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This from one of my children: "Last night started with a bizarre and overly Christian benediction that turned into an even more bizarre speech touting Trump. Aside from Melania's speech, which literally did
plagiarize portions of Michelle Obama's 2008 speech, (watch them side by side online)
the rest of the evening was a rather pessimistic tone that the bogey man is going to get us.
Now- this is America and I'm glad we can speak about Jesus all we won't and don't criticize it,
But if I were there as part of the RJC or AIPAC, you would have lost me so I don't think
It was the appropriate venue. Melania's speech, I couldn't care less who she plagiarized or didn't - non issue.
The pessimism and brimstone was also fodder for the crowd in the room so I get it.
That said, I do not think Trump has pivoted and is a serious candidate. He isn't taking the race seriously and I don't think he'll take the job seriously. It's one more ego trophy for his shelf. I don't care that he is not a policy wonk. I actually want a president who hasn't formed opinions but rather absorbs the advice of others and makes wise decisions. To date he has not shown he can surround himself with wise advisers and if he has he isn't listening so it's a moot point.
Hillary is a disaster too, so we choose from Scylla and Charybdis. I'll choose Johnson.
Now lots can change between now and Nov. but that's where I am now.
It's sad this is what I am leaving my child. ".
As for myself, I too thought about last night's RNC and the theme was obviously about what Trump was going to do - "Save America Again," "Make America Safe Again."
I do not believe any one person can accomplish these desires for us but I do believe a single person can set the tone. cause people to come together, feel better about themselves and their prospects and then proceed to accomplish significant things. It is called leadership.
Many people thought Obama had leadership ability and though I did not, I did hope he had it because our nation needed it then and frankly, any nation and people always need competent leadership.
With Trump I feel like what Pelosi said. Let's elect him and then find out what we have. After all we did it with Obama. In fact we really never know because, in the final analysis, so many things, like 9/11, can occur and change the entire direction of where a leader might wish to take us. Electing politicians is always a roll of the dice.
In the case of Trump, I am convinced he cares about trying to get America back on track and playing its rightful role and will surround himself with competent clear headed people. Whether he listens remains to be seen. In the case of Obama, he stacked his deck from the git go with AK Nodders and sycophants.Trump's achievements far exceed anything Obama had going for him when he campaigned. Obama's Nobel Peace Prize was an over reach and sham and millions of dead and hopeless refugees, fleeing tyranny and destruction in their country, attests to this fact. The rise of ISIS and their butchery will mark his and Hillary's headstones forever and will remain their true epitaph.
As I have said before, I am willing to roll the dice with Trump versus Hillary because a vote for anyone else is a vote for Mrs. Bhengazi.
As for Mrs. Trump's plagiarizing I can think of a lot better women from whom to plagiarize like Ayn Rand, Bess Truman or Barbara Bush et al. and she gave her speech in a charming manner.
I am posting three WSJ articles . The one by Seib, I believe, misses the fact that Trump will be in his mid 70's should he be elected and is not a politician nor likely to continue his remaining life as one. I do not fear his taking over the Republican party. Furthermore, the shaking up by Trump was needed.
As for Stephens and McGurn, I understand where both are coming from and though I believe Bret is correct, I have to make a choice and am going to punt with Trump because I fear Hillary far more nor do I want her appointing more Ginsburg's.
As for Brett asking when did America's character go into decline, I suggest probably during the Viet Nam period. When the protective press and media finally allowed the truth about JFK's personal life to become known, the rapidity of the decline might have been accelerated and certainly Clinton and Nixon did noting to impede the decline. The character of the top political leadership casts a shadow but America's character decline also began with the embrace of socialism and Democrat concepts and legislation pertaining to welfare and our embrace of entitlements..
Though all well intended, it resulted in the break down of the family, the discipline of our youth, rejection of God, a tolerance for lousy education and watered down curricula and the rest is history.
Finally and most importantly, I believe it is way past time to end the Clinton dynasty. (See 1, 1a and 1b below.)
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From a very dear friend and fellow memo reader: "Atlanta's mayor and chief met yesterday for 2 hours in a closed session with local protesters and listened to their grievances and demands.
One demand was to terminate Atlanta Police training with "Apartheid Israel". See
The mayor flatly rejected this demand.
Go to about minute 21:30. The mayor opposes the demand to cut off relations with Israel Police. https://www.facebook.com/
Also note that another demand was to "divest" money from the police budget for other purposes. That was rejected as well. However, it is clear the BDS has penetrated local politics and it's language is being used not only against Israel.
Thought you'd want to know."
