The further to the left or the right you move, the more your lens on life distorts.

Friday, June 29, 2018

Ocasio-Cortez

When the Georgia GOP voters made a serious mistake and used a primary election to nominate a hard right-wing judge named Roy Moore who apparently had a predilection for teenage girls, the trained hamsters of the main stream media had a field day. With glee, they demanded that every national GOP politician disavow Moore's extreme views. Most did. Fair enough.

A new hard-left Democratic superstar named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated nationally recognized Democratic Congressman Joe Crowley in the primary for New York's 14th Congressional District (and will win the deep blue district easily in November). You'd think the trained hamsters in the media would ask every Democrat to comment on and endorse or disavow the young "Democratic Socialist's" rather extreme positions on education, housing, taxation, immigration, and of course, Israel.

As a hard-left follower of Bernie Sander's socialist "solutions" and a poster child for identity politics, Ocasio-Cortez tells us bluntly that she'll vote to impeach Donald Trump, even though there's not a shred of evidence of an impeachable offense—because ... Trump Derangement Syndrome.

In the long tradition of utopian leftists who are really good at moral preening along with promising free stuff to naive voters, Ocasio-Cortez tells us she wants "free" college education and "free" healthcare for all, paid for, of course, by "taxing the rich."

She is an advocate of catch and release for illegal immigrants (sorry, "undocumented migrants") along with the abolishment of ICE—essentially, she's a champion of open borders.

And like a growing majority on the Left, she is virulently anti-Israel, preferring instead Hamas, a violent terrorist organization (elected by the "oppressed Palestinian people") that is anti-democratic, anti-gay, anti-human rights, anti-women, anti-Christian and of course anti-Semitic.

So ... following in the tradition of the media's treatment of Republicans after Roy Moore won the Senate nomination from Georgia, every national Democrat should be questioned repeatedly on Ocasio-Cortez' positions, and more importantly, asked if they support them.

Betcha it doesn't happen.

Oh ... BTW ... a significant percentage of Georgia Republicans, concerned about his extremist views, voted against Roy Moore in 2017 and thankfully, he lost the election in a deep red state. Georgia voters showed character in the end and elected a Democrat. Gotta wonder whether any Democrat voters, concerned about Ocasio-Cortez' extreme leftist positions, will do the same. Nah .. not a chance.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Chicken Little

Get ready for it, 'cause its coming. The Chicken Little strategy has been employed by Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media to sully the reputation, and in some cases defeat, any Supreme Court nominee of a Republican president. Sure, the GOP has also done this with Dem nominees, but never with the viciousness and personal attacks that we see coming from the Left. For example, after a thorough vetting, recently appointed liberal justice Sonia Sotomayor was confirmed by a bipartisan 68–31 vote in the Senate, with 23 percent of GOP members joining Dems in her confirmation. Yet, a few years later, only 9 percent of Democratic Senators joined the GOP in voting for Neil Gorsuch, a nominee clearly as qualified as Sotomayor.

In essence, the Chicken Little strategy gins up every boogieman that will energize the Democratic base and might cause hesitation among the general public. The editors of the Wall Street Journal comment:
... Democrats are already predicting the demise of abortion rights, the end of gay marriage, and no doubt we’ll be hearing about the revival of Dred Scott before the confirmation hearings on Justice Kennedy’s replacement are over.
These claims have been made repeatedly over the years and yet, abortion rights and other social issues have not been threatened in any meaningful way. In fact, with a conservative majority on the court, rights associated with social issues have expanded (e.g., Federal recognition of gay marriage occurred under a conservative majority court). The United States Constitution protects the rights of all people, and justices who interpret it strictly are bound to protect those rights ... and have done so.

Yet examples of the Chicken Little strategy abound. When Robert Bork was nominated (and ultimately defeated), the Chicken Little strategy was applied within hours. The Schmoop Blog summarizes the history of the most controversial SCOTUS nominees in the Modern era and reports:
Within an hour of the announcement, Ted Kennedy went on television to accuse Bork of envisioning an America “in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”

Believe it or not, the process and rhetoric only went downhill from there.

One thing is certain—Trump Derangement Syndrome will amplify the Chicken Little strategy. No matter who Trump nominates, we'll be told that the sky is falling. The nominee will be vilified as "an extremist," and using the tortured logic of the Left, as a "racist," a "misogynist" and oh, yeah ... if the nominee happens to be a caucasian male, as a dangerous continuation of our patriarchal society.

We've seen this strategy before and undoubtedly, we'll see it again over the coming months.

"The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky is falling" ... except it never does.

UPDATE:
-------------

Gosh, as predicted, it sure didn't take long. This, before Trump has even picked a SCOTUS nominee:

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) said, "Any one of President Trump's list of proposed SCOTUS justices would overturn Roe v. Wade and threaten our fundamental rights. I'll fight to make sure there are no hearings to replace Justice Kennedy until after the election. This is our democracy. Let’s fight like it."

Not to be outdone, Rep. Kamala Harris (D-CA) said: “We’re looking at a destruction of the Constitution of the United States as far as I can tell based on all the folks he’s been appointing thus far for lifetime appointments ... He’s been appointing ideologues, he’s been appointing people who have refused to agree that Brown v. Board of Education is settled law.”

Hmmm. The "Destruction of the Constitution of the United States!!!!" The sky is falling. Chicken Little in action.

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Nervous Breakdown

In a series of recent posts (here and here) I have lamented the increasingly unhinged behavior of the #Resistance. Angry criticism of everything Donald Trump does has escalated into vicious name calling, not only of Trump, but of all who voted for him or currently support some or all of his policies. But even this hasn't been enough. The #Resistance has recently sanctioned mob-like behavior in which members of the Trump administration have been verbally assaulted, not in a public forum where such "protests" can at least be characterized as free speech and opposition, but in their private lives (e.g., at a private dinner in a restaurant or outside their private residences). For a more complete list of the #Resistance's unhinged behavior over the past year, look here.

It's only fair to ask what's going on, and Roger Simon provides an interesting explanation:
[Those who suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome] are all having a nervous breakdown and it keeps getting worse, because... because.... because Trump.

But I have news for them. It's not at all about Trump. It's about them.

Trump is what the shrinks call the "presenting complaint." The real problem, as is often the case in psychotherapy, is something entirely different. And it is this: The left is dead. It's not only dead, it's decomposed with no there there or anywhere ...

So the left has nothing to say, only most of them don't quite realize it yet. But this blockage, this reluctance and even inability to deal with what is actually happening shuts down the brain and emerges as anger, the hamster wheel of constant rage against Trump.
Sure, as a person, Donald Trump can be infuriating. His personal foibles are well-documented and understood. But after almost two years, they should no longer surprise—anyone. But as president, Trump has accomplished good things and he is on a trajectory to accomplish even more. Despite a tsunami of negative press (93% negative at last count), vicious attacks from the so-called elites in both the Democrat and Republican parties, and clear evidence that a deep state cabal would like nothing more than to topple him, we have a vibrant domestic economy and a foreign policy that although not perfect, is infinitely better that the one offered by the preceding administration.

In the last election, the country rejected eight years of the previous leftist administration. It rejected the economic malaise delivered by high taxes and uncontrolled spending, its catastrophic foreign policy blunders (Syria, Libya, and Iran come to mind), and its big government ideology (more dependency, more regulation, more intrusiveness). And all despite the prevailing conventional wisdom that the Left was ascendant. It just might be that that rejection is as much a contributor to the rage we see as anything else.

But the Left is wrong if it thinks it's on a journey to victory. David French comments:
... if recent American history is any guide, the mob only sows the seeds of its own destruction. Americans don’t like political violence. They’re not impressed by men trying to physically intimidate women. They don’t like to see protesters disturbing the peace of a person’s home. The last time the Left turned to rage, it lost presidential elections in landslides. If given the choice between terrible tweets and chaos in the streets, voters will choose the tweets every time.

So, the choice is clear. Protest all you want, but the moment you turn vicious is the moment you turn dangerous. When you start to tear at the fabric of American political life, you won’t be able to control — and may not like — the forces you unleash in response.
Hopefully, the only response we'll see is Leftist candidates being crushed at the polling booth. That won't eliminate the rage. In fact, it might exacerbate it. Why? Because history also indicates another important thing. The left never, ever learns from its failures. It doubles down and does more of what everyone else rejects. Don't believe me? Take a really hard look at the chaos and human misery wrought by the Left in the failed state that was once Venezuela.

UPDATE-1:
-------------

There are so many instances of unhinged idiocy coming from far too many members of the #Resistance, coupled with tortured defenses of vicious verbal attacks on opposing political views, and advocacy (think: Maxine Waters) of mob rule, one can't keep up. But this comment, by former Obama White House aide Peter Emerson is epic. On Saturday’s MSNBC Live with Alex Witt, Emerson defended the owner of Red Hen restaurant for refusing to serve White House spokesperson, Sarah Sanders, saying this: “... This is a time for moral and ethical courage. It's not time for courtesies.” ... So, I'm all in favor of that because, let's not forget what happened in Germany when people were silent, Cambodia, Rwanda, now Myanmar with the Rohingyas ...”

