“These offices are honors to hold. If you ever forget that, you ought to leave. Our job is to lift people up. Our job is to provide aspiration for people to be better . . . . And it’s certainly to put in the plans and the structures and the processes to do that, but that is the job of us to lead, is to make our cities, our states, our country a better place, and we do that together.
The reality is that our country is extraordinarily diverse. That is not going to change. So the people who want to harken back to a day gone by . . . those days are gone. So what we should do as a country is say this diversity, this pluralism, is a strength. Embrace it."
— Gregory E. Fisher, American businessman and entrepreneur who is Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky.
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Our first great grandchild was visiting with us last week and Lynn took a picture of me holding her at my computer and the caption read, 7 month old Olivia is the one who has been writing all the memos.
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I will submit another angle on the Democrat's efforts to distract and disrupt Trump's agenda..
From my perspective, it is an unpatriotic distraction because anything that takes away from America's economic improvement is a dagger at the hearts of those Democrats, liberals and progressives profess to care about. If they truly thought black lives matter they would be doing everything to help create jobs and an atmosphere of hope and self worth.
When you thwart an economic recovery black citizens are the ones most impacted and the same for education. This is the message Republicans need to deliver to the black community but Republicans do not know how to relate, they have few tangent points of connection so they do not make the effort. Also, Republicans have been told they are not welcome by various black organizations so rather than defy they just walk away shrugging their shoulders.
Trump made an effort but he was criticized for pandering and was told he was insincere as if Democrats really care. Most Democrats are interested in one thing, votes and most everything they have done has resulted in dependency broken families and further feelings of insecurity and self worth. Johnson's War on Poverty was a sincere effort but heavy handed bureaucratic government is never the solution.
The black community has been played as political pawns so liberals can feel superior for being compassionate.
The whole thing is more pathetic than empathetic.
Also, those bleeding heart Jews who support Black Lives Matter have been played like pawns and duped:http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/15/black-lives-matters-anti-israel-platform-blindside/
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This was sent to me by a dear friend and fellow memo reader. The article appeared in a generally liberal leaning science type magazine. (See 1 below.)
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More food for thought. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) The Unfortunate Fallout of Campus Postmodernism
The roots of the current campus madness
By Michael Shermer
In a 1946 essay in the London Tribune entitled “In Front of Your Nose,” George Orwell noted that “we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
The intellectual battlefields today are on college campuses, where students' deep convictions about race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation and their social justice antipathy toward capitalism, imperialism, racism, white privilege, misogyny and “cissexist
heteropatriarchy” have bumped up against the reality of contradictory facts and opposing views, leading to campus chaos and even violence. Students at the University of California, Berkeley, and outside agitators, for example, rioted at the mere mention that conservative firebrands Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter had been invited to speak (in the end, they never did). Demonstrators at Middlebury College physically attacked libertarian author Charles Murray and his liberal host, professor Allison Stanger, pulling her hair, twisting her neck and sending her to the ER.*
One underlying cause of this troubling situation may be found in what happened at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., in May, when biologist and self-identified “deeply progressive” professor Bret Weinstein refused to participate in a “Day of Absence” in which “white students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day's activities.” Weinstein objected, writing in an e-mail: “on a college campus, one's right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.” In response, an angry mob of 50 students disrupted his biology class, surrounded him, called him a racist and insisted that he resign. He claims that campus police informed him that the college president told them to stand down, but he has been forced to stay off campus for his safety's sake.
How has it come to this? One of many trends was identified by Weinstein in a Wall Street Journal essay: “The button-down empirical and deductive fields, including all the hard sciences, have lived side by side with ‘critical theory,’ postmodernism and its perceptionbased relatives. Since the creation in 1960s and '70s of novel, justice-oriented fields, these incompatible worldviews have repelled one another.”
In an article for Quillette.com on “Methods Behind the Campus Madness,” graduate researcher Sumantra Maitra of the University of Nottingham in England reported that 12 of the 13 academics at U.C. Berkeley who signed a letter to the chancellor protesting Yiannopoulos were from “Critical theory, Gender studies and Post-Colonial/Postmodernist/
Students are being taught by these postmodern professors that there is no truth, that science and empirical facts are tools of oppression by the white patriarchy, and that nearly everyone in America is racist and bigoted, including their own professors, most of whom are liberals or progressives devoted to fighting these social ills. Of the 58 Evergreen faculty members who signed a statement “in solidarity with students” calling or disciplinary action against Weinstein for “endangering” the community by granting interviews in the national media, I tallied only seven from the sciences. Most specialize in English, literature, the arts, humanities, cultural studies, women's studies, media studies, and “quotidian imperialisms, intermetropolitan geography [and] detournement.” A course called “Fantastic Resistances” was described as a “training dojo for aspiring ‘social justice warriors’” that focuses on “power asymmetries.”
