After the Coup is Gone

By Julie Kelly 
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2019/02/15/after-the-coup-is-gone-by-julie-kelly/              
February 15th, 2019          
     
As the perpetrators of one of the most shameful scandals in American political history begin slowly to retreat, we are left to ponder one overarching question:

What now?

The tale we’ve been told for more than two years—that Donald Trump’s campaign team, possibly even the candidate himself, colluded with the Kremlin to influence the outcome of the 2016 presidential election—has been exposed as a lie. Various investigations into this alleged conspiracy are coming up empty and the accomplices are trying to change the subject. Even more pathetically, some still are clinging to the farce, desperate to salvage whatever still remains of their already sketchy credibility.

To describe it as a witch hunt, the president’s preferred term, is too generous. The American public has witnessed a seditious attempt by powerful interests garrisoned throughout our political complex to overthrow a sitting U.S. president. The orchestrated and failed coup has exceeded the routine combat of our two-party system, where out-of-power partisans disrupt and agitate the other side. No, this has been a full scale insurrection that has violated the boundaries of law, normalcy, and civility in an unprecedented way.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been complicit. The national news media have acted as hatchet men. Influential public officials, operating both inside and outside of government, have aided the stratagem. One of the main culprits just revealed—no, bragged—how a handful of corrupt bureaucrats plotted unlawfully to remove the president from the Oval Office based on the fantastical scheme.

It’s the kind of treachery that is supposed to animate banana republics or Soviet-style regimes—not our country.

And now that the Senate Intelligence Committee confirmed this week that their two-year investigation—which involved the interrogation of 200 witnesses and a review of 300,000 documents—will find no evidence of collusion, the aftermath of this scandal is coming into view. How it plays out is anyone’s guess at this point, but one thing is evident: There is deep rage at what has happened not just to this president but to this country—and people want answers.

On his show Tuesday night, Tucker Carlson unleashed a tirade that reflected the anger felt by millions of Americans. “In the end, it was all fake, and they knew it wasn’t real, they knew they were lying,” Carlson said after playing a series of clips by Democratic leaders accusing the president of colluding with the Russians. “We’ve spent two years perpetuating a fraud and they are still doing it. What is it? It’s negligence on a stunning scale. Historians will look back on this moment in amazement and sadness. Why didn’t any responsible person in the media say anything about it, why did they collude in the charade?”

Carlson unloaded on House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), one of the key conspirators from the beginning, insisting that Skiff's grandchildren “will be ashamed of what he did.” Perhaps they will. But only if his progeny have more integrity and decency than Schiff does which, I admit, sets a very low bar.

The cast of villains in this national nightmare is long. At the highest echelon is the Obama White House; to date, no one knows how involved the former president was in executing this scheme because not one journalist has yet confronted Obama about what he knew or when he knew it. Think about that for a moment. Barack Obama’s Justice Department weaponized federal law enforcement and intelligence powers to infiltrate and spy on a rival presidential campaign then leveraged that same authority after the election to raze an incoming administration, yet not one member of the press corps has asked him one question about it.

Former administration officials who pulled all the strings, including ex-FBI Director James Comey, ex-CIA Director John Brennan and ex-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper continue to attack the president, even accusing Trump of being a traitor and a Russian asset. Members of both the Obama and Bush administrations have become media celebrities by legitimizing the collusion fantasy on cable news shows and opinion pages. NeverTrump Republicans who long ago should have been run out of the public square for their consistently-wrong analysis on nearly every political and policy issue over the past two decades have earned earn rock-star status on social media from Democrats and liberals eager to exploit  their nonstop rants about Trump-Russia as proof “even Republicans” are suspicious.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have diverted time, money, and attention away from critical issues that matter to Americans in order to chase after a ruse that most, if not all, knew was a head fake from the start. It will be impossible to measure how many opportunities to fix illegal immigration or health care or entitlement reform over the past two years were lost while our political leaders across the country were mired in a nonexistent crisis. And probably that was the point. The Justice Department has diverted needed resources to a special counsel probe that has nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people.
Meanwhile, Robert Mueller’s investigation has not yielded one indictment related to collusion, yet it has wrecked countless reputations and livelihoods. Gutless elected officials have cowered in the presence of representatives from this ostensible fourth branch of government while Trump-Russia propagandists demand that every politician swear his allegiance and fealty to the almighty and unaccountable Robert Mueller. Any hint of disagreement with the special counsel is portrayed as either cowardice or insubordination.