So ... incarcerating illegal immigrants temporarily as they cross our borders, giving them food, lodging, and health care when necessary, providing legal assistance when justified, and then returning them, unharmed, to their native country is a precursor to genocide? All you can do is shake your head.

UPDATE-2:
----------------

A common meme in the unhinged behavior of #Resistance types is the Nazi metaphor—a wholly offensive and historically illiterate suggestion that Trump, his cabinet, and his millions of supporters are "Nazis."

David Harsanyi dismantles the #Resistance members (both nationally known and Facebook/Twitter trolls) who make the Nazi analogy:
In September 1941, the Germans took Kiev. On Hitler’s orders, the new military governor orders the round-up of all Jews in the vicinity and marched them north of the city to a place called Babi Yar. There, Jews were stripped naked and taken into a ravine in groups of ten. Once at the bottom their fate was clear. Among the cries of children (many already separated from their parents), Jews were made to lie down atop others who had already been murdered. German soldiers then walked across the bodies in the large pit and meticulously shot every man, woman, child and baby in the head or neck. Then the next group would be brought down and it would happen all over again and again over a period of two days — until almost 34,000 people were no more.

Babi Yar was only the third largest massacre of Jews during the war. But the killing of children — Jewish and otherwise — started in 1939, when German medical professionals were reporting any child with disability to the authorities, and parents started handing them over to special “schools” where thousands were eliminated using drugs and starvation. All of this before the wholesale industrialized killing of humans was in full swing.

Now, if you really believed Donald Trump or Kirstjen Nielsen or Sarah Huckabee Sanders are keen on engaging in this sort of behavior one day, or anything close to it, you’re a depraved coward for not taking up arms and stopping them. And the only other possible reasons for you to constantly compare them to Nazis are that you’re tragically illiterate on basic history or a hopelessly unimaginative and dishonest partisan — or maybe both.
"Depraved coward" seems just about the right description, but "tragically illiterate on basic history or a hopelessly unimaginative and dishonest partisan — or maybe both" also covers it pretty well.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Shock the Conscience

In the aftermath of a devastating Inspector General Report delineating case after case of extreme anti-Trump bias by senior members of the FBI and DoJ, and by implication, senior members of the broader intelligence community, what do the Democrats do? Instead of joining the GOP to get the bottom of this unprecedented and dangerous situation, they tell us there is no problem.

The Dems hope that this scandal will somehow evaporate and are doing every possible to make that happen. I don't think it will.

After noting the most egregious evidence of bias contained in the IG report, David B. Rivkin Jr. and Elizabeth Price Foley write:
What does this have to do with [special counsel] Mr. Mueller, who was appointed in May 2017 after President Trump fired Mr. Comey? The inspector general concludes that the pervasive bias “cast a cloud over the FBI investigations to which these employees were assigned,” including Crossfire. And if Crossfire was politically motivated, then its culmination, the appointment of a special counsel, inherited the taint. All special-counsel activities—investigations, plea deals, subpoenas, reports, indictments and convictions—are fruit of a poisonous tree, byproducts of a violation of due process. That Mr. Mueller and his staff had nothing to do with Crossfire’s origin offers no cure.

When the government deprives a person of life, liberty or property, it is required to use fundamentally fair processes. The Supreme Court has made clear that when governmental action “shocks the conscience,” it violates due process. Such conduct includes investigative or prosecutorial efforts that appear, under the totality of the circumstances, to be motivated by corruption, bias or entrapment.
If the IG report and its implications doesn't "shock the conscience" of progressives, that may be because they are blinded by Trump Derangement Syndrome. If the IG report and its implication doesn't spur Democrats to join the GOP and demand a full accounting (like the GOP did with Democrats during Watergate), then they view partisan politics as more important than uncovering and correcting a clear threat to democratic processes. And if the trained hamsters in the main stream media continue to ignore or de-emphasize the implication of this entire scandal, then their characterization as "Democratic Party operatives with bylines" is tragically accurate.

Mueller's investigation was predicated on "evidence" that was pro-offered by DoJ officials who were influenced by biased FBI officials (e.g., Peter Strzok). That's NOT an opinion—it's statement of fact backed up by copious written evidence in the officials' own words. Even if Mueller is squeaky clean (and I do not believe he is), the entire investigation is tainted by (as lawyers call it) the "fruit of a poisonous tree."

To quote Instapundit's Glen Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee, "It seems pretty clear that this is a case of investigating a man [Trump] in the hopes of finding a crime, rather than investigating a crime and hoping to find the man behind it.

UPDATE-1:
----------------

The Democrats are trying desperately to ignore the IG report They say concern about the report smacks of conspiracy theory and that the Obama administration knew nothing about this. With the help of their trained hamsters in the media, they're using the ongoing hysteria over the southern border to bury yet another scandal that is far bigger than Watergate. They're succeeding ... for now.

The Dems assiduously avoid any discussion of key players and key facts, deny that there is any bias, and reject the notion that senior officials in the nation's intelligence and law enforcement agencies colluded (hmmm, finally a place where that term is accurate) to defeat Donald Trump. Some Dems have gone so far as praising Assistant FBI Director Peter Strzok as a "patriot" after the IG report was released.

Sharyl Attkisson comments [read her entire documented timeline] on Peter Strzok:
Strzok isn’t just any rank-and-file guy spouting off in one ill-advised email. His fingerprints were on every FBI investigation that stood to impact Clinton’s presidential candidacy or to hurt Trump before and after the 2016 election.

He was chief of the FBI’s Counterespionage Section and number two in the FBI’s Counterintelligence Division. He led the team of investigators in the Clinton classified email probe and led the FBI investigation into alleged Russian interference in the election. He was involved in the controversial anti-Trump “Steele dossier” used, in part, to obtain multiple secret wiretaps. He was the one who interviewed Trump adviser Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who pled guilty to lying to the FBI only to later learn that agents reportedly didn’t think he’d lied. And Strzok was the “top” FBI agent appointed to work on the team of special counsel Robert Mueller to investigate alleged Trump-Russia collusion.

The earth-shattering finding on Strzok by the inspector general (IG) confirms a citizenry’s worst fears: A high-ranking government intel official allegedly conspired to affect the outcome of a U.S. presidential election.

It’s also directly relevant to the FBI investigations of Trump-Russia collusion, which the IG did not examine in this report. There are multiple allegations of FBI misbehavior in that inquiry, including conspiracies to frame Trump, and improper spying on Trump associates. Investigating those allegations takes on an added sense of urgency with news that the FBI’s top counterespionage official expressed willingness to use his official position against a political enemy.
Something is very wrong here. It should "shock the conscience" of every American, including every Democrat. If it could happen to Trump, it could happen to some rising start in the Dem party. To think that it couldn't is just another example of magical thinking.

UPDATE-1:
------------------

RealClear Investigations reports:
The Federal Bureau of Investigation formally opened its Trump investigation after Western intelligence assets and Clinton-affiliated political operatives repeatedly approached the Trump campaign and tried but failed to damage it through associations with Russia, a growing body of evidence suggests.

Before the FBI began investigating the Trump campaign in an operation code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” there were at least seven different instances when campaign advisers were approached with Russia-related offers. Most of those contacts -- including Donald Trump Jr.’s much-publicized meeting with a Russian lawyer and others in June 2016 — offered the prospect of information damaging to Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton.

Two of these approaches were made by one U.S. government informant already publicly identified as such, Stefan Halper. Another was made by a man who swore in court that he had worked as an FBI informant. Two others were made by figures associated with Western intelligence agencies. Another two approaches included political operatives, one foreign, with ties to the Clintons.

President Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, has asserted that dispatching Halper to follow the Trump campaign "protected" it from the Russians.

But Mark Wauck, a former FBI agent with experience in such tactics, sees an effort at entrapment. “What appear to have been repeated attempts to implicate the Trump campaign, in some sort of quid pro quo arrangement with Russians who claimed to have ‘dirt’ on Hillary,” Wauck told RealClearInvestigations, “look like efforts to manufacture evidence against members of the Trump campaign or create pretexts to investigate it.”
As time passes and more revelations occur, it looks increasingly like members of the FBI and intelligence agencies under Barack Obama attempted to set up the Trump campaign—sort of as an "insurance policy" (sound familiar?) in case he threatened Hillary. Gosh, there actually was collusion ... it's just that it was directed against Trump by government agencies.

UPDATE-2:
--------------------

And then there's this, again from RealClear Investigations:
The FBI had little problem leaking “unverified" dirt from Russian sources on Donald Trump and his campaign aides – and even basing FISA wiretaps on it. But according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the bureau is refusing to allow even members of Congress with top security clearance to see intercepted material alleging political interference by President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

That material – which has been outlined in press reports – consists of unverified accounts intercepted from putative Russian sources in which the head of the Democratic National Committee allegedly implicates the Hillary Clinton campaign and Lynch in a secret deal to fix the Clinton email investigation.

“It is remarkable how this Justice Department is protecting the corruption of the Obama Justice Department,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based watchdog Judicial Watch, which is suing for the material.

Lynch and Clinton officials as well as the DNC chairman at the time, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, have denied the allegations and characterized them as Russian disinformation.

