Monday, April 11, 2016

Challenged! Weak Succumb To Lies! My Liberal Friend's Missives!

Perhaps My Irish 
Jokes?
===
An Irishman who had a little too much to drink is
driving home from the city one night and, of course his car is weaving violently all over the road.
A cop pulls him over.
"So," says the cop to the driver,  "where have ya been?"
" Why, I've been to the pub of course," slurs the drunk.
” Well," says the cop, "it looks like you've had quite  a few to drink this evening."
"I did all right," the drunk says with a smile.
”Did you know," say's the cop, standing straight and folding his arms across his chest,  "that a few intersections back,your wife fell out of your car?"
"Oh, thanks heavens," sighs the drunk.
"For a minute there, I thought I'd gone deaf."
*********************************************************************
Brenda O'Malley is home making dinner, as usual, when Tim Finnegan arrives at her door.  "Brenda, may I come in?" he asks.  "I've somethin' to tell ya".
"Of course you can come in, you're always welcome, Tim.  But where is my husband?”
”That's what I'm here to be telling ya, Brenda. "there was an accident down at the Guinness brewery…"  "Oh, God no!" cries Brenda. "Please don't tell me."
"I must, Brenda. Your husband Shamus is dead and gone. I'm sorry."
Finally, she looked up at Tim. "How did it happen, Tim?"
"It was terrible, Brenda. He fell into a vat of Guinness Stout and drowned."
"Oh my dear Jesus! But you must tell me truth, Tim.  Did
he at least go quickly?"
"Well, Brenda... No. In fact,  He got out three times to pee.”
********************************************************************
A drunk staggers into a Catholic Church, enters a confessional booth, sits down, but says nothing.  
The Priest coughs a few times to get his attention
but the drunk continues to sit there.  Finally, the Priest pounds three times on the wall.  The drunk mumbles, "ain't no use knockin', there's no paper on this side either!"
===
From a dear friend and fellow memo reader regarding my comment about dogs in my previous memo: "Dick,

I don’t always agree with everything you write, but your thoughts below about dogs are right on the mark.  Republican, Democrat, or Socialist—political orientation doesn’t matter on that subject! T--

My response: "T--, Thanks for your comment, which I will post without direct attribution, but I would say that even some dogs are so pathetic and confused  they could only be liberals.  Me"

 And another response from a special friend and fellow memo reader regarding his experience with his dogs: 

 "As I have written in my autobio:

I do not believe my best friend can survive much longer and so I write next of my Boomer. He came to us as a scared little dog of several months because S----- had brought him from H------- without so much as a pet or drink of water. In two days he knew he was loved and became a show dog, with a high gait prance that would have won many show dog awards. He loved his sister, Beebe, and she trained him to live in a house and love his family. Then one day I was holding him in my arms in the backyard at St. L==== when a squirrel passed - he jumped - and broke his leg. We left on a month long trip to Europe shortly thereafter and returned to a saddened and still mending pup and he became forever our little lost soul. But what a love he is. He would wait at the front door until I returned to the house. He would place his head on my lap and sleep there as long as I stayed there. He slept at my side every night but would gradually creep up next to my head as the night passed and Beebe had also gone higher. He would bark and jump up and down for his three meals a day. He was a wonderful dog and I loved him through thick and thin. When he had a stroke in 2005 he could no longer see, but learned to navigate via carpets and furniture. He mostly stopped sleeping on my lap and this saddened me greatly, but I understood. Boomer lost his hearing and eyesight on April 30, 2005 On October 10, 2007 after 24/7 care for 2.5 years he jumped off his couch and it appeared his leg might be broken again. I decided to put him down, and I wrote that night the following: "And with a kiss and a tear my little, best friend is gone. How I loved that little dog, who never put up a front, never was selfish, a friend to all after the first bark - a truly great dog. Why can't you keep forever that which you love. Nineteen years of laying his head on my lap, nineteen years of climbing all but the last step and then crying for me to come and bring him up that last one. But to see him writhe in pain last night, to hold his once broken perhaps again leg off to the side in agony was too much for my heart to bear. I really truly loved that little dog, my dear Boomer."
===
If Hillarious becomes Commander In Chief and I were in the military, I would resign.  Same goes for Bernie.

Putin has got to be licking his chops!

The biggest threat will probably come from the fact that an insecure Hillarious will feel compelled to demonstrate how tough she is and thus, might over react every time she is challenged. She has proven time and again her judgement is awful. (See 1 below.)

Bernie will probably not know when he is challenged.

Trump will love to be challenged so he can build another wall and Cruz spends his life feeling and being challenged.

Kasich is too kind to react to a challenge. (See 1a below.)
===
Kerry's political correctness met with Taliban fire. (See 2 below.)
===
If you repeat a lie long enough it will become an acceptable fact. This is why all lies must be rejected. Truth is the best disinfectant. 

 The weak succumb to lies. (See 3 below.)
===
I have a Liberal friend and sometime memo reader who professes he is a centrist.  He reads the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, is voting for Hillarious and defends her and will vote for Bernie given the alternative chance. He sends me all kind of negative articles about the Republican Party yet he contends he is a centrist. He also comes from wealth and is very generous and socially conscious. He is a good citizen. At times he is a pain in the ass but I truly love him.  He has a fabulous wife.

