official data on children’s’ deaths from cancer.

More broadly, the mortality rate for children under 5 years has risen by 40% since 2000, the humanitarian group Save the Children said in its 2019 report.

Democratic voters have an opportunity to save U.S. patients of all ages from the plans of Mr. Sanders and his staff.

All Bernie’s Socialists

The candidate’s advisers want America to be more like Venezuela.

By The Editorial Board
Wall Street Journal
April 8, 2019

Socialism is cool again, and Bernie Sanders wants to reassure voters that there’s nothing to worry about. “I think what we have to do, and I will be doing it, is to do a better job maybe in explaining what we mean by socialism—democratic socialism,” Mr. Sanders said last month. He has also said that conservatives portray his brand of socialism “as authoritarianism and communism and Venezuela, and that’s nonsense.”

We wish that were true. But we’ve been reading the work of Bernie’s senior political advisers, and their words deserve more attention. Take speechwriter David Sirota, who joined the Sanders campaign in March, though he had been attacking the Vermont Senator’s Democratic opponents on Twitter for months.

Mr. Sirota wrote an op-ed for Salon in 2013 titled “Hugo Chávez’s Economic Miracle.” Mr. Sirota conceded, Chávez “was no saint” and “amassed a troubling record when it came to protecting human rights and basic democratic freedoms.” Those pesky disclaimers aside, Mr. Sirota suggested that there’s plenty to learn from Chávez.

“For example, the United States has adamantly rejected the concept of nationalization and instead pursued a bailout/subsidy strategy when it comes to rapacious banks and oil companies—and those firms have often gone on to wreak economic havoc. Are there any lessons to be learned from Venezuela’s decision to avoid that subsidization route and instead pursue full-on nationalization?” Mr. Sirota wrote. “And in a United States that has become more unequal than many Latin American nations, are there any constructive lessons to be learned from Chávez’s grand experiment with more aggressive redistribution?”

He wrote this in 2013, nearly 15 years after Chávez took power. Mr. Sirota has also opposed nearly all U.S. military actions abroad, and he blames the U.S. for inciting terrorism. Days after the Boston marathon bombing in 2013, Mr. Sirota wrote that “with America having killed thousands of civilians in its wars, we should be appalled by acts of terrorism—but we shouldn’t be surprised by them.” His disclaimer: “Noting this is not to argue that such attacks are justified or that we deserve them.”

Mr. Sanders’ political director, Analilia Mejia, spent part of her childhood in Venezuela and told the Atlantic in 2016 that “it was better to live on poverty-level wages in a shantytown in Venezuela than on a garment-worker’s salary in Elizabeth, New Jersey.”

Mr. Sanders’ senior policy adviser Heather Gautney visited Caracas in 2006 to attend the World Social Forum. The event featured a two-hour speech by Chávez lauding Karl Marx and Fidel Castro and pledging to “bury the U.S. empire.” Ms. Gautney admitted the event had “a militarized feel” but wrote about how Chávez had “implemented a serious [sic] of programs to redistribute the wealth of the country and bolster social welfare.”

She defended Chávez’s nationalization of private industry and efforts to rewrite the Venezuelan constitution on grounds that Chávez’s “proposals advocated for a system in which the presidency would be decided via popular vote.” She also wrote that “today’s neoliberal capitalist system has become utterly incompatible with the requisites of democratic freedom.” And she says that “as it stands, US representative political and economic institutions are not structured as representative bodies in any real sort of way.”

As a sociology professor at Fordham, Ms. Gautney has written admiringly that the U.S. Occupy movement was “based on the belief that some places, institutions, forms of property, and rights, should be collectively owned and enjoyed.” So “if neoliberal forces of privatization and deregulation have indeed dispossessed people of these forms of social wealth, then occupation should be understood as an act of repossession in which persons or groups take back what was once common.”

Redistribution of wealth and property is a major theme among the Bernie brigades. In a column for the Intercept this year, Mr. Sanders’ national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, wrote: “There will be no racial equality under capitalism. . . . voters should be clear that ‘recognizing’ disparities and doing something about them through aggressive, redistributive policies are not the same thing.”