My comments:
Those behind the BDS movement are anarchists and share their grievances with a variety of other fascist groups and are funded by those who hate Israel, hate America and want to see this nation and its allies destroyed. They work behind the scene in subtle ways.
If you think imposing Sharia Law is not their ultimate goal you are naive. As my friends reveals these are people who are penetrating our society while we sleep. (See 2 below.)
I have maintained for years that losing the Viet Nam War and the anti-authority protests during and after that war made it acceptable for America to lose and not win. This has been our modus operandi ever since and this is why we must never allow politicians and PC"ism to dictate our military strategy if we ever go to war again. This was Lt. Gen Flynn's message last night and he could not be more correct.
This is from a long time friend and fellow memo reader: "Dick These Are Your Words:
"I have warned for over a year that Sharia Law is coming our way. Sharia law is a tribal and brutal method by which people are judged.. One day, if not stopped, our own children and grandchildren will be subject to its dictates".
"Dick, you should take a trip up the Detroit, go visit the towns of Dearborn and Hamtramck, both are totally under Sharia Law. Christians and Jews ran. Yes it is already here, in the USA. Allowed by the Obama presidency!
Not a word is being said! T----"
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Iran to go nuclear earlier? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1) Republicans Face a Fundamental Question as Donald Trump Remakes Party
Republicans at their national convention face a central issue: Is the GOP in the midst of a long-term identity change?
By GERALD F. SEIB
CLEVELAND—Republicans gathered here for their national convention face a host of questions, but the fundamental one is this: Is Donald Trump merely renting the Republican Party, or has he now taken ownership of it?
The answer will determine not merely how Republicans emerge from their Cleveland gathering this week, but whether their party is in the midst of a fundamental, long-term identity change.
This uncertainty hangs over the convention because Mr. Trump is so different from past party leaders, stylistically and substantively, that only two explanations for his rise are possible.
The first is that he represents an aberration—someone who secured the nomination by a fluke born of an acutely angry political mood and a strange primary season in which more mainstream candidates unwittingly opened the way for him by slicing up one another. If that’s the case, Mr. Trump has merely borrowed a party apparatus that still belongs to more conventional leaders.
The second potential explanation has more profound implications. It is that Mr. Trump arrived on the scene at a time when the very character of the Republican Party was being transformed, and he is the agent who crystallized the change. It seems unlikely that he caused such a transformation in just a few months’ time, and more likely that he was there to capture it.
The second explanation is the one advanced by Mr. Trump’s team. “He has changed the face of the Republican Party,” much as Ronald Reagan did a generation ago, Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort said Monday at a Bloomberg News breakfast.
Long term, of course, the answer will be determined in large measure by whether Mr. Trump wins or loses in November. For now, though, there’s little doubt that the party that will nominate Mr. Trump on Thursday night is decidedly different from earlier versions that picked other kinds of standard bearers.
In six of their last nine conventions, Republicans gathered to nominate someone named Bush to be either president or vice president. This time, none of the Bush political heavy hitters will be in sight. Nor, for that matter, will past nominees named Romney or McCain.
More substantively, the Republican Party of Donald Trump is one that is openly sparring with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It has moved away from the party’s long-held beliefs on free trade agreements and immigration. It is not in favor of reining in Social Security and Medicare benefits in pursuit of more fiscal balance. It thinks the biggest foreign-policy gamble by the last Republican president, a war in Iraq, was a horrible failure.
Accumulated results from all Wall Street Journal/NBC News polling done in the first half of 2016 show Americans with no college education now make up a larger share of Republicans than of Democrats. Some 20% of self-identified Republicans are from rural areas, compared with just 11% of Democrats. Almost nine in 10 of those who call themselves Republicans are whites, vs. the 57% of self-identified Democrats.These aren’t small departures, and they reflect a party not just changing its views but changing its face. Around the country, the Republicans now constitute more of a populist party and less a traditionally conservative one.
There was a time, in the decades after Franklin Roosevelt created a Democratic Party in his own image, when working-class whites in rural America were heavily Democratic—indeed, were a backbone of the Democratic Party. Now that situation has been reversed.
Mr. Trump didn’t create this new, populist face of the Republican Party. Instead, it has been evolving—slowly, steadily, in ways noticed but not fully appreciated—for the past two decades. But it is Mr. Trump who has capitalized upon it. He speaks to it.
Yet there’s still another part of the Republican Party that Mr. Trump speaks to less, and where his nomination is met with feelings ranging from discomfort to derision.