True or false, the material is consequential because it appears to have influenced former FBI Director James B. Comey’s decision to break with bureau protocols because he didn’t trust Lynch. In his recent book, Comey said he took the reins in the Clinton email probe, announcing Clinton should not be indicted, because of a “development still unknown to the American public” that “cast serious doubt” on Lynch’s credibility – clearly the intercepted material.

If the material documents an authentic exchange between Lynch and a Clinton aide, it would appear to be strong evidence that the Obama administration put partisan political considerations ahead of its duty to enforce the law.

If the material is a fabrication, it may constitute the most fruitful effort by the Russians to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. For if Comey had not gone around Lynch and given his July 2016 press conference clearing Clinton, he almost certainly would not have publicly announced the reopening for the case just prior to the election – an event Clinton and her allies blame for her surprising loss to Trump.

The information remains so secret that Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz had to censor it from his recently released 500-plus-page report on the FBI’s investigation of Clinton, and even withhold it from Congress.

The contents of the secret intelligence document — which purport to show that Lynch informed the Clinton campaign she’d make sure the FBI didn't push too hard — were included in the inspector general’s original draft. But in the official IG report issued June 14, the information was tucked into a classified appendix to the report and entirely blanked out.
But if it's all false, why all the secrecy? After all, it's just made-up stuff, right? Hmmmm. Betcha it's true.

The stink is getting stronger and stronger, and yet, no one among the Dems or their trained hamsters in the media seems to smell it.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Over-Woke and Under-Informed

As if to add an exclamation point to my last post, Democratic Congresswoman Maxine Waters implicitly endorsed mob rule by suggesting that activists continue their verbal and near-physical assaults on Trump administration officials at their homes and during private activities. Many Democrats cheered.

Time reports:
“If you see anybody from that [Trump] cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd, and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”

Waters’ call to action comes after two Trump administration officials recently faced backlash in public and, in one case, was denied service at a restaurant.
Waters is but one of dozens of prominent celebrities, media types, and Democrat politicians who are, in the words of Alan Richarz, "over-woke and under-informed." He writes:
That the Trump administration would be compared with Nazi Germany is not surprising. Accusations of “Republicans-as-fascists” long predate this administration. A Democratic congressman accused President Ronald Reagan of “trying to replace the Bill of Rights with fascist precepts lifted verbatim from ‘Mein Kampf.’ ” In more recent times, recall Keith Olbermann’s tarring of President George W. Bush as a “fascist” in an on-air segment in 2008, an appellation also bestowed upon other members of the Bush administration.

Perhaps memories of the unfair accusations of fascism experienced by her husband explain Laura Bush’s decision to break ranks and instead go with a tortuous comparison of separating families of illegal border-crossers with the internment of Japanese-American citizens, keeping with the World War II theme but without resorting to outright accusations of Nazism.

Others, however, have no such compunction. Members of Congress, former officials, reporters and TV commentators have tweeted comparisons of U.S. detention facilities to Nazi concentration camps or issued none-too-subtle invocations of gas chambers in their tweets about children being led away from their parents by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Reporters have peppered administration officials with questions about their “Nazi” tactics.

On Friday, an MSNBC commentator extended the Nazi label to every Trump supporter, declaring: “If you vote for Trump then you, the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border, like Nazis, going: ‘You here, you here.’”

Earlier, one magazine fact-checker beclowned herself by mistaking the tattoo of an ICE forensics analyst — a wounded Marine veteran and Paralympian — as a Nazi symbol.

Given that the Obama administration also housed separated children in “cages,” which merited the faintest of peeps from supplicant media, politicians and activists, this newfound outrage comes off as contrived partisanship.

Apart from the historical ignorance in comparing the mechanized genocide of 6 million people with the temporary warehousing of children in detention facilities, going full-bore with accusations of Nazism is a grave strategic error on the part of those opposing the president.
At this point, the Nazi comparisons and the rantings of people like Maxine Waters have become a cartoonish caricature of an infantile tantrum. Outside the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd who cheer the recent words and actions of Waters and others, the broader public (if you can believe recent polls), looks on and shakes its collective head. With every hysterical comparison to "Nazis" or concentration camps, with every refusal to serve an official in a public place, with every vile verbal attack at a Hollywood awards show, with every demonstration of outright viciousness and intolerance for ideas that conflict with their own, the Dems lose another vote — or maybe 100 or 1,000 or 10,000.

Sunday, June 24, 2018

Bad Apples

It's unfair to characterize any group by the words or actions of a few bad apples. For example, Hillary Clinton's use of the pejorative "deplorables" was mild compared to the recent unhinged rhetoric of celebrity, political, and media types vis a vis the immigration debate. The Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd regularly paints the entire Trump administration and those that support some or all of its policies as "Nazis" or "racists." This occurs regularly when they encounter anything (and I do mean anything) that they find objectionable.

Hollywood celebrities lead the charge. Of course, many of those celebrities are not the brightest bulbs in the pack, so it's enormously unfair to characterize all progressives by considering what Hollywood types say. But still, if the supposedly professional media can spend hours discussing the implications of a designer jacket worn by Melania Trump, I suppose it's only fair to note that has-been actor Peter Fonda suggested that Donald Trump's son, Barron, be placed in a cage with pedophiles to punish his father for trying to enforce existing border laws. But it doesn't stop there.

The Boston Herald provides a summary of only a few of the progressive bad apples' latest statements:
U.S. Rep. Joseph Kennedy III tweeted a picture of President Trump in a meeting with GOP lawmakers and administrative officials. He commented, “You might not know this about me, but I’m a white guy. And as a white guy, I would encourage @realDonaldTrump & his fellow GOP white guys to consult a not-white-guy in their efforts to enact comprehensive immigration reform in less than 24 hours.”

That Kennedy would use skin color to evaluate the worth of any group is not only repugnant, but it speaks to a darker ideology of intersectionality that presumes to impugn people based on factors other than their actual thoughts and actions. It is a bleak way to see the world, and equivalent, tangential associations would make Kennedy culpable for the misdeeds of his lineage, including voting against the Civil Rights Act of 1957 as his great-uncle JFK did or creating the current immigration mess we have now by being the driving force behind the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which his great-uncle Ted was.

Former Celtics star Kevin McHale was set upon by hysterical media types after being spotted at a Trump rally in Duluth, Minn., Wednesday. Nathaniel Friedman of GQ Magazine tweeted, “Kevin McHale is extremely stupid for attending a public Trump event. That, as much as his politics, is why he should never work in the NBA again.”

The website Deadspin piled on, taking a shot at Boston along the way: “Celtics great Kevin McHale enjoys old feeling of being in an arena full of screaming bigots.”

Many celebrities attacked Ivanka Trump, including director Judd Apatow: “My dad kidnapped babies and I said come on dad, that’s not cool. And he said to shut up. So I guess I tried. @IvankaTrump is a cult member. She is a coward.”

Newsmakers all over celebrated the harassment and intimidation Kirstjen Nielsen received by an angry mob while out at a restaurant ...

There are too many instances of progressives acting petulant to count. They don’t care. We’re on year two of their collective tantrum. Let’s not react in kind, but let’s film them for posterity.
And then there's this:
Actress and New York Democratic gubernatorial candidate Cynthia Nixon called U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) a "terrorist organization" on Thursday.

Nixon also called for the law enforcement agency's abolition.

"ICE has strayed so far from its mission. It's supposed to be here to keep Americans safe but what it's turned into is frankly a terrorist organization of its own, that is terrorizing people who are coming to this country," Nixon said to NY1.
Sitting on their high moral perch, "good apple" progressives watch and listen to all of this without a word of criticism. It is fascinating that they tell us over and over again that "words matter" but then choose to disregard ugly words when they come from their tribe. I suspect that those same good apples follow the six rules of outrage and silently applaud the deranged ranting of the bad apples. And when "deplorables" push back with facts and questions, they are accused of being "unstable" or "bigoted" or "racist." After all, the progressive rules of outrage MUST be followed, or else.

UPDATE-1:
---------------

Name calling and heated language are bad enough but at the end of the day, it's still "Sticks and stones ..." But now the TDS crowd is moving ever closer to literal sticks and stones when confronting targeted people in a private setting. Kelsey Harkness describes an outrage demonstration aimed at TSA Sec. Kirstjen Nielsen, not at her place of work or at a public speech, but while she was having a private dinner out:
The protesters marched through MXDC Cocina Mexicana uninterrupted for 11 minutes, screaming things at Nielsen such as, “Shame, shame, shame,” “Fascist pig,” ‘End Texas concentration camps,” and “No borders, no walls, sanctuary for all.”

Nielsen sat there listening to the protesters — never once shouting back — until she was eventually driven out of the restaurant.

The protest was supported by many on the left, including an editor at The Washington Post and Valenti, a feminist writer who recently penned a New York Times op-ed telling conservative women they can’t be feminists. Valenti, who supposedly stands for the championing of women, described the harassment of Nielsen “VERY satisfying” to watch.

“She should never be able to show her face in public again,” she said.

As for the obvious hypocrisy of a “feminist” encouraging the targeted harassment of another woman, well, there’s an explanation for that. Harassment is wrong, Valenti tweeted, but not when there’s a good reason.
Imagine for just a moment the wild eyed progressive outrage crowd in the restaurant, screaming insults at the top of their lungs, spittle undoubtedly projected into the air, physically threatening by their proximity. Nice image, huh?