 He sent me this article and I am posting it because I believe there is some truth to it but I also believe it goes a bit overboard.

 The Demwits also have a schism within their party and I suspect this election will serve to make it more evident but they are more committed to winning than Republicans and will do whatever it takes whereas, Republicans are more prone to aim their ammunition at themselves and fight among themselves. Their unruly campaigning style is self-defeating.

 Also, the Demwit message is more soothing and beguiling because it makes little demands, is more prone to call for the dispensing goodies, entitlements and is based up creating wedge issues which pits our entire nation against each other. Finally, Demwits are more prone to support challenges to our Constitution and to use it to expand government rather than to restrain the spread of its tentacles.

 Repubs come across more philosophical when it comes to protecting the tenets of our Constitution but are equally to blame for failing to defend it and thus,I am reposting Scalia's warning.

 Neither party is serving our nation well and probably both will end destroying themselves as well as our Republic. Franklin was right when he said 'We have a Republic if we can keep it.'

 In my humble opinion, the root of our own self-destruction can be blamed upon many things starting with our success which came as a byproduct of many factors - our blessed geographical range of latitudes and longitudes, our inherent mineral wealth, our Constitution and our adherence to its principles, most importantly that it bestowed upon us the opportunity for freedom and our ability to retain the product of our own sweat and ingenuity.

 Once we began to allow government to grow, spend and take from us we lost self-discipline and the very creative attributes of what made us great.  The divergent political philosophies between the two parties also widened causing us to become a more disunited nation.

 Finally, and most destructive is our failure to integrate our divergent populous cultures and the decline in our experiment with mass education.

 Yes, there are many other factors but these are, in my mind, among the more prominent (See 4 and 4a below.)
=== 
Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)

U.S. general: Number of ISIS fighters in Libya doubles

By Nicole Gaouette

Washington (CNN) U.S. intelligence estimates now put the number of ISIS fighters in Libya between 4,000 to 6,000, double the number in the war-ravaged country last year, according to the top U.S. military commander in Africa.
Gen. David Rodriguez, commander of U.S. Africa Command, said the intelligence community estimates the number of ISIS fighters in Libya at “around 4 to 6,000.” He added that the number has “probably about doubled in the last 12 to 18 months, based on what their assessments were last year.”
Wracked by violence since the fall of Moammar Gadhafi in 2011, Libya has become a haven for militant groups.
From 2014, the country was divided between two rival governments, one in the capitol of Tripoli and another in the east. A December deal created a Government of National Accord that the United Nations and Western governments hope can unite the country's armed factions against ISIS and set Libya on a more stable course.
Rodriguez said several types of foreign fighters are flooding into Libya, many of whom come from other northern African countries.
“The foreign fighter flow goes back and forth across” North Africa, which generates a lot of the foreign fighters who “go all the way across to Syria and Iraq,” Rodriguez said.
He said there are also militants already in Libya who are now pledging allegiance to ISIS.
The U.S. continues to watch Libya closely, Rodriguez told reporters Thursday. “We are continuing to go after targets that pose an imminent threat to U.S. interests and personnel,” he said, citing a December air strike by a U.S. F-15 that killed ISIS leader Abu Nabil in eastern Libya and a March raid on the western city of Sabratha that left seven suspected ISIS fighters dead. “We continue to do that,” Rodriguez said.

 1a)Hillary Clinton Isn’t Qualified. Deal With It
By 
“You may have heard Senator Sanders say I’m unqualified to be president, Hillary Clinton said at a rally on Friday. “Well seriously, seriously, I’ve been called a lot of things over the years, but unqualified has not been one of them. Heh heh heh.” 
Is she kidding us? Is her memory failing? I believe I first heard her called “unqualified” when she was driving HillaryCare into a ditch as first lady. Or was it when she fired the White House Travel Office staff and replaced them with close friends? Or was it when she blamed her husband’s inability to act in an even remotely decent fashion on a conspiracy theory? I honestly don’t remember when it was, except that it was decades ago.
Since then, she had a very nice time in the Senate, during which she got along well with colleagues but accomplished absolutely nothing memorable. Unless you think that it’s memorable to sponsor bills to establish an historic site in New York, name a post office, or designate a portion of New York’s U.S. Route 20 as the Timothy J. Russert Highway. She did vote to invade Iraq, so there’s that. She was somehow completely out-organized and out-hustled for the Democratic nomination for president in 2008, before being given a keep-your-friends-close-but-your-enemies-closer job as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.
Her campaign for this turn at the Democratic nomination once claimed that they’d run on how she had “restored America’s place in the world, which had been very badly battered through the previous administration.” Good luck with that. She hasn’t just failed to lock up the easiest contested Democratic nomination race in history, she’s been given serious contention from a 70-bajillion-year-old, white-haired, honest-to-goodness socialist from Vermont.
Let’s clarify the definition of unqualified. Here’s Merriam-Webster:
Not having the skills, knowledge, or experience needed to do a particular job or activity.
Or as one person on Twitter put it:
Hans Fiene ‎@HansFiene
@MZHemingway I remember when "qualified" meant "was good at jobs" instead of just "has had jobs.
Yes, Hillary has had jobs. She has a resume that would make even 
the most accomplished crony capitalists blush. She did not have a particularly good go of things as first lady of either Arkansas or the United States, but let’s go ahead and blame her husband for that. She had a lot to deal with. And then she, thanks to running against a weak candidate, became a U.S. senator from a state she had never lived in. She failed to win the Democratic nomination for president in 2008. And she went on to push for invasions of Libya and other stellar decisions while U.S. 
secretary of State. The Russia “reset” is, perhaps, my favorite.
So yes, she has had those high-paying, high-status jobs. And she’s 
even done things. For instance, she and her husband have made 
 had a private server and secret email accounts transmit classified government information. For years. She pushed the United States 
to invade Libya and destabilize it, turning it into a hellhole where a
 U.S. ambassador and three other Americans were killed in an 
organized terror attack she suggested should be blamed on a You
Tube video.
Having jobs, including jobs you would not have gotten if you hadn’t endured being one of Bill Clinton’s ladies, doesn’t mean you’re 
qualified. You need the skills, knowledge, and experience to do a 
job well. So if you’re hiring for the job of being embroiled in scandal, making bad decisions, and showcasing horrible judgment, yes, 
Hillary is qualified. To be president of the United States? Oh, hell no.
While being president is a big job, many Americans are qualified 
to hold it on account of their understanding of the Constitution, 
prudence, experience doing their given jobs well, leadership 
qualities, and intellectual rigor. But some people disqualify 
themselves.