Claire Sandberg, national organization director for the Sanders campaign, praised U.K. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn for going “beyond even what Bernie called for in saying that we need to have a robust public sector, that we need to in the UK bring the railways back under public control, and to really fight back against the privatization. That’s something that we’re not even talking about here: How do we undo all of the privatization that’s occurred over the last 30 years?”

Mr. Sanders isn’t a gadfly on the fringes of the Democratic Party. He’s a leading candidate for its presidential nomination, and these are the people who would staff his White House. Voters need to understand that they don’t merely admire Venezuela. By their own words, they want America to emulate it.

Still Dreaming of Watergate II

Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/26/still-dreaming-of-watergate-ii/
March 26th, 2019

Of all the asinine and, at times, almost psychotic misstatements about the bone-crushing victory the president has won, the prize goes, with admirable historical symmetry, to John Dean.

It was Dean who led the destruction of lawyer-client privilege in the Watergate debacle, and with it, of much of America’s claim to be a society of laws. Having been the corrupt source of many of the most fatuous illegalities in the amateur obstruction put forward by members of President Richard Nixon’s entourage, John Dean was the first rat down the hawser, denouncing his client, employer, and benefactor with contemptuous disregard for the truth and in the supreme demonstration of the evil of the American plea bargain system.

This perversion of the justice system, more than anything else, has ensured that prosecutors in the United States, win a percentage of their cases about equal to those of North Korea and Cuba. They extort inculpatory evidence against the main target by threatening witnesses and give the denunciators immunity from perjury and a sweetheart sentence.

Dean’s performance exceeds in venality even the antics of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, American history’s most successful fiction-writers. (At least Gore Vidal acknowledged he was writing historical novels.) Odious though Woodward and Bernstein are, irritatingly imperishable though they are, as far as I know they didn’t break any laws and didn’t dishonor a learned profession. (Having employed thousands of journalists for decades, I can attest that they aren’t part of a profession and few of them are learned.)

With that preamble to remind us of what we are dealing with in John Dean, I cite his tweet on Friday night at 11:55, after news broke that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had given Attorney General William Barr his report and that he would recommend no more indictments: “Trump and his minions think they dodged a bullet. I have a notion—that Mueller delivered a bomb to AG Barr, who is now trying to figure out how to tell Trump in a way that doesn’t cause him to start World War III. Barr knows he works for a psycho.”
Thus are we reminded of the prescience and integrity of one of the sleaziest characters in American political history, the Michael Avenatti of his times, though thanks to the president he betrayed and traduced, he achieved an ostensibly serious position.

Democrats Vying to Embarrass Themselves

Others who inflict upon themselves more often than I do the cruel punishment of looking at the more egregiously bigoted news outlets are already presenting delicious examples of malicious and dishonest idiocy among the apostles of the Russian collusion fraud.
I cannot resist offering, however,  the two stupidest comments I heard from the bloated dunciad of Democratic presidential candidates. Naturally, the grand prize goes to the vapidest person ever touted as a presidential candidate in my 63 years as an observer of American politics, Beto O’Rourke. Just before the revelation that there would be no further indictments, Beto asserted his knowledge “beyond the slightest doubt” that the president was guilty, in effect, of high treason—that he would only escape the death penalty because the United States and Russia were not at war. (But neither were they when Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953.) And the day Trump was completely cleared of the collusion suspicion, O’Rourke declared that the investigation of Trump must continue.
Close at Beto’s heels is the almost equally simple-minded and even more pretentious straw-haired airhead, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.). Standing in front of the Trump Hotel in Washington on Sunday, she called the president “a coward” and then Gillibrand (“I chose to be brave”) said he was still a prime suspect of collusion with Russia, 90 minutes before the release of the attorney general’s letter to the leaders of the Senate and House judiciary committees. I stop here, but not for any lack of other worthy contestants to win the sweepstakes for malice and foolishness.