If you teach students to be warriors against all power asymmetries, don't be surprised when they turn on their professors and administrators. This is what happens when you separate facts from values, empiricism from morality, science from the humanities.
*Editor's Note (8/18/17): This sentence was edited after the print article was posted online. The original stated that students at Middlebury College “physically attacked” Charles Murray and his campus host, Allison tanger. In fact, a police investigation determined that it appears several participants in the demonstration against Murray came from outside the campus community and that those wearing masks used “tactics that indicated training in obstruction and intimidation.” Although the attackers were never identified, and thus the police were unable to press charges, Middlebury maintains that the masked assailants were not students but outside agitators. It has also made an official statement that "the College disciplined 74 students with sanctions ranging from probation to official College discipline, which places a permanent record in the student’s file."
This article was originally published with the title "Postmodernism vs. Science"
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2) What is Antifa?
“These offices are honors to hold. If you ever forget that, you ought to leave. Our job is to lift people up. Our job is to provide aspiration for people to be better . . . . And it’s certainly to put in the plans and the structures and the processes to do that, but that is the job of us to lead, is to make our cities, our states, our country a better place, and we do that together.
The reality is that our country is extraordinarily diverse. That is not going to change. So the people who want to harken back to a day gone by . . . those days are gone. So what we should do as a country is say this diversity, this pluralism, is a strength. Embrace it."
— Gregory E. Fisher, American businessman and entrepreneur who is Mayor of Louisville, Kentucky.
Our first great grandchild was visiting with us last week and Lynn took a picture of me holding her at my computer and the caption read, 7 month old Olivia is the one who has been writing all the memos.
Also, those bleeding heart Jews who support Black Lives Matter have been played like pawns and duped:http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/15/black-lives-matters-anti-israel-platform-blindside/
2) What is Antifa?
By Jessica Suerth, CNN
What is Antifa?Antifa is short for anti-fascists. The term is used to define a broad group of people whose political beliefs lean toward the left -- often the far left -- but do not conform with the Democratic Party platform. The group doesn't have an official leader or headquarters, although groups in certain states hold regular meetings.
Antifa positions can be hard to define, but many members support oppressed populations and protest the amassing of wealth by corporations and elites. Some employ radical or militant tactics to get their message across.
Scott Crow, a former Antifa organizer, says the "radical ideals" promoted by Antifas are starting to be adopted by liberals. "They would never have looked at (those ideals) before, because they saw us as the enemy as much as the right-wingers."
The majority of Antifa members don't fall into a stereotype. Since the election of President Donald Trump, however, most new Antifa members are young voters.
Antifa positions can be hard to define, but many members support oppressed populations and protest the amassing of wealth by corporations and elites. Some employ radical or militant tactics to get their message across.
Scott Crow, a former Antifa organizer, says the "radical ideals" promoted by Antifas are starting to be adopted by liberals. "They would never have looked at (those ideals) before, because they saw us as the enemy as much as the right-wingers."
The majority of Antifa members don't fall into a stereotype. Since the election of President Donald Trump, however, most new Antifa members are young voters.
How did the group start?
The exact origins of the group are unknown, but Antifa can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom.
Modern-day members of Antifa have become more active in making themselves known at public rallies and within the progressive movement, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
"What they're trying to do now is not only become prominent through violence at these high-profile rallies, but also to reach out through small meetings and through social networking to cultivate disenfranchised progressives who heretofore were peaceful," Levin said.
The exact origins of the group are unknown, but Antifa can be traced to Nazi Germany and Anti-Fascist Action, a militant group founded in the 1980s in the United Kingdom.
Modern-day members of Antifa have become more active in making themselves known at public rallies and within the progressive movement, said Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
"What they're trying to do now is not only become prominent through violence at these high-profile rallies, but also to reach out through small meetings and through social networking to cultivate disenfranchised progressives who heretofore were peaceful," Levin said.
Where do they protest?
Members have been spotted at high-profile, right-wing events across the country, including Milo Yiannopoulos' appearance at the University of California, Berkeley in February. They also protested President Donald Trump's inauguration in January.
While it can be difficult to distinguish Antifa activists from other protesters, some dress head to toe in black. Members call this the "Black Bloc."
They also wear masks to hide their identities from the police and whomever they are protesting.
Members have been spotted at high-profile, right-wing events across the country, including Milo Yiannopoulos' appearance at the University of California, Berkeley in February. They also protested President Donald Trump's inauguration in January.
While it can be difficult to distinguish Antifa activists from other protesters, some dress head to toe in black. Members call this the "Black Bloc."
They also wear masks to hide their identities from the police and whomever they are protesting.
Why are they controversial?
The group is known for causing damage to property during protests. In Berkeley, black-clad protesters wearing masks threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union center where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.
Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.
"There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes," Crow said.
Levin said Antifa activists feel the need to partake in violence because "they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist."