If We Can Call Men Unqualified, Why Can’t We Call 

Women?

Calling one’s political opponent unqualified is one of the most time-
tested critiques in the political book. It’s sort of the default 
assumption, in fact, for running against someone or not voting for someone. All politicians are accused of being unqualified to hold 
the office they’re running for because that’s a blanket way of 
describing why you think they’re not up to the job in a way that 
you or your candidate are. It’s not even a particularly noteworthy 
critique, for male or female politicians.
On top of that, after years of watching the media melt down any 
time a conservative woman sought political office, you’d be 
forgiven for thinking the media didn’t mind critiques of female 
politicians. Heck, in the case of some GOP women, they resort to 
mind-bogglingly unfair attacks that are barely distinguishable 
from visceral shrieks.
But no reporters questioned Hillary’s claim that she had never 
been called unqualified (perhaps our wise and smug journalists 
are too young to remember the 1990s. Or 2000s. Or 2010s. Or last 
month). Instead we saw various outlets rush to defend her as if 
she were a delicate flower who needed to rest on the fainting 
couch and be protected from the mean boys.
In his Philadelphia remarks, Sanders was attempting to make the basic argument of this election — that ‘outsiders’ are more qualified than ‘insiders’ to run the country at this particular moment. But calling Clinton,  former U.S. U.S senator and secretary of state, ‘unqualified’ is raising ire as a gendered attack, although that didn’t appear to be Sanders’ intention.
I gather that college is a place you go now to learn to use the word “gendered” regularly without feeling like you are a complete idiot.
Jill Greenlee, Mirya Holman, and Rachel VanSickle-Ward wrote an 
op-ed inThe Washington Post headlined, “Why women’s 
‘ambitious’ and ‘unqualified’.” Seriously, ladies, it won’t. Certainly 
no more than it makes women’s representation suffer when it 
takes three women to pen a single, weak op-ed.
Women are strong enough to handle completely legitimate 
criticisms of Hillary without crying. It might behoove the media to 
notice how many millions of women share the views of some men 
about Hillary’s bad judgment and other qualification problems.
Yes, Hillary has held high office and has made a ton of money off of 
her connections to government. However, her foreign policy “achievements” are almost uniformly negative, and her campaign capabilities and time as a senator aren’t so hot either. Crying sexism every time someone points out these flaws is ridiculous.
Photo By NBC News

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a senior editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter at@mzhemingway
=========================================================
2) Kerry invites Taliban to negotiate, they respond with rocket fire

Politically correct fantasy once again meets reality.
By Robert Spencer

KABUL, Afghanistan — The Taliban claimed responsibility Sunday for a rocket attack on Kabul’s diplomatic area which came just after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry ended a surprise visit by calling on the insurgents to come to the negotiating table to end the 15-year war.
Kerry told reporters late Saturday in Kabul that “the people of Afghanistan should be demanding that the Taliban, who are the only people holding out on that possibility, actually engage in (the peace) process.”
A Taliban spokesman said on Sunday that the rocket attack, which caused no casualties, was meant to undermine Kerry’s visit.
“This shows foreigners cannot remain safe in any spot in the country and we can target them wherever they are,” said Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid. “We couldn’t know exactly where he was (but) at least we could sabotage his visit and send a message he is not welcome here.”
According to officials, at least two rockets hit the heavily-guarded diplomatic zone in the late evening. By that time, Kerry was at Bagram Air Field, 35 miles north of the capital, getting ready to leave the country….
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) THE TRUTH IN ISRAEL'S DEFENSE



True peace between Israel and Palestinian Arabs cannot be based on a lie: There has never been 'a cycle of violence'. Resorting to such neutral terminology requires the United States to acquiesce to and perpetuate a gross misrepresentation of reality. Putting Israel and its neighbors on the same footing totally ignores the asymmetry of the history of the conflict and something as fundamental as 'cause and effect'.
The truth is - one side has been the aggressor time and again. The Arabs have been the initiators of more than five major wars, political and economic boycotts and unbridled incitement. The Palestinians have launched wave after wave of terrorism against Israelis and other Jews and made hate the fuel that directs and runs their society. All this began before there was a State of Israel, before there was an 'occupation' and it continues unabated to this day.