In the convulsive aftermath of the sudden death of the whole impeachment fraud, the grievously outnumbered elements of the media who had kept their heads through the whole saga were severely overworked calling the witless majority of media assassins to account. The most durable and contemptible of all American media mythmakers, Carl Bernstein, claimed the role of the anti-Trump media was heroic and entirely admirable. He did so on CNN, and so was not asked by his co-defamer Brian Stelter, who although he is only 33, manages to look like he lost his hair fighting alongside Senator Da Nang Dick Blumenthal in Vietnam. Of course, Bernstein was not probingly questioned. He never has been. This mad and pandemical egotism of the Washington media is precisely the reason why this time, the almost suicidal failure of the media must be run to ground.

No Forgiveness Without Conversion

I am venerable enough to have been a publisher of small daily newspapers at the time of Watergate, and I was one of the very few who warned where the criminalization of policy differences would lead. Eventually, Richard Nixon will be seen as the troubled but courageous, talented, and irrepressible American hero and very successful president that he was, (and was always perceived to be by his scores of millions of followers). He has been short-changed in recognition of his greatness and over-penalized for his faults, but history will sort it out, as he knew. (I had the privilege of knowing him in his last five years.)

The same ghastly group-narcissism that showered media awards among the Watergate jackals flared up again, like Camus’ description of the Plague, with Pulitzers to the New York Times and Washington Post for their obscene campaigns of lies about Trump-Russian collusion. The president spoke nothing but the truth when he said on Monday: “It was an illegal take-down that failed.”

It need hardly be emphasized that the right to freedom of expression is sacrosanct, and any attempt to muzzle or intimidate the media would be anathema. Even so, as the almost certain crimes of Hillary Clinton and some of her inner circle and allies—former intelligence chiefs John Brennan (now desperately backpedaling), and James Clapper, the FBI’s own James Comey and Andrew McCabe, former Attorney General Loretta Lynch and her deputy Sally Yates, Yates’ successor Rod Rosenstein, and many lesser figures—are resurrected and charged, untainted elements of the media must conduct a process of chastisement and reinduction of their wayward colleagues. The mercy of forgiveness must await those visited by the grace of conversion, in this case to honest reporting and the separation of reporting of facts from tendentious personal opinion. (Both must be expressed, but not commingled.)

Having been the victim of the evils of the American criminal justice system, I would not have it inflicted on others. In any case, I do not believe in the incarceration of nonviolent, first-time offenders. I wouldn’t ask more than some community service for those who seriously broke the law in the 2016 election and its aftermath.

But it was an attempted coup that would never have come to light if Hillary Clinton had won. The perpetrators must be given the opportunity to atone for their crimes and expiate them, and American posterity must understand the sanctity of the constitutional process. Those who deliver great nations from terrible fates are not always people who seem to have been selected by casting studios. This president’s imperfections are not indiscernible, but he has shown himself to be a courageous and indomitable leader in excruciatingly difficult circumstances. And he is the president; those who want him out can vote against him at the next election.

Having expressed my wish for gentle sentencing, I proclaim what must now be the wish of the majority toward those who so gravely threatened the democratic republican system of American government. I am not a pious man, but so important is the proper outcome of this prolonged crisis, I am moved to cite Judeo-Christian Scripture: “God of Vengeance, God to whom vengeance belongs; show Thyself.” Then it will be time for mercy, even unto the most unworthy, who shall be nameless, such as John Dean and Carl Bernstein.

Conrad Black: The absurd collusion delusion goes up in smoke at last

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/conrad-black-the-absurd-collusion-delusion-goes-up-in-smoke-at-last
March 29, 2019

It was amply documented that the Russians meddled in the election and made repeated efforts to associate with the Trump campaign, but that all such overtures were rebuffed

As the Trump-Kremlin conspiracy vanishes in a flash and puff of smoke, the colossal absurdity of it suddenly becomes clearer. Former senior CIA and FBI officials — John Brennan and Andrew McCabe — said in the past two weeks that the president of the U.S. may be “an asset” of the government of the detritus of the old Soviet Union, a country shorn of more than half of its population and with a GDP smaller than Canada’s.