To date, there has been little pushback for this repugnant behavior. But a time may come when those who find it reprehensible decide that the only response is to reproduce it. Harkness provides a few examples:
If feminists think this behavior is justifiable, where do they draw the line? Are Republicans justified in harassing House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi during a private dinner because of her unrelenting support for sanctuary cities? How about Bill and Hillary Clinton, whose administration got us into this mess in the first place. Do they deserve to dine alone?

Cheering on and encouraging mob rule is not just bad politics. It’s bad for civil society. No matter how egregious the situation, we don’t teach our children that it’s ever acceptable to bully others. So it’s strange feminists would change the standard and argue the opposite — that bullying is justified, so long as you have the right reason.
The right reason? That's the problem, the outrage/TDS crowd has jettisoned reason altogether and replaced it with something dark and increasingly threatening.

UPDATE-2:
-----------------

Unhinged behavior continues to intensify. The owner of a restaurant in Virginia refused to serve Trump spokesperson Sarah Sanders and seven members of her family. Imagine for a moment if a conservative owner of a restaurant in the DC area had refused to serve, say, Susan Rice and her family, because she was connected to Barack Obama. The media would be apoplectic as screams of "racism" and "misogyny" filled the air.

The Left is showing the rest of the country a level of viciousness and intolerance that is unprecedented in my lifetime. I hope they pay a price for their behavior at the polls, and I think they will.

Saturday, June 23, 2018

Wayfair

In this week's 5-4 Wayfair decision allowing state and local governments to compel out-of-state retailers to collect taxes on purchases made by their state residents, the Supreme Court broke decades of precedent. In addition, the justices exhibited a surprising lack of common sense by opening the door to a bureaucratic nightmare that could bury small businesses and give an unwarranted competitive advantage to large retailers like Amazon and Walmart. To say this puts an unfair burden on small e-commerce businesses is a gross understatement.

As the founder of a small Florida e-commerce business, I can state unequivocally that it is difficult and time-consuming to collect and pay sales taxes for Florida residents only. There are county by county surtaxes that vary considerably along with a base sales tax. The reporting form is obtuse and the rules change yearly. Now, multiply that bureaucratic burden by 50 states, and you begin to see what this ruling will create.

But of course, states that spend irresponsibly and need additional sources of revenue will rejoice. After all, what could be better than to force small out-of-state businesses to be their tax collectors on a nation-wide basis. A small business has no vote and no control in any state but their own, opening the door to abusive out-of-state audits and otherwise increasing the cost of doing business.

James Freeman comments:
For decades the law has prevented America’s 10,000 taxing authorities from imposing collection burdens on people with no physical presence in their jurisdictions. The court has now repealed that sensible standard and invited a million bureaucratic definitions to bloom. If Justices thought the physical-presence standard was arbitrary, wait until they get a look at the multitude of replacements that will begin oozing out of municipal revenue departments.

The idea that this is a restoration of federalism is a howler—states have never in the history of the republic enjoyed such power to hassle people outside their borders. The power to tax also means the power to impose reporting rules and the power to audit. Now state and city governments are free to impose burdens that crush distant small businesses and there will be no political accountability—because the tax collectors will be oppressing people with no representation in the abusive jurisdiction.
Those who argue that "fairness" demands that on-line retailers collect state and local taxes because brick and mortar retailers must do so, miss a very important point. The brick and mortar sellers collect, report, and pay taxes from one state and one state only, just like the majority of small on-line retailers have had to do. Now, on-line retailers are compelled to collect, report and pay taxes to 50 states. Is that fair and equitable? I don't think so. If anything, it could discourage some small e-commerce businesses from forming and damage a vibrant part of our retail economy. All because state and local politicians can't control their spending* and need more and more money for more and more wasteful policies and programs.

Normally, one would hope that Congress steps in and remedies the situation by developing federal legislation that would be fair to all. Given the current political climate, that's extremely unlikely. Government gets bigger in its reach and intrusiveness and the little guy takes it on the chin.

FOOTNOTE:
------------------

* It's worth noting that politicians are not the only culprits here. Amazon, among many large e-commerce retailers, lobbied in favor of this ruling and is the big winner because: (1) it already has the bandwidth to meet the regulatory hurdles, (2) it can charge smaller sell-through retailers a "fee" to help them with compliance, thereby increasing its own revenue, and (3) the burden of tax collections will eliminate some small competitors and open the big's markets even more.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Stupid Party

When it comes to immigration reform, Congressional members of the GOP has allowed ideological differences to get in the way of common sense, good governance, and doing what's right. The GOP, like its counterpart in the Democratic Party, are wed to ideological memes that are outdated and counterproductive.

Because the economy is booming, jobs are plentiful, and public satisfaction with the future is polling at historically high levels, the only wedge issue that the Dems have is immigration. It also appears that they will do nothing to compromise on the issue, allowing, for example, DACA to remain unresolved even though the GOP floated the idea of a pathway to citizenship for 1.8 million people.

But the Dems do stuff like that—all the time. They act like petulant children. But none of that excuses the stupidity that we're now seeing on the GOP side. An immigration reform package could still be offered by the GOP, yet "conservatives" wrongly insist that there be no "asylum." That ridiculous position rejects the reality of our current border situation, suggests that the children of illegal immigrants remain in political and legal limbo forever, and implies that millions can be deported (They. Can. Not.)

So Congressional GOP members fight with one another instead of seizing a unique opportunity to fix a decades old problem. Imagine for a moment if the GOP passed a reasonable bill that included a fix for the 'family separation issue, a DACA fix, a number of modifications to broader immigration issues (e.g., merit based entry, reducing the size and scope of lottery entries), improved vetting of all legal immigrants, and yes, new funding for increased border security (a.k.a. the "wall").

If a bill that covered those issues passed the House (and it could), it would be interesting to watch the Democrat response. Would the party that tells us repeated that they care so, so much about immigration reject the bill in the Senate. If they did, the hypocrisy would be breathtaking. If they didn't, the Trump administration would have done more than the past six presidents in addressing the immigration issue.

The GOP has a historic opportunity and they're blowing it. They're not called the stupid party for nothing.

UPDATE:
------------

As the GOP continues with its own stupidity on the immigration issue, the Dems sit comfortably, recognizing that a tacit open borders policy will benefit them politically over the long term. Rich Lowry breaks it down when his discussed the impact of the 20-year old Flores consent decree that demands that children be released from custody after 20 days and therefore implicitly required that illegal immigrants be released from custody (but generally not deported) if families are to stay together. He writes:
What is true is that the law makes it impossible to hold Central American parents and children together for any length of time. The children have to be released, and if you are going to keep them together with their parents, the parents have to be released, too. This is the forcing mechanism for waving Central American migrants into the country — more than a quarter of a million children and members of a family group over the past two and a half years — and Trump is right that Democrats have no interest in changing it.

When Republicans this week proposed fixes to remove these perversities in the law and to expedite the asylum process and provide for more detention space, Chuck Schumer had no interest. He thought he could back down Trump unilaterally from the family separations — correctly, as it turned out — and Democrats have no interest in making it easier for Trump to remove anyone from the country.

It’s easy to lose sight of the radicalism of this position. It’s understandable to oppose deporting an illegal immigrant who has been here for, say, 10 years. But these migrants are illegal immigrants who, in some cases, literally showed up yesterday.

The question they pose isn’t whether we are going to let illegal immigrants who are already here stay but whether we are constantly going to welcome more, in a perpetual, rolling amnesty. It is, in short, whether we have a border or whether a certain class of migrants can — for no good reason — present themselves to the authorities and expect to be admitted into the country.

Some of these migrants will claim asylum, but these claims are mostly bogus. There’s no doubt that they are desperate, and desperate to get into the United States. But they aren’t persecuted back home, even if they fear gangs or a violent boyfriend.

The merits don’t matter under the current system, though. If an asylum-seeker passes a credible fear interview — almost all do — and comes into the United States pending adjudication of his case, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever be seen again. And why not? Who wouldn’t take advantage of that opportunity?
Breaking one of the six rules of outrage, it might be worth asking Democratic leaders the following questions:
Are you in favor of open borders? If not, why do you support a loophole (Flores) that allows illegal immigrants be released into the country? And if you want to fix that loophole, how would you do so, specifically? Why do you generally oppose stronger border control measures? If you're in favir of border enforcement, how, specifically, would you accomplish it? Since you have great compassion for children and illegal immigrant families, why is it that you are in favor of policies that encourage those same families to take dangerous journies over thousands of miles, putting young children at risk all the way? How, specifically, would you address child trafficking that occurs daily at our border?

And on ... and on.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Six Rules of Outrage

Outrage is an effective weapon. One that is wielded daily by the Left and less frequently by the Right. The game is simple—select something that offends you, for example, Donald Trump calling members of the murderous Latin gang MS-13, "animals." In righteous indignation, tell us all that humans should not be called "animals," make a very aggrieved face, call Trump a "racist," rinse and repeat. And be absolutely sure that your trained hamsters in the media repeat that meme over and over and over again.

