The Roaring '20s

I'm old enough to recall grandparents remembering the Roaring '20s—a time in between big wars, a time when masters of the universe (big industrialists) ruled the roost in the private sector; a time when the stock market kept going up, bubble after bubble, until it didn't; a time when technology (e.g., the automobile, radio, the telephone) became increasingly accessible to at least some of the middle class; a time when college, although still an elitist institution was opened up to at least some of the masses; a time of change.

Today, we enter a new Roaring '20s, one hundred years after my grandparents' era, but with many characteristics that are analogous to that time long past. We are in a time of relative peace, although new threats from China, Russia and even Iran keep us slightly on edge. We watch as tech titans create and grow important new technology that has and/or will 'change the world.' We have experienced a stock market that has been upward trending for over a decade, long enough to lull younger people into the belief that it'll go up forever (it won't). We'll undoubtedly see cars that drive themselves, but far more important, we'll begin to feel the profound affects (and potential dangers) of strong artificial intelligence. We may begin to see a movement away from college as we know it and toward a learning model that replaces an increasingly stifling and ineffective college experience.

But what of the next 10 years—the new Roaring 20s. Here are a few predictions:

The Bad News

• We'll see an increasingly ineffective government, driven by increasingly ideological politicians who will refuse to work together. As a consequence, major systems (e.g., infrastructure, social security, the welfare state) that have been the engine of growth and stability over the past half century, will begin to degrade and fail.
• We'll see ever-growing national debt that will degrade the ability of even ineffective government to function at a sustainable level. Worse, we'll see politicians in both parties who simply don't care.
• We'll see a continuing effort by socialists to convince us that ineffective government can be fixed with still more ineffective government. That higher taxes, more controls (of speech, of commerce, of health care, of everything) will somehow make us a better country.
• We'll see a rush to regulate the private sector (again coming from the Left) and as a consequence, the establishment of significant roadblocks for the creation of new businesses and economic growth that benefits all.
• We'll see a media that is no longer professional or trustworthy. Fake news will become the norm.
• We'll watch as social media changes the psychology of human interaction.
• We'll hear more and more concern about problems that are characterized incorrectly as major existential threats, and relatively nothing about problems (see point 2) that actually are serious, if not existential, threats.
  

The Good News (maybe)

• Social media has freed us from dependence of an increasingly corrupt media, allowing more and more people to get their information without the filter imposed by those who consider themselves the elite.
• Big data, coupled with machine learning, will provide the first true hope of addressing currently intractable social problems, but only if (that's a big if), political correctness doesn't intercede.
• Humans and machines will begin to merge. That's already happening, and if you don't believe me, consider how much you rely on your mobile device, how often you look at it, and what you do with it. Soon, the device will become embedded in you.
• New energy technologies will become practical and widespread and will lead to a cleaner environment. But fossil fuels will remain and by giving us energy independence, they may lead to a significant change in geopolitics.
• The private sector will lead exploration into space and the results will be spectacular—less expensive and more compelling.
• Medical care will become more expensive, but if left alone by big government, will also become increasingly effective in eradicated and curing disease.

And then, of course, there's Scott Adams who writes:"Scientists will eventually stop flailing around with solar power and focus their efforts on harnessing the only truly unlimited source of energy on the planet: stupidity. I predict that in the future, scientists will learn how to convert stupidity into clean fuel."

In my view, if "scientists" just focused on Washington, DC and the media, the amount of stupidly they could harness would save the world. Where's Greta Thunberg when you need her?

May your road into the Roaring 20s be happy and healthy.

The Year in Review

As we approach the New Year and the transition to a new decade, it's time to review the events of 2019. Despite the craziness, 2019 has been a very good year for the vast majority of Americans. The economy continues to out-perform almost all predictions, unemployment is historically low, federal taxes are taking a smaller bite of of middle class paychecks, wages are up across all wage groups, minorities are doing well economically, and overseas, we are considerably less embroiled in foreign wars than we've been in a long time.

But I did mention "craziness," and we saw that on steroids emanating from virtually every Democrat politician on the national stage, a significant majority of their supporters and, of course, their legions of trained hamsters in the media. For the crazies, the United States is on the edge of ruin, the economy is "unfair" (to someone), the country is systemically 'racist," the constitution is under threat, and, of course, impeach, impeach, impeach ...

Frank Miel has a rather amusing take off on the craziness of 2019 when he writes:

For me, I’m going to remember 2019 as the Democrats’ last stand. The party of Thomas Jefferson was given the keys to the nation’s future and told, simply, don’t drive it off the road. Instead, the Democrats honored their Southern roots and decided to go mud bogging! Might have been fun if they had four-wheel drive, but they were stuck with the antique transmission of the Constitution. Voters were sure to notice when the yee-haw Democrats covered them with dirt, ground the gears to dust, and spun the engine into oblivion.

Meile goes on to review just a few of the many, many crazy events that defined the year. He begins by noting that as soon as the Dems took the House of Representatives in January, the drumbeat for impeachment began in earnest. But at the same time, they told us that our "racist" country could only be redeemed it they and they alone removed Donald trump an d took power. As if on cue, a supposed horrific incident occurred. Meile describes it:

Jan. 29: Democrats encountered a detour on their road to ruin when “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett claimed to be the victim of a hate crime on the streets of Chicago in the middle of the coldest night of the year. The noose still hanging around his neck when police came to his door later may have seemed like the perfect prop to TV star Smollett, but to everyone else it seemed like a giant neon light shouting, “Give me attention!” Did I say everyone? Oops. Not Democrats, who have mastered the marriage of victimhood and hagiography. To them, St. Jussie was the second coming of Tawana Brawley. Oh, wait. This is getting way too uncomfortable! It’s almost like Democrats specialize in phony attacks and disingenuous outrage. Hmmm. On Feb. 21, Smollett was arrested for filing a false police report, but thanks to a corrupt system in Chicago, he walked away without even a slap on the wrist for his staged hate crime. Did I mention Chicago?

The Dems and their trained hamsters in the media tripped over themselves to let the Smollett story go as quickly as they could, and with a cast of cartoon characters that Hollywood would envy—Nancy P., Adam S, and Jerry N., the Dems began their push toward the promised land. Lies, innuendo, and a rule-bending approach to their "investigations" lead to the forgone conclusion that the evil Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians and would be impeached. But then, in the best tradition of the Keystone cops, their own special counsel, Robert Mueller, told them it just didn't happen. Back to the drawing board.

As the economy continued to get better and better, the Dem's craziness was ratcheted up and some of it was truly comic. Miele writes:

March 25: CNN’s preferred candidate for president, porn-star lawyer Michael Avenatti, is arrested for a real extortion scheme he allegedly plotted against Nike. Over the next month, Avenatti, the darling of the Never Trumpers, would be indicted and charged with north of 40 federal crimes. The presidency would have to wait for a better con man.

April 25: Enter Joe Biden. Ignoring former boss Barack Obama’s wise counsel that “You don’t have to do this, Joe,” Biden commits professional suicide by announcing his candidacy for president, thus ensuring he will leap from comfortable irrelevancy to irrelevant corrupt con-man politician who will eventually have to answer for his bragging about a quid pro quo in Ukraine. Talk about poetic justice!

As the race for the presidency began in earnest, it became apparent that the only people who had a chance were 'woke.' Meile describes peak early crazy during the first 'debate:'

June 27: Wait, there actually was something else the Democrats could do. All 10 Democrat candidates in the first presidential primary debate on NBC raised their hands when asked if they would guarantee health-care coverage for illegal aliens. Democrats swooned, but the rest of us just felt sick.

In their vision quest to achieve impeachment, Dems were nothing if not persistent. Again Meile comments:

Sept. 9: The inspector general of the intelligence community, Michael Atkinson, draws the short straw and is forced to launch a third unsuccessful coup attempt against President Trump by the CIA involving the “urgent” and “credible” whistleblower complaint that turned out to be “irrelevant” and “partisan” a few days later when President Trump released the consensus transcript of his call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. When will they ever learn? Oh, well, after Trump is reelected, they will have four more years to get their impeachment-coup machine in working order. If at first you fail to smear, try, try again.