This was always an insane proposition. No U.S. major party presidential candidate would ever have considered colluding with a foreign government to rig an election, and no one who tried to would even get a security clearance. Yet practically the entire Democratic party and 80 percent of the American national media bought more or less fully into this Brobdingnagian canard.

The Clinton campaign commissioned a pastiche of defamatory falsehoods collected by a retired British spy and created an echo chamber between the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies, leaking parts of this spurious political assault document to the press and then citing the press references as evidence of its veracity. Even after it was fairly clear that this was what had probably happened, the collusion fable flourished imperishably. The majority of the U.S. national media constantly repeated the refrain for two years that the country’s elected leader had probably committed more grave crimes of national betrayal than those for which Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed in 1953 (mere espionage).

Some of us who are published in the United States and appear on current affairs programs there sometimes warned that this was simply impossible and that the politicization of the intelligence agencies, including the FBI, was an extreme danger to constitutional government. Now the most comprehensive investigation in American history, surpassing even that of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, conducted by diehard Trump haters and Democratic activists who desperately wanted to find some truth in this mad fantasy, found, reassuringly, no evidence that any American colluded in any way with any foreigners to intervene in the election. It was amply documented that the Russians meddled in the election (ineffectually), and that they made repeated efforts to associate their efforts with the Trump campaign, but that all such overtures were rebuffed. The more high-minded American commentators recognized that this verdict was heartening to the whole country.

The attempt by President Trump’s enemies to cling to supposed ambiguity on the question of whether Trump obstructed justice is ridiculous. Attorney General William Barr explained in his letter to the Congressional judiciary committee leaders on Sunday that to charge obstruction (which special counsel Robert Mueller did not recommend), it would be necessary to be confident beyond a reasonable doubt that the suspect had committed an obstructive act with corrupt intent in regard to a judicial proceeding, and that neither he nor the deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein (who had recommended the firing of the FBI director, James Comey, and had appointed Mueller in the first place), nor the independent counsel of the Justice Department, considered that there was any evidence of any of the necessary ingredients for an obstruction charge, and they had been examining the issue for the 30 days since Mueller had forewarned the attorney general of his findings. That turkey won’t fly any better than the Russian collusion fable.

This astonishing state of affairs arose because Donald Trump successfully attacked the entire political establishment for 20 years of fruitless wars and humanitarian crises in the Middle East, the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression, flat-lined living standards being the “new normal,” and a foreign policy that oscillated between George W. Bush’s trigger-happy foreign policy and Barack Obama’s declinist passivity and evaporating “red lines.” Such an election upset caused great stupefaction, especially because Trump had spent much of his career in shadowy, over-publicized, and often hucksterish activities that sometimes were outright flimflam. His career and public personality invited suspicion that he was ethically challenged. From these unique circumstances, the monster of the Russian collusion fraud was born and lurched about for over two years.

The imputation of base motives to Trump is not surprising, but the supreme defamation of treason is the most disgraceful character assassination in American political history. It was part of a largely uncoordinated scheme in which all of the men just named, and the former attorney general and deputy attorney general (Loretta Lynch and Sally Yates), as will be deduced from hearings and investigations that are in some cases already underway, politicized impartial national security agencies and attempted to influence a presidential election, and then to undo the result of that election. All the agitation and histrionics of Democratic committee chairmen in the House of Representatives about new investigations is just hot air.

The unearthing of the anti-Trump conspiracy will produce shocking revelations of misconduct by high intelligence and federal police officials; this is the last stop before the outright intervention of the armed forces: tanks on the White House lawn and generals and admirals commandeering television stations to announce the overthrow of the government. It will all be sorted out in a way that discourages a repetition. This is the scandal and the menace, not this unutterable bunk about collusion with Russia. Trump countered the hostile 80 or 90 per cent of the national media with his dominance of the talk shows, local media, social media, and the powers of communication of his office. He is, in his way, a very effective communicator, and he maintained his army of supporters intact in a very hostile media climate. He is already rising in the polls now.