But no entity has acted more recklessly and destructively than the national news media. From publishing illegally leaked information intended to destroy anyone in Trump’s orbit to ambushing elderly supporters of Donald Trump, the media have defiled their industry to a degree that will be unrecoverable. False reporting has been corrected quietly (when it is corrected at all) and without any consequence.
Sex-for-Trump-Russia-Scoop arrangements result in promotions.


Consider these numbers: Since May 2017, the New York Times has cited the Mueller investigation 4,392 times and posted nearly 1,200 articles, columns and editorials about Russian collusion since January 2017. The Washington Post has cited Robert Mueller 4,162 times and posted 1,100 pieces about Russian collusion just in the past 12 months. CNN has devoted more than 3,000 articles and news segments to Robert Mueller since he was appointed. Those are just the results of a few cursory searches.


But we will never know the total amount of air time, column inches and social media chatter that have been dedicated to a fabricated conspiracy peddled by a media infrastructure desperate to believe it was true and maliciously trying to convince the public of a lie in a vain attempt to satiate their own appetite for political revenge against Donald Trump.

So, what now? Who will pay the price for unleashing this ordeal on the American public? Which lawmaker will
be rebuked and censured for pretending to have evidence of malfeasance that never happened? Which former high level official will be charged for abuse of power?

What journalist will be fired and permanently jettisoned from the industry for intentionally misleading readers and viewers? What editor or media owner will be held accountable for publishing illegally leaked information that exacted real harm on innocent people? When will NeverTrumperers who accused more astute observers of this scheme of being “conspiracy theorists” going to apologize?

How will people harassed by the media and investigators restore their professional standing, squandered savings and mental wellbeing? How can the president regain the time in his term that has been lost to this craven insurgency?

These are only a handful of the questions now arising from the wreckage of the failed Trump-Russia collusion gambit; the answers might be just as infuriating as the questions themselves.

Donald Trump’s Annihilation of the Democratic Party

By Conrad Black
https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/06/donald-trumps-annihilation-of-the-democratic-party/
February 6, 2019 

The nadir of the amoral egotism of what might broadly be called “Me-ism” has been reached by the avant garde of the Democratic Party in their race to the bottom of the electoral depths. The renunciation of any notions of sacrifice, patriotic pride, the spirituality of life, or the recognition of anything except the smash-and-grab politics of endless atomized grievances and instant gratification of convenience, has reached what must, in its way, be the end of history.

The governor of Virginia, Ralph Northam, a pediatric neurologist, led the way downwards with an unctuous statement on the virtues of delivering children, assuring their survival as live babies, and then determining in discussion with the mother (of course) whether they deserved to be allowed to survive.

This was an attitude that appalled a large section of opinion in 5th century B.C. Athens. In espousing it, far more than the utter moral vacuity of the cutting edge of the Democratic Party has been exposed. When running for governor, Northam called his opponent a racist and President Trump a “narcissistic maniac.”

The Bigger Fight

The informal, spontaneous, emergent strategy of the Democrats is finally erupting and foaming from the mouths and nostrils of their legislators and candidates in a mighty outburst of opportunistic consciousness. This is a delayed reaction to the destruction of their monopoly on political power by the Trump phenomenon, compounded by the recognition that Trump can’t be impeached and will do everything he promised if he can get a firm enough grip on the apparatus of political power.


The supreme struggle for the commanding heights of American politics, the battle of Verdun or of Stalingrad, has come over immigration. The decades-old understanding between machine Democrats vacuuming up easy Latino votes and largely Republican employers exploiting the cheap labor of illegal Latino immigrants enabled Donald Trump to forge a new coalition of the threatened working class, the middle class exhausted by more than a decade of flat-lined purchasing power, the silent majority of disinterested patriotic Americans, and the legitimate immigrants who do not want their ability to climb the socio-economic ladder as American immigrants have done for 240 years to be undercut by swarms of illegal migrants with no sense of choosing a new country and determining to accept that country’s values and work within them.

Democrats rejoice in proclaiming that Trump didn’t drain much of the swamp when the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. They know perfectly well that the Republicans in the Congress were NeverTrumpers. The only senator Trump had at the outset was the subsequently hopeless attorney general, Jeff Sessions, who could not have done more to assist the cover-up of Democratic skullduggery if he had co-authored the Steele dossier.

Now Trump has banished the worst of the Never Trumpers from the congressional Republican delegation, and won the rest over by friendly persuasion—except for Mitt Romney, who virtually terminated his useful career as a senator two days before he was sworn in with an article on the president’s character. The piece confirmed about Romney what his predecessor from Utah, Orrin Hatch, had called him: “a well-oiled weather vane.” It showed, too, that he was a treacherous one. Despite Romney and the chronically bumptious Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Trump’s allies are now in control of the Senate and its committees and the unearthing of the misconduct of the Obama Justice Department, intelligence services, and the Clinton campaign—as the attorney general-designate has pledged—are about to begin.