The fact that the "whistleblower" is a Democratic operative with close connections to Joe Biden seemed to escape the trained hamsters in the media who characterized him as the second coming of Daniel Ellsberg. The hamsters also seemed curiously uninterested in the manner in which Joe Biden's son earned millions in the Ukraine or why his father, Joe Biden while VP of the United States, bragged about shutting down an investigation into the company that paid his son millions. Nothing to see there ... move along.

As we moved into 4Q19, the Dems told us that the country was in peril, that trump MUST be impeached post haste or the constitution would be destroyed due by spontaneous combustion. So they rushed through their latest "investigation," bending rules as they careened toward a predetermined result. And then, Nancy P. slammed on the brakes. All that talk about alacrity disappeared. Now she tells us it's important that the Senate call witnesses that the Dem House chose not to call, and play by the rules that the Dems refused to follow. Okay then.

Meile concludes with this:

... Speaker Pelosi, who had been holding the nation hostage since September, is expected to free the impeachment sometime early in 2020, but the nation itself will remain a prisoner throughout most of the year as Pelosi and her henchmen in the media continue to pretend that the other shoe is about to drop, leading to a bombshell revelation that this is the beginning of the end of President Trump, who will nonetheless breeze to reelection on his pledge to Keep America Great and to keep the socialist Democrats at bay.

But in the meantime, the Dems are just warming up. Peak crazy is yet to come.

Happy New Year!

Moby Dick

On this Christmas Eve day, the New York Times decided to publish an oped by Paul Krugman, the Nobel-prize winning, left-wing economist who told us with absolute certainly that: (1) the stock market would crash upon the election of Donald Trump, and (2) the United States would go into an unrelenting recession that would lead to high unemployment and general misery for the middle class.

Hmmm. Let's take a step away from Krugman's delusional world of Trump hatred and toward reality, noting the following. We have seen the longest sustained stock market rally in history with market highs on nearly a monthly basis. The 401Ks of middle class workers have benefitted mightily. We have also seen a period of historic economic growth with unemployment consistently under 4 percent and wages up in all income classes. African Americans, Latinos, and women are being employed in record numbers. But hey, even Paul Krugman can make mistakes. In fact, he always does.

Today's Krugman rant uses Dickens' classic character, Ebenezer Scrooge, to asset that "...many conservative politicians only pretend to be Scrooges, when they’re actually much worse — not mere misers, but actively cruel." Yeah, that's the ticket. In the long tradition of demented leftwing pundits, Krugman argues that the GOP pushes grandma off a cliff by withholding medical care, grabs food out of the outstretched hands of tiny children, and punishes staving families by eliminating their food stamps.

Writing for the NYT's predominantly left-wing readership, Krugman revels in the canard that attaching work requirements to some social programs (e.g., Medicaid) actually costs money. After all, it's VERY important to keep people at the bottom of the economic spectrum dependent on government. You know, votes and all that.

Because Krugman tends to be incoherent, he appeals to the authority of another author when he writes:

In 2018, The Atlantic published a memorable essay by Adam Serwer titled “The Cruelty Is the Point,” about the political importance of shared pleasure from other people’s suffering. Serwer was inspired to write that essay by photos of lynchings, which show groups of white men obviously enjoying the show. Indeed, in America, gratuitous cruelty has often been directed at people of color.

But as Serwer also noted, it’s not just about race. There are more people than we like to imagine who rejoice in the suffering of anyone they see as unlike themselves, especially anyone they perceive as weak.

In fact, I suspect that this mentality is part of the explanation for the seeming paradox of strong Republican support in places like eastern Kentucky where large numbers of poor whites depend on programs like food stamps: Those who aren’t receiving aid actually want to see their poorer neighbors hurt.

So ... those who are more fortunate "want to see their poorer neighbors hurt." What a truly dark view of his fellow Americans. But then again, far too many Krugmans of the Left, wallowing in their elitist, condescending view of the 'deplorables,' would nod their heads in agreement.

I suppose Krugman thinks he's being clever by using Scrooge as a metaphor for his enemies. So let's consider another metaphor from classic literature.

Krugman has an eerie similarity to Captain Ahab, the protagonist in Herman Melville’s classic novel, Moby Dick. Borderline insane and unquestionably obsessed with his enemy—a great white whale—Ahab's decision making suffers, his judgment is faulty, and his tragic end is as predictable as it is inevitable. Krugman should take note.

"Dangerous"

Early in her tenure as a freshman congresswoman, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a media darling. A telegenic media Star, AOC was quoted regularly, and was the goto spokesperson for a far left ideology that advocated socialism as a path to a utopian America. As time passed, it appears that party elders (looking at polls that showed she was hurting Dem election chances), told her to sit down and be quiet. She still got some media coverage but the level of fervor and the overall emphasis on her comments abated in the second half of 2019.

Today, AOC remains a committed socialist and is a strong campaigner for socialist, Bernie Sanders, one of the frontrunners for the Democratic presidential nomination. The social justice warrior crowd lionizes Sanders along with AOC.

Recently AOC was quoted as making the following comment:

"We should all be dangerous. We should be dangerous to injustice...we should be dangerous to a system that treats us as less than we deserve.”

The Left loves the use of romantic language when they describe themselves (e.g., the "Resistance") and their approach to what they characterize as “social justice“. AOC's followers love the thought that she somehow 'threatens' all of the institutions that have worked to make our country an outpost of freedom and opportunity in the world.

Here’s an example of one of her followers on Twitter picking up on the "dangerous" meme:

So deeply moved by @AOC who isn’t afraid to be dangerous and name the thing: late stage capitalism is collapsing our planet, white supremacy is in the WH and it must go. We must fight for justice and make it happen!

All socialists are 'dangerous,' but not in the way they think. By promoting the hysteria that the planet is collapsing due to capitalism, socialists conveniently forget that it's the capitalist system that has made the masses richer, eradicated disease, provided better living conditions and stronger educational opportunities, and given them more freedom than any attempt at socialism in the history of that same "collapsing" planet. They trivialize the phrase "white supremacist" by promoting a proven hoax (read the damn transcript!) that dishonestly claimed Donald Trump stated that neo-Nazis were "fine people." He. Did. Not. And they aggressively avoid the clear reality that people of modest means can apply their own initiative to improve their lives—sometimes substantially.

So AOC and Bernie, along with a majority of SJWs who support them are "dangerous." But not in the way they would like. They promote a destructive ideology that has ruined more countries and impoverished and imprisoned more people than capitalism, for all it flaws, every could.

UPDATE:
------------
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, except this editorial by the Las Vegas Review-Journal that comments on a recent Bernie-AOC political road show conducted in Sin City. The editors write:

There’s little doubt that the tired old Marxism promoted by Sen. Sanders and fellow comrade Rep. Ocasio-Cortez would indeed “transform” the United States. The debate arises over whether that transformation would be for the better — and on that point, the carnage wrought throughout the 20th century by the siren song of socialism offers a definitive answer.

Sen. Sanders is old enough to know better, of course. But the 30-year-old AOC is unburdened by the weight of historical perspective. She has sharp and canny political instincts, however, and has ridden a wave of radical progressive chic to become, in her first term, one of the most visible Democrats in the House, the vanguard of a young left that disdains individual liberty and capitalism in favor of a collectivism and identity politics cloaked in benevolence but steeped in a dangerous combination of compulsion and authoritarianism.

Ahhh ... the word "dangerous" appears yet again, but this time in the proper setting. The socialism espoused by Bernie, AOC, and a non-trivial percentage of the new Democratic party is a "dangerous" blend of "compulsion and authoritarianism." The woke tell us how to think; they tell us what we can and connot say, they tell us what we must tithe to the government in taxes emphasizing that you can never pay your "fair share"; they identify the subjects that can be taught in our schools and the content of the lessons; they demonize those who have achieved material wealth through hard work; the call half the country "racist;" they define the health care we can have (and the care we can't have); they edit history so it serves only their needs. And that's a short list.

Dangerous.

Deeply Stupid

Christopher Bedford offers a blistering commentary on recent events in D.C.:

It’s been an ugly fall in Washington. Wet, dreary and deeply stupid. ... despite Wednesday’s long-expected [impeachment] vote and the media cheer group accompanying it, this is going terribly for the Democrats.