Canada is, of all foreign countries, the most generally informed about American affairs, and it was almost monochromatically credulous toward these nonsensical charges against the president. It need hardly be emphasized that Donald Trump is a singularly un-Canadian personality. He is many things that Canadians are not and don’t generally admire. Nothing is wrong with that; he has no reason to care what Canadians think and Canadians have no obligation to like him. But we do have an obligation to ourselves to recognize and describe American political events accurately and even perceptively. No one seriously expects the Europeans to figure out American affairs. They generally stereotype Americans (along with Canadians) and even the British rarely have any concept of the U.S. apart from New York, Washington and Los Angeles, interesting cities which fortunately don’t much influence U.S. national elections.

The long-impressive magazine, the Economist, is utterly clueless and impenetrably condescending in its American political coverage. (Mercifully, my subscription of 60 years lapsed just after I read in the Economist that the president’s future would be determined by Michael Cohen.) Almost all foreigners missed the greatest American political story in 150 years — the attempted manipulation of a presidential election by the country’s intelligence and federal police forces.

There may have been other commentators than I in this country who warned what was really happening in these controversies, but I don’t recall many. Every time I appeared with other people on television discussing this, there were always complacent assurances that “the noose is tightening on Trump” and “the walls are closing in” and so forth. Our media failed. Our correspondents in Washington just took the feed from the Trump-haters and did precisely nothing to explain what was really happening, or to prepare the Canadian public for the outcome, or even comment intelligently after the collusion bubble burst. Dislike of Trump, I repeat, is quite understandable, but an almost complete failure of our media that focuses on Washington to grasp, even after the revelation of it, what was really unfolding there, is inexcusable.

Democrats - The Looney Tunes Party

The Emerging Democratic Minority

The party is doing its best to squander the limited victory it won in 2018.

Conrad Black
http://www.conradmblack.com/1457/the-emerging-democratic-minority
March 12, 2019

The biases of the media are so pervasive that there is little recognition of the steady disintegration of the Democrats, though it is occurring every day. Rational and intelligent members of the center-Left write to me every week with new concerns about where the Left is going. The Democratic National Committee’s decision not to allow Fox News to put on one of their candidates’ debates confirms the weakness of the party and of its leaders. The process of atomizing society into smaller and smaller bearers of less and less widespread grievances, on each of which the whole movement of protest, uproot, reveal, and punish is in constant paroxysms of righteousness, is becoming louder and faster and more absurdly overwrought by the day.

To take the most prominent recent examples, the Democratic leadership has declared the Trump tax cuts and reform to be a “disaster . . . the worst legislation in history . . . crumbs” (Speaker Pelosi) for the country, and a huge payoff for the rich. Economic growth has doubled, real incomes are increasing in the middle-class and working-class income levels for the first time in 20 years, and the country has more jobs to fill than unemployed people to fill them. The Democratic leadership has not just contested the existence of a serious problem at the southern border; it has flirted with proposing the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and Beto O’Rourke, who outspent prominent incumbent senator Ted Cruz three to one in Texas and came close to winning last year, not only opposes building a defined border but urges that whatever fencing and other obstacles are now in place be removed. At the same time, most official Democrats support the legal effort to prohibit the Census Bureau, in pursuing its constitutional duty to determine the apportionment of state delegations to the House of Representatives and the Electoral College, from asking people about their citizenship, just as they have long waived the necessity of being a citizen to vote.

Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell (California) has sponsored legislation to protect the media from the purported threat of physical assault by President Trump and has made a television tour throughout the Cohen road-show saying that anyone who needed “a fixer” shouldn’t be president.