This part of the party is made up of free-market conservatives who believe the open movement of people and goods boosts the economy for all; national-security hawks who think the world slides toward chaos when the U.S. isn’t willing to intervene abroad; fiscal hawks who think it is dangerous to avoid curbing entitlement programs; and a business community that believes the kind of trade war with China and Mexico that Mr. Trump seems to threaten would be catastrophic.
This coalition has, in fact, formed the core of the party for decades. It won’t prevail in Cleveland this week—though Mr. Trump’s choice of Indiana Gov. Mike Pence as his running mate represents a noteworthy nod toward it.
The broad question facing Republicans transcends personalities, even a personality as large as Mr. Trump’s: Is what it means to be a Republican changing this week here on the shores of Lake Erie?
1a) The Better Angels of Our Nature
What’s at stake in Cleveland is the identity of the GOP, not the next president.
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES/GALLO IMAGES
The Republican Party came to presidential life under the leadership of a man who concluded his first inaugural address as follows:
“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
This week, the same party will nominate as its presidential candidate a man who on Saturday introduced his running mate as follows:
“The turnaround and the strength of Indiana has been incredible, and I learned that when I campaigned there. And I learned that when I won that state in a landslide. And I learned that when Gov. Pence, under tremendous pressure from establishment people, endorsed somebody else, but it was more of an endorsement for me, if you remember. He talked about Trump, then he talked about Ted—who’s a good guy, by the way, who’s going to be speaking at the convention, Ted Cruz, good guy—but he talked about Trump, Ted, then he went back to Trump. I said, ‘who did he endorse?’ ”
I cite these two passages to discuss two subjects that once were dear to conservative hearts: national decline and personal character. Many conservatives believe the subjects are one and the same.
When did the decline of American character begin? Maybe it was between July 1969, when two Americans walked on the moon, and a Saturday that August, when 400,000 Americans rolled in the mud at Woodstock. Maybe it was when that year’s commencement speaker at Wellesley said it was the mission of her generation to search “for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” Maybe it happened the night of January 14, 1970, when Leonard and Felicia Bernstein held a soiree for the Black Panthers, inaugurating the era of radical chic.
Or maybe the date came later, when American culture sanctioned the idea that self-actualization should count for more than your children’s emotional health. Or when bragging ceased to be considered uncouth, and ignorance ceased to be embarrassing, and lying ceased to be shameful, and the habits of understatement gave way to ever more conspicuous displays of wealth, desire, feelings, skin.
Whenever. Whatever. Pick your date and trend. Not everything that happened to the American character in the past 50 years is bad—we are more tolerant, more empathetic and more relaxed—but much of it undoubtedly is. If Republicans are going to spend the next few days talking about making America great again, shouldn’t part of that discussion also be about making Americans great again—or, at very least, making us better?
We could use that discussion right now. Especially after Baton Rouge and Dallas, what better time for the GOP to invoke the better angels of our nature? But the party can’t do that, because in nominating Donald Trump it is elevating a man whose character and candidacy are the antithesis of the better angels.
Saying you aren’t worried about global warming is politically incorrect. Making fun of physically disabled reporters is called being a creep.From its beginning, the impulses that have dominated Mr. Trump’s candidacy are the insult, the put-down, the slander, the threat, the refusal to apologize. These have poured out of him in such profusion and at such velocity that they have degraded Republicans simply by accustoming us to them. Mr. Trump’s apologists praise this as a refreshing burst of political incorrectness, but that just betrays an ignorance of what it means to be politically incorrect.
But that isn’t all we’ve grown used to. Mr. Trump doesn’t merely lie, as Hillary Clintondoes. His statements are postmodern, in that they have no connection to a foundational concept of truth. Nor is Mr. Trump’s political ignorance a matter of not knowing the finer points of this or that policy. In a recent meeting with Republican members of Congress, he promised to protect Articles I through XII of the Constitution. The Constitution has a grand total of seven Articles.
This would be the Constitution he would be sworn, as president, to preserve, protect and defend. That presumes knowing it.
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This column will elicit the usual mental wheezing from the True Believing Trumpsters, whose skins are as thin as their candidate’s, along with the slightly better rebuttal that the presumptive GOP nominee is the lesser of two evils. That’s pure conjecture, based on the prayer that Mr. Trump will soon transform into a statesman. People who believe this also kiss frogs.
But that’s beside the point. What’s at stake in Cleveland this week isn’t the identity of the next president. It’s the identity of the GOP: its ideas, its leaders, its followers. Above all, its character.
For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Fellow conservatives: the same goes for your political party.
