We are at war with Radical Muslims.Seriously, do you believe Obama, Hillary and /or di Blasio liberal types could have won WW 2? (See 1 below.) They even fear identifying the enemy.
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To prove how much the world has changed due to PC nonsense, which has shredded our national character, this sailor would have been placed in jail. (See 2 below.)
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Sowell and Hanson our predicament. (See 3 and 3a below.)
From my perspective our nation is in a terrible mess on all counts - fiscal, political, domestic and foreign.
We are there not so much due to Republican policies but because Republicans have not stood up forcefully against Democrat, liberal and far left policies which have indebted our nation beyond our ability to maintain a sound currency, a strong military and because Liberal policies have weakened the family structure and led to worker despair and a listless economy etc..
Obviously fighting wars has had its causal effect and losing the war in Viet Nam has left a scar on America's psyche which has proven devastating.
I attended a meeting yesterday at which my Congressional Representative spoke and then took questions. Buddy Carter is a decent man, his speaking ability has vastly improved since he first ran for the office and he even displays a new found sense of humor. He clearly articulated the problems we face and what positions he favors and he understands the numbers which make it virtuously impossible for Republicans to get much done since they will never get Democrat co-operation and have debilitating conflicts even within their own party.
Buddy really had no answers to the questions he was asked and left agreeing with the questions posed. He favors Trump unabashedly, acknowledges D.C is broken and hopes Trump will shake things up and this is where we are it seems in 2016.
You would think Republicans would resort to de-funding various agencies whose actions are wasteful and counterproductive at the very minimal but that would take what they do not have - political guts and will.
Very sad and frightening indeed.
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The mass media are in Hillary's corner and simply edit out commentary tat would be hurtful. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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Life During Wartime
As terrorist attacks become more common, public tolerance for liberal pieties will wane
By Bret Stephens
Long after I returned to the U.S. after living in Jerusalem I kept thinking about soft targets. The peak-hour commuter train that took me from Westchester to Grand Central. The snaking queue outside the security checkpoint at La Guardia Airport. The theater crowds near Times Square.
All of these places were vulnerable and most of them undefended. Why, I wondered, weren’t they being attacked?
This was in late 2004, when Jack Bauer was an American hero and memories of 9/11 were vivid. Yet friends who were nervous about boarding a flight seemed nonchalant about much more plausible threats. Maybe they expected the next attack would be on the same grand scale of 9/11. Maybe they thought the perpetrators would be supervillains in the mold of Osama bin Laden, not fried-chicken vendors like Ahmad Khan Rahimi, the suspected 23rd Street bomber.
Life in Israel had taught me differently. Between January 2002, when I moved to the country, and October 2004, when I left, there were 85 suicide bombings, which took the lives of 543 Israelis. Palestinian gun attacks claimed hundreds of additional victims. In a small country it meant that most everyone knew one of those victims, or knew someone who knew someone.
To this day the bombings are landmarks in my life. March 2002: Cafe Moment, just down the street from my apartment, where my future wife had arranged to meet a friend who canceled at the last minute. Eleven dead. September 2003: Cafe Hillel, another neighborhood hangout, where seven people were murdered, including 20-year-old Nava Applebaum and her father, David, on the eve of her wedding. January 2004: Bus No. 19 on Gaza Street, which I witnessed close-up before the ambulances arrived. Another 11 dead and 13 seriously injured, including Jerusalem Post reporter Erik Schechter.
Living in those circumstances had a strange dichotomous quality. Things were absolutely fine until they absolutely weren’t. Memories of bombings mix with other memories: jogs around the walls of the old city, weekend outings to the beach, the daily grind of editing a newspaper. The sense of normality was achieved through an effort of will and a touch of fatalism. Past a certain point, fearing for your own safety becomes exhausting. You give it up.
But it wasn’t just psychological adjustment that made life livable. Israelis recoiled after each bombing, mourned every victim, then picked themselves up. Cafe Moment reopened weeks after it was destroyed. The army and police could not provide constant security, so every restaurant and supermarket hired an armed guard, every mall and hotel set up metal detectors, and people went out. More than a few attacks were stopped by lone Israeli civilians who prevented massacres through the expedient of a handgun.
As for the Israeli government, after much hesitation it did what governments are supposed to do: It fought. In April 2002 then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon sent Israeli tanks into Jenin, Bethlehem and every other nest of Palestinian terror. He trapped Yasser Arafat in his little palace in Ramallah. He ordered the killing of Hamas’s leaders in Gaza.
All this was done in the teeth of overwhelming international condemnation and the tut-tutting of experts who insisted only a “political solution” could break the “cycle of violence.” Instead, the Israeli military broke that cycle by building a wall and crippling the Palestinians’ capacity to perpetrate violence. In 2002 there were 47 bombings. In 2007 the number had come down to one.