There’s a willful suspension of belief at work in the capital city. Self-proclaimed defenders of the Constitution make excuses for sloppy spying on a major candidate for president. Men who compare themselves to those at Valley Forge shift seamlessly from allegations of urine-soaked escapades to collusion with the Kremlin, from the Kremlin to Ukraine, and finally from quid-quo-pro to bribery to obstruction, with stopovers on NFL anthem protests and insults to “The Squad.” The speaker quotes the deceased Elijah Cummings in wondering, “When we’re dancing with the angels, the question will be asked, in 2019,” did we impeach Donald Trump?

Media commentators in Washington and New York read D.C. bedtime stories about a majority of Americans backing their efforts– a statistic you would have to spend nearly all your time in New York or D.C. to remotely believe. When polls don’t fit that worldview, they’re discarded. “I don’t believe that poll for one second,” CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin balked when CNN political director David Chalian showed declining enthusiasm for a impeachment in a network poll. “David, that poll is wrong. Just because I said so.”

After the Robert Mueller Russia fiasco, it takes willful stupidity to think that a solid majority of Americans ever wanted to see this impeachment go through over a country some of them might recognize from a Risk game.

And now, as if to add an exclamation point to the rank hypocrisy and deep partisanship that has been in evidence since the Democrats began their impeachment push, House leader, Nancy Pelosi, has decided that she'll delay passing article of impeachment to the Senate for a trial. Recall that the Dems kept telling us the the House proceedings must be rushed because the 2020 election was "in jeopardy" if Trump remained in office—as outrageous a claim as they could possible make, given their proven, fact-based actions to subvert the 2016 election. Now, everything must slow down until the Dems—who did everything possible to make their impeachment investigation partisan and deeply unfair—now have the chutzpa to demand fairness from the GOP. This is not going well for the Dems.

UPDATE:
------------
Roger Kimball presents us with an entirely different view of Nancy Pelosi's words on impeachment:

I am so glad that Nancy Pelosi has finally come to her senses and declared — on the floor of the House no less — that impeachment is ‘a hatchet job on the presidency’. Yes, that’s right. The House, said Pelosi, is ‘not judging the president with fairness, but impeaching him with a vengeance’. Nicely phrased! The whole circus, she said, violates ‘fundamental principles that Americans hold dear: privacy, fairness, checks and balances’. Go, Nancy! Not only that, the impeachment process is taking place only because one party is ‘paralyzed with hatred’ of the president, and until they ‘free themselves of this hatred, our country will suffer’. I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, Pelosi was right again that the spectacle of impeachment is ‘about punishment searching for a crime that doesn’t exist’.

SCREECH!! The needle goes scudding across the vinyl disk: wrong impeachment!

That was Nancy Pelosi in 1998 when a Democrat was being impeached, not Pelosi in 2019 when a Republican is in the dock. As recently as last March, Pelosi insisted that impeachment had to be reserved for the most serious sorts of crimes and required bipartisan support, as was the case in history’s two previous impeachments, that of Andrew Johnson in 1868 and that of Bill Clinton in 1998.

Well, no. In neither case were the crimes serious enough nor was support bipartisan enough. Neither impeachment should have happened.

The GOP made a horrific mistake when they attempted to impeach Bill Clinton in 1998. Sure, Clinton was a dog, sure, he perjured himself, but NO, he did not deserve to be impeached for a bone-headed sexual dalliance. I thought so then, and I think so now.

It is interesting, however, how fluid politicians can be. Now that the Dems are performed an even more egregious "hatchet job on the presidency," Pelosi and her minions are cheering them on. In Pelosi's words, the house has ‘not judg[ed] the president with fairness, but impeach[ed] him with a vengeance.’

I suppose you could argue that what goes around, comes around, and that the GOP deserves this for its Clinton debacle two decades ago. That may be true, they may deserve it ... but the country doesn't.

False x 6

As I watched (albeit briefly, because one can only take so much sanctimonious B.S.) the impeachment "debate" on the House floor, I thought back to an earlier time in my life when I was asked to become an expert advisor in a major legal case between the Government of Canada and a major contractor to the government. Tens of millions of dollars were involved and the case was to be mediated by a retired Supreme Court Justice of Canada. He asked me to participate in all hearings, to review boxes and boxes of evidentiary material, and (much to my amazement) suggested that I ask questions from the bench as we heard two high priced legal teams (literally dozens of lawyers on each side) present their arguments.

I was nervous before the first hearing and the Justice pulled me aside.

"Roger," he said, "The Plaintiff has experienced lawyers who will present their case in a compelling way. You'll be convinced of the rightness of their arguments."

I nodded and said nothing, looking a little confused.

He smiled and continued, "The Defendant also has experienced lawyers who will present their case in a compelling way. You'll then be convinced in the rightness of their arguments."

He paused for effect. "But they both can't be right. It's our job to sort through who is right and who is wrong and come to a just decision."

As I watched a parade of Democrat members of congress tell me that the impeachment of Donald Trump is all about "protecting the constitution," I thought back to the Justice's advice and asked myself to consider the Democrats' record of veracity during the Trump era.

• They told me that Trump colluded with the Russians, yet their own special counsel indicated that no evidence of collusion could be found after two years of looking. Their allegation was false.
• Their investigative leader told me that he had conclusive evidence of collusion, yet he never produced it. His claim was false.
• The Dems told me that Trump obstructed justice, yet their special counsel completed his investigation without incident. Their claim was false.
• They told me that firing James Comey was an abuse of power and likely obstruction of justice, but a recent IG investigation has proven that Comey was at best derelict in his leadership and at worst, a liar and co-conspirator in an attempt to unseat a duly elected president. The Dems' allegation was false.
• They told me that Rep. Devin Nunes was a conspiracy theorist when he presented evidence of the Crossfire Hurricane scandal in 2018. They further called any suggestion that the FBI was complicit in actions against Trump a "hoax." Yet again, their claims were proven false by the FBI's Inspector general.
• They refused to address the allegations that the Bidens were involved in corrupt practices in the Ukraine, stating that they had been "cleared of wrongdoing." That statement is false.

False. False. False. False. False. and ... False.

And now they tell me that Trump abuses his presidential power because he asks for (but did not get) an investigation into corruption in a country known for it, and that he obstructed justice by suggesting that the courts must decide whether executive privilege applies in this impeachment inquiry?

Then I listened to the GOP Congressmen and women tell me all of the Dem claims were a sham and that the impeachment would do great harm to politics for decades to come.

Finally, I thought back to the words of the Canadian Justice, "... they both can't be right. It's [my] job to sort through who is right and who is wrong and come to a just decision.

False x 6 = WRONG.

The Democrats have poisoned their veracity with major falsehood after major falsehood promulgated knowingly and repeatedly over more than three years. There is no reason whatsoever to believe them now.

UPDATE:
--------------
Now that the Dems have fed their Trump Derangement Syndrome monster and voted to impeach, their leader, Nancy Pelosi, takes Chutzpa to an even higher level. Dressed in black (as if to mourn the state of the nation), she tells us she'll delay sending the articles of impeachment to the Senate because, "The GOP cannot be unbiased judges in the impeachment trial." Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. The Dems continue to beclown themselves in ways that should make you laugh.

Big Hurry

After hours of pro forma posturing, the House will vote to impeach Donald Trump today. It's laughable to watch the pre-vote count of "moderate" Dems who made promises to GOP members who (unwisely) voted for them in 2018. They promised that they wouldn't rubber stamp the Democrat leader's unhinged impeachment efforts and then went ahead and did just that—yeah, I know, it's all a matter of conscience and the constitution, riiighht?

But ya gotta give the Democrats points for Chutzpa. Lying to your constituents is perfectly okay when they're members of the GOP and besides, Trump is so icky he deserves to be impeached for something that never happened.

And now, on to the Senate trial!! Senate Minority leader, Chuck Schumer, escalates the level of Chutzpa by demanding that additional witnesses be called. Fairness and all that. Victoria Taft comments:

Try to stifle your laughter while watching Democrat Minority Leader Chuck Schumer lecture folks about the "fairness" he wants to see in the Senate Impeachment trial of President Trump. In fact, Schumer admits that some senators think there's so little evidence to convict Trump that he wants more "fairness" to suss out new dirt that House Democrats didn't discover in their "inquiry."

After the House conducted most of its "impeachment inquiry" in Rep Adam Schiff's panic room in secret in the basement, after he denied Republicans a chance to call witnesses without Schiff's approval, you've got to appreciate the out-of-the-ballpark gall that it takes to completely ignore your own side's treachery and demand you be treated better.