Democrats Backed Into a Corner

The Democratic House of Representatives has taken its stand on immigration. Led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), they claim to favor border security but are reluctant to do anything to reduce the flow of illegal immigrants. The entire Democratic media echo chamber has gone to maximum decibel levels denouncing the time-honored solution of an “immoral” wall, and claiming the problem is wildly exaggerated and chiefly occurs at airports. They are backing themselves into the corner of “sanctuary cities” where police are instructed to ignore federal immigration laws and census-takers are enjoined from asking the citizenship of the country’s residents, as the Constitution requires.

This is insurrection and the pervasion of the immigration question, around 20 million people who entered the United States illegally, has corrupted the Democratic Party as its leaders balk at rational solutions. These include the establishment of a border, the deportation of serious law-breakers illegally present in the United States, a generous treatment for the people who entered blamelessly as children, and an expedited path to citizenship for the great majority of illegal entrants who have been constructive and law-abiding residents.
With battle joined on immigration, the Democrats have lashed out at the rich, including the close pals of the Clintons and Obamas in Wall Street and Hollywood, and are calling for a return to pre-LBJ, almost World War II-level tax rates, (of the confiscatory levels that drove Ronald Reagan into the Republican Party). La Pasionaria of the movement, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), and the modern Herbert Marcuse, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), are both calling for top tax rates in the neighborhood of 70 percent. Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, junior U.S. senator from California, surged to the fore by calling for the nationalization of the entire health insurance industry, and, effectively of the entire gigantic field of health care. Never mind single-payer healthcare, this is no-payer health care. Doctors of America would become de facto federal employees.

Exalting Atrocities

The Democratic train is now roaring off the tracks and down the third rail which politicians used not to touch, out of a lingering sense of self-preservation. The logical coruscation of this dispersal—this flight from the political center to the left, to stage a goal-line stand of the die-hards against the Trump ogre, grinding relentlessly forward, heedless of the semi-daily announcements by most of the national media of his imminent collapse in legal shambles, is to repurpose abortion as the end of the policy rainbow.

Abortion is too intrusive, too inconvenient; let the children be born and then the mother can decide whether she wants to be a mother after all, or kill the child, or give it up for adoption.

This was the logical end of the nonsensical Roe v. Wade decision that childbirth is exclusively a matter of a woman’s control over her body: it decided correctly that the state does not have the power and should not seek the power to inflict childbirth on a woman who does not want to have a child. But it ignored the real question of when the unborn attain to the rights of a person. That is why the decision is vulnerable and the Democrats, in cold terror that it could be overturned, are in panic and are moving the battle-lines forward to the position of Ralph Northam, far from a natural oracle of moral opinion this past week.

To hell with control over their own bodies! Women will decide in post-natal calm whether to kill the child. It is to this unspeakable assault on every principle and value that has guided, inspired, and undergirded American civilization, where the Democrats are arriving at their last post.

#MeToo was justice by denunciation. Senator and presidential candidate Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) said Dr. Christine Blasey Ford had to be believed over Judge Brett Kavanaugh because she was a woman. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) saved the balance of evidence and of probabilities, and rebutted justice by mere unsubstantiated denunciation. The Democrats are moving on: women will not only cause the rejection of male candidates for high positions, but have them prosecuted, which in the corrupt American justice system in 95 percent of cases means imprisoned. For good measure, the warrior-queen sisterhood will also decide, after birth, whether their children will be allowed to survive. Life is not remotely sacred, it is to be encouraged if convenient and snuffed out if not.

A Frenzy of Extremism

Donald Trump’s greatest achievement may be the total annihilation of the Democratic Party in its present mutated and degraded form. The Democrats have been allowed to slither to their present state of moral degradation with the witless and spineless collaboration of look-alike Republicans who are easy to defeat, like McCain and Romney, or can be survived, like Reagan and the Bushes, or destroyed, like Nixon.

Faced with a Trump they could not defeat and cannot destroy, Democrats appear to be entering a frenzy of primal extremism. If the Democrats go to the voters next year as the party of infanticide, open borders, a 70 percent top personal income tax rate, and the practical abolition of private health care, they will vanish more quickly, and with less distinction, than the Whigs, who at least had serious leaders like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln before their party imploded. This thronging riff-raff of Democratic presidential aspirants couldn’t lead the country across Washington’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, and won’t get an invitation to try.

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.