What’s the lesson here for Americans? This past weekend’s terrorist attacks hold at least two. One is that there is a benefit for a society that allows competent and responsible adults to carry guns, like the off-duty police officer who shot the knife-wielding jihadist in St. Cloud, Minn. Another is that there is an equal benefit in the surveillance methods that allowed police in New York and New Jersey to swiftly identify and arrest Mr. Rahimi before his bombing spree took any lives.
These are lessons the political left in this country doesn’t want to hear, lest they unsettle established convictions that weapons can only cause violence, not stop it, and that security is the antithesis of, not a precondition to, civil liberty.
But hear them they will. The eclipse of al Qaeda by Islamic State means the terrorist threat is evolving from elaborately planned spectaculars such as 9/11 or the 2004 Madrid train bombings to hastily improvised and executed blood orgies of the sort we saw this year in Nice and Orlando. As attacks become more frequent and closer to everyday life, public tolerance for liberal pieties will wane. Not least among the casualties of the Palestinian intifada was the Israeli left.
Living in Israel in those crowded years taught me that free people aren’t so easily cowed by terror, and that jihadists are no match for a determined democracy. But it also taught me that democracies rarely muster their full reserves of determination until they’ve been bloodied one time too many.
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2)
Did the Famous Sailor Sexually Assault the Famous Nurse? ByDennis Prager
The most famous American photo of World War II is undoubtedly that of the four Marines planting the American flag on Iwo Jima. The second most famous is probably the legendary photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt's picture of an American sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square in New York City, when people were celebrating Japan's surrender.
The kiss was not, of course, merely a peck on the cheek. If it were, no photo would have been taken. And if one were, no one would have remembered it. The sailor clearly grabbed the nurse. She is leaning backward, bent at the waist; he is holding her up with both hands around her waist.
The photo has been back in the news because the woman, identified as Greta Zimmer Friedman, died on Sept. 8, at age 92. She was 21 when the picture was taken.
The sailor, later identified as George Mendonsa, mistook Friedman's dental assistant uniform for that of a nurse. He later explained that he hugged and kissed her because of his overwhelming gratitude for the work nurses had performed while he was in combat in the Navy, because of his elation over the war ending and because he had had a few drinks. As he put it, when he and Friedman were reunited in 2012 at the spot of their kiss, it was "the excitement of the war bein' over, plus I had a few drinks, so when I saw the nurse I grabbed her, and I kissed her."
Any American who looks at that photo today realizes just how different a time we live in.
If a man were to do that to a woman today, he would likely be charged with sexual assault, found guilty, be ordered to pay a serious sum of money to the woman, be sent to prison, be civilly sued and be labeled a sex offender -- effectively ruining much of his life.
She, on the other hand, would be regarded as victim of sexual assault and labelled a survivor, and would seek psychological counseling.
Living in pre-feminist darkness, Friedman did not see it this way. As her son told the New York Daily News, "My mom always had an appreciation for a feminist viewpoint, and understood the premise that you don't have a right to be intimate with a stranger on the street. ...(But) she didn't assign any bad motives to George in that circumstance, that situation, that time."
One reason might be that she was a Jewish refugee from Hitler's Europe, and, unlike feminists in America, she knew real evil.
Given the context, the act was essentially innocent. Reinforcing its innocence are the facts that the kiss was very brief and Mendonsa's wife can be seen smiling in the background.
But in the feminist age of enlightenment in which we live, when it comes to any act of physical intimacy by a man with a woman, there is no such thing as "context." Unless there is a verbal "yes" accompanying every act by the man, the presumption is that the intimacy was a sexual assault, a form of rape.
Thus, in today's America, George Mendonsa is deemed to have committed an act of sexual assault. Context has no say.
On the Sarasota, Florida, waterfront there is a 28-foot statue of Mendonsa kissing Friedman. It clearly offends at least one Sarasota Herald-Tribune columnist. A few days after Friedman's death, Chris Anderson acknowledged that the statue "represents euphoria, innocence, romance, nostalgia and a level of unity and pride this country arguably has not seen since V-J Day." But as a someone who surely attended college and probably graduate school, he sees the darker side, saying, "Is it possible that thousands upon thousands of people over the last seven years have come to the Sarasota waterfront to unwittingly pose in front of a giant depiction of a sexual assault?"
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3)
Our Political Predicament
By Thomas Sowell
There is no point denying or sugar-coating the plain fact that the voters this election year face a choice between two of the worst candidates in living memory. A professor at Morgan State University summarized the situation by saying that the upcoming debates may enable voters to decide which is the "less insufferable" candidate to be President of the United States.
My own take on this election is that the voter is in a situation much like that of an American fighter pilot in World War II, whose plane has been hit by enemy fire out over the Pacific Ocean and is beginning to burst into flames.
If he bails out, there is no guarantee that his parachute will open. But even if he lands safely in the ocean, he may be eaten by sharks. If he comes down on land, he may be captured by the Japanese and tortured and/or killed.