That was Schumer's task on Monday as he told reporters that he wanted to call his own witnesses to testify against President Trump, gain access to subpoenaed documents denied the House, and hold a real trial to collect evidence and cross examine witnesses.

"A good number of my Republican colleagues said that they believe the charges are serious but there isn't enough evidence yet to make a decision."

... Put another way, Schumer wants a do-over on Trump.

The shrinking #NeverTrump crowd within the GOP will tell us that the Senate must be deliberative. Must play by the rules and must give their charges a fair hearing.

Nope.

Think Kavanaugh.

No matter how fair, how thorough, how measured the Senate "trial" is, the Dems will tell us that it was a whitewash. That Trump is GUILTY!

So ... the trial should be short and sweet. One day ... maybe less. Acquittal for lack of evidence or sanity.

Sure, the Dems and their trained hamsters in the media will scream, but they'd do that even if the trial took 4 days or 4 weeks or 4 months. The Dems suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and they will not accept any action that leaves a duly-elected president in office to complete his term.

So screw 'em.

They were in a big hurry to impeach. The GOP Senate should be in a big hurry to acquit.

Billionaire

Social Justice Warriors and other progressive acolytes of Bernie Sanders, Liz Warren and The Squad seem compelled to virtue signal at every turn. Recently, they've been peppering social media with tweets and posts like these:

"In what universe is being a billionaire justified?"
or
"There is no reason for anyone to be a billionaire."
or
"Why is it okay to be a billionaire?"
or
"Why is anyone a billionaire?"

To answer the last question, and by extension, all of the other memes, let me propose the following:

• Because that person (the billionaire) is probably smarter and/or luckier and/or worked harder and/or worked longer than 99.9999% of their fellow humans.
• Because that person was probably unafraid to fail and bounced back from the failures in ways that are not typical of 99.9999% of their fellow humans.
• Because that person was willing to take risks that 99.9999% of their fellow humans were unwilling to take?
• Because that person pays more local, state, and federal taxes than 1,000 (or more) average taxpayers.
• Because that person purchases everything from real estate to automobiles to boats that provide employment to the thousands of middle class workers who make and sell them.
• Because that person creates a micro-economy that benefits not only them, but also all who come into contact with them.
• Because that person likely created one or more companies that employ hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people, who in turn live better lives because they have the income, health benefits and retirement savings derived from their employment.
• Because that person likely created one or more companies that employ hundred or thousands or tens of thousands of people, who pay millions in local, state and federal income taxes, thereby providing funding for those who are less fortunate and depend on the government for some or all of their support.
• Because that person likely created one or more companies that employ hundred or thousands or tens of thousands of people, who provide goods and services that have the potential to benefit hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of people or millions of people.
• Because that person has the resources to endow colleges or build hospital wings that provide direct benefit to those who want to learn and those who need medical care.
• Because that person is often a patron of the arts and provides support that allows artists of all kinds to thrive.
• Because that person often sets up foundations that provide funding for charities of all kinds.

And lastly, because that person has probably spent a lifetime making things or providing services that actually benefit society in some way, as opposed to leftist SJWs who accomplish little with their outrage and absolutely nothing by asking idiotic questions like "Why is anyone a billionaire?'

End-Stage Addicts

Victor Davis Hansen is a historian, so he remembers things that others would prefer we forget. He writes:

Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth.

But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the emoluments clause of the Constitution?

The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

Special counsel Robert Mueller's 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?

The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump's tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?

Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.

Most presidents might seem angry after three years of that. Yet in paradoxical fashion, Trump suddenly appears more composed than at any other time in his volatile presidency.

Ironically, Trump's opponents and enemies are the ones who have become publicly unhinged.

Adding to VDH's list, we might also consider:

• The despicable treatment of Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court, Bret Kavanaugh, that was really yet another attempt to discredit Trump.
• The media's continual and wholly dishonest assertion that the FBI's efforts to spy on Trump's campaign and then submarine his presidency (proven correct by the IG report) were nothing more than a conspiracy theory.
• The lack of reporting on a vibrant economy in which minorities (including women) have prospered and achieved historically high levels of employment and wages.
• The lack of reporting on the growing support that Trump has garnered among African Americans and Latinos, as both groups achieve record-high economic gains.
• The continual allegations by Dems and their media hamsters of "racism," "white supremacy," and "misogyny" that have no basis in fact.
  
• The shocking levels of media bias and animus toward an elected president.

and on ... and on. VDH goes on to recount the pathetic and continuing failed attempts by Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media to stop Trump, writing:

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump. Trump's many enemies fear he will be re-elected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become. Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

To paraphrase Glen Reynolds: All the Dems had to do to win this election was not act crazy ... and they couldn't even do that.

Blowout

Conservatives (the Tories) in the U.K. won a landslide victory against the leftist Labour Party. That should give the leftist base of the new Democratic Party in the United States nightmares ... the kind that leave you in shaking in their aftermath. The Labour party was Led by an anti-Semitic, hard left ideologue, Jeremy Corbyn (BTW, someone who is a "friend" of the now-silent "Squad" of hard-left Democrat congresswomen), and suffered shocking loses in Parliament as the British public said 'enough' to their extreme politics and their rabid obstructionism on Brexit.

For old school Dems in the U.S, there are uncomfortable parallels between the Tories and the new Democratic party. Both have moved hard left. Both refuse to condemn the anti-Semitic elements that are growing within their ranks (think: Ilhan Omar or Rashida Talib as examples in the USA). Both have prominent members that are hard left (think: Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren). Both are pro-tax and demonize "the rich." Both think that the government can solve all problems. Both spew hate at supporters of the opposition party and have extremist wings (think: Antifa) that are prone to violence. Both parties have significant minorities that shouted "not my president/not my prime minister" after their respective election losses. And incredibly, both have enlisted the infamous Fusion GPS (Hillary Clinton's go-to opposition research arm) to concoct smears of Donald Trump/Boris Johnson.

In Britain, the people voted and rejected Labour emphatically. Charles C.W. Cooke suggests some reasons for the U.K. blowout:

... It has happened because Corbyn promised a return to a time in which Britain was the sick man of Europe — a time of rolling blackouts, of runaway inflation, of endless “brain drain,” of union excess.

It has happened because the Labour Party under Corbyn’s leadership has become an incubator of anti-Semitism and unpleasantness, and, when push comes to shove, the British will not stand for that.

It has happened because Corbyn has surrounded himself with communists and kooks and the worst hangers-on to the magnet that is “radical chic.”

And it has happened, above all, because it has been more than three years since the British voted to leave the European Union and yet Britain remains a member.

That last point is crucial. The British establishment, in concert with the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, have been calling for a second Brexit referendum since the first one went the “wrong” way in 2016. Thursday, they got it — and how. Last time, the Leavers won by the thinnest of margins. Tonight, they crushed it.

Not everyone who contributed to the Conservative victory was a staunch supporter of Brexit. But they didn’t have to be to favor a resolution to the saga. There exists in Britain a large but quiet group of voters who believe primarily in fair play, in democracy and in keeping promises, and who have come to believe that it is time to deliver the result that was promised.

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar? Can we find similarities here at home?
The new democratic party is becoming an "incubator" as well. Its actions over the past 3 years have given new meaning to the word "unpleasantness," and to paraphrase Cooke, Americans will not stand for that.

M.H Johnston provides some additional analysis:

The American parallel to the counter-productive purism of the Liberal Democrats’ strategy is the apparently suicidal desire of the Democratic base to impeach President Trump. Apart from being, in my view, wrong on the facts and the law, Congressional Democrats’ apparent inability to control their base’s Trump Derangement Syndrome -derived compulsion to impeach is, well, stupid. They have no chance whatsoever of removing Trump and, again in my view, a Senate trial can only highlight both the flimsiness of their case and the corruption behind both the Mueller investigation and the Bidens’ family activities in Ukraine. The Trump-obsessed Democrats won’t get what they want and they will almost certainly end up with a lot of egg on their faces.

Like the Liberal Democrats, the Democrats are letting their passions get in the way of their preferred policy outcomes; they are opting for the politics of personal destruction over the steady or considered advancement of their policy aims – and I expect that they will pay a similar price to that of Labour and the Liberal Democrats.

Indeed, the Dems fate in 2020 may very well be the same as that of Labour in 2019. And it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch.