1b)The Case for Donald Trump
THE ALTERNATIVE IS HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON
Hillary Clinton campaigning in Annandale, Va., July 14. PHOTO: BLOOMBERG NEWS
This is the reality of choice in a two-party democracy. Still, many have a hard time accepting it. So even as Mr. Trump handily dispatched 16 more-experienced rivals, his shortcomings and unfitness for office have become a staple of conservative fare.
Yes, Mr. Trump elevates insult over argument. Yes, he is vague and contradictory about the details of his own proposals. And yes, he often speaks aloud before thinking things through. It’s all fair game.
Even so, in this election Mr. Trump is not running against himself. Though you might not know it from much of the commentary and coverage, he is running against Mrs. Clinton.
On so many issues—free trade, the claim that Mexico will pay for a border wall, his suspiciously recent embrace of the pro-life cause—Mr. Trump gives reasons for pause. But he still isn’t Mrs. Clinton. That’s crucial, because much of the argument for keeping Mr. Trump out of the Oval Office at all costs requires glossing over the damage a second Clinton presidency would do.
Start with the economy. There is zero reason to believe a Clinton administration would be any improvement over the past eight years, from taxes and spending and regulation to ObamaCare. If elected, moreover, Mrs. Clinton would be working with a Democratic Party that has been pulled sharply left by Bernie Sanders.
Mrs. Clinton’s flip-flop on the Trans-Pacific Partnership is illuminating. As PresidentObama’s secretary of state, she waxed enthusiastic. But when it came time to take her stand as a presidential candidate, she folded. Mr. Trump has made his own protectionist noises, but if this same trade agreement had been negotiated by a Trump White House, who doubts that he would be telling us what a great deal it was for American workers?
Or what about social issues? Mrs. Clinton has loudly repudiated the moderating language her husband ran on in 1992, notably on abortion. In sharp contrast, she is the candidate who touts the Planned Parenthood view of human life, who sees nothing wrong with forcing nuns to provide employees with contraceptives, and who supports the Obama administration’s bid to compel K-through-12 public schools to open girls’ bathrooms to males who identify as female.
In short, Mrs. Clinton is the culture war on steroids.
Which leaves foreign affairs. Here again, the initiatives where she was front-and-center do not inspire confidence: the Russian reset and Benghazi. More to the point, while she now apologizes for her 2002 vote to authorize the use of military force in Iraq, what she ought to be apologizing for is her admission that her 2007 opposition to the surge in Iraq was dictated not by any military concerns but because she was worried about facing antiwar candidate Barack Obama in the Iowa Democratic primary.
Nor is the case against Mrs. Clinton limited to policy. It’s as much about personnel, which goes much further than the activist nominees she would almost certainly nominate for the Supreme Court.Today this same woman supports the nuclear deal with Tehran and offers an Islamic State strategy that sounds tough but is not materially different from Mr. Obama’s. This is the “hawk” we’re always hearing about?
When presidents enter office, they bring with them about 6,000 people. From the head of the Environmental Protection Agency and White House assistants down to the lowliest Justice Department lawyer, Mrs. Clinton would fill her government with people who get up each day looking to tax, spend, regulate—and use the federal government to stomp on anyone in their way.
At a time when so much of American “law”—from the Health and Human Service’s contraceptive mandate, to the Education Department’s “Dear Colleague” letters on transgender policy, to the National Labor Relations Board’s prosecution of Boeing for opening a new plant in South Carolina instead of in Washington state—is decided by faceless federal bureaucrats, Mrs. Clinton would stuff these federal agencies from top to bottom with Lois Lerners and Elizabeth Warrens.
Welcome to 21st-century American liberalism, which no longer even pretends to produce results. Whatever the shortcomings of Mr. Trump’s people, non-progressives simply do not share the itch to use the government to boss everyone else around. On top of this, an overreaching President Trump would not be excused by the press and would face both Republican and Democratic opposition.
Fair enough to argue that Mr. Trump represents a huge risk. But honesty requires that this risk be weighed against a clear-eyed look at the certainties a Hillary Clinton administration would bring.
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2) Few in the West Are Serious About Islamic Terror
It appears that no matter how many men, women and children Islamists slaughter or maim, few in the West take Islamic terror seriously. This may sound odd, given how much talk there is about terror, but a compelling case can be made for this assertion.
1) The Western elites
The elites of the Western world are far more preoccupied with — and fearful of — global warming than Islamic terror. They regard those who believe that Islamic terror is the greatest threat to civilization as not merely wrong but bigots. They have labeled such people Islamophobes, but of course, there is no such thing as a carbon-phobe or fossil fuel-phobe.
