At least they would be dead.
Our president cannot even do a good Tango! Wave of the future!
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Sowell finds hypocrisy. Amazing. (See 1 below.)
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My friend Bret compares Trump and Obama and finds similarities. (See 2 below.)
David Brooks also takes Trumpism to task as well as The Republican Party and writes it must find a new heart because Reaganism is dead and a new paradigm confronts us..
David Brooks is the New York' Time's idea of what a Republican should look like and the way they should think. He is bright and a good writer and therefore, worth reading but in this article he may have jumped too far to reach a negative conclusion about Trump.
If elected president, Trump may prove worse than Obama. However, I believe anyone who follows Obama will have an impossible time succeeding because Islamist terror (which Obama cannot even pronounce), Iran, Russia and perhaps China will determine much of the course of our next president's agenda.
I doubt whomever is elected will be able to implement a necessary domestic program and get control over our runaway spending unless they force America to totally retreat from the world and, even then, I suspect spending will continue out of control. After 9/11, G.W's hand was called and whether he made the right or wrong choices the "die" was cast for him.
Furthermore, we are so indebted that any rise in interest rates will continue to narrow any president's options to spend where needed unless they are willing to cut entitlements. Entitlements, like toothpaste, once out of the tube are impossible to put back. Hillarious and Bernie will not touch them. In fact, they will expand them. Trump also is not likely to touch them. Cruz might try but doubt he would be allowed.
America's ability to return to a 3 or 4 percent growth pattern that provides jobs and re-employment at a level which will generate income both in improved worker's take home pay and increased government revenue allowing government to get control over deficit spending is a thing of the past, a pipe dream. America's economic blanket has shrunk. It no longer can cover both because demographics have finally caught up not only with America but the world in general.
The Ancient Mariner and Tennyson were right - "Getting and spending we lay waste our power." (See 2a below.)
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Obama just acknowledged there will be no Palestinian - Israeli solution in his remaining time in office and blamed Israel's intransigence on their prosperity.
Israel's prosperity is due to education, an intelligent work force and, more or less, free entrepreneurship. Whereas, Palestinians are mired in self imposed poor leadership, restrained by world handouts and crippled by an education system devoted to hatred.
Obama cannot see the difference because he is ideologically trapped in a warped mind set and to make matters worse, as noted above, he cannot even Tango!
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ISIS apparently targeting Jewish children in Turkey. (See 3 below.)
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This is what man, his hatred, and insane politics wants to destroy: https://www.youtube.com/embed/
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Dick
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1) Supreme Hypocrisy
By Thomas Sowell
If there is one thing that is bipartisan in Washington, it is brazen hypocrisy.
Currently there is much indignation being expressed by Democrats because the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to hold confirmation hearings on President Obama's nominee to the Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.
The Democrats complain, and the media echo their complaint, that it is the Senate's duty to provide "advice and consent" on the President's appointment of various federal officials. Therefore, according to this claim, the Senate is neglecting its Constitutional duty by refusing even to hold hearings to determine whether the nominee is qualified, and then vote accordingly.
First of all, the "advice and consent" provision of the Constitution is a restriction on the President's power, not an imposition of a duty on the Senate. It says nothing about the Senate's having a duty to hold hearings, or vote, on any Presidential nominee, whether for the Supreme Court or for any other federal institution. The power to consent is the power to refuse to consent, and for many years no hearings were held, whether the Senate consented or did not consent.
Nor have Democrats hesitated, when they controlled the Senate, to refuse to hold hearings or to vote when a lame-duck President nominated someone for some position requiring Senate confirmation during a Presidential election year.
When the shoe was on the other foot, the Republicans made the same arguments as the Democrats are making today, and the Democrats made the same arguments as the Republicans are now making.
The obvious reason, in both cases, is that the party controlling the Senate wants to save the appointment for their own candidate for the Presidency to make after winning the upcoming election. The rest is political hypocrisy on both sides.
None of this is new. It was already well-known 40 years ago, when President Gerald Ford nominated me to become one of the commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission during the 1976 Presidential election year.
After months passed without any hearings being held, I went to see the chief legislative aide of the committee that was responsible for confirming or denying. When the two of us were alone, he said to me, quite frankly, "We've gone over your record with a fine tooth comb and can find nothing to object to. So we are simply not going to hold hearings at all."
"If this were not an election year," he said, "your nomination would have sailed right through. But we think our man is going to win the Presidential election this year, and we want him to nominate someone in tune with our thinking."
Various Democrats who are currently denouncing the Republican Senate, including Vice President Biden, have used very similar arguments against letting lame-duck Republican Presidents appoint Supreme Court justices.
Last week, the New York Times ran a front-page "news" story about something Chief Justice John Roberts had said, more than a month ago, prior to the death of Justice Scalia, under the headline "Stern Rebuke For Senators."