"There's this 'It's going down' mentality and this 'Hit them with your boots' mentality that goes back many decades to confrontations that took place, not only here in the American South, but also in places like Europe," he added.
White nationalists and other members of the so-called alt-right have denounced members of Antifa, sometimes calling them the "alt-left." Many white nationalists from the Charlottesville rallies claimed it was the Antifa groups that led the protests to turn violent.
Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests over the weekend, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are "just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be."
"These are people who preach tolerance and love while at the same time threatening people with a different political ideology. We go to our rallies and they harass us and attack us but they held theirs and we ignore them. You don't see right-wing protests get like this," Cvjetanovic told CNN affiliate KRNV.
But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.
"And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don't believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece."
CNN's Sara Ganim contributed to this report.
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2a) Polls Don’t Tell the Tale—Trump’s Support is Deep. Here’s Why…
The group is known for causing damage to property during protests. In Berkeley, black-clad protesters wearing masks threw Molotov cocktails and smashed windows at the student union center where the Yiannopoulos event was to be held.
Crow, who was involved with Antifa for almost 30 years, said members use violence as a means of self-defense and they believe property destruction does not equate to violence.
"There is a place for violence. Is that the world that we want to live in? No. Is it the world we want to inhabit? No. Is it the world we want to create? No. But will we push back? Yes," Crow said.
Levin said Antifa activists feel the need to partake in violence because "they believe that elites are controlling the government and the media. So they need to make a statement head-on against the people who they regard as racist."
"There's this 'It's going down' mentality and this 'Hit them with your boots' mentality that goes back many decades to confrontations that took place, not only here in the American South, but also in places like Europe," he added.
White nationalists and other members of the so-called alt-right have denounced members of Antifa, sometimes calling them the "alt-left." Many white nationalists from the Charlottesville rallies claimed it was the Antifa groups that led the protests to turn violent.
Peter Cvjetanovic, a white nationalist who attended the Virginia protests over the weekend, said he believes the far left, including Antifa, are "just as dangerous, if not more dangerous than the right wing could ever be."
"These are people who preach tolerance and love while at the same time threatening people with a different political ideology. We go to our rallies and they harass us and attack us but they held theirs and we ignore them. You don't see right-wing protests get like this," Cvjetanovic told CNN affiliate KRNV.
But Crow said the philosophy of Antifa is based on the idea of direct action. "The idea in Antifa is that we go where they (right-wingers) go. That hate speech is not free speech. That if you are endangering people with what you say and the actions that are behind them, then you do not have the right to do that.
"And so we go to cause conflict, to shut them down where they are, because we don't believe that Nazis or fascists of any stripe should have a mouthpiece."
CNN's Sara Ganim contributed to this report.
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2a) Polls Don’t Tell the Tale—Trump’s Support is Deep. Here’s Why…
As a conservative Republican, I harbored concerns when I voted last November for Donald Trump to be my president. I knew that I had to vote for him, given the unacceptable alternative of an incompetent liar who had placed me in a basket of “Deplorables”; had destroyed 33,000 emails that she covertly maintained on her bathroom server while telling me that the emails all concerned yoga classes and wedding dresses; had lied to me and the families of those who fell in Benghazi about what had really happened there on another 9/11; and really had nothing to show for decades of public activity but a résumé of failure from HillaryCare, Whitewater, and Travelgate to a mediocre tenure in the State Department.
Her “Russian reset” had been a disaster. She had met many dozens of world figures, logged many thousands of miles of air travel, and had eaten well at many state banquets, but she had nothing of lasting substance to show for it all. During her State Department tenure, the “Arab Spring” devolved into a nightmarish winter. ISIS grew from a junior varsity to the major leagues of barbarism and terror. And she even had found the opportunity to scream on the phone at the Prime Minister of Israel, while denying the Jewish right to build without restriction in Jerusalem.
So I voted unhesitatingly for Trump. But, again, I had concerns.
Although I recoiled from the Republicans-in-Name-Only and “Never Trumpers,” I did share some of their bemusement. Would he be a true conservative, or was he really a liberal and a conservative hybrid at once, a man bereft of grounded ideology who simply tilted with the direction of the day’s breeze, capable of being turned by the last voice to compliment him?
Would he truly appoint conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices, or would his judicial legacy be another Republican flop like the Nixon liberal appointments after Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, or like George H. W. Bush’s disastrous appointment of David Souter? Would he keep his promises? Would he have a clue?
That was then. Now, six months into Trump’s first term, I could not be more pleased with the president we elected. He is better than I ever imagined, and he is the real thing. That is the reason that voter surveys continue to show that President Trump has not lost any support among the base who elected him, and that he does as well now as before in the counties throughout the country that he carried as his base.
