Click on walk below
Yada yada yada! https://www.youtube.com/watch?After you watch the above then watch the video that follows (skip the ad)
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We have returned from a great family Thanksgiving in Orlando where the three youngest grandchildren (first cousins) were treated to visits to Sea World and Disney World.
I also watched 'Bama win and Daniel was pleased with The Steeler's victory.
I hope your own Thanksgiving was a winner and safe.
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Don Feder calls for a permanent revolution. (See 1 below.)
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Will Trump keep this campaign pledge and alter history? (See 2 below.)
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SEMPER FI (See 3 below.)
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Will Iran prove those who believe Obama, lied regarding The Iran Deal, and blew it will prove to be prophetic with the passage of time? (See 4 below.)
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The ADL does not speak for me because it has become a vehicle for left wingers to express their bias under the guise of a once respected entity much as has The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) become an ostrich like albatross. (See 5 below.)
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Victor Davis Hanson responds to two angry Liberals who are choking on Trump's election.Words matter and Liberals love to change their meanings when it to suits their nefarious purposes. (See 6 , 6a, 6b and 6c below.)
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I am not happy the mass media have deservedly sunk because of their blatant bias and manipulation of facts so their pet candidate had wind at her back. Ah, but the press and media blew it bad. However, it is not good the Fourth Estate has become our Fifth Column. Why? Because we need a balanced and objective mass media. (See 7 below.)
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Since the election, our nation has witnessed a variety of pathetic outbursts from cry babies, many of whom did not vote though they were of age, academics who smoke their pipes yet, have lost sight of their role, liberals who are nothing but hypocrites, mass media opinion makers who could not have been more wrong, an assortment of unwashed radicals, fascists and chaos seekers who want nothing better than to cause public disruptions and discord and entertainment and athletic elites whose egos are inflated and who believe their opinions are important because they receive inflated salaries.
If these discontents are representative of our culture this Republic is in deep trouble.
Time will tell whether Trump can cope with all the problems Obama inherited and proceeded to make worse. I am willing to give Donald a chance. However, fairness, which liberals and progressives claim is their espoused goal, is being denied our president elect because sore losers cannot rise to the challenge of decency.
It is a sad spectacle but it has yet to compete with that of Jane Fonda sitting on a Viet Nam anti-aircraft gun.
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Dick
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++1)Needed: A Permanent Counter-Revolution
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++GrassTopsUSA Exclusive CommentaryBy Don FederThe right wins elections and the left transforms America. Patrick Buchanan made this point in his 1972 book, "Conservative Votes, Liberals Victories." Since then, Republicans won the White House seven times, and the Republic slips further from our grasp each day.
This election was another mandate for conservative values – secure the border, free the market, confront threats to national security, develop domestic energy, deregulate health insurance and cut taxes.
Trump won against all odds. The billionaire businessman never held public office. The RINO wing of his party refused to support him. He was outspent, faced the "solid blue wall" in his quest for 270 electoral votes, and the media – always biased against Republican presidential candidates – was rabid.
An overexposed GOP also defied the odds and maintained control of the Senate. Once again, Republicans will control the House of Representatives, as they have for 18 of the past 24 years.
Still, it's the left's agenda that dominates government. During the Obama years, homosexual marriage became the law of the land (despite being rejected in 33 state referenda). By executive order, schools were told to allow boys who feel like girls to use ladies' rooms. By the fall of 2017, Washington state public schools will begin teaching what's called transgenderism (that gender is a social construct) to kindergarteners.
The domestic war on Christianity gets hotter every year.
Citizens of a once-free republic are forced to buy health insurance designed by bureaucrats. As many as 60%, of federal judges believe the U.S. Constitution was written by Elizabeth Warren. Obama has doubled the National Debt. (Liberals have long held that we can spend our way to prosperity.)
We're providing billions to facilitate the nuclear program of the most anti-American regime on Earth. Relations have been normalized with communist Cuba. The Middle East exploded, as we helped to topple pro-American regimes and install Islamic nightmares.
The president and his allies have subverted law enforcement in the name of racial justice. The Environmental Protection Agency is on an anti-industrial jihad, propelled by the myth of man-made global warming. Middle class income is stagnant. In 2012, the income of the typical U.S. household was $51,017 – inflation-adjusted, the same as 1988.
Why is the left so successful at achieving its goals, while regularly losing at the polls? It's due, in part, to its iron grip on the culture.
Every time conservatives win, the media swing into action to subvert our victory – to convince the squishy middle that the changes we want to make are racist/sexist/anti-immigrant/anti-human rights etc., even though voters recently endorsed them.
Unless he nominates Bernie Saunders or Senator Pocahontas, it's guaranteed the left and its media megaphone will seek to destroy President-elect Donald Trump's cabinet choices. The assault began within hours of the announcement that Trump has tapped Senator Jeff Sessions for Attorney General. "Racism" is the line of attack. How original.
When Trump nominates a Supreme Court justice to replace the late Antonin Scalia, it will make the siege of Bastogne in the Battle of the Bulge look like a Victorian garden party. The objective will be to turn enough squeamish Republicans to block anyone to the right of Anthony Kennedy.
The culture aside, liberals win because they're tougher than we are, more determined than we are, and more resilient than we are.
Their revolution is permanent. They never take a break. We get tired, discouraged or overly optimistic and go home for a rest. They're open 24/7.