Illegal Arab aggression against the territorial integrity and political independence of Israel cannot and should note be rewarded
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4) The Republican Party is in a pickle.
How Fox News Unwittingly Destroyed the Republican Party.
The Republican Party is in a pickle.
The Party itself despises its own two leading presidential candidates, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. This is a remarkable oddity just in itself. But there is good 
reason for it. Both of these candidates are so extreme and disastrous that 
they will almost certainly never be able to win a national election for the 
Republican Party.
But much worse, if and when one of these candidates does becomes the Republican Party’s nominee for president, the Party could very well be torn 
asunder into factions. One wing would split off to support the extremist 
candidate, and the other more moderate wing would be so embarrassed by 
what the Republican Party had become that they might even abandon the 
Party altogether. And forget about attracting new members into the Party 
because it would be too mean and extreme.
This could devastate the Party for years or even decades to come. So the Republican Party now finds itself teetering on the precipice of disintegration.
The Republicans, however, have no one to blame but themselves. This is a 
crisis of their own creation. And it didn’t just happen overnight.
The Republican Party has been fomenting anger and discontent in the base 
of its own Party for years. The mechanism through which this hate has been disseminated has been the network of extremist media of right-wing talk 
radio and the Fox News Channel, which is essentially talk radio transposed 
onto television.
Just think of all the right-wing “superstars” who spew messages of anger and hate every single day throughout the land over this enormous megaphone. Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, Ben Shapiro, Dana 
Loesch, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, to name a few.
And make no mistake, spewing hate has a significant impact upon society. 
It is the equivalent of modern-day propaganda where the population is 
barraged with a stream of consistent messaging. As ordinary people go 
about their daily lives, they are exposed repeatedly, day-in and day-out, to 
the same messages in numerous different forms and by numerous different 
people. Pretty soon, these messages begin to sink in and take effect. The 
audience begins to adopt a worldview consistent with these messages, regardless of the degree of truth. It is a remarkable phenomenon.
History is replete with examples of how propaganda can be very effective in 
altering the views of a population. Nazi Germany in the 1930’s is a classic 
example. How could it possibly be that a maniac like Adolph Hitler was able 
to convince millions of ordinary people throughout the entire nation of 
Germany to go to war against the world? Well, propaganda was an 
extremely powerful component.
For years, Hitler inundated the German population with a stream of 
consistent messages that the German Aryans were the superior master 
race of all humans, and that Germany was under imminent threat of 
destruction by foreign enemies as evidenced by the Treaty of Versailles, 
which was the international peace treaty that ended World War I but that 
also imposed upon Germany the hardship of having to make enormous 
reparation payments to the foreign victors for having caused the war. The 
Nazi messaging also preached about internal threats from various 
segments of Germany’s own population, like Jews, homosexuals, and 
communists. The German population began to adopt this perverse and 
paranoid worldview as truth, and a national war machine was born.
A more contemporary example is the Bosnian War from the early 1990’s that shockingly occurred in the heart of Europe right near Italy and Greece. The government of Serbia deployed propaganda to incite its Christian Serbian population to turn against the Bosnian Muslim ethnic group. Previously, 
however, the Serbs and the Bosnians had lived together in peace for 
generations in the very same towns and villages. But the propaganda from 
the nationalistic Serbian government whipped-up its population into a frenzy
that resulted in former neighbors and friends killing each other in horrifying atrocities of ethnic cleansing, systematic mass rape, and genocide.
Another contemporary example is the genocide that occurred in the African 
nation of Rwanda in 1994. The Hutu-led government systematically 
employed propaganda to spread fear and paranoia that the Tutsi minority 
was about to rise-up and enslave the Hutus, so the Hutus had better spring
into action and save themselves by striking first against the devious and 
plotting Tutsis. This incited a wave of violence that lasted for months. In 
villages across Rwanda where Hutus and Tutsis had previously lived 
together in peace and harmony, suddenly mobs of Hutus were rampaging 
against their own Tutsi neighbors with machetes and clubs. One million 
Tutsis were killed in the genocide.
Propaganda is powerful stuff. Many people are susceptible to it and can be 
swayed by it, especially the less educated.
In America today, the right-wing media network is engaged in this very 
same activity through Fox News and extremist talk radio. This network is 
constantly barraging its audience, day-in and day-out, over and over again, 
with a stream of consistent messaging. And this messaging is overwhelmingly negative and destructive.
The messaging consists of common themes that recur over and over in 
various forms. One central theme is a fierce opposition against government, especially so called “big government.” This reappears in various sub-forms 
as well, such as rage against bureaucracy, regulations, Washington, D.C., 
the IRS, the Environmental Protection Agency, and federal politicians.
It is really quite remarkable that a major political party could get away with so shamelessly trashing our very own government and our very own nation.
But yet, there it is.
They rant and rave about how our nation is a disaster, out of control, a huge
mess. The government is so far off the rails that it no longer even follows 
the Constitution of the United States! Absurd, of course. But wildly popular.
Another big theme is fear and victimization. You had better watch out 
because government is gonna getcha! “They,” whoever that may be, are 
about to take away your rights. Your freedom is about to disappear. Your 
religious liberties will be stripped away. You won’t be able to make your own healthcare decisions. Free choice will be gone. Your children will suffer. You
 are under a big threat. Even though you are just an innocent person 
minding your own business, you are about to be victimized!
Another common theme is the fear of foreigners, or outsiders. We must 
protect our own in-group from the vague and mysterious threats posed by 
those who are a little bit different from us. The particular targeted group 
changes with the times, but it has included Muslims, illegal immigrants, 
Syrian refugees, Russia, China, Mexican immigrants and communists. But 
the concept remains the same.
And, of course, someone from the Democratic Party, or some “liberal,” is to 
blame for all of this wreckage. Demonizing a specific target is powerful. If a Democrat is in the White House, then the President becomes the favorite 
bullseye. Otherwise the demon is some other Democratic politician, 
typically from Congress.
But why would a Democrat want to take away people’s rights throughout the nation? This would mean that the Democrat would also be taking away their
own rights, and also the rights of their constituents. Why in the world would
 they do that? Well, of course, this makes no sense whatsoever. But it 
doesn’t need to make any sense. It just needs to instill fear, anger, and 
discontent.
Now, a political platform comprised of nothing more than hate and anger is 
not a very viable or sustainable political strategy, especially for a national 
party like the Republican Party. It may be a good strategy for a specific 
election or an isolated situation, but an entire political party cannot endure based upon only a message of outrage and opposition.