A Massive Media Scandal

As the Democrats' impeachment sham drones on with an expected vote to impeach Trump today, the real news in Washington is about the Crossfire Hurricane scandal. The Dems would prefer to maintain focus on their despicable attempt to impeach a president for a telephone conversation that resulted in NOTHING—no actions of any kind. They need to deflect from the simple fact that the FBI and intelligence agencies under a Democratic administration used knowingly false information, subverted the FISA process in significant ways, and spied on the Democrat's opponent to provide them with an advantage. Now that's election interference!

But there's a collateral story that is equally important—the complete and utter failure of legacy media to report the scandal. In fact, the Dem's trained hamsters in the media did everything possible to cover it up.

Glen Greenwald comments:

If you don’t consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal, what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that’s what these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.

In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It’s brimming with proof of FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.

Just a few excerpts from the report should suffice to end any debate for rational persons about how damning it is. The focus of the first part of the IG Report was on the warrants obtained by the DOJ, at the behest of the FBI, to spy on Carter Page on the grounds that there was probable cause to believe he was an agent of the Russian government. That Page was a Kremlin agent was a widely disseminated media claim – typically asserted as fact even though it had no evidence. As a result of this media narrative, the Mueller investigation examined these widespread accusations yet concluded that “the investigation did not establish that Page coordinated with the Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.”

Those of us who followed Crossfire Hurricane from the beginning were chagrined but not surprised that the media covered it up, claiming it was "conspiracy theory" or a hoax. And #NeverTrumpers like Chris Wallace want to know why Donald Trump castigates the media at every opportunity. This scandal is yet another indication that the media's dishonesty and bias gives Trump ample opportunity and justification to do so.

Greenwald summarizes:

... the revelations of the IG Report are not merely a massive FBI scandal. They are also a massive media scandal, because they reveal that so much of what the U.S. media has authoritatively claimed about all of these matters for more than two years is completely false.

But who is going to report the media scandal? Certainly not the trained hamsters, and not Chris Wallace. I guess honest reporting is left to the a few true journalists (Kim Strassel and Mollie Hemingway come to mind) and the 'little people' on small news sites, blogs, and with tweets, who have been doggedly following this story, reporting it accurately, and sounding the alarm for over two years.

The Joke/Hoax and the Scandal

Two things are happening simultaneously in Washington, DC. One is a joke/hoox that is meritless, seting a precedent that could potentially hurt all future presidents. That would be the Democrats pathetic and desparate vote to impeach an elected president of the United States.

The other is arguably the most serious political scandal to ever envelope the nation's Capital—the weaponization (by the Democrat administration then in power and its many sympathizers within the deep state) of our premier law enforcement agency to investigate and undermine a candidate for president and then, once he won the election, destroy his presidency. That would be the Crossfire Hurricane scandal.

The Democrats and their trained hamsters in the media* would have us believe that the joke/hoax (the impeachment) is a threat to the constitution and democracy and that a scandal (Crossfire Hurricane) that does threaten the very basis of our democratic system is a "hoax" and or a "conspiracy theory." So much for reality.

The Dems and their trained hamsters tell us that the IG report that begins the long process of correcting the abuses that were Crossfire Hurricane "vindicated" the senior players within the FBI and intelligence community. Nothing could be further from the truth, but the NYT, WaPo and slew of alphabet networks never saw a piece of fake news they didn't like. In the words of Michael Horowitz, the FBI Inspector General, NO ONE who participated in FISA abuse and spying on the Trump campaign was vindicated by his report.

Miranda Devine comments:

Inspector General Michael Horowitz finally damned the FBI during his testimony Wednesday when he said he would be “skeptical” that there was anything accidental in the egregious catalog of errors the FBI committed in its spying operation on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

It took five hours of questioning about the FBI’s motivations but Horowitz, prudent and impartial as he is, finally delivered the money shot.

Asked by Republican Sen. Mike Crapo if the 17 “significant errors or omissions” he found in the FBI’s surveillance operation could possibly be “accidental,” Horowitz said: “I would be skeptical.”

He went on to explain “the answers we got were not satisfactory [so] we’re left trying to understand how could all these errors have occurred over a nine-month period on three teams hand-picked, on . . . the highest-profile case of the FBI, going to the very top of the organization, involving a presidential campaign.”

Horowitz described the conduct of the FBI as “inexplicable” when its operatives bent the rules to try to prove Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russia.

But sadly the FBI’s conduct is all too explicable. It can be explained by the proven anti-Trump bias of its personnel, hand-picked to run Crossfire Hurricane, the FBI operation to spy on the Trump campaign using salacious opposition research paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Horowitz’s testimony confirms suspicions that the Russia-collusion hoax amounted to an attempted coup against Trump and laid the groundwork for impeachment.

“It’s Trump today,” Sen. Lindsay Graham said in a blistering opening statement before he began questioning Horowitz. “It could be you or me tomorrow . . . if they can do this to the candidate for the president of the United States, what could they do to you? The Trump presidency will end in a year or five years . . . but we can’t write this off as being just about one man or one event. We’ve got to understand how off the rails the system got.”

The funny thing is, the Democrats are saying all the right things about how election interference is a threat to democracy. The only problem is Trump Derangement Syndrome has them focusing on the victim rather that the aggressor. Trump was the victim of Crossfire Hurricane (and won despite of it). The FBI and the intelligence agencies, all working under a Democrat administration that the IG report indicates was briefed on their actions, were the aggressors. But the Dems refuse to look because it happened on their watch.

No matter. I'm hopeful that at least some of the perpetrators will be indicted for these heinous actions and maybe a few will go the jail. That would be appropriate.

FOOTNOTE:
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* Its worth noting that both CNN and MSNBC (both champions of the impeachment joke/hoax) inexplicably cut away from the opening statements of the Horowitz hearing, thereby ignoring the real "threat to democracy." After all, when actual reality conflicts with their fake new fantasy, it's best to ignore it.

Crossfire Hurricane—The First Report

As expected, the Democrat's trained hamsters in the mainstream media are tripping over themselves to spin the recently released Inspector General's report of the FBI's Crossfire Hurricane scandal (reported in this blog here, here, here, here, and here) as "proof" that there was no attempt by the FBI to subvert the electoral process and unseat Donald Trump. They're counting on the fact that most American's won't read the report and fewer still have studied the background in a way that enables them to ask salient questions about the report's conclusions.

Kim Strassel, one of the few true journalists who has been on this sordid story since the beginning, released a tweet storm that is well-worth reading. It's presented here in its entirety:

Key findings of Horowitz report:
--Yup, IG said FBI hit threshold for opening an investigation. But also goes out of its way to note what a "low threshold" this is. [John] Durham's statement made clear he will provide more info for Americans to make a judgment on reasonableness.

2) The report is triumph for former House Intel Chair Devin Nunes, who first blew the whistle on FISA abuse. The report confirms all the elements of the February 2018 Nunes memo, which said dossier was as an "essential" part of applications, and FBI withheld info from FISA court.

3) Conversely, report is an excoriation of Adam Schiff and his "memo" of Feb 2018. That doc stated that "FBI and DOJ officials did NOT abuse the [FISA] process" or "omit material information." Also claimed FBI didn't much rely on dossier.

4) In fact, IG report says dossier played "central and essential role" in getting FISA warrants. Schiff had access to same documents as Nunes, yet chose to misinform the public. This is the guy who just ran impeachment proceedings.

5) Report is a devastating indictment of Steele, Fusion GPS and the "dossier." Report finds that about the only thing FBI ever corroborated in that doc were publicly available times, places, title names. Ouch.

6) IG finds 17 separate problems with FISA court submissions, including FBI's overstatement of Steele's credentials. Also the failure to provide court with exculpatory evidence and issues with Steele's sources and additional info it got about Steele's credibility.

7) Every one of these "issues" is a story all on its own. Example: The FBI had tapes of Page and Papadopoulos making statements that were inconsistent with FBI's own collusion theories. They did not provide these to the FISA court.

8) Another example: FBI later got info from professional contacts with Steele who said he suffered from "lack of self awareness, poor judgement" and "pursued people" with "no intelligence value." FBI also did not tell the court about these credibility concerns.

9) And this: FBI failed to tell Court that Page was approved as an "operational contact" for another U.S. agency, and "candidly" reported his interactions with a Russian intel officer. FBI instead used that Russian interaction against Page, with no exculpatory detail.