When they win, it's damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. When we win, we look to Great White Father in Washington to take care of us, whether it's Nixon, Reagan or George W. Bush.
When they lose, they're furious. They grit their teeth and go to work to reverse the outcome of the election, as they did with Watergate, and almost succeeded in doing with Iran-Contra. They made "Bork," (Reagan's Supreme Court nominee) a synonym for turning loose a pack of Rottweilers.
When we lose, we go in a corner and sulk, take a year or two off and come out of hibernation in time for the next election.
They apply the concept of total war to politics. We approach it as dilettantes. We slap a bumper sticker on our car, put up a yard sign, maybe go to a rally and vote. Win or lose, they are relentless, taking every opportunity to bludgeon our guys into submission.
The lecture delivered to Vice President-elect Mike Pence by the star of the hip-hop musical "Hamilton," (who, in real life, wanted government of the educated and successful) is the latest example of left-wing arrogance. The cast did a fundraiser for Hillary during the campaign.
The actor who plays Aaron Burr whined at Pence: "We sir – we – are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents(they forgot their pets), or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights."
Last March the producers of "Hamilton" put out a casting call for "non-white" actors. Apparently, whites aren't part of their diverse America.
Our opponents never take a break from politics. We can't fight them without the same commitment.
To fight a permanent revolution, we need a permanent counter-revolution. Win or lose, there can be no demobilization. There can be no truce, no ceasefire in the fight for freedom, the family and authentic human rights. Always go on the offensive. Retreat only to regroup.
Trump can't succeed alone. He needs a citizen army that will fight the alien invasion, multicultural madness, oppression in the name of tolerance and reverse racism. America needs a force which will capture the populist enthusiasm of Trump rallies during the general election.
If we lose this time, we may not get another chance to stop the forces of darkness. We must be as determined to uphold the right as they are to advance the wrong.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writerwho is now a political/communicationsconsultant. He also maintains a Facebook page.
2) Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem: A Great Opportunity for the New President
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem would be a good example of the kind of policy change that President-Elect Donald Trump has said is needed in Washington. More importantly, this action could mark a new US strategy for pursuing Israeli-Palestinian peace: Telling the truth.
The US State Department, which has always opposed moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, understands very well that any peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians will leave at least western Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and part of sovereign Israel. So why will the State Department nevertheless advise President-Elect Donald Trump not to fulfill his promise to move the embassy?
Moving the embassy to Israel’s actual capital would provoke Arab anger at the US and lead to protests that might turn violent. The foreign policy establishment wishes to prevent this result and protect America’s status as an “honest broker.” It therefore continues to insist that because Jerusalem’s ultimate status can only be determined by agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, and that it would be wrong for the US to “prejudge” the outcome by acting on the truth that Israel’s capital is Jerusalem.
This is a perfect example of the kind of politically-correct establishment pettifogging that Trump campaigned against. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem is a low-cost action that he could take as soon as he is inaugurated, and one of the easiest and quickest changes in policy that he could implement. The new US consulate in Jerusalem was built with security features that would be needed for an embassy, so the move could be started almost immediately, without any prejudice to the Palestinian claim to eastern Jerusalem.
The State Department’s insistence on the diplomatic fiction that none of Jerusalem is part of Israel helps preserve the Palestinian hope that, someday, Israel will be forced to give up its capital and will be destroyed as the independent, democratic Jewish state.
That Palestinian hope is the main obstacle to peace. The Palestinians can only make peace when their community – and perhaps the Arab world of which it is a part – comes to understand that international pressure will never force Israel to acquiesce in its own destruction. One of the best ways the US can demonstrate that it will never consent to the Palestinian destruction of Israel is for Washington to stop ignoring blatant Palestinian lies that work against peace.
There is another way that an American truth-telling strategy could encourage peace. Palestinian leadership now tells its people – and most of them believe – that compromise with Israel would be immoral because Israel is a colonial invader that stole Palestinian land by force. By that argument, Israel has no moral claim to any of the land, and any concession to it would be dishonorable.
But Israel is descended from Jewish kingdoms that ruled parts of the land for centuries in ancient times. It too has a traditional base for moral claims to the territory (in addition to legal claims from the League of Nations mandate). If the Palestinians recognized this truth, they would see that compromise between the two groups, each of which has valid claims to the land, could be an honorable way to end the dispute and not a cowardly yielding to force.
To undermine this moral basis for compromise with Israel, Palestinian leadership flatly denies any ancient Jewish connection to the land. They claim, for example, that there never was a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount from which Jesus could have chased the money-changers. Yet their own history belies this claim. In 1929, the Supreme Moslem Council in Jerusalem, in its guide to the Mount, wrote: “[The Temple Mount’s] identity with the site of Solomon’s Temple is beyond dispute.”
The US may not be able to induce the Palestinian Authority to stop inciting its constituents and teaching its children to hate Israel. But there are ways in which the US can expose and eventually defeat Palestinian lies that work against peace; ways that do not require getting agreement from anyone.
Exploring these new approaches would constitute a striking change in diplomatic direction. There are many examples of the West rejecting truth on behalf of the Palestinians and their Arab supporters. For example, some Western countries went along with the recent denial by UNESCO of any ancient Jewish connection to the land of Israel. The US politely ignores the Palestinian lie that there was never a Jewish temple on the Temple Mount.
If the US consistently tells the truth about the ancient Jewish presence in Palestine, and publicly refuses to swallow the Palestinians’ false and anti-peace denials of history, the Palestinian leadership will not for long be able to keep the truth from their people, or at least from the large educated class.
