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JACK DANIEL'S TRICK
A woman goes to a counselor, worried about her husband's temper.
The counselor asks, "What's the problem?
The woman says, "I don't know what to do. Every day my husband loses his temper for no reason. It scares me."
The Counselor says, "I have a cure for that. When it seems your husband is getting angry, take a double shot of Jack Daniel's and swish it in your mouth. Swish and swish, but don't swallow until he either leaves the room or calms down."
Two weeks later, she goes back to the counselor, looking fresh and reborn.
She tells the counselor, "That was a brilliant idea. Every time my husband started to get angry, I swished the Jack. I swished and swished, and he calmed down. How does swishing Jack Daniel's in your mouth do that?
The counselor said, "The Jack Daniel's does nothing. Keeping your mouth shut is the trick.
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It takes guts which Nadler lacks. (See 1 and 1a below.)+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Jason Riley writes Stacey Abrams engaged in a fraud when she made claims regarding voting suppression. Statistics do not support her outlandish claims. (See 2 below.)
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Appeals Court upholds ability of Trump to keep immigrants to remain in Mexico and overturns liberal lower court decision..
What have the Democrats been doing since Trump was elected?
a) First they denied he was elected legally.
b) Second, they supported, what we now are learning, was a ruse based on a contrived Dossier paid for by Trump's opponent, to perpetuate the claim Trump is illegitimate.
c) Third, they continue to disrupt his ability to govern by persisting in this myth even after Mueller cleared him and all Americans from engaging in collusion.
d) Having failed in their efforts to obstruct Trump, Democrats have shifted their attack on another duly appointed professional - Trump's Attorney General. Smacks of The Kavanaugh character assassination attempt (See 2 below.)
e) Finally, Democrats oppose everything Trump is trying by way of correcting problems relating to poor trade policies,illegal immigration, open borders, sanctuary cities, impeding rules and regulations, our decline in military preparedness, drug costs among others.
How anyone, in his right mind, can vote for radical Democrats, simply because of Trump's boorishness, is beyond rational behaviour. (See 2a below.)
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Dick
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1) Democrats hold show trials rather than vote to oust the President.
The Editorial Board
House Democrats are escalating their campaign against the Trump Administration with complaints that its resistance to Congressional requests for documents is a threat to democracy. It’s more accurate to say that Democrats are performing what amounts to a pseudo-impeachment so they don’t have to undertake a real one.
Democrats are agonizing over impeachment because while they’re itching to do it, special counsel Robert Mueller’s report blew up their Russian collusion hopes. He also took no position on obstruction of justice while reporting a highly critical “analysis” of President Trump’s actions. Democrats now find themselves caught between a left-wing base that says they’ll abdicate their duty if they don’t impeach and Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s cold-blooded calculation that it could cost their majority in 2020.
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What to do? Democrats have decided to act out a pseudo-impeachment that claims Mr. Trump and his Administration are committing offenses against the Constitution without daring to open a formal impeachment inquiry. The split-level goal is to appease the left while sparing the swing-district Democrats who delivered the 2018 majority from ever having to vote on articles of impeachment.
The problem with this play-acting is that it has Democrats fulminating about actions that aren’t even misdemeanors, much less high crimes. Exhibit A is Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler’s threat to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt for failing to turn over the entire Mueller report to Congress.
Yet Mr. Barr has been as accommodating as the law allows. He made the entire report public with light redactions though he didn’t have to release any of it under the law. He has let senior Members of Congress review redacted material in private, though no Democrats have taken him up on the offer.
The exception is grand-jury information that Mr. Barr can’t release without a judge’s order if relevant to specific legal investigations. A judge isn’t supposed to open such testimony to Members of Congress for general oversight, though it might get it as part of a formal impeachment proceeding.
How is Mr. Barr obstructing Congress by providing access to nearly all of the Mueller report, and 99.9% of the section on obstruction of justice? Mr. Nadler is threatening to sue Mr. Barr to get the rest, but we’ll go out on a limb and predict he has no chance of winning in court. Even if a liberal judge agrees, the decision would be overturned on appeal.
These executive-Congress disputes are typically settled by negotiation, and on Tuesday Judiciary staffers of both parties met with representatives from Justice to discuss an accommodation. We’re told Justice offered to allow a dozen more staffers to review the less-redacted report, to take and keep notes, and to allow those who have viewed the report in camera to discuss it with one another.