Donald Trump was a New York billionaire property developer, impresario, and reality-television star, not a librarian in Swalwell’s native Sac City, Iowa. Rich and active New Yorkers do need fixers (though Trump could have done better than Cohen). American presidents need to be worldlier than they recently have been, not moralistic yokels. Swalwell is a 38-year-old fourth-term congressman who, like much of the population, is contemplating a presidential run. Another Democratic congressman, whose name I decided I did not want to know or remember shortly after his soundbite began over the weekend, said that all the House Judiciary and Intelligence Committees’ subpoenas of the Trump entourage would not have been necessary if Trump had published his tax returns.

This is the moronic level to which the opposition has excavated. Trump’s tax returns have been audited, and often contested, every year for over 40 years by the IRS. If there were anything substantial lying dead under his fiscal floorboards, Trump’s returns would be plastered and illuminated in Times Square, and Rachel Maddow would read them to viewers every night with the same breathy and then crestfallen excitement that she exhibited last year when reading from a questionably obtained Trump tax return that he had in one year paid “only . . . 55 million dollars.” It was 18 months ago that Senator Chris Coons of Delaware declared that Trump’s tax returns would reveal the Russian collusion to rig the election. The last Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Tim Kaine, on discovering that Trump’s son and son-in-law had met with a Russian woman at the Trump Tower, announced that treason may have occurred.

For two years it was thought Mueller would be the deus ex machina who would end the imposture and terminate the aberrant Trump presidency. Now that it is clear that this is not happening, the Democrats, completely shameless at having to start all over with a new canard about Trump’s illegitimate election, are calling for U-Hauls full of materials and scores of witnesses to again unleash the motor-mouthed non-stop-talking television airheads to tell us once more that we don’t know what we don’t know, and just because Mueller couldn’t do it in two years with 15 investigators (so rabidly anti-Trump that some were fired and all had to be brought into the office on leash), that doesn’t mean Trump isn’t a criminal. Elizabeth Warren, self-remade into one of the ludicrous figures of American public life over her claim to being a beer-swilling native, tells cheering crowds that Trump may finish his term in prison. Liberal high-mindedness has reached its coronation; the debasement of the Eleanor Roosevelt tradition.

Because this president had never sought or held any public office, elected or unelected, or a high military position, his presidential candidacy, which was the subject of such uproarious mirth until he was elected, has incited the inference that anyone, everyman (and woman), can be elected to that position. Thus the field of possible Democratic candidates has become absurdly crowded with absolute poltroons. It is like a New York City Marathon for the unfit. Governor Jay Inslee of Washington, who, when a guest in the White House, reprimanded the president for sending too many tweets, and who was chief judge-shopper for the initial fatuous district-court ruling purporting to exercise the president’s rights over immigration, is running for president on the climate-change issue. His own measures on the subject were rejected in his home state. Americans, rightly, do not consider this a pressing issue, but he wants to ride this hobbyhorse to the White House.

There are more than 30 possible or already declared Democratic candidates, and all but three or four tick at least three of the following high-explosive booby-trap boxes: a draconian green program based on Ocasio La Pasionaria’s intuition that without it the world will burn up in twelve years; personal-income-tax rates in the 70 percent range; legalized infanticide; completely nationalized health care; open borders and no attempt to distinguish citizens from noncitizens; and vast reparations to African Americans, Latinos, and native people.

The Trump-hating media are enablers of a fantasy game in which everyone pretends that the Democratic party has a large number of interesting, qualified, sensible people to choose from to knock off this president. The true evidence of what is happening is that the canaries in the mineshaft are falling over. There were only four putative candidates who had the position, recognition, and sensible perspective to make a serious race. Michael Bloomberg (who has drunk himself half-silly with the climate-change Kool-Aid) has gone to his default position of aiming for secretary of state, as he did with Jeb Bush and Hillary. He left the race, and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio followed him. Amy Klobuchar is unlikely to have the flair to win, but she is a presentable candidate. The inevitable Joe Biden, who first ran for president in 1988 but was knocked out for cribbing a platitudinous line from defeated British Labour-party leader Neil Kinnock, seems likely to make the race.