The US has followed a policy of avoiding truths that are painful or embarrassing to the Arabs for at least 50 years. It hasn’t worked. Maybe it is time to try the strategy of telling the truth. Moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, in accordance with the long-standing congressional position, would be a good way for President Trump to make a start on a truth-telling strategy – as well as to fulfill a campaign promise.
Dr. Max Singer, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, is co-founder of the Washington-based Hudson Institute.
Justin Allen, 23, Brett Linley, 29, Matthew Weikert, 29, Justus Bartett, 27, Dave Santos, 21, Chase Stanley, 21 Jesse Reed, 26, Matthew Johnson, 21, Zachary Fisher, 24, Brandon King, 23, Christopher Goeke, 23, Sheldon Tate, 27.
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4)
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| Radioactive material produced at Iran's Bushehr Nuclear Plant has reportedly been stolen raising concerns about the potential use of a so-called dirty bomb in the future, according to London-based Arabic language newspaper Asharq al-Awsat. The missing material, Iridium-192, was reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency by Iran's nuclear regulatory body earlier this month, who warned neighboring Gulf States of its possible nefarious use. A so-called dirty bomb, or radiological dispersion device, is a conventional weapon equipped with nuclear material. The idea behind a dirty bomb is to blast radioactive material, such as powder or pellets, into the area around an explosion. Citing Saudi intelligence sources, Asharq al-Awsat reported Friday that the Iridium-192 was stolen as it was being transported from the Bushehr facility. The vehicle carrying the nuclear material was later found abandoned with its contents seized. It remains unclear who stole the nuclear material and for what purpose. The IAEA defines Iridium-192, a highly unstable isotope which emits both electrons and gamma-rays, as a category-2 radioactive substance. Substances with a category-2 classification can permanently injure or even kill a human being if exposed to the material within hours or days. Iridium-192 is generally used for industrial reasons, utilized to locate flaws in metal components, despite the danger it poses to humans. In July 2015, Iran and six world powers, namely Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany, reached a nuclear deal over the country's controversial nuclear program. The deal, which went into effect in January, requires Iran to scrap the bulk of its nuclear activities in return for the ease of international sanctions on the country's energy and financial sectors. It allows regular inspections of the facilities inside Iran. Earlier this month, the UN nuclear watchdog said Iran must stop repeatedly overstepping a limit on its stock of a sensitive material set by the landmark deal with major powers. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is policing the deal, said in a report in early November that Iran had slightly exceeded the 130-tonne soft limit on its stock of heavy water for a second time since the deal was put in place in January. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
By Caroline Glick
In an interview this week with the Australian media, Jordan’s King Abdullah became the latest Arab leader to express hope that President-elect Donald Trump and his team will lead the world’s to date failed fight against jihadist Islam.
Like his counterparts in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, Abdullah effectively ruled out the possibility that President Barack Obama will take any constructive steps to defeat the forces of global jihad in his last months in power.
Speaking of the humanitarian disaster in Aleppo for instance, Abdullah said, “I don’t think there’s much we can do until the new administration is in place and a strategy is formulated.”
Egyptian President Abdel Fatah a-Sisi was among the first Arab leaders to welcome Trump’s victory. Sisi has been largely shunned by the Obama administration. President Barack Obama supported the Muslim Brotherhood regime that Sisi and the Egyptian military overthrew in 2013.
Sisi was the first foreign leader to speak to Trump after his victory was announced. He released a statement to the media saying that he “looks forward to the presidency of President Donald Trump to inject a new spirit into the trajectory of Egyptian-American relations.”
The support that the incoming Trump administration is garnering in the Arab world stands in stark contrast to the near wall-to-wall opposition to Trump expressed by the American Muslim community. According to a survey of Muslim-American opinion taken in October by the Council for American Islamic Relations, (CAIR), 72 percent of American Muslims supported Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Trump was supported by a mere 4 percent of the Muslim community.
Muslim-American activists played key roles in the Clinton campaign. They were particularly active in swing states like Ohio and Michigan where Trump won by narrow margins.
As the Jerusalem Post reported Wednesday, since the election, Muslim-American leaders have expressed concern and hostility towards the incoming Trump administration. Muslim Democrat activist James Zogby, who also heads the Arab American Institute, published an op-ed in the Jordan Times to this effect after the election. Zogby expressed concern that the Trump administration would harm the civil rights of Arab Americans.
The gap between the Arab world’s support for Trump and the Muslim-American community’s opposition to him is particularly notable because it reverberates strongly the growing cleavage between the Israeli government and public and large swathes of the American Jewish community.
Led most prominently by the Anti-Defamation League and its executive director Jonathan Greenblatt, in the wake of the election, American Jews are at the forefront of efforts to delegitimize Trump and his senior advisors. Unlike their Muslim-American counterparts, who are keeping their criticism of Arab regimes to themselves, Greenblatt, the ADL, and their allies on the Left have linked their opposition to Trump to legitimizing opponents of Israel.
Before assuming his role at the ADL, Greenblatt worked in Valerie Jarrett’s political influence shop in the Obama White House. As ADL chief, Greenblatt has used his position as the head of a major Jewish organization to support the Obama administration’s policies. To this end, since the election, the ADL has worked to tar the incoming Trump administration as anti-Semitic, focusing its fire on Trump’s senior strategist, former Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon.