The question is whether this will be enough for Mr. Nadler to postpone the contempt vote he has so recklessly set for Wednesday. If Mr. Nadler proceeds with contempt, we’ll know it’s one more act of the pseudo-impeachment production. The vote will feed the liberal outrage machine and throw up the appearance of wrongdoing. But a contempt vote won’t matter in practice because a U.S. Attorney is unlikely to act on it and file charges.
Perhaps Mr. Nadler will send the sergeant-at-arms to arrest Mr. Barr, which would make for an interesting showdown with the federal marshals who protect the AG. Even if Mr. Nadler were cynical enough to try such a stunt, most Americans would see it as one more sign of the Democratic obsession with investigations instead of legislative achievement.
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The real offense against the Constitution here is by Democrats. Oversight of the executive branch is an important Congressional power, but the Supreme Court has said it should be related to Congress’s legislative function or constitutional duty. It can’t merely be a trawling exercise to see what nasty details they can find to score political points and discredit a President before the 2020 election.
If Chairman Nadler wants to continue his Mueller fixation, he should announce that he is beginning formal impeachment proceedings. Impeachment is a legitimate Congressional power, and at least the public would then understand what Congress is up to and could judge the effort. If Democrats really believe Mr. Trump is a threat to the Constitution, they should file articles of impeachment and have every Member vote on them.
That’s the path of accountability. The current pseudo-impeachment is a fraud on the Constitution and the American public.
1a) Motive Matters in Trump
Spygate
When intelligence actions are launched for political effect, we’re in trouble.
By
For the better part of two years I’ve been saying, in principle, that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was not wrong to be concerned about the Russians exploiting peripheral Trump campaign figures as witting or unwitting agents. As long as such spying remained discreet and unknown to the public, it could not have influenced the election. Of courses there’s a caveat: if such spying was ordered up on a flimsy premise to legitimize internally a story line about Trump-Russia connections that Obama administration officials would then try to peddle to the public through leaks.
This is what should concern us: that quite apart from illegal leaks, which are themselves a big problem, certain intelligence-agency actions were undertaken deliberately for domestic political purposes. Example: It is absurd at this point to pretend that James Comey’s original intervention in the Hillary Clinton email matter, based on intercepted Russian intelligence, was not such an action. It relieved the Obama Justice Department of the delicate problem of having to defend politically a decision not to prosecute Mrs. Clinton, by pretending that an independent institution (in reality the FBI and its chief worked for Mr. Obama) had made the call.
Mr. Comey would never have waited until three weeks before the Democratic Convention if he were seriously entertaining the possibility that Mrs. Clinton might be charged. The Russian intelligence reportedly consisted of prima facie evidence of Justice Department corruption of the Hillary email case, yet Mr. Comey apparently discounted its import even as he reasoned that this supposedly misleading intelligence somehow required his extraordinary intervention to clear Mrs. Clinton. A subsequent inspector general’s report found Mr. Comey’s intervention improper, but everything about the secret motive behind it remains hidden in a “classified appendix.”
Understand: The alternative was not to charge Mrs. Clinton. It was to let the administration own the decision as it should have.
This is the clearest example of intelligence functions being opportunistically used for domestic political purposes, and to my mind the one from which all else flows. But there are others:
It is distinctly possible (not certain) that the FBI, in its dealings with Christopher Steele, deliberately sought to assist his campaign to get the media to report the unsupported accusations contained in his dossier.
It is distinctly possible (not certain) that a decision by Mr. Comey and his intelligence colleagues to brief President-elect Trump on the existence of the Steele dossier but to withhold certain information (such as that the dossier was a concoction of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic Party) was meant to create an opportunity for the media to report on the dossier’s existence but also to deprive Mr. Trump of the opportunity to defend himself by revealing its origins.
About one matter no uncertainty exists: Obama intelligence chieftains John Brennan and James Clapper, after they left office, went immediately on the airwaves to promote the story that Mr. Trump was a Russian agent.
That these actions took place is not a theory and whether they involved a conspiracy remains to be seen. What you might really be waiting for is certain mainstream news organs to acknowledge that these phenomena are real and that the questions they raise are legitimate. So am I.