In fact, Joe Biden is the man America needs. To be sure, he could not possibly win, and he does not have the judgment or moral authority to be an effective president. But he is an amiable old water buffalo who would make a somewhat respectable race and gather together the many Democratic constituencies that are now proliferating and multiplying like an aggressive virus, and by his honorable example, though failing to excite anyone, might also prevent every sane Democrat from voting Republican. Biden might spare his party a terrible fate and deliver it to a serious contender in 2024, when the country could be expected to continue its now well-established pattern of alternating parties in the White House every eight years. The polls are not now asking the questions they will in 18 months: Trump will have delivered on the economy, illegal immigration, trade, energy, and avoidance of foreign-policy fiascos, and his opponents are mainly quacks. America needs a two-party system with sane people at the head of each. Joe Biden is no world-beater, but he could spare the Democrats a world-historic beating at the polls next year.

The Cohen Fiasco

Conrad Black
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/michael-cohen-testimony-trump-impeachment-case-democrats/
March 4, 2019

Democrats are doing their feeble best to build an impeachment case against the president, but it won’t succeed.

The whole state of national political discourse has risen a notch, but not from elevated content, rather from a de-escalation of the tawdriness and vituperation of discredited allegations. As the abysmal, shaming failure of the Russian-collusion fraud reveals itself in the run-up to the production of the Mueller report, the president’s accusers, without even a subliminal hint of embarrassment, regret, or belated moderation, lower their sights.

Let us recall that two years ago, all manner of groups were staging sizable marches all over the world announcing, in Bruce Springsteen’s words (from Perth, Australia), the beginning of the Resistance. The New York Times’ Tom Friedman asserted that the Russian influence on the 2016 election was an infringement of U.S. sovereignty on the same scale as the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Hillary Clinton was putting the finishing touches on her book about the 2016 election, which explained that she had lost because of Donald Trump’s treasonable collusion with the Russians in the Kremlin’s tactical interventions in the campaign, and because she was “shivved three times by Jim Comey.” (Never mind that two of these applications of the shiv were exonerations and another was almost certainly a whitewash of illegal conduct.)

Two years ago, the congressional Republican party was sitting on its hands, waiting to see if the president who had run against them as much as against the Democrats would be impeached. Whole conversations between the president and foreign leaders were being leaked, and personnel were coming and going from important positions in the White House in a blur of constant change magnified by the rabidly hostile media. When President Trump spoke to the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) two years ago, he was received politely but tentatively, hopefulness tempered by astonishment and disbelief. At that time, Nathan Silver was predicting that Trump’s chances of impeachment were 50–50, and even the sober David Gergen said on CNN “We are moving into impeachment country.” An immense media effort was made to enhance his vulnerability by dragging his approval ratings down into the 30s. His following has been unshakable.

When the president returned to CPAC on Saturday, it was clear from beginning to end of his extraordinary appearance, speaking largely extempore for over two hours, that he was the head of a united Republican party and a conservative movement lined up to the last male and female combatant behind him. His leadership of the Republicans is now as unambiguous as that of Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower, an astounding feat in these uproarious circumstances, and given that he is much more of an outsider than Reagan was. (In the case of Eisenhower, the party grandees came caps-in-hand to the general and asked him to run, and Richard Nixon delivered the California delegates to provide the margin of victory in seating the Eisenhower delegates over those pledged to Senate leader Robert A. Taft in a number of contested states, in exchange for the vice presidency.)

Richard Nixon in 1972, on his way to what still stands as the greatest plurality victory in American presidential history (18 million votes in an electorate only about 60 percent the size of the present one), faced a primary challenge, and won only about 68 percent in the New Hampshire primary, though he swept everything after that. At this point, despite obscure audible ruminations in rural church basements by Maryland governor Larry Hogan and John Kasich, former governor of Ohio, not even a mouse is stirring in the Republican party, and the president’s tour de force at CPAC reinforced his position as the head of the entire country to the right of Joe Biden and Michael Bloomberg. If he is not running next year against either of those men, or possibly Amy Klobuchar or Sherrod Brown, that will be his likely percentage of votes cast next year, around 60 percent. If he is running against one of the few plausible centrists in the Democratic scrum, his margin could narrow to about 10 percent, which is still nearly 15 million votes.