The ADL spearheaded the campaign to label Bannon an anti-Semite. When its claims were shown to be entirely spurious, this week the ADL quietly acknowledged that Bannon has actually never made any anti-Semitic statements. But its quiet admission of spreading lies didn’t stop the ADL from continuing to traffic in them.
Even after it admitted that “We are not aware of any anti-Semitic statements from Bannon,” the ADL continued to insist that Breitbart has been a home for anti-Semites because some Jew haters wrote anti-Semitic responses to Breitbart articles.
The ADL’s smear campaign against Bannon is a hard sell because Breitbart is among the most pro-Israel websites in the US. But this brings us to the second aspect of the ADL-led campaign against President-elect Donald Trump and his team.
With each passing day, it becomes increasingly clear that the ADL and its allies are using the Trump victory as a means to draw a distinction between pro-Israel and Jew-friendly while arguing that anti-Semites support Israel and that people who hate Israel are not anti-Semites. This was the clear goal at the ADL’s summit on anti-Semitism last week.
As Daniel Greenfield reported Thursday in Frontpage Magazine, ADL used the conference to legitimize the so-called BDS campaign to boycott Jewish Israeli products and divest from businesses that do business with Jewish owned Israeli businesses. It similarly normalized the general argument that there is nothing inherently anti-Semitic about opposing the Jewish state.
In a panel with the disturbing title, “Is Delegitimization of Israel Anti-Semitism?” the ADL featured anti-Israel activist Jill Jacobs and the Jane Eisen. Both women argued that BDS is legitimate. At the same time, they denounced fervent supporters of Israel like Bannon and Center for Security President Frank Gaffney.
Greenfield reported that the ADL gave a prominent platform at the conference supposedly dedicated to fighting anti-Semitism to Ford Foundation CEO Darren Walker. The Ford Foundation is one of the leading contributors to anti-Israel organizations in the US and to anti-Zionist political front groups in Israel.
Other speakers explained that it isn’t that Israel’s foes are anti-Semitic. It is just that Israelis and their supporters have become “hypersensitive” to criticism.
All in all, Greenfield concluded, “Instead of tackling anti-Semitism, the ADL was tackling Israel and pro-Israel Jews” and “normalizing anti-Israel rhetoric and organizations.”
A few days after the conference, the ADL took the next step towards normalizing hatred for Israel in America when it announced its support for Rep. Keith Ellison’s candidacy to serve as the next chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
Ellison became the first Muslim American elected to the House of Representatives in 2006. In the decades that preceded his election, Ellison built a long and documented history of membership in and advocacy and employment for the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. In his capacity as a Nation of Islam spokesman, Ellison made anti-Semitic statements and promoted anti-Jewish and anti-Israel positions and activists.
Since joining the House of Representatives, Ellison has been one of the leading anti-Israel voices in Congress. He has spearheaded multiple anti-Israel initiatives. He openly supports the boycott of Israeli Jewish products and has castigated Israel as an apartheid state.
Together with James Zogby, last August Ellison served as a member of the Democratic Party’s platform committee. The men attempted to purge the platform of language in support of Israel.
Yet Wednesday the ADL released a statement extolling Ellison as “a man of good character.” The ADL praised him as “an ally in the fight against anti-Semitism and for civil rights.”
It even said that Ellison “has been on record in support of Israel.”
ADL is supporting Ellison – and opposing Trump and his pro-Israel advisors – because Greenblatt and his backers support Obama’s policies in the Middle East and want to make it difficult for Trump to abandon them.
Ellison and the leading American Muslim groups oppose Trump for the same reason. The difference between the two groups is that the ADL and its Jewish backers are acting in this manner because they support the Left, which Obama leads. Ellison and his allies at CAIR, the Islamic Society of North America, and the Arab American Institute and other groups oppose Trump because they support the substance of Obama’s policies.
The chief characteristics of Obama’s Middle East policies have been support for the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran against Israel and the US’s Sunni allies.
Former FBI agent and counter terrorism expert John Guandolo estimates that upwards of 80 percent of Islamic centers and mosques in the US are controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.
The major American Muslim groups, including CAIR, ISNA and the Islamic Circle of North America are tied to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood in turn supports Iran.
During his year in power in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Muhammad Morsi permitted Iranian warships to travel through the Suez Canal, hosted Iranian leaders and Hezbollah commanders in Cairo and took a series of additional steps to embrace Iran.
Trump’s foreign policy advisor Walid Phares gave an interview to Egyptian television after Trump’s election stating that Trump will support a bill introduced by Senator Ted Cruz to outlaw the Muslim Brotherhood in the US as well as its offshoots CAIR, ISNA and others due to their support for jihadist terror groups formed by Brotherhood members. Al Qaeda, Hamas and a host of other jihadist groups have all been formed by Muslim Brotherhood followers.
Trump’s National Security Advisor, Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn, Rep. Mike Pompeo, whom Trump has selected to serve as his CIA Director as well as Marine Gen. James Mattis, the leading contender to serve as Trump’s Defense Secretary are all outspoken opponents of Obama’ nuclear deal with Iran.
Given the stakes then, it makes perfect sense that the Arab American groups oppose Trump.
It also makes sense that Arab regimes threatened by the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran support Trump and eagerly await his inauguration.
And it clearly makes sense for Israel to welcome Trump’s election.
The only thing that makes no sense is the American Jewish campaign to demonize Trump. The ADL’s leadership of the campaign to smear Trump and his advisors while legitimizing BDS and supporting Israel bashers is antithetical to the interests of the American Jewish community.