More real reporting about the Steele dossier was contained in a single tweet from the New York Times’s Maggie Haberman, after its Democratic authorship was revealed, than in the 19 months since. She said: “Folks involved in funding this lied about it, and with sanctimony, for a year.”
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward caused a stir on Fox News recently when he said the intelligence community’s adoption of the Steele dossier was “highly questionable” and “needs to be investigated.” That need was evident two years ago.
The near-silence of the media on the secret appendix to the report on Mr. Comey and the Hillary Clinton case, even though it was mentioned 17 times in the public report, is just baffling—unless you assume a reluctance to pursue leads that might tend to discredit the very same sources the press had come to depend on to legitimize the Trump-Russia collusion story.
Two years ago, I wrote: “Democrats wanted an independent counsel investigation of Russia’s election meddling. They believed it would lead to evidence of, or at least keep alive the story of, Trump collusion. They may be unpleasantly surprised where it really leads.”
The questions about Mr. Trump and his competence, ethics and desire for closer relations with Russia are not more important than getting to the bottom of the intelligence community’s role in the 2016 election. Because in their minds celebrity triumphs over all, don’t expect TV pundits ever to repent of their collusion hysteria. That catharsis is not coming. Look elsewhere for the truth.
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2)Data Disprove the ‘Voter
Suppression’ Myth
Democrats scapegoat photo-ID laws for losses in states where minority turnout rose in 2018.
By Jason L. Riley
It has long been an article of faith on the political left that Republicans win elections by disenfranchising certain voting blocs. We are told that requiring voters to present photo identification at polling places not only depresses minority turnout but is tantamount to racial discrimination. The evidence challenging these assumptions gets stronger with every passing election, but Democrats and most of the political press don’t seem to have noticed.
At an NAACP dinner in Detroit on Sunday, Sen. Kamala Harris told the audience that “voter suppression” in Georgia and Florida cost Democrats gubernatorial races in the 2018 midterm elections. “Let’s say this loud and clear,” said Ms. Harris, a Democratic presidential candidate. “Without voter suppression, Stacey Abrams would be the governor of Georgia. Andrew Gillum is the governor of Florida.”
A few days earlier, Ms. Abrams herself, apparently still bitter over her defeat, made a similar claim. “We had an architect of voter suppression that spent the last eight years knitting together a system of voter suppression that is unparalleled in America,” said Ms. Abrams in reference to her Republican opponent, Brian Kemp, a former Georgia secretary of state. “I’ve never seen a community of people work so hard to strip away our rights and our humanity as fast as they can.” But if mandating voter ID, removing inactive voters from registration rolls or limiting early voting harms minorities, where is the evidence?
It just so happens that two weeks ago the Census Bureau released a report on voter turnout in 2018, which climbed 11 percentage points from the last midterm election, in 2014, and surpassed 50% for the first time since 1982. Moreover, the increased turnout was largely driven by the same minority voters Democrats claim are being disenfranchised. Black turnout grew around 27%, and Hispanic turnout increased about 50%. An analysis of the census data published by the Pew Research Center found that “all major racial and ethnic groups saw historic jumps in voter turnout” last year.
None of this comes as news to anyone who pays attention to sober facts instead of inflammatory rhetoric. The black voter turnout rate for the most part has grown steadily since the 1990s. This has occurred notwithstanding an increase in state voter-ID requirements over the same period. In 2012 blacks voted at higher rates than whites nationwide, including in Georgia, which was one of the first states in the country to implement a photo-ID requirement for voting. Ms. Abrams claims that Republicans have been hard at work trying to disenfranchise black voters, but the reality is that black voter registration is outpacing white registration in the Peach State.
Nor is it at all clear that minority voters share the view of politicians and activists who have chosen to racialize a debate over ensuring the accuracy and integrity of U.S. elections. Ms. Harris may feel that identification requirements for banking and flying should not apply to voting, but most people don’t have a problem with them. In a 2016 Gallup poll, voter-ID laws were supported by 4 in 5 respondents, including 95% of Republicans, 63% of Democrats, 81% of whites and 77% of nonwhites. In a 2012 survey published by the Washington Post, approval was similarly broad and deep, with 78% of whites, 65% of blacks and 64% of Hispanics expressing support for voter ID laws. When will Democrats learn how to lose an election without playing the race card?