So why would the Republican Party devise such a strategy that has no hope of success? Well, it turns out that they did not devise this strategy. In fact, it’s 
not even a strategy at all. It emerged not as a result of a grand Republican 
master plan, but rather, it emerged as a result of market economics.
The extremist right-wing network of Fox News and talk radio was not created by politicians, and it is not funded by a political party. It is not supported by 
donations from people seeking political expression. No. It was created for 
one central purpose: to make money.
The founding motivation and the driving force behind all of this propaganda 
of hate and anger that is being disseminated throughout our society is 
nothing more than the almighty dollar. The profit motive. It is a business. 
Pure and simple.
And, as it turns out, the business of peddling hate and anger is a fantastically profitable one at that.
Rush Limbaugh raked-in $80 million for himself in 2015 alone. Sean Hannity was paid $30 million. Glenn Beck is personally worth over $100 million. Bill O’Reilly’s television show, “The O’Reilly Factor,” generates over $100 million per year in advertising revenue.
If these front-men are making this much money, well then you know that their corporate masters are making even more.
Fox News has dominated the ratings as the number one cable news channel for the last 14 years and reportedly earns over $1 billion in profits annually, making 
it a golden goose in the overall Fox corporate empire. Fox itself is one of the most valuable brands in the world with sales of over $13 billion. And the tycoon behind Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, is personally worth $12 billion.
This is Big Business.
It is no joke. We are not talking about some folks just yearning to express 
their opinions. No. This operation is not being driven by politics or by a 
desire to promulgate political viewpoints. No. This operation is being driven 
by money. Big Money. This is what it’s all about.
Of course, politics is involved as well. No doubt. The content spewed by 
this media network is highly political in nature and it champions right-wing 
issues, right-wing politicians, and the right-wing Republican Party. This is no accident. In fact, it makes perfect sense when viewed through an economic perspective.
Corporate profits are greatly impacted by governmental policies. 
Corporations, therefore, desire the government to be controlled by 
whichever political party is the most favorable to corporate profits. And this, 
of course, is the Republican Party. So it makes perfect sense that this 
extremist media network would use its megaphone to attempt to influence 
politics by urging support for the right-wing Republican Party.
Interestingly, the Fox media empire that is dominated by the tycoon Rupert Murdoch is shockingly reminiscent of the media empire from around 1900 
that was dominated by the tycoon William Randolph Hearst.
Mr. Hearst was notorious for printing false information in his media network 
of newspapers in order to influence public opinion and politics. Instead of 
using his vast media network to objectively and fairly report news and 
disseminate information, Mr. Hearst used his media network as an 
instrument of power by controlling the content and distorting the truth in 
order to manipulate public opinion for his own benefit.
So we have seen this playbook before. One would think that we would now 
be savvy enough to prevent this terrible abuse from happening again. But apparently not. It is astonishing that Mr. Murdoch has been able to recreate 
right before our very eyes the abusive practices pioneered by Mr. Hearst 
over one hundred years ago.
Today, the bottom line is money. Politics is secondary. While the media content is highly political, the purpose behind influencing politics is to serve the primary objective of protecting the big profits.
Just think what would happen if the Republican Party suddenly proposed a 
tax on excessive corporate media profits. This right-wing network would shift away from the Republican Party so fast your head would spin. Bill O’Reilly would 
be sporting tie-dyes and Birkenstocks.
Corporate profits is what led to the creation and expansion of this extremist
 right-wing media network. And it is indeed a cozy little business model. The network builds an audience by appealing to people’s fear, insecurity, and 
anger, and simultaneously directs its audience to support the right-wing 
political party that best protects the network’s own profits.
It’s like a rigged game. The content disseminated over the network 
masquerades as being objective and informative, but in reality the content 
has instead been carefully designed to promote the network’s own business interests.
Pretty nifty.
What is best for corporate profits, however, is not necessarily best for a 
democratic society.
From a political perspective, it is certainly not healthy to incite anger and 
hate within a nation’s own population. And it is not very wise to inflame 
hostility and rage against a nation’s own government. From a business 
perspective, sure, it is perfectly understandable because a corporation can 
exploit this and profit handsomely from it. But from a political perspective of 
creating a cohesive society and maintaining peace and harmony among the population, this is disastrous.
Responsible politicians certainly know better and would never endorse any enterprise seeking to inflame anger and hostility in the population. A true 
political leader would not participate in any such conduct, but instead would 
speak out against it. A true political leader would not condone the 
dissemination of false and misleading information, but instead would seek 
to correct it with accuracy. A true political leader would not sacrifice unity in 
society in order to capture a few easy votes, but instead would uphold his 
or her principles and integrity even at the risk of losing votes.
That is genuine political leadership. Doing what is best for society, even in 
the face of adversity.
But politicians in the Republican Party could not resist. The extremist right-
wing network of Fox News and talk radio had built up an audience that 
could easily be exploited for political support. Even though the extremist 
media network was fomenting anger and hatred that is disastrous for society overall, the network could also be used to deliver political votes to 
Republican politicians.
And there it was. The Republican Party had made a deal with the devil.
An unholy alliance was formed. The Republican Party would allow the 
extremist right-wing network to promulgate its destructive propaganda 
throughout society in order to generate its enormous profits, and in 
exchange, the network would direct its audience to vote for the Republican 
Party.
The allure of easy votes was too great. Exercising true leadership was too 
difficult.
So for years and years, the extremist right-wing media network spewed out 
content full of anger, hate, and division. And Republican politicians jumped 
on the bandwagon. They began preaching the same destructive messages 
and appearing on the extremist right-wing network all across the nation.
And guess what? It worked.
The base of the Republican Party grew more and more angry. Their 
resentment against our very own government grew ever greater. Their 
sense of victimization became ever more acute. Their fury at the 
establishment boiled over.
And then, predictably, it backfired.
The base of the Republican Party became a Frankenstein. It became 
radicalized into an extreme movement that turned against the established 
order, including the leadership of the Republican Party itself. It has become a monster of its own that is now roaming the countryside and terrorizing the very political party that created it.
This is the reason behind the rise of candidates like Donald Trump and Ted 
Cruz. The Republican Party establishment despises these candidates, but 
the Party has no idea how to slay these dragons.
These candidates now pose the enormous threat of potentially causing a 
giant split within the Party that could lead to the utter destruction of the entire Republican Party itself.
It is a remarkable story.
The Republican Party has enjoyed its dance with the devil. Now it must pay 
the piper.