In adopting these positions, Greenblatt and the ADL along with their allies in J Street, Jewish Voices for Peace, If Not Now, the Forward, other far left groups and mainstream groups that have lost their way show through their actions that they have conflated their Judaism with their support for the Left. To the extent that the interests of the Jews of America contradict the positions of the Left, the Jews of America are behaving in an “anti-Semitic” way.
It is the responsibility of the segment of the community that understands “Jewish” is not a synonym of “leftist” to oppose the ADL and its backers. If they fail to do so, they will contribute to the descent of the community into powerlessness and irrelevance, not only in the era of Trump, but into the future.
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6) From an Angry Reader:
She WON the popular vote!!!!!Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:
Dear Angry Reader Suzanne Williams,
I got your point without the capital letters and the five exclamation marks.
As a general rule the resort to exclamation is a reflection of an absence of argument. Let words speak for themselves—and in your case fail on their own merits.
The Founders created an Electoral College for a reason: to avoid the sort of fickle demagoguery that characterized ancient Athenian democracy and that turns up in chilling scenes in Thucydides and Xenophon, and was thus in depth critiqued by Aristotle and Plato. We follow more instead Roman Republicanism that sought to provide reflection to the pulses of the people before they translated into instant political change. A few additional points:
1) Would you have written this sentence had the opposite occurred: that is, suggesting that Hillary was somehow an illegitimate president because Trump won the popular vote?
2) Do you think that candidates would campaign quite differently had the rules been different? Do you not think that both candidates otherwise might have skipped more sparsely populated swing states to focus on population density? Who knows that outcome?
3) You seem somewhat in a state of denial. The Trump victory was remarkable in ways well beyond his substantial victory in the Electoral College:
- a) I cannot remember a candidate in modern memory who was bitterly opposed by those in his own party. Trump won despite a dearth of party endorsements, with the hostility of conservative media (Weekly Standard, National Review, many at The Wall Street Journal). The #NeverTrump people shook the Republican Party in a way Bernie Sanders did not the Democratic Party.
- b) Trump was outspent at somewhere between 3-1 to 2-1 by Hillary: he had few bundlers; his campaign team was much less experienced; he had no ground game in traditional terms; far fewer ads; no real celebrity rallies; etc. Yet he blew up the “blue wall.” Why was that?
- c) The media hated Trump in a way the Left have never quite matched before. Read WikiLeaks and you can see that both reporters and opinion writers were checking in first with Podesta, Inc. The entire media was corrupt and sought to shape the election by collusion with Hillary and yet all for naught? Why?
It would be wiser to look forward and be introspective: what are liberals doing that is destroying the Democratic Party at state and federal levels? The answers will be more helpful to you rather than suggesting that the U.S. Constitution is at fault.Sincerely,VDH
6a) RUTHFULLY YOURS
Who Are Wise, Who Not? Insight often comes not from an Ivy League degree but by way of animal cunning, instinct, and hard work. By Victor Davis Hanson
Posted By Ruth King“Cleverness is not wisdom.”
— Euripides, the Bacchae
At the height of the sophistic age in classical Athens, the playwright Euripides asked an eternal question in his masterpiece, the Bacchae: “What is wisdom?”
Was wisdom defined as clever wordplay, or as the urban sophistication of the robed philosophers in the agora and rhetoricians in the assembly?
Or instead was true wisdom a deeper and more modest appreciation of unchanging human nature throughout the ages, which reminds us to avoid hubris, tread carefully, always expect the unlikely, and distrust the self-acclaimed wise who eventually prove clever fools? At the end of the play, a savage, merciless nemesis is unleashed on the hubristic wise of the establishment.
Euripides would have appreciated the ironies of the 2016 election.
Millions of Americans, far from the two coasts, kept largely quiet. They either did not talk much to pollsters or they politely declined to reveal their true feelings. They tuned out talking heads and ignored blue-chip pundits. They did not listen to the shrill bombast of President Obama on the campaign trail or pollsters who ad nauseam declared Hillary Clinton the sure electoral-college winner.
They were not shamed or much bothered by the condescension they receive from the media and the Washington elite, who proved wrong or biased or both in their coverage. They believed that free trade was not worth much if it was not fair trade, that illegal and politicized immigration was as subversive as legal and diverse immigration was valuable, that real racists were those who used race and ethnicity to encourage others to break the law for their own political and elite interests, and that it was stupid to trust their job futures to those who never lost their own jobs while often losing those of others.So, to return to Euripides, what really is wisdom in the 21st century?
Is it to be judged according to the values of those who inhabit the Podesta WikiLeaks archive? Is being smart defined as being on lots of corporate boards, having an impressive contact list of private cellphone numbers, name-dropping one’s Ivy League degrees, referencing weekends in the Hamptons or on Martha’s Vineyard, or being ranked in the top 100, 1,000, or 5,000 of some cool magazine’s list of go-getters and “people to watch”?
Is there not wisdom in being able to drop an 80-foot pine tree with a chain saw within a foot of the mark, or to take apart a hydraulic ram in an hour, or to steer a bulldozer on a narrow uphill road? Can MSNBC news reader Brian Williams tell the truth any better than the Michigan lathe operator? Is Lois Lerner, formerly of the IRS and now enjoying a multimillion-dollar retirement, more likely to file an honest tax return than the Wyoming rancher, or would you feel safer knowing that Press Secretary Josh Earnest was working on a high-voltage wire outside your front door?