If more people from different backgrounds are participating in American democracy, this is progress. But what’s good for the country in that respect isn’t necessarily good for President Trump’s re-election prospects. In 2016, Mr. Trump won Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania—representing a combined 46 electoral votes—by less than a percentage point. If the Democratic nominee holds the states that Hillary Clinton won and flips those three, Mr. Trump is a one-term president.
Whether Mrs. Clinton fell short in the Rust Belt because blacks hadn’t forgiven her for challenging Barack Obama in 2008 or because they felt taken for granted and stayed home, we’ll never know for certain. But there’s a reason Democrats chose Milwaukee for their nominating convention in 2020. And if the 2018 midterms are any indication of what’s to come next year, Democratic turnout won’t be a problem.
The Democrats’ real fear is that people will vote their pocketbooks. Under Mr. Trump, working-class minorities in particular have experienced generational lows in unemployment and seen their wages grow at a faster clip than their supervisors’. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that a new survey suggests the president is “making headway with select groups of Americans who disapprove of his job performance but are willing to credit him for a bustling economy, revealing a block of voters that his re-election campaign is likely to target in the coming months.” That frightens Democrats far more than any supposed “voter suppression” effort by their opponents.
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2) A LETTER TO WILLIAM BARR
Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to President Trump, has sent a letter to Attorney General Barr. Although Barr is the addressee, Robert Mueller is the main target. The letter is a blistering attack on Mueller’s report with a shot at James Comey thrown in.
Flood gets right to the point:
The [special counsel’s report] suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law.
Flood cites two major ways in which the Mueller report suffers from this defect. The first problem centers around its statement that the evidence “prevent[ed] [the special counsel’s office] from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” with respect to possible obstruction of justice. Flood explains that “conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” was not Mueller’s assigned task, because making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.
Instead:
What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make that decision not because they have “conclusively determin[ed] that no criminal conduct occurred,” but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s because:
In the American justice system, innocence is presumed: there is never any need for prosecutors to “conclusively determine” it. Nor is there any place for such a determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the [special counsel’s] standard and citizens were obliged to prove “conclusively. . .that no criminal conduct occurred.”
Why, then, did Mueller resort to terminology that is foreign to our criminal justice vocabulary? Flood’s answer is straightforward and difficult to dispute:
[T]he [special counsel’s] inverted-proof standard and “exoneration” statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties.
(Emphasis in the letter)
The second big problem with Mueller’s report is that it didn’t do the one job Mueller was tasked with. Under the relevant regulation, his duty was to “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.” 28 C.F.R. Section 600.8(c). But on the question of obstruction of justice, Mueller made neither a prosecution decision nor a declination decision. Thus, says Flood, “none of the Report’s Volume II complied with the obligation imposed by the governing regulation to ‘explain[] the prosecution or declination decisions reached.'” (Emphasis in the letter)
Flood continues:
The [special counsel] instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity — part “truth commission” report and part law school exam paper. Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the Report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis. That information is accompanied by a series of inexplicably inconclusive observations (inexplicable, that is, coming from a prosecutor) concerning the possible application of law to fact. This species of public report has no basis in the relevant regulations and no precedent in the history of special/independent counsel investigations.
Flood goes on to describe President Trump’s cooperation with the special counsel, including his decision not to invoke executive privilege over any presumptively privileged portions of the Mueller report.
He then condemns the “campaign of illegal leaks against the President,” many of which “were felonies.” These leaks “disclosed the identity of a U.S. person in violation of his civil rights; they misused intelligence for partisan political purposes; and they eroded confidence in the integrity and impartiality of our intelligence services.”
Flood complains:
The criminal investigation began with a breach of confidentiality executed by a very senior administration official who was himself an intelligence service chief. This leak of confidential information, personally directed by the former Director of the FBI, triggered the creation of [the special counsel’s office] itself — precisely as it was intended to do.
Not so long ago, the idea that a law enforcement official might provide the press with confidential governmental information for the proclaimed purpose of prompting a criminal investigation of an identified individual would have troubled Americans of all political persuasions. That the head of our country’s top law enforcement agency has actually done so to the President of the United States should frighten every friend of individual liberty.
Flood notes in his letter that some view the Mueller report as a kind of “road map” for congressional action against President Trump. Flood’s letter, though not a road map, will perhaps reinforce Attorney General Barr’s resolve to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute the high government officials who may have violated the law in their zealous efforts to undermine the President of the United States.