In other words, there are huge and potentially fatal risks. But, if he remains in the plane, he is doomed for certain. To me, Donald Trump represents multiple and potentially fatal risks. But Hillary Clinton is a certainty of disaster. Her vaunted "experience" is an experience of having repeatedly made decisions that turned out to be not merely wrong but catastrophic.
The most obvious example has been her role as Secretary of State during the Obama administration's decision to undermine and help destroy the governments of two nations -- Egypt and Libya -- that were no threat whatever to Americans or to America's interests.
The net result was that two Middle East nations that were at least neutral toward the United States, in contrast to others who are hostile and belligerent, were turned into countries where Islamic extremists created turmoil, and one in which Islamic terrorists killed the American ambassador and those who came to his aid.
President Obama and Secretary Clinton inherited an Iraq where terrorists had been soundly defeated, thanks to General David Petraeus' "surge" campaign, which both had opposed when they were in the Senate.
But the Obama administration turned victory into defeat by pulling American troops out of Iraq, against the advice of top military leaders, setting the stage for the emergence of ISIS and its triumphant barbarism that attracted adherents who began waging a terrorist war inside Western nations, including the United States.
A whole series of disastrous military and foreign policy decisions have led to public criticisms by an extraordinary succession of former Secretaries of Defense and top generals who had served under the Obama administration. Such public criticisms of any administration, by its own former high officials, are virtually unheard of.
One of these Secretaries of Defense, Robert Gates -- who has served under several administrations of both parties -- criticized Donald Trump as well. Secretary Gates said: "The world we confront is too perilous and too complex to have as president a man who believes that he, and he alone, has all the answers and has no need to listen to anyone."
Secretary Gates called Trump "beyond repair." He also criticized Hillary Clinton, so this was no partisan attack. Unfortunately -- perhaps tragically -- she and Trump are our only alternatives this election year. On the domestic front, as well, Trump is an uncertainty, while Hillary is a guaranteed catastrophe. Given the advanced ages of various Supreme Court justices, whoever becomes the next President of the United States can expect to have enough appointments to that court to determine the future of American law -- and American freedom -- for decades after that President's term of office is over.
Hillary Clinton has already said that she wants to see the current Supreme Court's decision overturned in a case where they ruled, by a 5 to 4 vote, that both corporations and labor unions have free speech rights. On other issues as well, she has advocated curtailments on free speech. And without free speech, there is no effective limit on what any administration can do.
On racial issues, Mrs. Clinton has repeatedly pushed the idea that blacks are besieged by enemies on all sides, and need her to protect them -- in exchange for their votes. Trump has at least supported charter schools, which are one of the few avenues through which the next generation of blacks can get a decent education.
There are no good choices, but nevertheless we must choose.
3a) Never-NeverTrump. Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide
by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The Republican dilemma
Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.
When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.
In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.
Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?
The Orangeman Cometh
In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.
Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.
That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.
For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.
For all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”
Yet for all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Trump at his worst was never put away by Hillary at her best, and he has stayed within six to eight points for most of his awful August and is now nipping her heels as October nears.
Fracking Populist Fury
Trump’s hare-and-tortoise strategy, his mishmash politics, reinventions, mastery of free publicity, and El Jefe celebrity had always offered him an outside chance of winning. But he is most aided by the daily news cycle that cannot be quite contorted to favor Hillary Clinton. Last weekend, in a 48-hour cycle, there were “Allahu akbar” attacks in Minneapolis and New York, pipe-bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey, and shootings of police in Philadelphia — the sort of violence that the public feels is not addressed by “workplace violence” and “hands up, don’t shoot” pandering.
Almost daily we read of these disasters that channel Trump’s Jacksonian populism, from closed Ford Motor plants moving to Mexico to yet another innocent killed by an illegal alien to more crowds flowing unimpeded across the border. Having Vicente Fox and Jorge Ramos spew televised animus at you is about as much a downside as Cher’s threats to leave the U.S. in 2016 or the plagiarist Fareed Zakaria’s frowns. When Barack Obama is reduced to begging African-American audiences, on the basis of racial solidarity, to vote for Hillary to preserve his ego and legacy, something is up.
All that news buzz is sandwiched by almost hourly reports of hacked e-mails, Clinton Foundation scandals, and violations of federal protocols — drip, drip, drip disclosures with more promised on the horizon. Some wondered, Why did not Hillary come clean and end the psychodramas? But that is like asking blue jays to become songbirds.
Hubris does finally earn nemesis — and at the most disastrous Oedipal moment. This time around, even the media is no defense against an entirely new 21st-century hydra. Cyber serpents have no ideologies other than anarchist ruin. Hackers give Hillary no more exemption, due to her professed progressivism, than they would any other sucker foolish enough to be famous, sloppy in electronic communications, and self-righteous, sanctimonious, and slippery. Ask the ambidextrous and once iconic Colin Powell.