Or is wisdom sometimes gained by losing the polish on one’s hands? Is the wrinkled man’s face as trustworthy as the thirty-something’s peach fuzz or the Botox grin of the middle-aged metrosexual on the evening news or the pollster who assures you that the election has already been decided before the voting?
In this year of weariness with the elite and their definition of success and wisdom, lots of such questions are being asked.
Where is John Podesta today — who was a master of the universe two weeks ago? Is the Podesta name a stamp of honesty and sobriety? Do obsequious media still seek the latest gossip from Cheryl Mills or Robbie Mook, the boy wonder from Columbia who was to oversee the inevitable landslide victory? Do our demigods in Silicon Valley ever grasp that even their cosmos is a fragile and fickle place where yesterday’s wise are rendered today’s fools? Is doing all the “right” things often a guarantee of ensuring the absolutely wrong things?
Will President Trump learn from the wise-fool President Obama that hubris always incurs nemesis, and that there is an all-knowing power who waits in ambush for us once we deem ourselves gods? Is David Brooks still critiquing the crease in the president’s pants leg, or are our historians still wedded to the idea that Obama is a “god” and the smartest man to have entered the presidency?
Ramming down Obamacare by lying about its provisions did what exactly, and for whom? Did untruth ensure that a simple Affordable Care Act website would work? What was the wisdom or good of presidential guarantees of reasonable premiums, deductibles, and choice to the insured? Did it make Americans feel more secure in their health care? Did the sterling résumés of Jonathan Gruber and Ezekiel Emanuel prove to us that Obamacare was both fair and smart?
What good did grifting for all those hundreds of millions of dollars do for the Clintons in their sunset years? Do they look healthier and haler for their frenzied pursuit of lucre? Did they gain greater respect and acclaim, the richer they became, or are they resting in peace with the assurance of lives well lived? Are they finally deemed successful for scamming that last $50 million in their pay-for-play scheming?
Did daily fibbing make Hillary more virtuous? Can a Yale law graduate make a mockery of the law in way a tractor driver from Mendota cannot — given the greater power to do good or evil that is a dividend of greater education and status? Did Barack Obama’s prize-winning Harvard professors teach him about the constitutional limits of the presidency? Or, instead, does moral regress sometimes come with material and intellectual progress?
Size up the 2016 campaign, and our self-acclaimed wise — defined by their ubiquity in the media, their glib ability to assert that up is down, and down up, their tony school brands — often became utterly foolish. A garish Donald Trump did not need to hire supposedly brilliant politicos to defeat supposedly brilliant politicos on the other side.
What good did all the Russian experts in his administration over the last few years do for Barack Obama?Trump is criticized now that he might be too soft on Putin. Perhaps. Yet it was not Trump, but the Ivy League Trinity of Obama, Clinton, and Kerry who “reset” George W. Bush’s reset sanctions against Putin, who canceled already-planned missile defense with the Czechs and the Poles; it was Clinton who pushed a ridiculous plastic reset button; and Obama who in a hot-mic quip stealthily promised Dmitry Medvedev that he would be more reasonable with Vladimir Putin after his reelection, who invited the Russians into the Middle East after a 40-year hiatus, who mocked Mitt Romney when the latter suggested that Russia was a threat to America, who loudly announced faux “step-over” line ultimatums to the Russians; it was Clinton who in pay-for-play greed opened up North American uranium resources to the Russians, and Obama who personally mocked Putin as an adolescent school cut-up even as he appeased Putin at every turn.
For now, Donald Trump has proved that the animal cunning necessary to survive in the jungle of Manhattan real estate — duplicitous and venal politicians, all-powerful unions, incompetent and vindictive regulators, fair-weather bankers and investors, and dozens of special-interest crusaders — trumps the definition of traditional political wisdom: finding a young hip graduate from the right school with the right résumé to hire the right people to run the right sort of campaign.
Trump instinctively sensed that to win, Republicans would have to recapture the Rust Belt states, and to do that, he would have to campaign on illegal immigration, jobs, trade, and the economy. He sensed that populism was a state of mind and speech, not necessarily net worth. What good did it do for pundits to insist that a billionaire could not appeal to the horny-handed when the billionaire in fact talked and connected with the horny-handed? What good did it do to deplore the loud vulgarity of Trump if one’s own polish and sobriety could not hide the vulgarity of the carnival grifter, glib plagiarist, and loquacious fabulist? Is the local town paper in Wisconsin more or less fair in its coverage than the New York Times? Did the fact that well-spoken Fareed Zakaria snickered at the crudity of Trump suggest that he was not himself a Harvard-trained plagiarist?
If “Make America Great Again” is not to end up like the banal “Hope and Change,” if the Republican Congress of 2017 is not to wither away like the Democratic Congress of 2009, and if the glitzy promises of 2016 are not to prove as empty as the deceptions of Obamacare, the Iran Deal, the stimulus, and “balancing the budget,” then Trump will have to reflect on the nature of true wisdom: Trust instinct as much as conventional wisdom, never forget who elects the politician, remember that cheap praise is fickle and transient and those who traffic in it disappear in extremis, quietly do what is promised to those who were promised a change, ignore the venom of critics, and do not gloat over successes — and move silently, quickly, and, above all, modestly.
Do all that, and Trump would prove wiser than the more erudite who hate him.