Or maybe it's the current outrage du jour—the "ripping" of innocent young children out of the arms of their angelic illegal immigrant mothers and fathers. Make a very aggrieved face, call Trump a "Nazi," rinse and repeat. And be absolutely sure that your trained hamsters in the media repeat that meme over and over and over again.

But here's the thing. The outrage weapon is a cynical scam—pure and simple. And if you have half a brain you can recognize it immediately. Kurt Schlichter writes:
Look for the indicators. Is it something that seems unreasonably horrible? Well, like something that sounds too good to be true probably is, something that sounds too bad to be true likewise is probably not true either. Does Trump ordering screaming babies to be wrenched from their innocent mommies’ arms and cast into dungeons sound pretty extreme? Yeah, because it is. And it’s a lie.
But there's more too it than that. Here are the rules:

1. Use emotions, not facts, to drive outrage. In reality, facts get in the way and should be omitted whenever possible. It's extremely helpful if your allies in the media refuse to present facts or context that might conflict with the outrage narrative.

2. Change labels to obfuscate. Illegal immigrants—that is, people who illegally enter our country, something that is against the law—are re-labeled as "migrants" or "undocumented immigrants," thereby clouding the reason why they have been apprehended in the first place.

3. Be selective. Direct outrage only at your political enemies, never at your allies, even when both your enemies and your allies have done the same thing that is now generating outrage.

4. Avoid or shout down inconvenient questions. For example, the fact is that the Obama administration separated illegal immigrant families and held children in holding pens (there are dozens of photos to support that statement). The question is—why weren't Democrats (or the GOP) outraged about it? That's a VERY inconvenient question and must be avoided at all cost.

5. Use ad hominem attacks, preferably calling the party who has committed the "outrage" (and even members of his or her family) a "racist" or a "Nazi." The reason for this approach is that when the facts aren't on your side, inflammatory language is a useful tool.

6. Finally, insist that morality is a sole virtue of those who are outraged. Anyone who tries to introduce facts that conflict with the outrage narrative, who doesn't use the right labels, who dares to ask inconvenient questions, or to push back against ad hominem attacks or outrageous allegations is characterized as less moral and less worthy. But only in the eyes of the outraged and their supporters.

Those are the rules, and maybe that's the worst outrage of all.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Solidad

Solidad O'Brien is hardly a great intellect. As one of thousands of trained hamsters in the main stream media, she is consistently partisan, has a poor grasp of facts associated with any story she covers, and is a clear example of an attractive talking head that is about as far from a professional journalist as possible. But Solidad worked to lower her already pathetic standing even further when she joined the hysteria concerning the current and past practice of separating children from their illegal immigrant parents when those parents are incarcerated, pending a hearing or deportation.

O'Brien tweeted:
Welp, I guess we've put to rest the question: "Nazi Germany: Could it happen here in America?"
In response, a twitter follower, @Ron_Christie, tweeted:
The Holocaust brought about by Nazi Germany resulted in the murder of 6 million Jews in Europe. 2/3 of the Jewish population there. The notion that anything remotely similar is taking place in America today- or to seek moral equivalence - has me sickened beyond words.
If O'Brien's tweet was a one-off, I'd simply laugh it off as abject stupidity masquerading as moral preening. But that's not the case. Dozens (hundreds?) of leftist commentators regularly attack a variety of Trump administration policies with Nazi metaphors. The vacuity of these attacks is obvious, not to mention a reinforcement of Godwin's Law.

What leftist Democrats don't seem to realize is just how offensive their idiotic comparisons of 2018 America to Nazi Germany are.

I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. I grew up without a single member of my mother's family alive in either Europe or the United States—all brutally murdered by the 1940-era Nazis. And Solidad and her soul mates dare to offer up Nazi metaphors to criticize the current leadership of the United States?

Leftists tell me that detaining people who cross our borders illegally, temporarily separating them from their children when they are arrested, housing them, feeding them, providing medical care when required, and ultimately reuniting parents and children without physical harm is Nazi-like?

My mother's immediate and extended family should have been so lucky.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Infection

The previous administration touted itself as being "scandal free." That laughable claim would have been forgotten, except that like a bad infection that goes deep into the tissue and bone of the host organism, the scandals wrought by the Obama administration have embedded themselves deep into the government agencies and people that are core elements of the federal government.

The Justice department IG report is but the latest indication that the infection is severe, dangerous even, and deeply embedded in government agencies. And like every virulent infection, it will fight any attempt to remove it.

Because the infection is so widespread—the purposely botched Hillary Clinton investigation; the scandalous use of a democrat-sponsored dossier to manipulate the FISA courts; the extreme anti-Trump bias of senior members of the FBI and intelligence communities; the clear implication that the anti-Trump bias morphed into aggressive actions against Trump; the Crossfire Hurricane operation in which an FBI-informant was embedded into the Trump campaign; text messages from senior official that talked about an "insurance policy" against Trump and efforts to "stop him," leaks the emanated from the director of the FBI, and clear evidence that Trump was set up in a manner that lead to a special counsel being appointed. All of that, not to mention the spurious, evidence-free claims that Trump "colluded" with the Russians, indicates a scandal that is historic in its breadth and depth.

But the infection is resisting all efforts to kill it. The same people who were responsible for introducing the infection are fighting hard to resist efforts to eliminate it. Both the FBI and intelligence agencies have resisted all attempts at getting to the root of the infection, stonewalling congressional requests for information in a manner that follows the successful template first applied for other Obama-era scandals (e.g., Fast and Furious).

William McGurn, like yours truly, is fed up and wants Congress to act. He suggests that a contempt citation, impeachment proceeding and even jail are appropriate for people like Rod Rosenstein or Christopher Wray who seem to value the tattered reputation of their agencies more than any attempt to remove the infection. McGurn writes:
Congress has a third option for contempt: It can jail someone until he produces the testimony or documents sought. The advantage here is that Congress can do this all on its own. The last time Congress used contempt to jail was in 1934, when the Senate arrested, tried and then sentenced former Assistant Commerce Secretary William P. MacCracken Jr. to 10 days for allowing the removal and destruction of papers he’d been subpoenaed to produce.

You have to go back even further for the last time Congress impeached an executive-branch official. In 1876, Congress accused Secretary of War William Belknap of using his office for private gain. But if Sally Yates as deputy attorney general could cite the 1799 Logan Act, which no American has ever been convicted of violating, to intervene in the Mike Flynn case, surely Congress needn’t be shy about its Article I constitutional power to impeach.

The obstruction of Justice and the FBI appears rooted in the mistaken idea that they are somehow above the elected representatives of the American people. While Mr. Rosenstein has referred to congressional talk of impeaching him as “extortion,” Mr. Wray, in his statement to a press conference outlining steps to fix the FBI, conspicuously made no mention of better cooperation with Congress.

An impeachment that removed either Mr. Rosenstein or Mr. Wray—or a contempt finding that sent one of them to the congressional pokey for a spell—could send a good message to federal bureaucrats inclined to be dismissive of congressional subpoenas.
It's long past time that there be an accounting. That the infection be clearly identified, that its scope be determined, that a cure be developed, and that it then be eradicated. The only way to do that is to throw those who are resisting the cure into jail. Do it! Now.

UPDATE:
----------------

Conservative bomb thrower Kurt Schlichter summarizes the infection nicely:
The IG report, simultaneously a devastating indictment of elite misconduct and a total whitewash, is a symptom of the moral leprosy infecting our elite. It is rotting away our institutions, and the foundations of the United States as we knew it. But the elite can’t, or won’t, even admit to itself what we all see.
Indeed. On the one hand, the IG report describes the infection in some detail, noting the symptoms in dozens of instances and naming names. However, it concluded that the infection isn't dangerous to the tissue and bone (that "no bias" could be identified). It's an amazingly ridiculous conclusion.

Schlicter uses a metaphor with commentary:
Let’s try a hypothetical. You are on a jury. My client is a black man claiming racial discrimination by his company. I present you with texts from key leaders in the company – who are still employed in high positions at the company – discussing how they hate black people. I demonstrate that at every single opportunity, the company made choices that hurt my client, just like at every opportunity the FBI and DOJ made choices to help Hillary the Harpy. Then, I show the company fired my client with no evidence of his wrongdoing, just like the FBI exonerated Stumbles O’Drunky with tons of evidence of her wrongdoing. Do you think I presented “no evidence?”

You, as a juror, have a choice – was my client discriminated against?

I, as his lawyer, also have a choice – Ferrari or Lamborghini?

The IG report sidestepped the most critical point, the one that is resulting in the American people losing their last remaining fragments of faith in our system, the fact that there are demonstrably two sets of rules, that there are two brands of justice in America.

There is one for you, me, and everyone else not in the elite – the infuriated, angry Normals. And there is another one for the elite.

I bet if you, me, or anyone else not in the elite were being prosecuted by the feds, the feds would be totally neutral regarding our politics, they would show us deference and give us breaks, and they would resolve from the beginning that we were going to walk. Let’s ask Scooter Libby or Dinesh De Souza or Conrad Black or Mike Flynn about that.
And yet, the Democrats have grabbed on the the "no bias" conclusion like a drowning man grabs onto a straw. The fact that it's ludicrous is of no concern.

Infection—what infection?