Since Justice Scalia was still alive then, and there was no Supreme Court vacancy to fill at the time, Chief Justice Roberts' remarks had nothing to do with the current controversy. Nor were these remarks news after such a long lapse of time. But this was part of a pattern of the New York Times' disguising editorials as front-page news stories.
In short, the political hypocrisy was matched by journalistic hypocrisy. Indeed, there was more than a little judicial hypocrisy in Chief Justice Roberts' complaint that Senate confirmation hearings on Supreme Court nominees do not confine themselves to the nominees' judicial qualifications, rather than their conservative or liberal orientations.
If judges confined themselves to acting like judges, instead of legislating from the bench, creating new "rights" out of thin air that are nowhere to be found in the Constitution, maybe Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees would not be such bitter and ugly ideological battles.
Chief Justice Roberts himself practically repealed the 10th Amendment's limitation on federal power when he wrote the decision that the government could order us all to buy ObamaCare insurance policies. When judges act like whores, they can hardly expect to be treated like nuns.
Politicians, journalists and judges should all spare us pious hypocrisy.
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2) Trump Is Obama Squared
Two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem America.
Donald Trump is Barack Obama squared. Not as a matter of rhetorical style, where the president is glib and grammatical, while the developer is rambling and coarse. Not as a matter of economic instincts, where Mr. Obama is a social democrat while Mr. Trump is a mercantilist.
And not as a matter of temperament. Mr. Obama is aloof and calculated. Mr. Trump loves to get in your face.
But leave smaller differences aside. The president and The Donald are two epic narcissists who see themselves as singularly suited to redeem an America that is not only imperfect but fundamentally broken. Both men revel in their disdain for the political system and the rules governing it. Both men see themselves not as politicians but as movement leaders. Both are prone to telling fairy tales about their lives and careers.
And both believe they are better than everyone else.
“I think I’m a better speech writer than my speech writers,” Mr. Obama told an aide in 2008. “I know more about policies on any particular issue than my policy directors. And I’ll tell you right now that I’m . . . a better political director than my director.” Compare that to Mr. Trump earlier this month, when asked on MSNBC who he turns to for foreign policy advice. “My primary consultant is myself.”
Historians may mark the early 21st century as the moment when Americans stopped seeking probity or at least predictability in their leaders and started shopping for ecstasy and transformation; a politics beyond words. Republicans mocked the grandiosity of Mr. Obama’s first run for the presidency—the Doric columns; the pledge to make the seas recede—but is that so different from the pompous iconography of the Trump jet or his manifestly absurd promises to get foreign countries to pay for his political boondoggles?
More to the point, Mr. Obama was a cult-of-personality candidate. His admirers projected on him whatever they wanted to see: passionate liberal; post-ideological pragmatist; philosopher king; cool cat. Politically, he was the equivalent of a non-falsifiable hypothesis. No evidence could disprove his rightness.
Mr. Trump inspires similar fancies among his supporters. Either he’s the Great Negotiator who will know how to bargain with Congress and cut better trade and security deals with the Saudis, Chinese, Europeans and so on. Or he’s the immovable man of principle who will remain unbowed when, for instance, troubles mount with his mass deportation of los ilegales.
Both interpretations can’t be true. But it’s in the nature of cult personalities that followers rarely ask hard questions because they are seeking leaders who square circles.
Non-American readers might also note the ways in which, on foreign policy, Mr. Trump is a magnification of Mr. Obama, rather than his opposite number. The president caused some consternation overseas when he complained, in a recent lengthy interview with the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, that too many U.S. allies are “free riders” mooching off American security guarantees. “We don’t always have to be the ones who are up front,” the president explained. Leading from behind “was part of the anti-free rider campaign.”
Now take Mr. Trump. NATO, he told the New York Times last week, is “unfair” to the U.S., which pays “a disproportionate share” of the defense burden. The U.S.-Japan defense treaty is “not a fair deal.” Across the world, the U.S. is being “systematically ripped off.” On Ukraine, “I would agree with” the president that the country belongs in Russia’s sphere of influence. If Europeans won’t take the lead, Mr. Trump wonders, why should the U.S.?
Both men also share the conviction that the U.S. can’t afford much of a foreign policy anymore. Mr. Obama often faults the high cost of the war in Iraq for “constraining our ability to nation-build here at home.” Mr. Trump complains that “we’re defending the world” despite a national debt nearing $21 trillion.
One man wants to shrink America’s role in the world for the sake of a bigger state; the other man for the sake of shrinking the debt. In either case, the prescription is to put America in retreat. In neither case do they want to address the real driver of the U.S.’s long-term fiscal problems, which are entitlements and welfare (59% of the federal budget), not defense and international security (16%).
Which brings us to the most important way in which Mr. Trump is another version of the president: They both bend reality to suit their conveniences, and their conceits.
In Mr. Obama’s universe, terrorism is a nuisance, climate change is an apocalypse, and economic growth is an inequality problem. In Mr. Trump’s, immigrants are invaders, trade is theft and allies are millstones. For each species of rubbish there’s a sizable political constituency. Maybe it will be large enough to launch Mr. Trump to the White House.