10) Overall, IG was so concerned by these "extensive compliance failures" that is has now initiated additional "oversight" to assess how FBI in general complies with "policies that seek to protect the civil liberties of U.S. persons."

11) Report also expressed concerns about FBI's failure to present any of these issues to DOJ higher ups; its ongoing contacts with Steele after he was fired for talking to media; and its use of spies against the campaign without any DOJ input.

12) Remember Comey telling us it was no big deal who paid for dossier? Turns out it was a big deal in FBI/DOJ, where one lawyer (Stuart Evans) expressed "concerns" it had been funded by Clinton/DNC. Because of his "consistent inquiries" we go that convoluted footnote.

13) IG also slaps FBI for using what was supposed to be a baseline briefing for the Trump campaign of foreign intelligence threats as a surreptitious opportunity to investigate Flynn.

14) Finally, intriguing just how many people at the FBI don't remember anything about anything. Highly convenient.

15) Last point. When IG says he found no "documentary" evidence of bias, he means just that: He didn't find smoking gun email that says "let's take out Trump." And it isn't his job to guess at the motivations of FBI employees. Instead...

16) He straightforwardly lays out facts. Those facts produce a pattern of FBI playing the FISA Court--overstating some info, omitting other info, cherrypicking details. Americans can look at totality and make their own judgment as to "why" FBI behaved in such a manner.

Strassel does more in 16 short tweets to negate the dishonest spin of The New York Times, WaPo, and dozens of other media outlets who don't care that a premier federal law enforcement agency acted in ways that are suspect at best and seditious at worst. Their job is to make the Democrats look good and Trump look bad. If that means failing to report on the biggest political scandal in the nation's history—to relegate it to a "hoax" status, then so be it. Sad.

Meth Addicts

From the very beginning, the Democrats knew full well they were going to impeach Donald Trump. They rooted around in the political mire, looking for an excuse—any excuse—that would justify their actions. They lied, they bent or obliterated the rules of the House, they tried to destroy the reputation of anyone close to Trump, they obstructed investigations into their own wrong-doing, they weaponized the deep state and the media, they name-called, and as they struggled to make impeachment happen, they became hysterical. Today, they introduce two tendentious articles of impeach. What a shock!

Political opposition is healthy and necessary in a democracy, but the Dems have substituted derangement for opposition and as a consequence, have done nothing other than try to undo an election they lost. The end result is that immigration reform, health care reform, trade reform and other issues critical to our nation's well-being have gone untouched. The irony is that Donald Trump may very well have negotiated reasonable reforms on some or all of these issues, but the Dems just couldn't give him the wins. After all, impeachment was the Dem's sole focus. The further irony in all of this is that Trump has achieved incredible economic successes for all citizens and some foreign policy victories despite the Dem's attacks.

It looks like the Dems behavior over the past three years is beginning to hurt them. In a recent poll of battle ground states, Firehouse Strategies has found that support for Dem candidates in head-to-head contests with Trump has eroded significantly over the past quarter. In MI, PA, and WS, Trump beats every Democrat contender. This was not the case a year ago.

Even more telling, Trump's support among African Americans and Latinos is growing. Newsday reports:

The new Emerson poll puts Trump at 35 percent with black voters and 38 percent with Hispanics. “If you add in Asian voters at 28 percent approval,” notes Emerson’s director of polling Spencer Kimball, “our number is very close to the new Marist poll,” which finds Trump’s approval at 33 percent among non-white voters. A recent RasmussenReports poll has Trump support among black voters at 34 percent, and even the new CNN poll has Trump’s approval among non-white voters at 26 percent.

I think the Dems are a lot like meth addicts. Deep down, they know what they're doing is stupid and wrong, bad for their health, and destructive to their well-being. They look in the mirror (the polls) and see the results. But it feels so good to channel their hatred in such public and provocative ways that they simply don't care.

There one more detail—meth addicts rarely come out the other end without damage, and in many cases, severe damage. That's beginning to happen with the Dems. There's no political party that has earned it more.

UPDATE:
-----------
This angry comment from Stephen Kruiser pretty much says it all:

The utter pointlessness of the impeachment charade is what is so frustrating. The Democrats are still upset that their long game with the Mueller report laid and egg and left them with nothing. This pathetic Ukrainian do-over of theirs won’t be given the kindest treatment by history, no matter how infused with righteousness their indignation may seem to them at the moment.

Frankly, the 'charade' is so obvious to so many that the voters' verdict is far more important than the historians'.

Precedent

Today, the Impeachment Travesty continues. The Democrats are driven by a combination of hatred and desperation, both grounded in Trump Derangement Syndrome, and as a consequence, they careen toward a hyper-partisan impeachment. They tell us that they really, really care about Democracy, the constitution, political precedent and the like, but in reality, they care nothing for those things. If they did, they wouldn't set a horrendously bad precedent that will now allow an opposition political party to attempt to remove a first term president because they don't like the results of an election. Victory Davis Hansen summarizes:

From now on, impeachment can be used against any first-term president with a record of success. It will be used solely as a political strategy by the opposition party that controls the House to weaken a president’s reelection chances. That’s the Democratic Party’s legacy and Democrats will live to rue it.

In the three years since the 2016 election, the Democrats have attempted everything to destroy Donald Trump. Their level of political viciousness has been shocking, even by beltway standards.

Lead by a cabal of inveterate liars and smarmy political operators, the Dems keep trying and failing to make the case that Trump should be removed from office by their fiat, not by a vote of the people. Their Keystone Cops effort indicates the new Democratic party cares little for the people. In fact, it seems that they despise the very voters who might allow them to recapture the presidency. After all, according to the new Dems, we're a country of racists—peppered with a collection of misogynists and other 'deplorables.' We're greedy, we don't pay enough taxes, we demand personal freedom (the horror!), and we can't seen to bend to the supreme power of the deep state. We reject the abject idiocy of political correctness run amuck and no longer worship at the alter of blue policies that have failed badly in cities and states where they have been implemented.

So ... bring on impeachment.

I can only hope that the American people recognize this truly despicable attempt to negate their vote and that payback will be the result. The behavior of the democrats deserves a strong response, and the best response is their defeat in 2020.

UPDATE-1:
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It's not at all unusual for the editors of The New York Times to add to the level of idiocy associated with the Democrats' impeachment circus, but today just might take the cake. The editors of America's "paper of record" (LOL) are upset that the Trump administration won't dignify the Dem kangaroo court in the House with participation. After all, the Dems need people to think that they're all about the serious business of governance, even-handedness, and the 'rule of law." They. Are Not. They are all about political viciousness and truly do want to negate an election. Anyhow, the NYT editors ask: "Does Trump Think Our Constitutional Processes Are Beneath Him?"

The august group of NYT opinion leaders writes:

President Trump has now made obvious his contempt for the notion that Congress has any authority to hold him accountable. He has signaled that he won’t mount any defense to impeachment charges in the House over his scheming in Ukraine, insisting it is somehow beneath him to participate in a constitutional process.

Yeah ... seems to be that contempt is exactly the right attitude, given that the "charges" are trumped up, the constitutional questions are non-existent, and the notion that an elected president cannot put conditions of foreign aid is ridiculous, or cannot ask for an investigation into corruption that involves an ex-VP of the United States, and most important, that running for office somehow inoculates that same ex-VP from an culpability for influence pedaling.

The NYT editors sit in their New York City offices, insulated from the masses they purport to understand, and clutch their collective pearls as they talk about "President Trump’s rejection of Congress’s independent authority." What this group of clueless elites don't seem to recognize is that there are tens of millions of average citizens who reject congress' impeachment actions. Those tens of millions will be heard in less than a year.

UPDATE-2:
--------------
It's truly comical to watch the Dems struggle for an Impeachment meme (in the old fashioned sense of the word) that will resonate with their left-wing base and at the same time find acceptance through the broader electorate. First it was "Russian collusion," then "obstruction" of a crime that didn't happen, then "quid pro quo," then "bribery," and now, an attempt to "ensure the integrity of the 2020 election."

Byron York writes:

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler tried to explain why Democrats are racing to finish their work. The reason, Nadler said, is that if the president is not removed from office immediately, he will cheat in the next election.

"The integrity of our next election is at stake," Nadler said. "Nothing could be more urgent." Impeachment is so pressing, Nadler said, because the president represents "a continuing risk to the country."