a) SCALIA'S WARNING!


It is a rare and sobering thing to see a roomful of people 
rendered speechless, as if punched in the solar plexus by a 
proposition so terrible and true that it leaves them seeing stars. I
saw it happen in the summer of 2015 when I joined a group of attorneys, scholars, and government officials in Colorado for a 
seminar on the constitutional doctrine of the separation of 
powers.

Our teacher was none other than Supreme Court justice Antonin
Scalia. “You are not going to learn anything that will make you 
any money,” he told us as we convened. “You’re here to be good lawyers. You’re here to be learned in the law.”

After talk of Montesquieu and Madison, Hamilton and
Tocqueville, we got down to cases: Supreme Court cases, to be
exact, each one relating to the relationship between freedom
and the structural constitution. But when we got to U.S. v. 
Windsor, the controversial 2013 case in which a 5-4 majority
struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the room
tensed. Justice Scalia had written a blistering dissent in the case,
taking the majority to task for agreeing to hear the matter in the
first place. “The Court is eager—hungry—to tell everyone its
view of the legal question at the heart of this case,” he had
written.
Standing in the way is an obstacle, a technicality of little
interest to anyone but the people of We the People, who 
created it as a barrier against judges’ intrusion into their lives. 
They gave judges, in Article III, only the “judicial Power,” a power 
to decide not abstract questions but real, concrete “Cases” and “Controversies.” Yet the plaintiff and the Government agree 
entirely on what should happen in this lawsuit. They agree that 
the court below got it right; and they agreed in the court below 
that the court below that one got it right as well. What, then, are 
we doing here?
It was a good question. The procedural history of the case was
utterly bizarre. President Obama had instructed the Department
of Justice not to defend DOMA from constitutional challenges
because he believed that the statute was unconstitutional. Yet at
the same time, the president had instructed other executive
agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service, to continue
enforcing DOMA’s provisions. It was at this point that a small
group within the House of Representatives—the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group, or BLAG—filed an amicus brief attempting to
defend the constitutionality of the law.

According to the majority, this brief enabled the BLAG to adopt
the very cause the executive branch had abandoned on the
steps of the courthouse. It was an unprecedented procedural
move that enabled the majority to inject the high court into a
volatile and sensitive political debate. But, Scalia assured the
seminar’s participants, we need not worry too much about the
long-term implications of Windsor. The holding was of limited precedential value. The majority got what it wanted—it killed
DOMA—and there was little by way of a rule of law that emerged from the case.