So What? Who Cares?I do not care a whit about the “Russia stuff.” That is what I call it: the “Russia stuff.” Whether it is about Russian “collusion” or deals that Jared Kushner did or did not negotiate, or whom Attorney General Jeff Sessions met when he was a U.S. senator, or where former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort did business, or the telephone contacts of Michael Flynn—the moment that I see the word “Russia” in a headline about the White House, I skip the story. Although I am a “news junkie,” I simply do not care. For me, the subject has as much relevance as a soccer game: Yawn.
I even have stopped watching almost all of Fox News, even though Tucker Carlson’s solid conservatism is an improvement over Bill O’Reilly’s softer version, and the network is so much stronger without Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren. I simply have no more interest in wasting my time with “fair and balanced debate,” to sit and listen to some liberal hack named Tarlov or Roginsky recite memorized talking points, or a fool named Marie Harf who used her State Department platform to explain that ISIS beheadings stemmed from a lack of job opportunities. (Remember: #JobsForISIS?)
For my news I have moved to the Fox Business channel, and I treat myself to Stuart Varney, Melissa Francis, Lou Dobbs and insightful conservative guests who do not waste my time. And, although I once was a Johnny Carson and Jay Leno regular, I no longer watch those late night talk shows. Instead, I choose between Ken Burns documentaries, MLB.TV’s “Quick Pitch,” and studying the Talmud. Same for “Saturday Night Live.” The moment the Washington Post began reporting every Monday on that show’s latest political slams against the Trump White House, I decided to turn elsewhere for my Saturday night entertainment. Besides, that show stopped being funny decades ago.
But what about all of Trump’s tweeting? Is Trump a nut? And what
about the time he devotes to tweeting and to watching “Fox & Friends”
and “Morning Joe”?
I don’t know. Maybe he is a nut. Yet, as an Orthodox rabbi who has
counseled hundreds of people over 35 years, and as a high-stakes
litigation attorney who has counseled and represented hundreds more, I
will share a secret that is not protected by any professional rule of
privilege: most people are nuts. (For verification, just ask their spouses,
their parents-in-law, and their grown kids.) And most people have side
hobbies that “waste time.” I wasted time these past four months
watching the Mets. How many hours did President Kennedy waste
running after Judith Exner, Marilyn Monroe, and others whom I do not
know—and keeping it all secret from his wife? How many hours did
President Nixon waste dealing with the Watergate cover-up? How many
hours did President Ford need to devote lovingly to his wife as she
battled bravely to overcome certain private challenges? How many hours
did President Clinton set aside for Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey,
Monica Lewinsky, and dealing with the subsequent fallout emanating
from them and from Juanita Broaddrick?
It would seem that the only president who initially wasted no time but
devoted every moment’s focus to every detail of government was Jimmy
Carter. How did that work out? In the end, he was consumed by the
Iran hostage crisis, and we were consumed by him.
Does Twitter take more time away from the work day than those
distractions? How long does it take to type 140 characters, even in five
or six strings?
What Really MattersWe conservatives do not care about these side
stories and Democrat smokescreens that aim to divert this president and
us from the agenda to make America great again. Rather, here is what
we have come to know these six months since Trump took office:
Republicans have won every seriously contested Congressional election
since President Trump was elected. It is absurd to think that, when push
comes to shove, Republican voters in 2018 would allow Red State
Democrats to sweep the U.S. Senate merely because Chuck Schumer and
Elizabeth Warren engage in screeds, while in the House, Maxine Waters
calls for the president to be impeached or exiled, or both.
We do not mind that the president fired FBI Director James Comey.
This is a man who we now know leaked secret internal information to
the New York Times. Notwithstanding that Comey did not trust the
president, it was just as reasonable for the president to determine that he
could not trust Comey—just as the Democrats long before could not
trust Comey and also wanted him fired. Comey interfered with the
election process more than Vladimir Putin ever did, arrogated to himself
authority to absolve Hillary Clinton despite his own recognition that she
had committed serious federal crimes, and never dealt with the Deep
State within his department.
President Trump somehow has managed to lead for six months, despite
the most hostile media gangland in a century and more, and he has
gained important governing experience along the way, just as the
neophyte Obama learned his way around after arriving at the White
House with little more than a background in community organizing, a
pair of Greek or Roman columns, and a paperback copy of Saul
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
President Trump has appointed an extraordinary team of cabinet
secretaries, and they are a better and more reliably conservative team
than Ronald Reagan ever assembled. While President Reagan not only
named Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court but also Sandra Day
O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, President Trump has named Neil
Gorsuch, and the future names in waiting are likely equally impressive.
For all the “Resistance” tactics that the Democrats deployed during the
Gorsuch battle, the president did not give ground, and he leveraged
Harry Reid’s blunder of ending the filibuster rule for federal judicial
appointments to get the nomination through. The president’s team now
is working to fill the 129 other open federal judicial seats awaiting judges.