Trump’s electoral calculus was easy to fathom. He needed to win as many independents as Romney, enthuse some new Reagan Democrats to return to politics, keep steady the Republican establishment, and win at least as much of the Latino and black vote as had the underperforming McCain and Romney — all to win seven or eight swing states. He planned to do that, in addition to not stepping on IEDs, through the simple enough strategy of an outraged outsider not nibbling, but blasting away, at political correctness, reminding audiences that he was not a traditional conservative, but certainly more conservative than Hillary, and a roguish celebrity billionaire with a propensity to talk with, not down to, the lower middle classes.
That the establishment was repulsed by his carroty look, his past scheming, his Queens-accented bombast, and his nationalist policies only made him seem more authentic to his supporters, old and possibly new as well. The more Trump grew unnaturally calmer, he became somewhat presentable, and the more he did, the more a flummoxed Hillary returned to her natural shrillness — and likewise became less viable.
By late September, Trump had slowly mastered the electoral formula, in part due to his new campaign staff — ridiculed as amateurs by the handler establishment but who were versed in pop culture that may have made establishment politics this year obsolete. In good Obama (the erstwhile opponent of gay marriage and big deficits) and Clinton (the former free trader and closed-borders advocate) style, Trump became a version of the comic-book character The Flash: He left his critics far behind to shoot at empty silhouettes while he zoomed miles away to pause in his new incarnation.
Never in My Name?
The only missing tessera in Trump’s mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather the 10 percent or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1–2 percent in one or two key states and spell his defeat. Some NeverTrump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican party; barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial, spoilers in a 1–2 percent loss to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win.
To be fair, NeverTrump’s logic is that Trump’s past indiscretions and lack of ethics, his present opportunistic populist rather than conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters (whom I think Hillary clumsily referenced as the “deplorables” and whom Colin Powell huffed off as “poor white folks”) make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives — or too gauche to admit supporting in reasoned circles.
Perhaps.
But the proper question is a reductionist “compared to what?” NeverTrumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments. That is simply not a sustainable proposition.
Is Trump uncooked all that much more odious than the sautéed orneriness of the present incumbent, who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials, serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi, ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school, oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA, and has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Trump on occasion did not recognize the “nuclear triad,” but then he probably does not say “corpse men” either or believe we added 57 states.
Did the scandals and divisiveness of the last eight years ever prompt in 2012 a Democratic #NeverObama walkout or a 2016 progressive “not in my name” disowning of Obama? Are there 50 former Democratic foreign-policy veterans who cannot stomach Hillary’s prevarications and what she has done to national security, and therefore will sign a letter of principled non-support? Did socialist idealist and self-appointed ethicist Bernie Sanders play a Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Jeb Bush, and plead that Hillary’s Wall Street and pay-for-play grifting was so antithetical to his share-the-wealth fantasies that he would stay home?
Replying in kind to a Gold Star Muslim family or attacking a Mexican-American judge who is a member of a La Raza legal group is, of course, stupid and crass, but perhaps not as stupid as Hillary, before a Manhattan crowd of millionaires, writing off a quarter of America as deplorable, not American, and reprobate racists and bigots.
As for Trump’s bombast, I wish there was an accepted and consistent standard of political discourse by which to censure his past insensitiveness and worse, but there has not been one for some time. Examine, for example, the level of racial invective used in the past by Hillary Clinton (“working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”), Harry Reid (“light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”), Joe Biden (“first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”), or Barack Obama (his own grandmother became a “typical white person”), and it’s hard to make the argument that Trump’s vocabulary marks a new low, especially given that few if any liberals bothered much about the racist tripe of their own. Trump so far has not appeared in linguistic blackface to patronize and mock the intelligence of an African-American audience with a 30-second, manufactured, and bad Southern accent in the manner of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Similarly, in the old days, any candidates who met with the press, held news conferences, were easily cross-examined, gave out their blood tests and EKG results (did Obama or Hillary?), had small staffs and few TV ads, raised little outside money, spoke extemporaneously, and were not prepped by legions of handlers were considered “different” in the sense that they were welcomed mavericks to an otherwise scripted campaign season. In a bankrupt Washington world in which “wise man” Colin Powell writes to a multimillionaire donor and lobbyist partner and other insiders about Bill Clinton “d***ing bimbos,” flashes the elite race card, name drops the Hamptons and the Bohemian Grove, whines that Hillary’s greed drove down his own excessive speaking fees, unkindly attacks his own former promoters, and exchanges e-mail inane intimacies with a former foreign diplomatic official, the supposedly misogynist Trump is the first Republican nominee to entrust his party’s fate to a female campaign manager and a female African-American national spokesperson.
An Overdue Reckoning
Trump’s ball-and-chain flail, such as it can be fathomed, is in large part overdue. The old Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites. How conservative was a definition of free trade that energized European Union subsidies on agriculture, tariffs on American imports into Japan, Chinese cheating or peddling toxic products, or general dumping into the United States? For two decades, farmers and small businesses have been wiped out in rural America; that destruction may have been “creative,” but it certainly was not because the farmers and business owners were stupid, lazy, or uncompetitive. By this late date, for millions, wild and often unpredictable populist venting became preferable to being sent to the library to be enlightened by Adam Smith or Edmund Burke.
The Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites. Outsourcing and offshoring did not make the U.S more competitive, at least for most Americans outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Boutique corporate multiculturalism was always driven by profits while undermining the rare American idea of e pluribus unum assimilation — as the canny multimillionaires like Colin Kaepernick and Beyoncé grasped. Long ago, an Ivy League brand ceased being synonymous with erudition or ethics — as Bill, Hillary, and Barack Obama showed. Defeated or retired “conservative” Republican grandees were just as likely as their liberal counterparts to profit from their government service in Washington to rake in lobbyist cash. So hoi polloi were about ready for anything — or rather everything.
In sum, if Trump’s D-11 bulldozer blade did not exist, it would have to be invented. He is Obama’s nemesis, Hillary’s worst nightmare, and a vampire’s mirror of the Republican establishment. Before November’s election, his next outburst or reinvention will once again sorely embarrass his supporters, but perhaps not to the degree that Clinton’s erudite callousness should repel her own. In farming, I learned there is no good harvest, only each year one that’s 51 percent preferable to the alternative, which in 2016 is a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton hailstorm.
It may be discomforting for some conservatives to vote for the Republican party’s duly nominated candidate, but as this Manichean two-person race ends, it is now becoming suicidal not to. —
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. .
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3a) Never-NeverTrump. Not Voting Trump Is Republican Suicide
by VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
The Republican dilemma
Any Republican has a difficult pathway to the presidency. On the electoral map, expanding blue blobs in coastal and big-city America swamp the conservative geographical sea of red. Big-electoral-vote states such as California, Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are utterly lost before the campaign even begins. The media have devolved into a weird Ministry of Truth. News seems defined now as what information is necessary to release to arrive at correct views. In recent elections, centrists, like John McCain and Mitt Romney – once found useful by the media when running against more-conservative Republicans — were reinvented as caricatures of Potterville scoundrels right out of a Frank Capra movie.
When the media got through with a good man like McCain, he was left an adulterous, confused septuagenarian, unsure of how many mansions he owned, and a likely closeted bigot. Another gentleman like Romney was reduced to a comic-book Ri¢hie Ri¢h, who owned an elevator, never talked to his garbage man, hazed innocents in prep school, and tortured his dog on the roof of his car. If it were a choice between shouting down debate moderator Candy Crowley and shaming her unprofessionalism, or allowing her to hijack the debate, Romney in Ajaxian style (“nobly live, or nobly die”) chose the decorous path of dignified abdication.
In contrast, we were to believe Obama’s adolescent faux Greek columns, hokey “lowering the seas and cooling the planet,” vero possumus seal on his podium as president-elect, and 57 states were Lincolnesque.
Why would 2016 not end up again in losing nobly? Would once again campaigning under the Marquess of Queensberry rules win Republicans a Munich reprieve?
The Orangeman Cometh
In such a hysterical landscape, it was possible that no traditional Republican in 2016 was likely to win, even against a flawed candidate like Hillary Clinton, who emerged wounded from a bruising primary win over aged socialist Bernie Sanders.
Then came along the Trump, the seducer of the Right when the Republican establishment was busy early on coronating Jeb Bush. After the cuckolded front-runners imploded, we all assumed that Trump’s successful primary victories — oddly predicated on avoidance of a ground game, internal polling, ad campaigns, sophisticated fundraising, and a sea of consultants and handlers — were hardly applicable to Clinton, Inc. She surely would bury him under a sea of cash, consultants, and sheer manpower.
That Trump was an amateur, a cad, his own worst enemy, cynically leveraging a new business or brand, and at any time could say anything was supposedly confirmation of Hillary’s inevitable victory. Her winning paradigm was seen as simply anti-Trump rather than pro-Hillary: light campaigning to conserve her disguised fragile health, while giving full media attention to allow Trump to elucidate his fully obnoxious self. Her campaign was to be a series of self-important selfies, each more flattering to the beholder but otherwise of no interest to her reluctant supporters.
For insurance, Clinton would enlist the bipartisan highbrow Washington establishment to close ranks, with their habitual tsk-tsking of Trump in a nuanced historical context — “Hitler,” “Stalin,” “Mussolini,” “brown shirt,” etc.
For all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Hillary would rely on the old Obama team of progressive hit men in the public-employee unions, the news ministries, the pajama-boy bloggers, the race industry, and the open-borders lobbies to brand Trump supporters as racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, nativist, homophobic. The shades of Obama’s old white reprehensible “Clingers” would spring back to life as “The Deplorables.”
Yet for all Hillary’s hundreds of millions of corporate dollars and legions of Clinton Foundation strategists, she could never quite shake Trump, who at 70 seemed more like a frenzied 55. Trump at his worst was never put away by Hillary at her best, and he has stayed within six to eight points for most of his awful August and is now nipping her heels as October nears.