2) Universities
The universities of the Western world not only do not identify Muslim terrorists or Muslim terror organizations as Muslim but also teach students the falsehood that there is no moral difference between Islam and Christianity or Judaism. This has helped leave the West incapable of dealing with the root cause of Islamic terror — some of the teachings and practices of Islam.
Of course, there are vast numbers of peaceful Muslims; and the great majority of American-born Muslims are just like their Protestant, Catholic and Jewish neighbors. But to deny that there is something Muslim about the theology of the Muslims who commit atrocities against "infidels" is to deny one of the most important truths about Islamic terror. And it therefore prevents the only solution to Muslim violence — a reformation of Islam, starting with overthrowing its ideal of a Shariah-based society and then moving to Muslim views of women, of non-Muslims and of Muslims who convert out of Islam.
3) Apple and other Silicon Valley giants
The business giants of the Silicon Valley are united in weakening Western civilization's ability to fight Islamic terror. The heads of Apple, for example, are on the verge of making it impossible for anyone, even Apple itself, to ever be able to open an iPhone. The tech company refused to unlock the iPhone used by Syed Rizwan Farook, the husband of the married team of San Bernardino terrorists, to see whether he had accomplices — even though Farook was not the phone's owner and his employer, San Bernardino County, owned the phone and wanted it unlocked.
In other words, Apple's position is that even if it could prevent another massacre of Americans by unlocking a terrorist's iPhone, it would not do so. The position was supported by virtually every major Silicon Valley company.
In The Wall Street Journal, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, no conservative, recently wrote this about the tech companies and terrorism:
"In the future, phones will be designed to prevent even Apple from opening them, just as the makers of some messaging services have already done. Such a move would be an unprecedented rejection of public authority and a potentially catastrophic blow to public safety. The prospect of criminals and terrorists communicating with phones beyond the reach of government search warrants should send a shiver down the spine of every citizen.
"Google, Facebook, Snapchat and WhatsApp are all working to increase encryption in ways that will make it impossible for the courts and law-enforcement officials to obtain their users' data."
4) Barack Obama
The American government under its president, Barack Obama, does not call Islamic violence "Islamic violence." Rather, it's "violent extremism." This began in 2009, when the Obama administration declared the massacre of 12 soldiers and a civilian by "Allahu akbar"-shouting Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood "workplace violence." It continues. You'd think that after two massacres in Paris, another in Brussels and another in Nice in just the past 18 months, the administration would change its terminology to comport with the facts. But it hasn't. Islamic violence is, to the American government, still "violent extremism."
5) Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president of the United States, has called for the U.S. to accept 65,000 Muslims from the Middle East. That's six times more than President Obama has called for. She says they would be vetted — a laughable notion. How do you "vet" 65,000 Syrians and Iraqis?
Do we ask them, "Do you want to kill Americans?" "Do you favor killing Muslims who leave Islam?" "Will you kill your daughter if she dates a man you don't approve of?" "Do you want Israel to be destroyed?"
6) The European Union
Even more extreme than Hillary Clinton's call for 65,000 Middle Eastern Muslims, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, announced last year that Germany will accept more than 800,000 more Muslims into its borders — and, by extension, to virtually all European Union countries.
There are already about 20 million Muslims in the EU, a significant percentage of whom do not assimilate and reject Western liberal values, and among the latter, a small but significant number are what we call radicalized.
Despite this, the leader of the most powerful country in Europe calls for nearly a million more Muslims from the most radicalized Muslim region in the world — the Middle East.
It is inconceivable that this situation will long endure. Most people in the West do not share its elites' broken moral compass
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3)
SECRET DOCUMENT LIFTS IRAN NUKE CONSTRAINTS, HALVING TIME IT WILL TAKE FOR IRAN TO BUILD A BOMB
The Iranian nuclear agreement keeps getting worse the more we discover about it. Get the ghastly details in my new book The Complete Infidel’s Guide to Iran.
“AP Exclusive: Secret document lifts Iran nuke constraints,” by George Jahn, Associated Press, July 18, 2016:
“AP Exclusive: Secret document lifts Iran nuke constraints,” by George Jahn, Associated Press, July 18, 2016:
VIENNA (AP) — A document obtained by The Associated Press shows that key restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program will ease in slightly more than a decade, halving the time Tehran would need to build a bomb.
The document is the only secret text linked to last year’s agreement between Iran and six foreign powers. It says that after a period between 11 to 13 years, Iran can replace its 5,060 inefficient centrifuges with up to 3,500 advanced machines.
Since those are five times as efficient, the time Iran would need to make a weapon would drop from a year to six months.
Iran says its enrichment is peaceful, but the program could be used for nuclear warheads….