As he proceeds, we will see balance return to the federal district courts
that conduct trials and the federal appellate courts that ultimately settle
most of America’s laws, and his own immediate experiences in seeing
his entry ban navigate through the courts has taught him that federal
judges matter on all levels.
On the energy front, we no longer awake each morning to learn of new
Obama-era regulations aimed at strangling American energy
independence. Instead, the Keystone XL pipeline was approved, as
promised. Obama executive orders have been reversed at dizzying speed.
Although a new era has changed the place of “King Coal” in the energy
spectrum, the “War on Coal” is ended, as promised, and America is
back on the path to end its partial dependency on the dirty oil produced
by dictators and thugs from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia—oil drilled and
extracted in tyrannies where environmental concerns are a joke—and
we now even are inducing allies like Poland in Europe to consider
moving their own energy contracts away from Russia and towards the
United States.
Trump promised action on immigration, and he has begun the process
of inviting bidders to compete for federal contracts to build that wall.
Truth is, most of us do not care ultimately who pays for it; we separate
his bluster from his substance. That substance already has driven down
illegal immigration markedly. And the “bad dudes” really are being
by ICE and are being deported or locked up, not merely released on
their own recognizance with a promise maybe someday to show up for
an immigration hearing, perhaps.
The Underlying Challenge: Congress
We know that the reality of democracy is complicated, and that our
Founding Fathers crafted an elegant system of checks and balances for a
reason.
Yes, the Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the White
House, and the Supreme Court—for which we all thank Barack Obama
daily—but the sophisticates among us also recognize that 52 Republican
Senators is too razor-thin a margin for a bold Trump agenda to flourish.
For example, Susan Collins represents Blue Maine, and she simply
cannot be a Tea Party senator. We need another half-dozen Red State
Republican senators, and contrary to the common wisdom, help may be
on the way.
Meanwhile, we know that President Trump has done his best to corral
the team to reverse the tragedy of Obamacare, but he has been disrupted
meanwhile by a crazy filibuster voting rule, an even crazier series of
rules regarding “reconciliation,” a liberal Democrat stationed as the
Senate’s “Parliamentarian,” and an utterly incoherent and
incomprehensible rule regarding the Congressional Budget Office whose
projections repeatedly have proven false and imaginary in health care
and everything else. If people are told that they no longer will be
penalized and coerced to buy health insurance they do not want, of course
millions will drop the plans foisted on them. That is not properly termed
“millions losing insurance”; that is “millions choosing of their own free
will not to pay for something they do not want and do not value.”
We know this president and this Congress will pass a major tax cut
before the 2018 elections because Trump wants it, his economic team
has it mapped out, and the House and Senate would not dare go to the
voters next year without a tax cut. Watch for Red State Democrats,
facing electoral elimination, to be passionate supporters of a Republican
tax bill. It will happen, and this president will sign it. Of that we have no
doubt.
Cut Through the Noise These Next 18 MonthsSo we have a very
strong determination to stand by this president, to give him more
Senators in 18 months, and to give him another four years in
Washington before Maxine Waters exiles him.
We do not care that Europeans and their leaders like America less now
than they did when Obama was president. Most children like their
grandparents more than they like their parents because Gramps and
Granny have no rules, feed them candy, and let them stay up all night,
while the parents make the kids do their homework, brush their teeth,
and clean their rooms. Obama was cheered by throngs in Berlin, giggled
with Hugo Chavez, and salsaed in Cuba in front of Castro. Sure they
loved him—they even gave him a Nobel Peace Prize, just as they
previously had given one to Yasser Arafat, before he did anything.
We want a president who goes to Europe, tells them to pay the bill
they promised to pay NATO, and gets results. We want him extricating
us from climate pacts and trade agreements that do not serve our
interests. Along the way, our allies from Japan to Israel to England know
they now have a reliable leader in the White House, not a team of
kibbitzers who send James Taylor to Paris to sing “You’ve Got a Friend”
as an American response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France.
Americans want jobs, and this president now is forward on rebuilding
the nation’s long-neglected infrastructure, while emphasizing the
importance of “Buying American” and restoring America’s historical
role in manufacturing. We want lower taxes and an America where we
pay only for the health coverage options we want. We do not want to
pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control pills or Planned Parenthood’s
abortions, although many of us are copacetic with their family planning
and social counseling. We want trade agreements that protect American
jobs and that recognize that international polluters like China and India
and the misogynistic Arab oil sheikhdoms need to catch up with our
clean-environment practices before we continue marching like lemmings
over industrial cliffs while the mass polluters scoop up our forfeited
interests.
As the president now begins his next six months in office, we among his
supporters have learned to tune out the nonsense that defines the lazy
legislators in the Washington Beltway who prefer to mull over Mueller
than to craft landmark health legislation that passes.