Monday, June 18, 2018

Godwin's Law

Members of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd seem unaware on Godwin's Law. It states: "... if you accuse your enemy of being a Nazi, you’ve lost the argument."

There have been a lot of "Nazi accusations" over the weekend as members of the four constituencies (e.g., General Michael Hayden. ex-Congressman Joe Scarborogh) have suggested that the long-running government policy of separating children from their parents temporarily when they have crossed into the United States illegally is akin to Nazi concentration camp behavior. In their view, Trump is Hitler. Okay, then.

The separations occur because the courts have ruled (in a 1997 law, Flores v. Reno) that minor children can be separated from their parents for a period not to exceed 20 days while the parents legal status is adjudicated. This certainly is not an ideal outcome. It is traumatic for the kids and the parents. It's also a direct result of the parents' decision to cross into the United States illegally.

Despite the propaganda being promoted by the trained hamsters in the main stream media, every shred a credible evidence indicates that the children are being treated well. But that doesn't jibe with the TDS narrative, so CCN reports that a baby was "ripped" from a nursing mother's arms. The Victory Girls blog comments:
CNN related a heart-wrenching story about an illegal Honduran mother whose baby was “forcibly” ripped from her while breastfeeding. At least, that’s the story that Natalia Cornelio told CNN.

So who’s Natalia Cornelio?

She’s a civil rights attorney. Yeah, color me shocked, too.

Here’s what Cornelio said: “When she resisted having her daughter taken from her she said agents forcibly took her child and then placed her in handcuffs.”

Cornelio added that the mother was “sobbing.”

The problem with this tale is that no one else reported it other than Cornelio. There are no other witnesses. Just the word of the mother and an attorney with an agenda.

So what does DHS say?

“We do not separate breastfeeding children from their parents. That does not exist. That is not a policy. That is not something that DHS does.”
I find it interesting that over the past six months the TDS crowd has been the first to defend our intelligence agencies and FBI, interpreting clear public evidence of wrong-doing as nothing to be concerned about. They were okay with the weaponization of the IRS against American citizens, they were sanguine about the Fast and Furious gun running scandal, they didn't blink an eye when a senior presidential advisor blatantly lied about the death of a US ambassador and three other Americans. That was all a big yawn. But they are the first to promote hearsay evidence about kids being "ripped" from their mothers arms as fact, and run around screaming "Nazi, Nazi, Nazi" backed by 75-year old pictures of concentration camps and their victims. Derangement does strange things to a person's psyche.

The solution to all of this hyperventilation is for the Congress to pass immigration law that addresses child separation, but also considers everything from DACA to the border wall to the status of illegals in the USA at the moment. But that doesn't serve the Democrat strategy of using immigration as a wedge issue, so nothing is done. And yes, the GOP isn't blameless either, but at least they're proposing legislation that attempts to correct immigration problems, even though they can't seem to agree within their own caucus. Dumb politically and bad for the country.

At the risk of being accused of cynicism, I do find it an interesting coincidence that the shrill accusations of Nazi-like behavior coupled with wall-to-wall media coverage by the trained hamsters is occurring at exactly the same time as news of a significant government scandal involving the FBI, the intelligence agencies, and yes, the Obama administration is breaking. What a perfect way for the trained hamsters to drown out any news of the scandal, relegating it a brief mention in passing. The strategy is brilliant, I must admit, if a bit venal. But what else is new.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

The Cult

Since his election in November of 2016, Donald Trump has faced many obstacles, some of his own making and some erected by the millions of people who were absolutely certain that he would lose the election. When he did not, unjustified fear, understandable anger and emotional distress, and then unhinged "resistance" followed. Over the intervening 18 months, most objective observers thought that the fear, anger and resistance would moderate into the normal partisan political opposition. They have not. In fact, Trump Derangement Syndrome is now morphing into a cult-like experience in which the elites within the four constituencies shape the narrative for the millions of less sophisticated members of the cult.

Speaking about another important subject—the hard-left influence at far too many college campuses—Professor Bret Weinstein writes:
Am I alleging a conspiracy? No. What I have seen functions much more like a cult in which the purpose is only understood by the leaders and the rest have been seduced into a carefully architected fiction. Most of the people involved in this movement earnestly believe that they are acting nobly to end oppression. Only the leaders understand that the true goal is to turn the tables of oppression.
This statement could equally be applied to the TDS/#Resistance crowd.

Their accusations of Trump the "racist," Trump the "misogynist," Trump the "Hitlerian monster," Trump the anti-immigrant bigot have become so common and so tedious that they are in fact, like the mindless, robotic chants of a dangerous cult. The accusation have become so over the top, that many millions are forced to look away, embarrassed and repelled by the crazed voices of the TDS cult.

In their nonstop effort to 'monsterize' Trump, the cult now levels accusations that Trump is "tearing children from the arms of their parents" as those parents illegally cross our borders. It's a compelling and emotional accusation (perfect for those who are dedicated to moral preening). The TDS crowd went so far as the show photos of cages holding small children—until they realized that those photos were of Obama-era vintage. The discussion never addresses the roll of the immigrant parents themselves, putting their family structure and children in jeopardy by risking capture and incarceration.

Cults are dangerous because the few do the thinking for the many. The many parrot the memes offered by the few, and believe that as their outrage grows it will spread to others. Instead, the "others" begin to feel a different type of outrage and over the long term, that outrage will not bode well for the TDS cult.

UPDATE:
-----------------

The Cult and their trained hamsters in the media (some who are active members of the cult and others that control it) rush to present anecdotal stories of illegal immigrant families "torn apart" when the parents are captured crossing the border.

They are far more hesitant to present anecdotal stories of America children living under the threat of immigrant gangs that have, in some cases, taken over schools from Maryland to Massachusets. Here's a Washington Post (certainly not a pro-Trump media source) story that never achieved meme status:
Gang-related fights are now a near-daily occurrence at Wirt [William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Maryland], where a small group of suspected MS-13 members ... throw gang signs, sell drugs, draw gang graffiti, and aggressively recruit students recently arrived from Central America.... The situation inside the aging, over-crowded building has left some teachers so afraid that they refuse to be alone with their students.”

Nor is Wirt unique: “Dozens of schools from Northern Virginia to Long Island to Boston are dealing with a resurgence of MS-13, which has been linked to a string of grisly killings throughout the country.”
Hmmm. Why is it, I wonder, that the Cult is so, so concerned about the children of illegal immigrants but seems to be far less concerned about the impact of illegal immigrant gangs who threaten American children and their teachers.

Sure ... only a small percentage of illegal immigrants are gang members. In fact many just want a better life. By the same token, not all family separations are unjustified. In fact, many, as tragic as they are, are done for the overriding good of the children. But that's a degree of subtlety that the Cult can't seem to grasp.

I wonder, for example, whether a family composed of an MS-13 leader, his wife, and three small children should be allowed to cross the border untouched because they are a family. Would the arrest and deportation of the father be characterized as "tearing his family apart?" I recognize that this is a special case, but so are the situations offered up by the Cult. They can't have it both ways.

Friday, June 15, 2018

Two Narratives

Since the election of Donald Trump, illegal immigration has become the cause célèbre for social justice warriors. They conflate legal, vetted and appropriate immigrants, many of whom have waited for years to get a visa into the USA with illegal immigrants who sneak across our borders and then hide in the population. That enables them to label Donald Trump and his supporters as anti-immigrant monsters.

The problem, of course is that illegal immigrants are breaking the law when they cross the border. But that doesn't stop the narrative. SJWs argue that illegal immigrants are "forced" to come to the United States due to horrific conditions in their own countries—poverty, crime, corruption, to name only a few. Undoubtedly, those conditions do exist, but if we opened our borders and allowed people who live under regimes that foster poverty, crime, corruption, poor health care, poor education, and the like, our population would swell uncontrollably, and social services designed for our own citizens would disappear.

Recently, SJWs have added a small twist to their cause célèbre, telling us that victims of domestic violence should be granted asylum. Angered that many claims of domestic violence among asylum seekers are deemed to be bogus, Nancy Pelosi accused the Trump Administration of "staggering cruelty."

But here's the irony. The same people who follow Nancy Pelosi's ideological path, tell us repeatedly that the American patriarchy subjugates all women, that misogyny abounds among white males, that a "rape culture" exists at American universities, that the workplace is toxic for women, that the USA is not a "safe space" for women—in short, that their own country is a caldron of domestic violence.

Heather McDonald comments on the irony of all of this:
But why should social-justice warriors want to subject these potential asylees to the horrors of America? In coming to the U.S., if you believe the dominant feminist narrative, the female aliens would simply be exchanging their local violent patriarchy for a new one. Indeed, it should be a mystery to these committed progressives why any Third World resident would seek to enter the United States. Not only is rape culture pervasive in the U.S., but the very lifeblood of America is the destruction of “black bodies,” in the words of media star Ta-Nehesi Coates. Surely, a Third World person of color would be better off staying in his home country, where he is free from genocidal whiteness and the murderous legacy of Western civilization and Enlightenment values.