Fracking Populist Fury
Trump’s hare-and-tortoise strategy, his mishmash politics, reinventions, mastery of free publicity, and El Jefe celebrity had always offered him an outside chance of winning. But he is most aided by the daily news cycle that cannot be quite contorted to favor Hillary Clinton. Last weekend, in a 48-hour cycle, there were “Allahu akbar” attacks in Minneapolis and New York, pipe-bombings in Manhattan and New Jersey, and shootings of police in Philadelphia — the sort of violence that the public feels is not addressed by “workplace violence” and “hands up, don’t shoot” pandering.
Almost daily we read of these disasters that channel Trump’s Jacksonian populism, from closed Ford Motor plants moving to Mexico to yet another innocent killed by an illegal alien to more crowds flowing unimpeded across the border. Having Vicente Fox and Jorge Ramos spew televised animus at you is about as much a downside as Cher’s threats to leave the U.S. in 2016 or the plagiarist Fareed Zakaria’s frowns. When Barack Obama is reduced to begging African-American audiences, on the basis of racial solidarity, to vote for Hillary to preserve his ego and legacy, something is up.
All that news buzz is sandwiched by almost hourly reports of hacked e-mails, Clinton Foundation scandals, and violations of federal protocols — drip, drip, drip disclosures with more promised on the horizon. Some wondered, Why did not Hillary come clean and end the psychodramas? But that is like asking blue jays to become songbirds.
Hubris does finally earn nemesis — and at the most disastrous Oedipal moment. This time around, even the media is no defense against an entirely new 21st-century hydra. Cyber serpents have no ideologies other than anarchist ruin. Hackers give Hillary no more exemption, due to her professed progressivism, than they would any other sucker foolish enough to be famous, sloppy in electronic communications, and self-righteous, sanctimonious, and slippery. Ask the ambidextrous and once iconic Colin Powell.
Trump’s electoral calculus was easy to fathom. He needed to win as many independents as Romney, enthuse some new Reagan Democrats to return to politics, keep steady the Republican establishment, and win at least as much of the Latino and black vote as had the underperforming McCain and Romney — all to win seven or eight swing states. He planned to do that, in addition to not stepping on IEDs, through the simple enough strategy of an outraged outsider not nibbling, but blasting away, at political correctness, reminding audiences that he was not a traditional conservative, but certainly more conservative than Hillary, and a roguish celebrity billionaire with a propensity to talk with, not down to, the lower middle classes.
That the establishment was repulsed by his carroty look, his past scheming, his Queens-accented bombast, and his nationalist policies only made him seem more authentic to his supporters, old and possibly new as well. The more Trump grew unnaturally calmer, he became somewhat presentable, and the more he did, the more a flummoxed Hillary returned to her natural shrillness — and likewise became less viable.
By late September, Trump had slowly mastered the electoral formula, in part due to his new campaign staff — ridiculed as amateurs by the handler establishment but who were versed in pop culture that may have made establishment politics this year obsolete. In good Obama (the erstwhile opponent of gay marriage and big deficits) and Clinton (the former free trader and closed-borders advocate) style, Trump became a version of the comic-book character The Flash: He left his critics far behind to shoot at empty silhouettes while he zoomed miles away to pause in his new incarnation.
Never in My Name?
The only missing tessera in Trump’s mosaic is the Republican establishment, or rather the 10 percent or so of them whose opposition might resonate enough to cost Trump 1–2 percent in one or two key states and spell his defeat. Some NeverTrump critics would prefer a Trump electoral disaster that still could redeem their warnings that he would destroy the Republican party; barring that, increasingly many would at least settle to be disliked, but controversial, spoilers in a 1–2 percent loss to Hillary rather than irrelevant in a Trump win.
To be fair, NeverTrump’s logic is that Trump’s past indiscretions and lack of ethics, his present opportunistic populist rather than conservative message, and the Sarah Palin nature of some of his supporters (whom I think Hillary clumsily referenced as the “deplorables” and whom Colin Powell huffed off as “poor white folks”) make him either too reckless to be commander-in-chief or too liberal to be endorsed by conservatives — or too gauche to admit supporting in reasoned circles.
Perhaps.
But the proper question is a reductionist “compared to what?” NeverTrumpers assume that the latest insincerely packaged Trump is less conservative than the latest incarnation of an insincere Clinton on matters of border enforcement, military spending, tax and regulation reform, abortion, school choice, and cabinet and Supreme Court appointments. That is simply not a sustainable proposition.
Is Trump uncooked all that much more odious than the sautéed orneriness of the present incumbent, who has variously insulted the Special Olympics, racially stereotyped at will, resorted to braggadocio laced with violent rhetoric, racially hyped ongoing criminal trials, serially lied about Obamacare and Benghazi, ridiculed the grandmother who scrimped to send him to a private prep school, oversaw government corruption from the IRS to the VA to the GSA, and has grown the national debt in a fashion never before envisioned? Trump on occasion did not recognize the “nuclear triad,” but then he probably does not say “corpse men” either or believe we added 57 states.