6b) From an Angry Reader:
The new kind of Republican party is part 1930’s Nazi and 1950’s Dixiecrat.Raye Harper
Enemies of Language What would happen if conservatives started to change the words we use for political ends? By Victor Davis Hanson
Throughout history, revolutionaries of all stripes have warped the meaning of words to subvert reality.
And now here we go again, with another effort — spearheaded by the media and universities — to use any linguistic means necessary to achieve political ends.
“Sanctuary city” is a euphemism for the local and state nullification of federal law — a subversive tactic that dates back to the nullification crises during the Andrew Jackson administration and, later, in the years leading up to the Civil War.
This makes a mockery of the simple constitutional principle that cities and states cannot subversively pick and choose which federal laws to obey.
The term “sanctuary” would never apply to conservative jurisdictions that in similar fashion sought to offer “sanctuary” to those dissidents who disobeyed federal gun registration, income tax, or environmental laws.
College administrators boast of offering counseling and therapeutic help to students and faculty members distraught over the recent election. They use terms like “divisive” and “polarizing” in describing the election, when in truth they wish to hide from their donors, alumni, and half the country their own abject and one-sided contempt for incoming president-elect Donald Trump.
Note that in the highly emotional elections of 2008 and 2012, universities did not offer commensurate counseling services — because their own preferred candidate won and was thus his victory was not “polarizing.” Once upon a time, campuses did not worry about whether independent faculty and conservative students were sullen and depressed in adolescent style over the implications of President-elect Barack Obama’s radical promises to “fundamentally change America.”
Campus “safe space” is another vocabulary distortion. Such places are often set-aside spots that actually discriminate on the basis of race or gender.
Likewise, college “theme houses” often admit residents on the basis of segregation by ethnicity or race — in a way that would have been considered deplorable during the Civil Rights movement. Indeed, the word “segregation” has now virtually disappeared from our vocabulary because it could more likely apply to left-wing rather than right-wing protocols.
“Microaggression” is certainly not aggression as usually defined. Instead, the term seeks to stifle free expression on the principle that one can still be dubbed a racist or sexist by saying something that normally would not offend anyone — at least not without arcane academic inventions of bias.
Both right-wing Nazi Germany and the left-wing Soviet Union banned old words and created new words that furthered political agendas and warped reality.
“Trigger warning” should mean that readers or viewers are advised that literature or media could be obscene or threatening. In fact, this one-sided term only applies to material — from Roman elegiac poetry to the works of Mark Twain — deemed potentially hurtful or unfair by 21st century progressive standards of race, class, and gender. No one on campus is given a trigger warning before reading the left-wing manifestos of Eldridge Cleaver or Malcolm X, despite their calls for violence.
There are also lots of Orwellian nouns and adjectives to describe those from other countries who broke federal immigration laws to enter and reside in the United States.
“Illegal alien” used to be a neutral and descriptive legal term — one still preferred by the Supreme Court — but is now seen as counterproductive to the agendas of the open-borders movement. Thus the more inexact “undocumented alien” followed, although few who entered illegally ever had immigration “documents” of any sort. Next came the term “undocumented immigrant” — on the theory that the ancient word “alien” (from the Latin word alienus, meaning “belonging to another”) is offensive and also unhelpful to the open-borders project.
Finally, the ambiguous word “migrant” is being used to suggest that there is really no difference between entering and exiting a country under any circumstances.
The danger of destroying rules of language is that revolutionaries of any stripe can join this crooked game.
What if a right-wing movement wished to redefine “sanctuary cites” as “subversive cities”?
Would it be any more biased to call the sites of university post-election counseling services “progressive lamentation centers”?
Would a visitor from Mars be less confused about “safe spaces” if they were rebranded by right-wingers as “segregated set-asides”? Would “microaggressions” be better understood if they were renamed “nanno thought crimes”?
Perhaps “trigger warnings” could be rephrased by counter-revolutionaries as “censorship protocols”?
Of course, no one would like such linguistic payback.
There would be howls of protest if the new Trump administration rebranded extraconstitutional executive orders as “pen and phone liberation acts,” or named its substitute for Obamacare “The Real Affordable Care Act.”
To prevent this endless cycle of corrupting words, members of the media and academia should act as our linguistic guardians. Instead, for short-term political gain, they have abandoned their professional responsibilities to become our worst subverters of language.
6c) From an Angry Reader:
The new kind of Republican party is part 1930’s Nazi and 1950’s Dixiecrat.Raye Harper——————————Victor Davis Hanson’s Reply:
Dear Angry Reader Raye Harper,
Since you assert rather than argue or explain, it is hard to fathom what you are getting at. But in the spirit of the Angry Reader, I’ll give it a shot.
There is a reason why etymology is a valuable pursuit. Seek the root meaning of words and thereby learn. Our English word Nazism derives as an English transliterated abbreviation for the German Nationalsozialismus (“National Socialism”)—Hitler’s effort to combine fanatical nationalism with socialist and anti-capitalist principles.
Take also your “Dixiecrat” (which incidentally was a one-time phenomenon of the election of 1948, and did not reappear as you suggest in the “1950s.”) Note the suffix “-crat” (Greek, kratos, “power/rule”). It was so named in 1948 because it was a derivative of the Democratic Party. It was not called the Dixiepublicans because it had no similarities to the Republican Party.