Yes, we have seen the president mature in office. He has made some
important pinpointed staff changes. He is moving away from abiding
the daily media circus. For those Democrats who warned with alarm and
portents of peril that Donald Trump could not be trusted with the
nuclear codes, we have seen that he has assembled a remarkable defense
team, that he has authorized a surgical MOAB strike in Afghanistan and
the dispatch of 59 cruise missiles to bombard clearly designated Syrian
targets without embroiling us in a Middle East war that America should
avoid. He has acted with care and delicacy in confronting the serious
problem in North Korea, giving the lie to those who argued that he
would be hot-headed and unable to lead.
For those of us who voted for Donald Trump last November—many of
us with some concern—we support him even more today than we did
then. Though we occasionally recoil from the more outlandish, we have
come to prefer reading his tweets more than we did reading about
Clinton’s sexual harassment scandals. And we have learned to disregard
the “Russian stuff” like so much “white noise” that rivals the sound of
a tree falling in the middle of a forest for irrelevance.
As a conservative Republican, I harbored concerns when I voted last November for Donald Trump to be my president. I knew that I had to vote for him, given the unacceptable alternative of an incompetent liar who had placed me in a basket of “Deplorables”; had destroyed 33,000 emails that she covertly maintained on her bathroom server while telling me that the emails all concerned yoga classes and wedding dresses; had lied to me and the families of those who fell in Benghazi about what had really happened there on another 9/11; and really had nothing to show for decades of public activity but a résumé of failure from HillaryCare, Whitewater, and Travelgate to a mediocre tenure in the State Department.
Her “Russian reset” had been a disaster. She had met many dozens of world figures, logged many thousands of miles of air travel, and had eaten well at many state banquets, but she had nothing of lasting substance to show for it all. During her State Department tenure, the “Arab Spring” devolved into a nightmarish winter. ISIS grew from a junior varsity to the major leagues of barbarism and terror. And she even had found the opportunity to scream on the phone at the Prime Minister of Israel, while denying the Jewish right to build without restriction in Jerusalem.
So I voted unhesitatingly for Trump. But, again, I had concerns.
Although I recoiled from the Republicans-in-Name-Only and “Never Trumpers,” I did share some of their bemusement. Would he be a true conservative, or was he really a liberal and a conservative hybrid at once, a man bereft of grounded ideology who simply tilted with the direction of the day’s breeze, capable of being turned by the last voice to compliment him?
Would he truly appoint conservative federal judges and Supreme Court justices, or would his judicial legacy be another Republican flop like the Nixon liberal appointments after Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell, or like George H. W. Bush’s disastrous appointment of David Souter? Would he keep his promises? Would he have a clue?
That was then. Now, six months into Trump’s first term, I could not be more pleased with the president we elected. He is better than I ever imagined, and he is the real thing. That is the reason that voter surveys continue to show that President Trump has not lost any support among the base who elected him, and that he does as well now as before in the counties throughout the country that he carried as his base.
So What? Who Cares?I do not care a whit about the “Russia stuff.” That is what I call it: the “Russia stuff.” Whether it is about Russian “collusion” or deals that Jared Kushner did or did not negotiate, or whom Attorney General Jeff Sessions met when he was a U.S. senator, or where former Trump campaign chief Paul Manafort did business, or the telephone contacts of Michael Flynn—the moment that I see the word “Russia” in a headline about the White House, I skip the story. Although I am a “news junkie,” I simply do not care. For me, the subject has as much relevance as a soccer game: Yawn.
I even have stopped watching almost all of Fox News, even though Tucker Carlson’s solid conservatism is an improvement over Bill O’Reilly’s softer version, and the network is so much stronger without Megyn Kelly and Greta Van Susteren. I simply have no more interest in wasting my time with “fair and balanced debate,” to sit and listen to some liberal hack named Tarlov or Roginsky recite memorized talking points, or a fool named Marie Harf who used her State Department platform to explain that ISIS beheadings stemmed from a lack of job opportunities. (Remember: #JobsForISIS?)
For my news I have moved to the Fox Business channel, and I treat myself to Stuart Varney, Melissa Francis, Lou Dobbs and insightful conservative guests who do not waste my time. And, although I once was a Johnny Carson and Jay Leno regular, I no longer watch those late night talk shows. Instead, I choose between Ken Burns documentaries, MLB.TV’s “Quick Pitch,” and studying the Talmud. Same for “Saturday Night Live.” The moment the Washington Post began reporting every Monday on that show’s latest political slams against the Trump White House, I decided to turn elsewhere for my Saturday night entertainment. Besides, that show stopped being funny decades ago.
But what about all of Trump’s tweeting? Is Trump a nut? And what
about the time he devotes to tweeting and to watching “Fox & Friends”
and “Morning Joe”?