Did the scandals and divisiveness of the last eight years ever prompt in 2012 a Democratic #NeverObama walkout or a 2016 progressive “not in my name” disowning of Obama? Are there 50 former Democratic foreign-policy veterans who cannot stomach Hillary’s prevarications and what she has done to national security, and therefore will sign a letter of principled non-support? Did socialist idealist and self-appointed ethicist Bernie Sanders play a Ted Cruz, John Kasich, or Jeb Bush, and plead that Hillary’s Wall Street and pay-for-play grifting was so antithetical to his share-the-wealth fantasies that he would stay home?
Replying in kind to a Gold Star Muslim family or attacking a Mexican-American judge who is a member of a La Raza legal group is, of course, stupid and crass, but perhaps not as stupid as Hillary, before a Manhattan crowd of millionaires, writing off a quarter of America as deplorable, not American, and reprobate racists and bigots.
As for Trump’s bombast, I wish there was an accepted and consistent standard of political discourse by which to censure his past insensitiveness and worse, but there has not been one for some time. Examine, for example, the level of racial invective used in the past by Hillary Clinton (“working, hard-working Americans, white Americans”), Harry Reid (“light-skinned African American with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one”), Joe Biden (“first mainstream African American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”), or Barack Obama (his own grandmother became a “typical white person”), and it’s hard to make the argument that Trump’s vocabulary marks a new low, especially given that few if any liberals bothered much about the racist tripe of their own. Trump so far has not appeared in linguistic blackface to patronize and mock the intelligence of an African-American audience with a 30-second, manufactured, and bad Southern accent in the manner of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Similarly, in the old days, any candidates who met with the press, held news conferences, were easily cross-examined, gave out their blood tests and EKG results (did Obama or Hillary?), had small staffs and few TV ads, raised little outside money, spoke extemporaneously, and were not prepped by legions of handlers were considered “different” in the sense that they were welcomed mavericks to an otherwise scripted campaign season. In a bankrupt Washington world in which “wise man” Colin Powell writes to a multimillionaire donor and lobbyist partner and other insiders about Bill Clinton “d***ing bimbos,” flashes the elite race card, name drops the Hamptons and the Bohemian Grove, whines that Hillary’s greed drove down his own excessive speaking fees, unkindly attacks his own former promoters, and exchanges e-mail inane intimacies with a former foreign diplomatic official, the supposedly misogynist Trump is the first Republican nominee to entrust his party’s fate to a female campaign manager and a female African-American national spokesperson.
An Overdue Reckoning
Trump’s ball-and-chain flail, such as it can be fathomed, is in large part overdue. The old Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites. How conservative was a definition of free trade that energized European Union subsidies on agriculture, tariffs on American imports into Japan, Chinese cheating or peddling toxic products, or general dumping into the United States? For two decades, farmers and small businesses have been wiped out in rural America; that destruction may have been “creative,” but it certainly was not because the farmers and business owners were stupid, lazy, or uncompetitive. By this late date, for millions, wild and often unpredictable populist venting became preferable to being sent to the library to be enlightened by Adam Smith or Edmund Burke.
The Wall Street Journal adherence to open borders was not so conservative — at least not for those on the front lines of illegal immigration and without the means to navigate around the concrete ramifications of the open-borders ideologies of apartheid elites. Outsourcing and offshoring did not make the U.S more competitive, at least for most Americans outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Boutique corporate multiculturalism was always driven by profits while undermining the rare American idea of e pluribus unum assimilation — as the canny multimillionaires like Colin Kaepernick and Beyoncé grasped. Long ago, an Ivy League brand ceased being synonymous with erudition or ethics — as Bill, Hillary, and Barack Obama showed. Defeated or retired “conservative” Republican grandees were just as likely as their liberal counterparts to profit from their government service in Washington to rake in lobbyist cash. So hoi polloi were about ready for anything — or rather everything.
In sum, if Trump’s D-11 bulldozer blade did not exist, it would have to be invented. He is Obama’s nemesis, Hillary’s worst nightmare, and a vampire’s mirror of the Republican establishment. Before November’s election, his next outburst or reinvention will once again sorely embarrass his supporters, but perhaps not to the degree that Clinton’s erudite callousness should repel her own. In farming, I learned there is no good harvest, only each year one that’s 51 percent preferable to the alternative, which in 2016 is a likely 16-year Obama-Clinton hailstorm.
It may be discomforting for some conservatives to vote for the Republican party’s duly nominated candidate, but as this Manichean two-person race ends, it is now becoming suicidal not to. —
Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. .
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4)The Debate Tactic Trump Should Use
There have been two recent instances when major television networks edited out comments made by Bill and Hillary Clinton, respectively, that would harm her chances to win the presidency. Clearly that is precisely why the Pravda-like monitors in the media hit the delete buttons.