But the same left-wing establishment that in the morning rails against American oppression of an ever-expanding number of victim groups in the afternoon denounces the U.S. for not giving unlimited access to foreign members of those same victim groups. In their open-borders afternoon mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the only source of hope and opportunity for low-skilled, low-social-capital Third Worlders; a place obligated by its immigration history to take in all comers, forever. In their America-as-the-font-of-all-evil-against-females-and-persons-of-color morning mode, progressives paint the U.S. as the place where hope and opportunity die under a tsunami of misogyny and racism.

Which reality do progressives actually believe? They likely hold both mutually exclusive concepts in their heads simultaneously, unaware of the contradiction, toggling smoothly between one and the other according to context. But both claims cannot be true. And actions speak more loudly than words. In pressing for an immigration policy determined by the desire of hundreds of millions of foreigners to enter the U.S., progressives implicitly acknowledge that the left-wing narrative about America is false. In fact, there is no place on earth less governed by tribal prejudice and machismo than the United States. The left-wing narrative is simply a form of moral preening.
At the end of the day, maybe the most important question is why millions want to come here—even if they must come here illegally? Maybe, despite what social justice warriors continually tell us, their outrage over the ills of our country is monumentally overblown. Maybe, just maybe, the illegal immigrants have a better feel for the benefits offered by the United States than their supposed protectors on the Left.

500 Pages

Scrambling to put the best possible spin on a scathing 500-page report that eviscerates the FBI actions associated with the Hillary Clinton email investigation (opps, sorry, "matter") and all of the other actions taken in the run-up to the 2016 presdiential election, the democrats appear to have settled on two talking points. Quoting from the report's findings, they claim there was (1) "no bias" in the investigation, and (2) that James Comey's "insubordinate actions" were responsible for Hillary Clinton's defeat.

Wait! What?

For the past 18 months the Dems have claimed the Trump's "Russian collusion" brought Hillary down ... or was it misogyny on the part of White males? Or maybe it was white women who know no better than to do the bidding of their anti-Hillary husbands?

The last time I checked, even the most unhinged member of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd has not claimed that Comey was a Russian puppet, nor that he was a misogynist, and he's certainly not a woman. When reality collides with progressive fantasy, we find that Hillary Clinton's decision to use a private email server, her irresponsible disregard for national security documents, and a cloud of self-serving dishonesty and corruption that goes back decades, is what brought her down. But never mind.

The FBI actions associated with the 2016 campaign are old news—concerning, but old news. The key point is that many of the same high-level FBI actors and some of the DoJ lawyers who were involved in 2016 are still involved right now—in Robert Mueller's "investigation" of Russian "collusion."

Kim Strassel summarizes what happened in 2016:
it is the report’s findings on the wider culture of the FBI and Justice Department that are most alarming. The report depicts agencies that operate outside the rules to which they hold everybody else, and that showed extraordinary bias while investigating two presidential candidates.

There’s Loretta Lynch, who felt it perfectly fine to have a long catch-up with her friend Bill Clinton on a Phoenix tarmac and whom the inspector general slams for an “error in judgment.” Mr. Comey’s entire staff was complicit in concealing the contents of the July press conference from Justice officials. We discover that significant FBI “resources” were dedicated in October to spinning FBI “talking points” about the Clinton investigation—rather than actually investigating the new Anthony Weiner laptop emails the bureau discovered in September. We even find that Mr. Comey used personal email and laptops to conduct government work.

There’s former Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik, who was tipping off the Clinton campaign even as he took part in the investigation, and who “failed to strictly adhere to [his] recusal” when he finally stepped away. Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe also did not “fully comply with his recusal,” and he’d already been found to have lied to the bureau about a leak to the media. Speaking of leaks, Mr. Horowitz needed full attachments and charts to list the entire “volume of communication” between FBI employees and the press. Not only did these folks have “no official reason to be in contact with the media,” but they also “improperly received benefits from reporters, including tickets to sporting events, golfing outings, drinks and meals, and admittance to nonpublic social events.”

Be ready to hear the report absolves the FBI and DOJ of “bias.” Not true. It very carefully states that “our review did not find documentary or testimonial evidence directly connecting the political views these employees expressed in their text messages and instant messages to the specific investigative decisions we reviewed.” Put another way, he never caught anyone writing down: Let’s start this Trump investigation so we can help Hillary win.

But the bias is everywhere. It’s in the texts between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, and those of three other employees who are routinely “hostile” to Candidate Trump. It’s in Ms. Page’s freak-out that Mr. Trump might win the presidency and Mr. Strzok’s reply: “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.” It’s in a message from an unnamed agent in November 2016 who writes that although the FBI found Clinton aide Huma Abedin had “lied,” it doesn’t matter since “no one at DOJ is going to prosecute.” To which a second agent replies. “Rog—noone is going to pros[ecute] even if we find unique classified.”
The same bias that pervaded top levels of the 2016 FBI campaign investigations also pervades the Mueller probe. After all, the majority of Mueller's team are documented Clinton supporters who contributed to Hillary's campaign and likely have a distinct animus toward Trump. Sure, they're not as stupid as Strok (as far as we know) and have not put their feelings down on paper or in digital messages, but that doesn't mean the feelings don't exist. They cannot be trusted to do an objective assessment of evidence or lack of evidence surrounding any allegation of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign.

Couple all of that with the DoJ stonewalling on current Congressional requests for documents associated with the Crossfire Hurricane scandal and we have an out of control attempt to bring Trump down.

It's not clear who will win, but one thing is certain, public trust in our federal law enforcement agencies and the DoJ is the big loser.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

The Best People

It has been 100 percent predictable as well as immensely amusing to watch the four constituencies try their damnedest to denigrate Donald Trump's summit with the Nokos. The same elite constituencies who were, no more than six months ago, suggesting that Trump would undoubtedly get us into a full-blown nuclear war are now gravely concerned (frowns and furrowed foreheads all around) that Kim Jong-un got some TV time, or that our flag and the NoKo flag were sitting next to one another, or that "there aren't enough details" in the loose commitment to denuclearize or that Trump was played (gosh, those same elites seemed remarkably sanguine when Barack Obama actually was played by the mad Mullahs of Iran), or that we've committed to cancel war games (oh, the humanity) in an effort to show good faith, or ... I know, this does get tedious.

Because Trump has made more progress with North Korea in 18 months than Clinton, Bush and Obama made over a period of 24 years, the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd doesn't know where to turn. At CNN and MSNBC (along with the vast majority of main stream media sites), the trained hamsters are demonstrating a combination of bias and idiocy that will do nothing to polish the already abysmal public perception of their "journalism." They are beclowning themselves, and they don't even know it.

They drag in "foreign policy experts" who have been consistently wrong about everything associated with NoKo (and most other international issues) and encourage them to criticize Trump's efforts. They question Trump's stability, intelligence and sanity, but lack the humility to recognize that their own stability, intelligence and sanity did not insulate them from failure after failure—some catastrophic.

Matthew J. Peterson comments on all of this expert (and unhinged) criticism with an understandable dose of cynicism:
Assuming North Korea has some desire to reform itself—admittedly, the very assumption we are now testing—the biggest obstacle to peace on the Korean Peninsula is the disastrous legacy of Hillary-Obama foreign policy, which mimics decades of earlier, similar American failures.

Even if Kim Jong-un is willing to make a deal trading in nukes for becoming the hero and leader of a potentially burgeoning economy, thanks to the previous administration he’s worried about getting killed with the assistance of the United States government as happened with Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi.

Gaddafi gave up his nuclear program in Libya in exchange for the promise that we wouldn’t depose him during a Republican administration. He kept his part of the bargain. When Obama and Hillary came into office, and Hillary supported the rebellion against him, they helped cause a continental humanitarian refugee crisis after his death.

“We came, we saw, he died,” Clinton publicly joked of Gaddafi’s ouster. But, of course, she and Obama were surrounded by all the best people. They were all very smart. Very well educated. Perfectly competent. Rational. Professional. Not like the nasty Trumpsters.

Meanwhile, the human slave trade is thriving in Libya.

Of course, Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize, so I suppose it was all Hillary’s fault.

But you still worry that Trump is constitutionally incapable of living up to the expert wisdom and Nobel Prize-winning peace of the Bush-Obama legacy?
It amazes me how all of the "best people ... all very smart. Very well educated. Perfectly competent. Rational. Professional" can be so consistently wrong about so much.

The DTS crowd turns to these failures for commentary and direction. The deplorables reject their incompetence, their hubris and their blatant bias and instead are willing to risk another, admittedly disruptive, approach.

Monday, June 11, 2018

Mushroom Cloud

Donald Trump is the first American president to have achieved the true potential for major change on the Korean Peninsula. And to think, just a few months ago, the four anti-Trump constituencies—the #Resistance, the #Never Trumpers, the trained hamsters in the media, and the denizens of the deep state collectively clutched their pearls and shuddered as Trump called out Kim in rather bellicose terms. The four constituencies were certain that Trump was headed toward nuclear war. Their condemnation was a loud as it was unanimous. Trump was unstable. Trump was uninformed. Trump was a war-monger. Trump had no strategy. Trump's threats would never get Kim to the table. Trump threatened the entire Asian region. Millions would die!! Remember that?

The four constituencies were also — DEAD WRONG. About everything.

Now, with the historic meeting only a few hours away, you'd think they'd show some humility. You'd think that for just a few days they'd lay aside Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) and wish the president well. In this case, you'd be dead wrong.