I don’t know. Maybe he is a nut. Yet, as an Orthodox rabbi who has
counseled hundreds of people over 35 years, and as a high-stakes
litigation attorney who has counseled and represented hundreds more, I
will share a secret that is not protected by any professional rule of
privilege: most people are nuts. (For verification, just ask their spouses,
their parents-in-law, and their grown kids.) And most people have side
hobbies that “waste time.” I wasted time these past four months
watching the Mets. How many hours did President Kennedy waste
running after Judith Exner, Marilyn Monroe, and others whom I do not
know—and keeping it all secret from his wife? How many hours did
President Nixon waste dealing with the Watergate cover-up? How many
hours did President Ford need to devote lovingly to his wife as she
battled bravely to overcome certain private challenges? How many hours
did President Clinton set aside for Paula Corbin Jones, Kathleen Willey,
Monica Lewinsky, and dealing with the subsequent fallout emanating
from them and from Juanita Broaddrick?
It would seem that the only president who initially wasted no time but
devoted every moment’s focus to every detail of government was Jimmy
Carter. How did that work out? In the end, he was consumed by the
Iran hostage crisis, and we were consumed by him.
Does Twitter take more time away from the work day than those
distractions? How long does it take to type 140 characters, even in five
or six strings?
or six strings?
What Really MattersWe conservatives do not care about these side
stories and Democrat smokescreens that aim to divert this president and
us from the agenda to make America great again. Rather, here is what
we have come to know these six months since Trump took office:
stories and Democrat smokescreens that aim to divert this president and
us from the agenda to make America great again. Rather, here is what
we have come to know these six months since Trump took office:
Republicans have won every seriously contested Congressional election
since President Trump was elected. It is absurd to think that, when push
comes to shove, Republican voters in 2018 would allow Red State
Democrats to sweep the U.S. Senate merely because Chuck Schumer and
Elizabeth Warren engage in screeds, while in the House, Maxine Waters
calls for the president to be impeached or exiled, or both.
We do not mind that the president fired FBI Director James Comey.
This is a man who we now know leaked secret internal information to
the New York Times. Notwithstanding that Comey did not trust the
president, it was just as reasonable for the president to determine that he
could not trust Comey—just as the Democrats long before could not
trust Comey and also wanted him fired. Comey interfered with the
election process more than Vladimir Putin ever did, arrogated to himself
authority to absolve Hillary Clinton despite his own recognition that she
had committed serious federal crimes, and never dealt with the Deep
State within his department.
President Trump somehow has managed to lead for six months, despite
the most hostile media gangland in a century and more, and he has
gained important governing experience along the way, just as the
neophyte Obama learned his way around after arriving at the White
House with little more than a background in community organizing, a
pair of Greek or Roman columns, and a paperback copy of Saul
Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.
President Trump has appointed an extraordinary team of cabinet
secretaries, and they are a better and more reliably conservative team
than Ronald Reagan ever assembled. While President Reagan not only
named Antonin Scalia to the Supreme Court but also Sandra Day
O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, President Trump has named Neil
Gorsuch, and the future names in waiting are likely equally impressive.
For all the “Resistance” tactics that the Democrats deployed during the
Gorsuch battle, the president did not give ground, and he leveraged
Harry Reid’s blunder of ending the filibuster rule for federal judicial
appointments to get the nomination through. The president’s team now
is working to fill the 129 other open federal judicial seats awaiting judges.
As he proceeds, we will see balance return to the federal district courts
that conduct trials and the federal appellate courts that ultimately settle
most of America’s laws, and his own immediate experiences in seeing
his entry ban navigate through the courts has taught him that federal
judges matter on all levels.
On the energy front, we no longer awake each morning to learn of new
Obama-era regulations aimed at strangling American energy
independence. Instead, the Keystone XL pipeline was approved, as
promised. Obama executive orders have been reversed at dizzying speed.
Although a new era has changed the place of “King Coal” in the energy
spectrum, the “War on Coal” is ended, as promised, and America is
back on the path to end its partial dependency on the dirty oil produced
by dictators and thugs from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia—oil drilled and
extracted in tyrannies where environmental concerns are a joke—and
we now even are inducing allies like Poland in Europe to consider
moving their own energy contracts away from Russia and towards the
United States.
independence. Instead, the Keystone XL pipeline was approved, as
promised. Obama executive orders have been reversed at dizzying speed.
Although a new era has changed the place of “King Coal” in the energy
spectrum, the “War on Coal” is ended, as promised, and America is
back on the path to end its partial dependency on the dirty oil produced
by dictators and thugs from Venezuela to Saudi Arabia—oil drilled and
extracted in tyrannies where environmental concerns are a joke—and
we now even are inducing allies like Poland in Europe to consider
moving their own energy contracts away from Russia and towards the
United States.
Trump promised action on immigration, and he has begun the process
of inviting bidders to compete for federal contracts to build that wall.
Truth is, most of us do not care ultimately who pays for it; we separate
his bluster from his substance. That substance already has driven down
illegal immigration markedly. And the “bad dudes” really are being
by ICE and are being deported or locked up, not merely released on
their own recognizance with a promise maybe someday to show up for
an immigration hearing, perhaps.