2a) The strange greatness of Donald Trump
BY GRADY MEANS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to President Trump, has sent a letter to Attorney General Barr. Although Barr is the addressee, Robert Mueller is the main target. The letter is a blistering attack on Mueller’s report with a shot at James Comey thrown in.
Flood gets right to the point:
The [special counsel’s report] suffers from an extraordinary legal defect: It quite deliberately fails to comply with the requirements of governing law.
Flood cites two major ways in which the Mueller report suffers from this defect. The first problem centers around its statement that the evidence “prevent[ed] [the special counsel’s office] from conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” with respect to possible obstruction of justice. Flood explains that “conclusively determining that no criminal conduct occurred” was not Mueller’s assigned task, because making conclusive determinations of innocence is never the task of the federal prosecutor.
Instead:
What prosecutors are supposed to do is complete an investigation and then either ask the grand jury to return an indictment or decline to charge the case. When prosecutors decline to charge, they make that decision not because they have “conclusively determin[ed] that no criminal conduct occurred,” but rather because they do not believe that the investigated conduct constitutes a crime for which all the elements can be proven to the satisfaction of a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
That’s because:
In the American justice system, innocence is presumed: there is never any need for prosecutors to “conclusively determine” it. Nor is there any place for such a determination. Our country would be a very different (and very dangerous) place if prosecutors applied the [special counsel’s] standard and citizens were obliged to prove “conclusively. . .that no criminal conduct occurred.”
Why, then, did Mueller resort to terminology that is foreign to our criminal justice vocabulary? Flood’s answer is straightforward and difficult to dispute:
[T]he [special counsel’s] inverted-proof standard and “exoneration” statements can be understood only as political statements, issuing from persons (federal prosecutors) who in our system of government are rightly expected never to be political in the performance of their duties.
(Emphasis in the letter)
The second big problem with Mueller’s report is that it didn’t do the one job Mueller was tasked with. Under the relevant regulation, his duty was to “provide the Attorney General with a confidential report explaining the prosecution or declination decisions reached by the Special Counsel.” 28 C.F.R. Section 600.8(c). But on the question of obstruction of justice, Mueller made neither a prosecution decision nor a declination decision. Thus, says Flood, “none of the Report’s Volume II complied with the obligation imposed by the governing regulation to ‘explain[] the prosecution or declination decisions reached.'” (Emphasis in the letter)
Flood continues:
The [special counsel] instead produced a prosecutorial curiosity — part “truth commission” report and part law school exam paper. Far more detailed than the text of any known criminal indictment or declination memorandum, the Report is laden with factual information that has never been subjected to adversarial testing or independent analysis. That information is accompanied by a series of inexplicably inconclusive observations (inexplicable, that is, coming from a prosecutor) concerning the possible application of law to fact. This species of public report has no basis in the relevant regulations and no precedent in the history of special/independent counsel investigations.
Flood goes on to describe President Trump’s cooperation with the special counsel, including his decision not to invoke executive privilege over any presumptively privileged portions of the Mueller report.
He then condemns the “campaign of illegal leaks against the President,” many of which “were felonies.” These leaks “disclosed the identity of a U.S. person in violation of his civil rights; they misused intelligence for partisan political purposes; and they eroded confidence in the integrity and impartiality of our intelligence services.”
Flood complains:
The criminal investigation began with a breach of confidentiality executed by a very senior administration official who was himself an intelligence service chief. This leak of confidential information, personally directed by the former Director of the FBI, triggered the creation of [the special counsel’s office] itself — precisely as it was intended to do.
Not so long ago, the idea that a law enforcement official might provide the press with confidential governmental information for the proclaimed purpose of prompting a criminal investigation of an identified individual would have troubled Americans of all political persuasions. That the head of our country’s top law enforcement agency has actually done so to the President of the United States should frighten every friend of individual liberty.
Flood notes in his letter that some view the Mueller report as a kind of “road map” for congressional action against President Trump. Flood’s letter, though not a road map, will perhaps reinforce Attorney General Barr’s resolve to investigate and, if appropriate, prosecute the high government officials who may have violated the law in their zealous efforts to undermine the President of the United States.