From the back of the room, I asked Justice Scalia whether, notwithstanding Windsor’s limited precedential value, the threat
to the separation of powers from “executive non-enforcement”
had grown critical. In the wake of Windsor, had it become easier
for the president not only to decline to defend laws that he found objectionable, but to decline to enforce laws that he found objectionable? It is, after all, one thing for the president to refuse to defend a law because he considers it unconstitutional. It is quite another for the president to refuse to enforce a law because he considers it bad policy—which is precisely what President Obama has tried to do with respect to federal immigration and drug law. Was there any basis, I asked, upon which the Supreme Court might rule on
the constitutionality of executive non-enforcement?
It all depends on Congress, Justice Scalia responded—and “if
Congress doesn’t do its job and challenge the president,” he said, “what we have is a failed democracy.” The blow landed. The room fell silent. The moderator called for a break.

Justice Scalia’s remark has haunted me since last August. One’s
blood runs cold at the thought that the American experiment
might well be failing. And with Antonin Scalia’s sudden passing
last month, one wonders whether one of the republic’s last lines
of defense, the separation-of-powers doctrine, will be overcome
by a Court that is growing increasingly unmoored from the text
of the Constitution. For the originalism he espoused is more than just an interpretive method: it is a philosophy of government. And
Justice Scalia was one of its leading proponents, practitioners,
and defenders.

Originalism is preoccupied with what it means to live in a
government of laws and not of men. It asks who, precisely, is
doing the governing and by what constitutional authority. The Constitution is the most fundamental of our laws. It is also a fundamental law over which the governed exert substantial
control. It was framed in a closed room in Philadelphia, but it was ratified by We the People and has been amended 27 times. In
this important respect, We the People are the architects of the
frame of government within which we live. Through its political branches, we create the laws by which we are ruled. In the United States, constitutional government is the very essence of self-government.
If our frame of government has a fundamental design principle, 
it is the separation of powers. Dividing power among three 
separate branches ensures that the various forms of government authority (legislative, executive, and judicial) cannot be 
accumulated in either a single person or in a group of people, 
the very essence of tyranny. Checks and balances support the 
structural constitution by enabling each branch to guard its 
powers against encroachments by the other branches. As James Madison explained in Federalist48, the legislative branch, whose powers are “less susceptible of precise limits” than the others, cannot draw “all power into its impetuous vortex” because it is restrained by the executive. The executive, in turn, is restrained by the 
legislative branch, which holds the power of the purse. And the judiciary? It is, according to Alexander Hamilton in Federalist 78, 
to act as “an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter 
within the limits assigned to their authority.”

To Hamilton, the legislature posed the greatest threat to liberty
while the judiciary was “the least dangerous” branch. For this reason, he wrote:
The complete independence of the courts of justice is
peculiarly essential in a limited Constitution. By a limited 
Constitution, I understand one which contains certain specified exceptions to the legislative authority; such, for instance, as that 
it shall pass no bills of attainder, no ex-post facto laws, and the 
like. Limitations of this kind can be preserved in practice no 
other way than through the medium of courts of justice, whose 
duty it must be to declare all acts contrary to the manifest tenor of the Constitution void….It is not otherwise to be supposed, that the Constitution could intend to enable the representatives of the people to substitute their WILL to that of their constituents.
Nor, for that matter, could judges substitute their will for the act
of judging—that is, interpreting the laws—without encroaching
upon the lawmaking function.
The trouble, of course, is that judges may be tempted to construe the law not as it is, but as they wish it to be. The interpretive
enterprise invites abuses of discretion, and so the manner in
which judges decide cases is essential to preserving the
separation of powers. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the
courts,” Hamilton wrote, “it is indispensable that [judges] should
be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to
define and point out their duty in every particular case that
comes before them.”
As a judicial philosophy, originalism seeks to bind judges to
strict rules of interpretation. As a philosophy of government, it privileges the will of the people over the will of individual judges
on the ground that there is no higher expression of the popular will than the text of the Constitution itself. To the originalist, this text should not be interpreted in light of changing times and changing circumstances. Rather, it should be interpreted in accordance with the original meaning of the text.
Originalism is committed to the proposition that the Constitution means what it says and says what it meant when it was written.
The Constitution is neither a dead letter nor a living document.
It is an enduring frame of government. It is the function of the
judge to recover, interpret, and apply the original meaning of
the text of the Constitution no matter what novel situations
arise. This is no semantic game. It is an enterprise that cuts to
the very essence of political legitimacy.