On Sunday, Nadler appeared on NBC's Meet the Press. He argued that impeachment is a "matter of urgency" because "we have to make sure that the next election is conducted with integrity and without foreign interference."

"The president, based on his past performance, will do everything he can to make it not a fair election, and that is part of what gives us the urgency to proceed with this impeachment," Nadler said.

In other words, this is a preemptive impeachment.

The true irony of all of this is that EVERYTHING that the Dems accuse Trump of doing (despite the fact that no hard evidence exists to support their claims) the Democrats actually did. They colluded with the Russians to create the phony Steele dossier; they then obstructed an investigation into a deep state conspiracy to sabotage Trump's candidacy and presidency; in the Obama years they offered Iran both a quid pro quo and bribes to create the awful Iran Deal, and their is clear and compelling evidence that the Clinton campaign and the DNC, along with other deep state operators, worked to destroy the integrity of the 2016 elections.

And now, they will offer up absurd and empty articles of impeachment. They should pay a price for all of this. They do NOT deserve to lead.

Wile E. Coyote

The Wile E. Cayote of the U.S. House of Reps, Adam Schiff, has enlisted a motley crew of helpers to try to catch the Road Runner, Donald Trump. Among the players in the motley crew are Nancy Pelosi, who has been dragged kicking and screaming into an impeachment vote that I suspect she knows (deep down) will not end well, and Gerald Nadler, who plays the role of the large boulder that Wile E continually tries to drop on the Road Rummer. Among other members of the motley crew are a brain trust that includes Democrat congress men and women (Richard Blumenthal and Maxine Waters come to mind) who have howled for Trump's impeachment since before he was inaugurated.

Wile E. thinks that by lying about "bribery" and/or "quid pro quo" that resulted in aid that was never given to the Ukraine (oh, wait, the aid was given to the Ukraine) for an investigation of the corrupt Biden father and son (oh, wait, the investigation never happened). Wile E., along with other members of the motley crew, keep telling us with a degree of solemnity that is laughable that they are doing this to "save our democracy" and "protect our constitution." If you didn't know it was actually happening, you'd think this was all a political parody.



Picture it, Wile E. sitting bug-eyed in the desert with a pencil and a large ream of paper, using a boulder (Nadler?) as his desk. Scribbling a report that is evidence-free and innuendo-rich, he keeps breaking the point of his pencil as he scribbles, grabbing at sheets of paper that keep blowing around him. Meanwhile, the road runner goes "bleep, bleep" on Twitter.

I suspect that at this point, with the notable exception of the progressive wing of the Democratic party, their trained hamsters in the media and a few other members of the the GOP and deep state, the American public takes this impeachment travesty no more seriously that they take a Road Runner cartoon.

Anger

As we move toward the new year—and a presidential election year to boot—there's much talk within the main stream media about a "divided country." In what has to be an epic example of chutzpa, the media and their Democrat masters would have us believe that Donald Trump is the sole cause of these divisions. And in a way, they're right. After all, Trump won an upset victory against Hillary Clinton (and the Left) in 2016, and the Dems and their trained hamsters in the media have never been been able to get past it. Trump's bombastic style, along with his precedent-setting inclination to punch back when he is attacked, have created an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has infected the four constituencies who have wanted him removed from office since January, 2016.

The latest impeachment circus is simply another example of the deranged behavior that began after Trump's election. It began with the "Russian collusion" hoax, spilled into the "obstruction" narrative, then flowed into the despicable behavior (and lies) exhibited during the Kavanaugh hearings, and now exists in the form of Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler and company. The Dems seem to think that these attacked on an elected president and their outright refusal to accept the results of an election or accept that there are those who disagree with their ideology, would somehow erode support for Trump. What they have accomplished over 3-plus years is to stoke anger—throughout their base, to be sure, but also among a much larger group of citizens who despise the Dems' actions. Sarah Hoyt addresses Democrats and the media when she writes:

There is an anger in the land I don’t think you’re even vaguely aware of. I’m not — not even close — the most hot tempered on our side. And I was a very reluctant Trump voter. But watching your sham-wow-impeachment (It’s Russia, it’s Ukraine, it’s taxes, it’s mean tweets against the squad, it’s the fact that orange man bad), your attempt to reverse elections you don’t like, and silence people who don’t agree with you, has me spitting mad, furious, not even sure what to do with all this anger. And I’m not alone. You have no idea of the anger stalking this land. (And if you say “you sound angry” guess what “Damn skippy. You have no idea how angry.” The only ones not angry aren’t paying attention.)

Hoyt uses the Jeffrey Epstein case as metaphor for just how stupid the political and media elites think the people are. Their "He committed suicide ..." narrative followed by "Nothing to see here, move along ..." followed by their recent obsessive focus on Prince Andrew while an ex-President of the United States was documented to have flown on Epstein's Lolita Express 26 times using it a lot like an Uber to Epstein's properties is ... well .. insulting. They expect us to accept all of this and shut up. Instead, we get angrier and angrier about the Epstein cover-up, and yeah, about the Trump witch hunt as well.

Whether it's the growing #Walkway movement among Dems who may not like Trump, but are embarrassed at the behavior of their leadership over the past 3 years, or the #Blexit movement that has seen African American support for Trump increase rather substantially over the same time period, or that many Latinos (should I append an "x" instead of an "o" be PC?) support Trump despite (or maybe because of) his positions on illegal immigrants, the Dems refuse to look or listen or learn.

But ... but ... but ... the polls, counter the hamsters. Hoyt responds:

I hope you boys and girls are telling the polls what they want to hear. (Bats eyelashes) “Why Mr. Poll taker, I can’t wait to vote Trump out of office. I’m all for Biden/Warren/Harris/Mayor Pete/ Bernie Sanders [gargles with mouth wash, followed by sheep dip]/Tulsi/Bloomberg/the rest of the clown car.” That is a form of (real, not their imagined bullshit) resistance, because you’re messing with their knowledge of how many votes to manufacture. We must beat the margin of fraud. And we know they’re going to fraud like nobody’s business.

So for the rest of us—"deplorables," many independents, and most of the GOP—the anger is there ... seething below the surface. Unlike the activist Left who express their faux-outrage at the drop of a proper pronoun, the outrage among the rest of us will remain hidden ... until November, 2020. Then ... it will surface.

The Opus

In a style that is now expected from the most smarmy politician in a generation, congenital liar and Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Adam Schiff, released the Democrats' indictment of Donald Trump along with the tacit recommendation that he be impeached and removed from office. The editors of the Wall Street Journal (no friends of Donald Trump) derisively call the Schiff report an "Opus" and go on to write:

The report’s summary sentence reveals the weakness of its case with overstatement: “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security.”

Yet every President seeks some political advantage in pursuing foreign policy. That includes Barack Obama when he asked Dmitry Medvedev to tell Mr. Putin to go easy on missile defense until after the 2012 election.

As for undermining election integrity, that was Bill Clinton when he vacuumed foreign campaign contributions from the Riadys and multiple other foreigners in 1996. Or Hillary Clinton in 2016 when her campaign financed Christopher Steele to spread Russian disinformation on Mr. Trump to the media and FBI.

Mr. Trump, in his reckless way, asked President Zelensky for the “favor” of investigating Joe Biden and tried to delay military aid. But as Senator Ron Johnson relates in his recent letter that is a more even-handed account of events, Mr. Trump’s attempts were resisted across Washington and ultimately failed.

None of this undermined elections or “endangered” U.S. national security because there was no investigation and the aid was never withheld. [emphasis mine] Even if aid had been withheld, that would merely have put U.S. policy back to where it was when Mr. Obama denied Ukraine lethal military aid for several years until Mr. Trump provided it.

The Starr report laid out irrefutable evidence that Mr. Clinton lied to a grand jury and tampered with witnesses. Those were criminal offenses. The evidence that Richard Nixon obstructed justice was also clear once the tapes became public. By contrast, Mr. Schiff’s report mentions no specific crime and is full of too many inferences and overbroad assertions to provide a convincing impeachment case.

Of course, none of that matters in the least. As soon as the 2016 election was done, the Dems decided that their mission was to remove Donald Trump from office, not by defeating him at the ballot box, but 'by any means necessary.' Subsequently, they have lied, exaggerated, promulgated hoaxes, become hysterical and now, manufacture a flimsy case that argues that impeachment is the only path forward. I guess Schiff believes that the weight of 300 pages of innuendo and blather gives his partisan report gravitas. It does not.