There’s a tendency among pundits to offer high-toned explanations for why Mr. Trump has risen this far, despite political expectations and ordinary good sense. Many of those pundits performed similarly opportunistic services when Mr. Obama’s star was rising. We repeat our mistakes when we think we’re doing the opposite.
2a)The Opinion Pages | OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Post-Trump Era
This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative. For decades now the Republican Party has been groaning under the Reagan orthodoxy, which was right for the 1980s but has become increasingly obsolete. The Reagan worldview was based on the idea that a rising economic tide would lift all boats. But that’s clearly no longer true.
We’ve gone from Rising Tide America to Coming Apart America. Technological change, globalization and social and family breakdown mean that the benefits of growth, to the extent there is growth, are not widely shared.
Republicans sort of recognize this reality, but they are still imprisoned in the Reaganite model. They ask Reaganite questions, propose Reaganite policies and have Reaganite instincts.
Now along comes Donald Trump, an angel of destruction, to blow it all to smithereens. He represents not only a rejection of the existing Reaganite establishment, but also a rejection of Reaganite foreign policy (he is less globalist) and Reaganite domestic policy (he is friendlier to the state).
Trumpism will not replace Reaganism, though. Trump is prompting what Thomas Kuhn, in his theory of scientific revolutions, called a model crisis.
According to Kuhn, intellectual progress is not steady and gradual. It’s marked by sudden paradigm shifts. There’s a period of normal science when everybody embraces a paradigm that seems to be working. Then there’s a period of model drift: As years go by, anomalies accumulate and the model begins to seem creaky and flawed.
Then there’s a model crisis, when the whole thing collapses. Attempts to patch up the model fail. Everybody is in anguish, but nobody knows what to do.
That’s where the Republican Party is right now. Everybody talks about being so depressed about Trump. But Republicans are passive and psychologically defeated. That’s because their conscious and unconscious mental frameworks have just stopped working. Trump has a monopoly on audacity, while everyone else is immobile.
But Trump has no actual ideas or policies. There is no army of Trumpists out there to carry on his legacy. He will almost certainly go down to a devastating defeat, either in the general election or — God help us — as the worst president in American history.
At that point the G.O.P. will enter what Kuhn called the revolution phase. During these moments you get a proliferation of competing approaches, a willingness to try anything. People ask different questions, speak a different language, congregate around a new paradigm that is incommensurate with the last.
That’s where the G.O.P. is heading. So this is a moment of anticipation. The great question is not, Should I vote for Hillary or sit out this campaign? The great question is, How do I prepare now for the post-Trump era?
The first step clearly is mental purging: casting aside many existing mental categories and presuppositions, to shift your identity from one with a fixed mind-set to one in which you are a seeker and open to anything. The second step is probably embedding: going out and seeing America again with fresh eyes and listening to American voices with fresh ears, paying special attention to that nexus where the struggles of Trump supporters overlap with the struggles of immigrants and African-Americans.
This is a moment for honesty. Valuably, Trump has exposed the rottenness of the consultant culture, and the squirrelly way politicians now talk to us. This is a moment for revived American nationalism. Trump’s closed, ethnic nationalism is dominant because Iraq, globalization and broken immigration policies have discredited the expansive open form of nationalism that usually dominates American culture.
This is also a moment for redefined compassion. Trump is loveless. There is no room for reciprocity and love in his worldview. There is just winning or losing, beating or being beaten.
It is as if he was a person who received no love and tried to compensate through competition. That is an ugly, freakish and untenable representation of the human condition. Somehow the Republican Party will have to rediscover a language of loving thy neighbor, which is a primary ideal in our culture, and a primary longing of the heart.
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Islamic State terrorists had reportedly "advanced plans" to murder Jewish children in attacks aimed at educational and youth institutions in Turkey, according to Britain's Sky News on Monday. The report cited information allegedly obtained by intelligence officials from arrested ISIS operatives regarding "an imminent" attack. According to the Sky News report, six ISIS members arrested over the last week in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep revealed the alleged plans by the extremist group to target Jewish children at kindergartens, schools and youth centers. "In light of these circumstances, extraordinary security measures are being taken above and beyond the high alert level already in place by the Turkish police, as well as vigilance within the Jewish community," Sky News quoted an unidentified intelligence source as saying. The source added that Turkey was treating the information as "a more than credible threat," adding that it was "an active plot." The report noted a synagogue in Istanbul as the most likely target of an attack. The Turkish intelligence source underlined that: "Undercover and other covert counter-terror measures are being implemented around the clock." The report came 10 days after three Israelis and an Iranian were killed in a suicide bombing in central Istanbul. On Monday, Israel upgraded its travel advisory regarding Turkey, recommending that not only should Israelis not travel to the country, but that its citizens already there should leave immediately. ================================================================================= |
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