2a) The strange greatness of Donald Trump
BY GRADY MEANS, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR
With the Democrats still trying to throw a Hail-Mueller Pass with time out on the scoreboard and with the economy humming, it's time to confront the central issue: "Has Donald Trump been an awful, OK, or great president?"
The president, unquestionably, is often appalling in his style. His self-aggrandizing, dreadful treatment of opponents and subordinates, public embrace of homicidal dictators, and rambling speaking style draw a portrait of a leader embarrassing to many Americans. He has been vexing to all sides in Washington. Special counsel Robert Mueller added to this picture in his report on the Russia investigation.
And yet, over his first two years, he has enjoyed remarkable political, diplomatic, policy and leadership success. I personally don't care for his style of management and governance, but I think there is a case to be made that he has been a great president.
When making the case for Trump, you must start in a defensive hole.
For example, "immoral" often is a tag hung on him. But his proclivities, especially in regard to women, pale in comparison to Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton, who reportedly turned the White House into a virtual bordello. There is little hint at all of that with the Trump presidency. Similarly, his "immoral" treatment of undocumented immigrants differs little from his predecessors. Finally, he hasn't blundered into an unnecessary shooting war, which many would find immoral.
In the field of "corruption," he has been thoroughly investigated and there is nothing to match the smarmy signs of pay-to-play kickbacks alleged in the Clinton State Department.
In the field of "dictatorship," it's hard to argue that he has suppressed the free press or public criticism, which has been running wild. He certainly couldn't match the apparent political weaponization of the IRS, the FBI, the CIA and the Justice Department under Barack Obama or match the numerous contempt of Congress charges against many of those officials. To the contrary, Trump has exerted far less of a direct influence over his agency leaders, who often publicly defy him.
"White nationalist"? Nope. There is every indication that he is trying to be president for all the people. His trade policies are designed to benefit middle class, predominantly union, workers. If anything, they undercut big business off-shoring strategies. In addition, the economic and employment data suggest that he has provided more jobs and income opportunity to African Americans, Hispanics and women than any president over the past 40 years. (The argument that the economic trends are an extension of Obama policies is specious - Obama "bought" his results by eroding the financial stability of the country with a Fed-driven, free money, Ponzi scheme. Trump's results are real and lasting, based on realistic interest rates, investment and private-sector jobs, the real bases for sustained growth.)
Trump's awkward attempt to equate the behavior of the white nationalist thugs who precipitated the Charlottesville carnage with the Antifa thugs who came prepared to inflict violence of their own was off the mark, but it is certainly not a strong case for hanging a "racist" or "white nationalist" label on him - "clumsy" is far more accurate. The left's attempt to conflate his "nationalism" in his protectionist trade policies with racist "white nationalism" is dishonest and twisted logic.
He is divisive. But so is the unprecedented rejection of the 2016 election by the congressional Democrats and the Rise and Resist movement and the endless criticism from the media. Trump has shown remarkable personal strength in standing up to relentless attacks.
Moving from the defensive to the positive side of the balance sheet, despite all of the attacks and resistance, Trump has accomplished more in two years than his four immediate predecessors accomplished in four to eight years.
The economy is in the best shape in modern history. New and better trade agreements been developed with the major economies. Our defense is much stronger, including a stronger and better funded NATO. Our principal adversaries - Russia, China, Iran, North Korea - are more off-balance than they have been in decades. Each of them is tough and ruthless, but they see in Trump someone who understands them and is equally tough in defending his country. And, with the collapse of ObamaCare, Trump has a huge opportunity to advance an effective, market-based approach to American health care coverage and cost control to help everyone.
Belying the hysteria of the left, all Americans are moving forward; these are not "sad times," and there is no "crisis."
This raises the central question to be framed in the next election: What should we demand of our president? If we're looking for dignity, manners, grace and orderliness, Trump is vulnerable. If we're looking for strong leadership to provide real opportunity for economic advancement for all Americans and a strong defense of America and its interests, then Trump has a claim to greatness over his current opponents and his predecessors.
The weak field of Democrats presents voters with a virtual Hobson's choice. It will be interesting to see how they choose.
Grady Means is a writer and former corporate strategy consultant. He served in the White House as a policy assistant to Nelson Rockefeller and as a staff economist for Secretary Elliott Richardson of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Follow him on Twitter @GradyMeans.
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