As the Democrats take to the lifeboats from their foundering ship of impeachment, the unsinkables who have eschewed life vests are still declaiming on the tilting deck. Jerry Nadler is claiming the president’s 1,100 public references to the Mueller inquiry as a witch-hunt constituted obstruction of justice, and the unstoppable talking head Adam Schiff is still repeating the existence of evidence of Trump–Russian collusion (that he can’t identify and no one else has seen). Their fallback position, when they finally take the order to abandon ship on Russian collusion, is to make Trump’s entire career their province and try to paw through everything he ever did commercially, back to childhood lemonade stands. Of course, this will be a complete failure. The president can ignore these subpoenas and restrict compliance to specific issues, and endless trips up the court ladder could easily retard the progress of this nonsense until the public has entirely lost interest. These are not the same Nadler and Schiff of two years ago, who had thin lines of foam and saliva at the corners of their mouths as they solemnly announced that they had cornered the president.

The Trump-hating media did their best with Michael Cohen, a man who again lied to Congress last week, claimed to have flipped against Trump after Charlottesville nearly two years ago, and affirmed that there was no Trump–Russian collusion, although, while the president had never told him to pay off the stripper who was trying to blackmail Trump (Stormy Daniels), he had used a coded method of urging him to do so, which Cohen couldn’t describe. We have descended from hearsay from a self-confessed liar to hear-intuition from the same majestic source, and the Democrats are so desperate they are having him back in the days immediately preceding his incarceration. We have descended from the drama of the conceivable removal of the world’s premier officeholder to the squalid fabricated evidence of a pathetic plea bargainer, ground to powder by the partisan Mueller meat-grinder.

The Democrats and their media organ monkeys have done their best to sound unctuous and morally outraged and pretend that a credible witness has produced real evidence of a “high crime,” and that an unadmitted response to attempted blackmail constitutes a campaign-finance violation, which is itself a constitutional high crime. But no one believes any of it, and no one cares. This clunker will take the dead-cat bounce, like all the others, including the weekly bubble of rage about the president’s son-in-law receiving a security clearance. The country is tired of it. Those who detest Trump detest him. Those who like him are no less convinced or numerous than they were. But the modest no-man’s land between them is breaking in the president’s favor as he edges slowly up in the polls. There are no more plausible revelations; there is no doubt of the country’s economic performance, and the administration is clearly moving coherently and steadily in foreign policy.

In the absence of any new sensational or substantive anti-Trump argument, of anything to justify the howls of racism and misogyny of two years ago, the Resistance is doomed with their nonsense about Cohen and obstruction, and the Never Trumpers are mercifully silent. And those who merely disapprove of Trump, with sadness and nostalgia for more stylish and chivalrous times, such as Peggy Noonan, are back to the character issue. This is legitimate as a reservation about the president and a reason not to vote for him, but it won’t fly as grounds for impeachment, and is not claimed to be by those who articulate it.

The country knew in 2016 that it was gambling on a garish, financially checkered New York development wheeler-dealer television reality-show star and downmarket impresario. They gambled that someone as far out of the familiar mold of the OBushintons as Trump was could be justified to try to reverse the post-Reagan slide in America’s morale, economic competitiveness, and standing in the world. By a hair’s breadth, the gamble succeeded, and so far, Trump supporters are reassured. Every conceivable epithet and charge has been hurled at Trump, and there is almost nothing to any of it. We’re only 20 months from the next election and the Democrats, with no show-stopper to disqualify Trump, are scrambling to the left like lemmings to mount a radical alternative to the incumbent. If one of the few Democratic moderates can’t get control of the runaway bus, it will go over the cliff. If they can, it will still break down on its axles as the long-delayed inquiry into the skullduggery of the politicized Obama Justice Department and intelligence agencies oozes into the public’s nostrils. The Democrats have had their long turn at mudslinging. Now professionally and discreetly, it is time to unearth the real scandal from the last election.