The Underlying Challenge: Congress
We know that the reality of democracy is complicated, and that our
We know that the reality of democracy is complicated, and that our
Founding Fathers crafted an elegant system of checks and balances for a
reason.
Yes, the Republicans now control the House, the Senate, the White
House, and the Supreme Court—for which we all thank Barack Obama
daily—but the sophisticates among us also recognize that 52 Republican
Senators is too razor-thin a margin for a bold Trump agenda to flourish.
For example, Susan Collins represents Blue Maine, and she simply
cannot be a Tea Party senator. We need another half-dozen Red State
Republican senators, and contrary to the common wisdom, help may be
on the way.
Meanwhile, we know that President Trump has done his best to corral
the team to reverse the tragedy of Obamacare, but he has been disrupted
meanwhile by a crazy filibuster voting rule, an even crazier series of
rules regarding “reconciliation,” a liberal Democrat stationed as the
Senate’s “Parliamentarian,” and an utterly incoherent and
incomprehensible rule regarding the Congressional Budget Office whose
projections repeatedly have proven false and imaginary in health care
and everything else. If people are told that they no longer will be
penalized and coerced to buy health insurance they do not want, of course
millions will drop the plans foisted on them. That is not properly termed
“millions losing insurance”; that is “millions choosing of their own free
will not to pay for something they do not want and do not value.”
We know this president and this Congress will pass a major tax cut
before the 2018 elections because Trump wants it, his economic team
has it mapped out, and the House and Senate would not dare go to the
voters next year without a tax cut. Watch for Red State Democrats,
facing electoral elimination, to be passionate supporters of a Republican
tax bill. It will happen, and this president will sign it. Of that we have no
doubt.
Cut Through the Noise These Next 18 MonthsSo we have a very
strong determination to stand by this president, to give him more
Senators in 18 months, and to give him another four years in
Washington before Maxine Waters exiles him.
strong determination to stand by this president, to give him more
Senators in 18 months, and to give him another four years in
Washington before Maxine Waters exiles him.
We do not care that Europeans and their leaders like America less now
than they did when Obama was president. Most children like their
grandparents more than they like their parents because Gramps and
Granny have no rules, feed them candy, and let them stay up all night,
while the parents make the kids do their homework, brush their teeth,
and clean their rooms. Obama was cheered by throngs in Berlin, giggled
with Hugo Chavez, and salsaed in Cuba in front of Castro. Sure they
loved him—they even gave him a Nobel Peace Prize, just as they
previously had given one to Yasser Arafat, before he did anything.
We want a president who goes to Europe, tells them to pay the bill
they promised to pay NATO, and gets results. We want him extricating
us from climate pacts and trade agreements that do not serve our
interests. Along the way, our allies from Japan to Israel to England know
they now have a reliable leader in the White House, not a team of
kibbitzers who send James Taylor to Paris to sing “You’ve Got a Friend”
as an American response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in France.
Americans want jobs, and this president now is forward on rebuilding
the nation’s long-neglected infrastructure, while emphasizing the
importance of “Buying American” and restoring America’s historical
role in manufacturing. We want lower taxes and an America where we
pay only for the health coverage options we want. We do not want to
pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control pills or Planned Parenthood’s
abortions, although many of us are copacetic with their family planning
and social counseling. We want trade agreements that protect American
jobs and that recognize that international polluters like China and India
and the misogynistic Arab oil sheikhdoms need to catch up with our
clean-environment practices before we continue marching like lemmings
over industrial cliffs while the mass polluters scoop up our forfeited
interests.
As the president now begins his next six months in office, we among his
supporters have learned to tune out the nonsense that defines the lazy
legislators in the Washington Beltway who prefer to mull over Mueller
than to craft landmark health legislation that passes.
Yes, we have seen the president mature in office. He has made some
important pinpointed staff changes. He is moving away from abiding
the daily media circus. For those Democrats who warned with alarm and
portents of peril that Donald Trump could not be trusted with the
nuclear codes, we have seen that he has assembled a remarkable defense
team, that he has authorized a surgical MOAB strike in Afghanistan and
the dispatch of 59 cruise missiles to bombard clearly designated Syrian
targets without embroiling us in a Middle East war that America should
avoid. He has acted with care and delicacy in confronting the serious
problem in North Korea, giving the lie to those who argued that he
would be hot-headed and unable to lead.
For those of us who voted for Donald Trump last November—many of
us with some concern—we support him even more today than we did
then. Though we occasionally recoil from the more outlandish, we have
come to prefer reading his tweets more than we did reading about
Clinton’s sexual harassment scandals. And we have learned to disregard
the “Russian stuff” like so much “white noise” that rivals the sound of
a tree falling in the middle of a forest for irrelevance.
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