UPDATE:
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The trained hamsters in the mainstream media are all atwitter, reveling in the "damning" report issued by the Democrats. There's only one problem, like everything that the Dems have attempted to remove Trump from office over the past three years, it's evidence-free and innuendo-laden. The editors of Investor's Business Daily write:

... read into the report, and then look through the Republican response, and you come to realize that the Democrats fail to support either claim. In fact, in some ways, they make Trump’s case for him.

The report never actually accuses Trump of engaging in bribery.

Despite all the foreboding tones and dark insinuation, the impeachment report never actually accuses Trump of bribery. In fact, the word “bribery” appears only four times in the entire 300-page document: once when it quotes the impeachment clause of the Constitution, twice in reference to accusations of bribery against Biden, and once in defending the impeachment inquiry itself.

Trump’s actual crime apparently was not following the “script.”

Despite its attempt to paint a picture of Trump as a corrupt leader, the report actually showcases that at the heart of the impeachment are the hurt feelings of career bureaucrats.

The report says that, in advance of Trump’s call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, “NSC staff had prepared a standard package of talking points for the president based on official U.S. policy. The talking points included recommendations to encourage President Zelensky to continue to promote anti-corruption reforms in Ukraine, a pillar of American foreign policy in the country as far back as its independence in the 1990s when Ukraine first rid itself of Kremlin control.

“This call would deviate significantly from that script.”

Removing a president from office for not sticking to a set of bureaucratic talking points would set an interesting precedent.

And therein lies the problem. The Dems have decided to create a new political precedent that attempts to negate the vote of 63 million people all because the Dems lost to a guy they don't like. What they don't seem to realize is that they're stoking anger. But more on that in a future post.

The Midwife of Stupidity

Amazon Prime has produced a relatively vapid action-adventure series, Jack Ryan, based on the Tom Clancy character of the same name. It's innocent enough escapist entertainment, this year set in strife-torn Venezuela which is shown suffering from all of the ills that the actual Venezuela has endured ever since socialist dictators Hugo Chavez and then Nicholas Maduro took over—economic collapse, food and medicine shortages, corruption, human right abuses, lack of medical care, mass out-migration, and of course, an elite leftist ruling class that experiences none of that.

The interesting thing about the Jack Ryan treatment is that the Hollywood writers never discuss what got Venezuela into this mess. That is, they NEVER mention socialism as a cause. Sure they create an evil, murderous dictator along Maduro lines, but never once mention his political ideology. Not surprising, but typical of the manner in which the left manages the narrative to their advantage. Oh, BTW, the dictator's political opponent is a woman, described as a "social justice" proponent who is backed by smiling and enthusiastic "leftist" (the script writer's terminology) young people. Um ... wasn't it the "leftists" who allowed Chavez and Maduro to destroy their country in the first place? Never mind.

Anyhow, the Jack Ryan treatment on Amazon Prime is indicative of the new Left in the United States. In essence, the Left and its trained hamsters in the media want to censor information that conflicts with their narrative. That censorship takes many forms including 'fake news' achieved via outright lies by their media allies or conscious omission of key information (as in the case of Jack Ryan).

Brendan O'Neill provides an important comment on this:

Censorship is the midwife of stupidity, and more importantly of dogmatism. When religious or political or moral ideologies are insulated from critique, they become dogmas. They become belief systems that are cleaved to, not because they have been tested and discussed in the public sphere, but because their adherents just know that they are right. These are the perfect conditions in which arrogance and intellectual hollowness can flourish, and in which defensiveness and fury become the default responses to any challenge from outside.

Reread that simple paragraph. It contains much to consider.

The Left doesn't want its ideas to be "tested or discussed" because those ideas are deeply flawed. That's not an opinion but rather a conclusion based on factual evidence drawn from places like Venezuela where those ideas have been implemented as part of governance. Catastrophic results ensued.

In a recent post I noted that Leftists really do believe they're the smartest kids in the room, but often exhibit "defensiveness and fury" when their ideas and policies are questioned vigorously. These smartest kids exhibit an "arrogance and intellectual hollowness" that is evident in their writing, in their world view, in their predictable ad hominem attacks against anyone who disagrees, and in their ideas and actions.

They MUST be challenged from the outside.

Maybe that should be Jack Ryan's next mission.

Corbyn

Americans pay very little attention to politics in the U.K.—and that's a shame, because U.K.'s left-wing Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, may very well be harbingers of the probable direction of an increasingly left-wing Democratic party in the United States. Corbyn is an anti-Semite, plain and simple, and yet, the British left tries to mask his Jew-Hatred as something else. They claim that his anti-Semitic and anti-Israel rhetoric is all about "palestinian rights." If any of this sounds familiar, it should. Increasingly, Dem leaders in the U.S., like Bernie Sanders, have begun to sound a lot like Cprben. Not as overt or as extreme to be sure, but still—a lot like Corbyn.

David Harsanyi comments of a recent Corbyn apologia in the left-leaning Washington Post:

In a now-deleted tweet, the Washington Post informed its 14 million followers that the historic condemnation of Jeremy Corbyn by the Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom was triggered by Labour Party leader’s strong support for “Palestinian rights.”

As numerous people quickly pointed out, this is a detestable falsehood. Indeed, the article to which the tweet linked notes that a review of online posts by Labour members uncovered “examples of Holocaust denial, crude stereotypes of Jewish bankers, conspiracy theories blaming 9/11 on Israel, and even one individual who appeared to believe that Hitler had been misunderstood.”

Despite this, the rest of the Post’s story is something of a whitewash. Like so many others that have covered Labour’s moral deterioration, it goes out of its way to note that, “Corbyn, alongside many in the left-wing of his party, are strong supporters of Palestinian rights and fierce critics of Israel’s right-wing government.” This insinuation — that Corbynite animosity towards British Jewry is predicated on the existence of a “right-wing Israeli government” — is a myth.

For one thing, despite public perception, the right-center coalition run by Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t altered Israeli policy governing the West Bank and Gaza in any significant way from its predecessors (other than, perhaps, by offering Palestinians more autonomy). For another, even if Netanyahu had altered that policy, there has never been — and almost surely never will be — any Israeli government of the right, left, or center that would placate the average Corbynite.

The link the Post draws is nonsensical. Are we to believe that the Leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition referred to anti-Semitic terror groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah as his “friends” in a speech in front of Parliament because he was worried about final status negotiations? Did Corbyn appear multiple times on the Holocaust-denying Hamas-backing Iranian regime’s propaganda channel because he misses Yitzhak Rabin?

The man who participates in a 2014 wreath-laying ceremony for the terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics and prevaricates when asked whether it is “anti-Semitic to say that Rothschild Zionists run world governments” is no friend of the Jews.

True ... no Democratic leader in the U.S. has gone as far or as extreme as Corbyn, but then again, the Brits have had a strong anti-Semitic strain of politics for many decades, so Corbyn's overt anti-Semitism is more easily tolerated.

That may very well come to pass in the United States. The Democrats and their left-wing base have adopted a rather strong anti-Israel bias of their own and have been escalating their anti-Israel rhetoric for at least a decade. Give them another decade, and their own 'Corbyn" may very well emerge. Just another reason they do not deserve to lead.

UPDATE (12/3/2019):
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It's easy to find examples of the 'corbynization' of the democratic party on a daily basis. Cameron Cawthorn reports:

Anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour linked Israel to white supremacy while speaking at a pro-Palestinian conference on Friday.

"Ask them this: How can you be against white supremacy in the United States of America and the idea of living in a supremacist state based on race and class, but then you support a state like Israel that is built on supremacy, that is built on the idea that Jews are supreme to everybody else?" Sarsour said.

Sarsour, a prominent surrogate for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, made the comparison while addressing the American Muslims for Palestine conference in Chicago. She also questioned how Zionists could oppose the separation of families at the U.S.-Mexico border while supporting Israel.

on a daily basis.
It is true that some dems have tried to distance themselves from Sarsour, but criticism of her extreme positions within the party and among the Dem,'s trained hamsters in the media is muted or non-existent. No point in alienating the Dem's hard-left base, is there?

Maybe someone in the media should as Bernie what he thinks about Sarsour's comments. Nah ... not gonna do that.