As Trump prepared for his meeting in Singapore, another self congratulatory awards show, the Tonys, was held in New York. It comes as no surprise that the artists who perform on Broadway exemplify TDS as well as any progressive group. But it was a bit unsettling to watch actor Robert DeNiro exhibit full blown TDS when he exclaimed on live television, "Fuck Trump!" The audience gave him a standing ovation. Classy ... real classy.

Like all self-important glitterati, the progressives on Broadway think they're moral arbiters for the rest of us. That their politics should be everyone's politics, and that anyone who disagrees is a "deplorable." And when the rest of the country pushes back ... they become hysterical, possibly because they realize deep down that they're not nearly as important as they think they are. That includes DeNiro. Anyone who thinks that what DeNiro did in front of an adoring audience was the brave expression of "truth to power," has a very loose understanding Power and no concept whatsoever of Truth.

As Donald Trump begins a long and complex negotiation with Kim, he has a difficult and uncertain path that is unlikely to yield the instant gratification that the DTS crowd now demands. Longer term, there is hope, if not certainty. Trump could achieve something important. Something that presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama were unable to achieve. I, for one, hope he succeeds.

On the other hand, I honestly do believe that DeNiro along with a non-trivial percentage of the audience that gave him a standing ovation, hope Trump fails. After all, what's more important—a failure that will make Trump look bad or a world that is less likely to see a mushroom cloud.

Friday, June 08, 2018

Bacon

Kevin Williamson is one of those commentators whose insight comes from writing outside the box. He is acerbic, brutal even, in his analysis of our current political landscape. He's also an African American conservative, making him an anomaly who drives his predictably liberal media colleagues just a bit nuts.

Williamson explores the underlying sociology of Samantha Bee's tasteless attack on Ivanka Trump by considering another commedian, George Carlin. Carlin has always been a social commentator, exploring the small things in life that can evoke a smile. Now at the very end of his career, Carlin's attempts at humor are angry, yet his followers laugh. Why is that?

Williamson comments:
What’s interesting about the late-period Carlin is that it illustrates how things that are not actually funny can still get a laugh provided they are presented in the form of a joke or with the familiar comedic bump set spike vocal modulation and other stand-up genre conventions. There is tremendous subconscious social pressure to laugh when presented with something that is shaped like a joke — how many times have you seen somebody laugh at a joke he didn’t get?

Williamson goes on to describe a sociological study at Duke University suggesting that "Humor is in part an exercise in tribe building." He writes:
This may very well be hardwired into us in the so-called mirror neurons that fire in primates both when they perform an action and when they see that action being performed by another. Tribes are hierarchical, and primate brains are evolved to accommodate those hierarchies: A paper authored by scientists at Duke and published in the March issue of Scientific Reports finds that mirroring (“interbrain cortical synchronization”) is strongly influenced by social status — among monkeys, at least. Among humans, social status can be permanent or situational: A celebrity has high status, a person standing on a stage at the center of attention has high status, and George Carlin in performance was both.

Williamson then transitions to Samatha Bee and writes:
Samantha Bee has never to my knowledge said anything that is funny. Her business is the sort of thing that would be of keen interest to those monkeys in the Duke study: the ritual raising and lowering of status — which, as Tyler Cowen and Arnold Kling and others have argued, is what politics is mostly about. The same holds true for media criticism, which is of course only another form of politics. Professor Cowen: “I have a simple hypothesis. No matter what the media tells you their job is, the feature of media that actually draws viewer interest is how media stories either raise or lower particular individuals in status. . . . The status ranking of individuals implied by a particular media source is never the same as yours, and often not even close. . . . Indeed that is why other people enjoy those media sources, because they take pleasure in your status, and the status of your allies, being lowered.”
As a card-carrying member of the Trump Derangement Syndrome crowd (a definite tribe"), the entire Bee episode exemplifies the need to do anything and/or say anything that might lower the status of Trump, his supporters, or members of his family.

Yet, for reasons that are difficult to explain, the non-stop effort to lower Trump's status doesn't seem to work as it normally does. In fact, in a bizarre reversal (if you can believe the polls) it somehow improves his status. It might be that Trump, unlike most of celebrities/presidents, punches back—hard. But that in itself is a violation of the normal rules. Again, from Williamson:
Calling Ivanka Trump a “feckless c***” on television is a win-win for Bee et al.: One possibility is that Ivanka Trump offers no response, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to endure outrageous insults by a relative nobody on TBS; the second possibility is that she responds, in which case her status is lowered by her being obliged to condescend to respond to the outrageous insults of a relative nobody on TBS. The proverb holds that the problem with wrestling a pig is that you both get dirty but only the pig enjoys it. Samantha Bee is that pig.
But here's the thing—when Donald Trump wrestles the pig, he enjoys it. The pig is incapable of understanding that, and the result is bacon.


Thursday, June 07, 2018

Helping the Mullahs

There is nothing more aggrevating than the double standard that has been applied by the main stream media to the previous administration and the current one. Imagine for a moment if Donald Trump had gone to two major U.S. banks and pressed them to allow North Korea to avoid monetary sanctions and covert currency in a manner that would provide them with benefit. Given that Trump's pressure essentially asked the banks to violate U.S. law, it would be a major scandal, and screeches of "impeachment" would fill the air. Even better, the banks refused to cooperation, demonstrating the moral vacuity of the request.

The only problem is Donald Trump did none of that for the NoKos, but Barack Obama did all of it for the Mad Mullahs of Iran as he negotiated his infamous Iran deal. Sohrab Ahmari explains:
Wednesday’s bombshell Associated Press scoop detailing the Obama administration’s secret effort to help Tehran gain access to the American financial system was a case study. In the months after Iran and the great powers led by the U.S. agreed on the nuclear deal, the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord.

That’s according to the AP’s Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee, citing a newly released report from the GOP-led Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Lederman and Lee write: “The effort was unsuccessful because American banks—themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions—declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion . . . but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.”

Put another way: The Obama administration pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system, and the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury.

This was far from the first instance in which the Obama administration bent over backward, going far beyond the requirements of the deal, to help the Iranian regime cash in on the deal. In May 2016, then-Secretary of State John Kerry encouraged a gathering of European banking leaders in London to invest in Iran. This, even though the world’s leading anti-money laundering standards body had deemed Iran “a serious threat to the integrity of the global financial system” a few months earlier.
The comedy in all of this is that the Democrats are the first to accuse Trump of "obstruction of justice" and "collusion," when the last Democrat president did all of that and more vis a vis Iran. Of course, the past president could do no wrong, so what's the big deal? After all, he was on the path of the angels, even if a few laws were broken on the way.

Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Cerebral Cortex

CNN is the cerebral cortex of the hive-mind that is Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). In addition to an on-going flow of fake news reports (retractions occur regularly), the talking heads at CNN offer a continuous parade of anti-Trump "opinion leaders" who spout aggressively anti-Trump propaganda. Recently, Dan Helmer, a candidate for congress from Virgina opined: "The greatest threat to our democracy today is a president who doesn't take the oath to defend the Constitution seriously."

The CNN anchor nodded sagely and frowned, and the progressive base no doubt cheered. Both appear to be absolutely oblivious to the irony of Mr. Helmer's statement. Apparently, they and he are too blinded by their #Resistance ideology to consider the true threats to our democracy that have happened and are happening.

1. The weaponization of the IRS designed to attack political opponents of the previous administration. When uncovered, CNN and other trained hamsters in the media were notably incurious about the details and really quite blasé when a senior IRS officer took the Fifth, rather than testify before congress. There was copious evidence of wrong-doing, but never mind.

2. The weaponization of federal law-enforcement and intelligence agencies designed to attack the campaign of an opposition candidate. When uncovered, CNN and other trained hamsters in the media were notably incurious about the details and in the long tradition of biased media when Democrats are in office, defended the government, rather than work to uncover the truth.

3. The outright dishonesty that was the hallmark of the previous administration's attempt attempt to sell Obamacare, even as the electorate was skeptical. Lies were used to promote the proposed healthcare system (e.g., "it will save money, you can keep your Doctor, you can keep your insurance plan").

4. A double standard within the DoJ that defines who gets investigated and who gets prosecuted. When a government official (Hillary Clinton) clearly violated national security, the fix was in—she was neither indicted nor prosecuted while others from the opposition party (think: David Patreus) were convicted for significantly less serious national security offenses.

5. The political prosecution of Denesh DeSousa, a harsh critic of the then sitting Democrat president, who was forced to plea guilty by the DoJ for a minor campaign finance offense. The trained hamsters yawned, and now have the chutzpa to suggest that his recent pardon is somehow a bad thing.

6. The promotion of the canard that an opposition candidate colluded with Russians to swing an election that was supposedly in the bag for a Democratic candidate. The implication is that a legitimate democratic vote is invalid – still another threat to our democratic process.

Of course all of those "threats to our democracy" came from the Left, from Democrats, so they don't count within the hive mind. Since he professes to be soooo concerned about "threats to democracy," the voters of Virginia might ask Mr. Helmer to explain why a single man (Trump) no matter how powerful, represents a greater threat than an entire political party (the Democrats), its leadership and the preceding examples of their corrupt manipulation of major branches of our government.