There have been two recent instances when major television networks edited out comments made by Bill and Hillary Clinton, respectively, that would harm her chances to win the presidency. Clearly that is precisely why the Pravda-like monitors in the media hit the delete buttons.
Bill Clinton said the Hillary Clinton “faints frequently.” CBS excised that comment completely and the edited version showed Bill Clinton saying she fainted “rarely” (no doubt because she chooses to “power through” her various maladies –that seems to be the company line all her flacks are using in the media.
The second recent editing job occurred in the wake of the terrorism bombings in New York and New Jersey. This time the culprit was CNN (or “Clinton News Network”). Joe Concha in The Hill:
According to an ABC News transcript below, Clinton called the attacks in New York and New Jersey "bombings" before criticizing Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump — who also referred to the explosion as a "bomb" — in an attempt to show contrast between the temperament of the two candidates, who are deadlocked in the polls.
Clinton: I’ve been briefed about bombings in New York and New Jersey, and the attacks in Minnesota. Obviously, we need to do everything we can to support our first responders, also to pray for the victims. We have to let this investigation unfold. We’ve been in touch with various officials, including the mayor’s office in New York, to learn what they are discovering as they conduct this investigation. And I’ll have more to say about it when we actually know the facts.
Reporter: Secretary Clinton, do you have any reaction to the fact that Donald Trump, immediately upon taking the stage tonight, called the explosion in New York a “bomb” … ?
Clinton: Well, I think it’s important to know the facts about any incident like this. That’s why it’s critical to support the first responders, the investigators who are looking into it, trying to determine what did happen.
But in showing Clinton's comments moments after they were made, CNN edited out the first sentence when she said, "I’ve been briefed about bombings in New York and New Jersey, and the attacks in Minnesota." The soundbite starts with Clinton's call to support first responders.
In a CNN.com article entitled "Trump says 'bomb went off in New York,' " reporter Jeremy Diamond doesn't mention Clinton used similar language until the seventh paragraph of the story, after contrasting statements by Trump and New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio.
The press has since largely slammed Trump for referring to the explosion as a "bomb" too soon.
Other major media outlets also failed to mention Clinton in focusing on Trump:
When the two nominees first meet onstage, at the very first opportunity Trump should take control of the debate by turning on the “journalists” and asking them about these Pravda and 1984-like tactics. Trump should take a page from Saul Alinsky (recall Hillary Clinton, like Barack Obama, was an acolyte of Alinsky’s):
Pick the target, freeze, it, personalize it and polarize it.
We know Trump has no compunction on taking on the media. Alinsky also counseled that ridicule was a very effective tactic. Trump could ridicule the excuse CBS offered to explain away the excision of Bill Clinton’s comment that Hillary faints frequently: that it was used to save time ( 1.7 seconds!)
Mitt Romney could and should have responded similarly when Candy Crowley infamously butted in and lied during his debate with Barack Obama in 2008 when she falsely corrected Romney’s statement that Barack Obama did not refer to the Benghazi attacks as terrorism. Romney blew it. Trump should learn that lesson. He can also learn a lesson from his adviser Newt Gingrich, who went after CNN’s John King during a debate in 2008 when he questioned Gingrich about his ex-wife.
Gingrich said he did not want to take time to respond to answer the question but would --and did he ever:
I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that," Gingrich said, prompting a standing ovation from the crowd.
"I am frankly astounded that CNN would take trash like that and use it to open a presidential debate," Gingrich added.
The former House Speaker went on to denounce the story as "false" and accuse the media of raising the issue to protect President Obama.
"I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans," Gingrich said.
A ploy like this in the debate (and early on put the media on the defensive and cast skepticism about all their future questions) would most likely be welcomed by much of the public because the public trust for the media is at an all-time low. Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes admitted (almost proudly) that the reason his show as able to land coveted interviews with Barack Obama was because, “ I think he knows we’re not going to play gotcha with him.” Would Kroft have meant the types of questions candidate George Bush had to deal with during a 1999 surprise quiz when he was asked to name the foreign leaders of a slew of obscure nations? The headline of the Washington Post said it all about the goal of the trivia quiz: “Bush Fails Quiz on Foreign Affairs.” He “failed” a quiz on foreign affairs because he could not name the president of Chechnya and other assorted questions that a governor of Texas would not necessarily be expected to have at his fingertips. Did anyone in the media ridicule Barack Obama for saying Hawaii was in Asia or that they speak Austrian in Austria?
Will this “win” the debate or the election for Trump? No, but he will be performing a public service by revealing to all the Americans watching (it is projected to be the most watched presidential debate in history) that the media -- as is true of so many institutions -- has been corrupted by bias and that mainstream media do not have a monopoly on news and certainly cannot be trusted to give Americans the truth, unless one confuses Pravda (translated it means “truth) with facts.
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