As Justice Scalia explained in Reading the Law,
Originalism is the only approach to text that is compatible with democracy. When government-adopted texts are given a new meaning, the law is changed; and changing a written law, like adopting written law in the first place, is the function of the first two branches of government—elected legislators and (in the 
case of authorized prescriptions by the executive branch 
elected executive officials and their delegates.
The approach is not perfect, but it offers something that no other interpretive approach can offer: a fixed criterion by which to
interpret laws and judge cases.
The only alternative to this approach is to invite judges to rule
us—and in the realm of equal-protection jurisprudence, they do.
Scalia once called the area “an embarrassment to teach,” filled
with decisions “tied together by threads of social preference and predisposition.”2 This is particularly evident, Scalia wrote, in the
Court’s affirmative-action jurisprudence, where judges effectively designate “debtor races” and “creditor races” in the interest of restorative justice. From college admissions to government
contracts, the courts have allowed entire groups of people to
be treated differently on the sole basis of their race. Here,
judges have created an Orwellian line of decisions that tortures
the very notion of equal protection of laws in order to secure
preferred societal outcomes. Their logic is, in essence, this: All
people are entitled to equal protection, but some groups are
entitled to protection that is more equal than others.
It is by constitutional design that federal judges are neither representative of nor accountable to the electorate. The political appointment of life-tenured judges is meant to preserve the independence of the judiciary from the political branches, not to render the federal judiciary a governing committee in black robes. Originalism demands that judges be mindful of this. It demands
judicial restraint because the integrity of the structural
constitution can be maintained only by the scrupulous
preservation of the separation of powers. A flexible approach to
the separation of powers is as hazardous to liberty as a flexible approach to the structure of a house is to the safety of its inhabitants.

The very text of the Constitution carves out a limited role for the federal judiciary. Article III confers upon it jurisdiction over cases
or controversies—that is, authority to provide injured parties with judicial remedies against the person or authority responsible. Sometimes, in the course of exercising this power, the Court must determine the constitutionality of a law. Oftentimes the Court
does this only incidentally. For example, in Marbury v. Madison,
which recognized the very power of judicial review essential to Hamilton’s characterization of the judicial branch, the question of whether Congress could pass a law that violated the Constitution was secondary to the question of whether the plaintiff, William
Marbury, had a right to the particular court order he sought.
The Constitution does not confer upon the federal judiciary a free-roaming charter to police the executive and legislative branches. The judiciary is neither a babysitter to the president nor a homework checker to Congress. The Constitution’s grant of power to the
courts is modest and determinate: It grants them the authority to decide cases or controversies that exist only when litigants possess “standing” to make the claim that they have been harmed.

Some injuries, however, are neither direct nor personal. A law that allows people to eat their pets, for example, may strike people as morally repugnant, but moral repugnance does not give rise to standing no matter how irked the claimant is. To these injuries,
the separation of powers offers a different remedy: participation
in the political process. Other injuries may arise because the Constitution is insufficient to the task, which is inevitable in a
system of limited government. In these cases, the separation of
powers demands that the people alter the text of the
Constitution by amendment, not the judiciary by interpretive fiat.

Standing is thus a powerful doctrine that restricts the power of
judges to the limits of their constitutional authority. However,
when judges ride over the standing requirement in cases such as Windsor, they breach the separation of powers. And as judges
expand the courts’ power to decide general questions of law as opposed to cases or controversies, they also alter the delicate equilibrium of federal power, arrogating unto themselves the
authority to decide matters properly left to the political branches.

Judicial restraint cuts all ways, though. The standing doctrine may well prevent the Supreme Court from deciding the merits of a current challenge to President Obama’s refusal to enforce federal
immigration law. In United States v. Texas, which the Supreme
Court will likely decide this spring, 26 states are challenging the constitutionality of the president’s proposed deferred-action
program. The program would allow more than 4 million illegal immigrants to remain in the country and work here legally. The
Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that of the 26 claimants, at
least one—the state of Texas—had standing because it
demonstrated it would have to issue drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants within the state at a financial loss. The court barred
the president from implementing his policy pending the final disposition of the case. The executive branch, the same branch
that played fast and loose with the doctrine of standing in
Windsor, has appealed the Fifth Circuit’s ruling on the ground
that the claimants lack standing.

It is unclear how the Court will rule on the standing question in
U.S. v. Texas, but in a sense it does not matter. The states should
not be in this alone. The Constitution provides clear recourse in
such a situation: Congress must rouse itself and defend its
legislative authority against nullification by the executive. History reveals the frailty of the executive branch whenever Congress
calls it to task. It was Congress, not the president, that designed
and implemented Radical Reconstruction in the post-bellum
South. And it was Congress, not the courts, that brought the
Nixon administration to its knees during the Watergate scandal. Congress has the constitutional authority to sue the president
over his refusal to uphold his responsibility under the
Constitution’s Article II to take care that the laws of the United
States be faithfully executed—but Congress is not exercising that authority.

This is why Justice Scalia’s lifework remains so vitally important.
By abdicating its constitutional interest in defending its laws,
Congress is also abdicating its political responsibility to the
people who elected its members. And as the electorate grows increasingly frustrated with the ineffectuality of Congress, it
grows more acquiescent in allowing courts to fill the vacuum.
Political leaders are taken off the hook, and judges are allowed
greater freedom to decide cases not in accordance with the text
of the law but in accordance with the discretion of the judge.
Judicial power is transformed into something quasi-legislative.

This is, I believe, what Justice Scalia meant when he said, “If
Congress doesn’t do its job and challenge the president, what
we have is a failed democracy.”

With Justice Scalia’s passing during an election year, the nation
finds itself face to face with a choice of historic proportions. The
Senate is unlikely to approve a successor to Scalia until after the election; and when it does, that justice will likely shift the
balance of ideological power on the deeply divided court. Not
since 1788 has the nation faced an election in which all three
branches of government were on the line. Voters will decide who controls the presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court. If
ever there was a time for a renewed commitment to original
principles, it is now. Otherwise, Antonin Scalia’s warning will
become prophecy, and we will have a failed democracy.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

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