Ironically, Dixiecrats’ official name (“The States’ Rights Democratic Party”) reflected and championed the idea of federal nullification (in this case school integration), which had been the source of the 1828 (in this case tariffs) and 1860 (in this case slavery) secessionist fervors. How odd, then, that 300 liberal jurisdictions currently are now “Sanctuary Cities” (perhaps better described as “Nullification Cities”) that defy federal immigration in the neo-Confederate spirit. Ask yourself which party, in the spirit of the Dixiecrats, is more likely to excuse race-base segregation, where on-campus “theme houses” or “safe spaces” with impunity discriminate on the basis of superficial appearance. Who is more tolerant of the idea of La Raza (“the Race”), a noun whose pedigree is found in Franco’s fascist Spain and Mussolini’s (as Razza) fascist Italy—Democrats or Republicans?
Is there any need to ask further where the impetus of contemporary anti-Semitism originates? Just walk on any contemporary campus, and visit the free-speech area. Being Jewish and pro-Israel is far more likely to incur left-wing anti-Semites than old-fashioned right-wing ones.In sum, I don’t see how the present pro-capitalist, pro-federalist, pro-Israel Republican Party can derive from either a foreign imported socialism or an indigenous states’ rights Democratic Party.
Finally, most readers are aware of your insidious liberal trope. In 1980 Reagan was called a Nazi. When he left office, newly-elected George H.W. Bush was the next extremist and suddenly the Left nostalgically called Reagan moderate, given that he was out of power. In 2000 George W. Bush was the new Nazi, and his father reinvented as a moderate in comparison. By 2016 a “new” Republican Party under Trump is now supposedly Nazi-like and W. is now seen as sober and judicious. So the playbook is transparent: assassinate the character of your present adversary by claiming he is an extremist by the standard of his predecessors, whom you of course smeared when they were in power as well.Bottom line: a lot of incoherence in your short sentence.Sincerely,VDH
— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailingauthor@victorhanson.com. © 2016 Tribune Media Services, Inc.
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7)America's Fourth Estate has become America's Fifth Column
By Victor Sharpe
At one time, perhaps before the Vietnam War, the media was considered a respectable and trusted purveyor of objective news. But for too long much of the mainstream media in America has shed that belief and become instead organs of state propaganda.
The dread examples of such disinformation as was seen in the Fascist, Nazi, and Communist authoritarian regimes has, it now seems, increasingly polluted our own mainstream media (MSM).
The general election has exposed the alphabet houses – ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, PBS, CNN as no better than unapologetic shills for the Democrat party and for the Clinton machine. Newspapers share the same guilt with the New York Times and the Washington Post leading the baleful and deplorable charge.
It was President Thomas Jefferson who presciently saw the peril a future America might face in what has now become its present demise of a free and vital press when he said: "If it were left to me to decide whether we should have a government without a free press or a free press without a government, I would prefer the latter."
We have seen the dismal and bleak spectacle of an endless procession of print and broadcasting reporters, journalists and talking heads taking unabashed left wing, pro-Obama and pro-Clinton positions to the point of dropping all pretense at objectivity or impartiality.
In that same 18th century, when Jefferson uttered his warning about the press, Edmund Burke in England looked at what he called the three estates within the British political system. He saw the King, the House of Lords and the House of Commons. However pre-eminent above them all was the press, which he called the Fourth Estate.
As for the term, Fifth Column, it of course refers to the time of the Spanish Civil War when Franco's four military columns were approaching besieged Madrid. But there was a fifth column secretly ensconced within the city itself.
On October 14th, 1936, the Fitchburg Sentinel newspaper reported that:
"Out of hiding came a few of the phantom fifth column, which was the Fascist auxiliary force so dreaded by the Spanish loyalists."
Indeed, Ernest Hemingway in 1937 wrote a play called "The Fifth Column." The term is now used to mean traitor or spy. Cicero, the Roman senator and famous orator, also warned against the traitor within the gate who is more dangerous than a foreign enemy – http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/33210-a-nation-can-survive-its-fools-and-even-the-ambitious.
Briefly I see three triggers that has led us to the present untenable predicament. The first was during the Vietnam War when the Vietnamese Communist General Giap masterfully manipulated the American press to act against its own country during a time of war thus breaking a long standing taboo, turning much of the media into a veritable fifth column and opening a ghastly Pandora's box.
The second trigger was Watergate when the press began to operate against the establishment in ways which harmed the very nation state.
Third trigger was the election in 2,000 when liberals and the Left erupted over what they considered a stolen election and defeat of Al Gore by the hated President Bush. Remember the Democrat frenzy and the hanging chads?
This perhaps more than anything else drove the Democrat Party and its allies in the media to do all in their power to attack and demonize any Republican and Conservative president and administration, even to the extent of lurching so far left that they are now willing to appoint as head of the Democrat Party a known rabid Islamist and hater of the United States – Keith Ellison.
Whilst still a law student in 1989, Ellison allegedly penned two columns for the Minnesota Daily under the name, Keith Hakim, in which he defended the anti-American Nation of Islam and its spokesman, Khalid Abdul Muhammad. He also called for reparations for slavery and demanded a separate homeland for American blacks. He has more recently allegedly called for the elimination of the Second Amendment.
The last eight malevolent years of the Obama administration – during which Mr. Obama reduced our military, our intelligence capabilities and our influence abroad to such a degree that we are no longer able to influence the world's important events – also revealed how his willing and captive media became a menacing device of government manipulation and indoctrination.
If a government co-opts the press to do its bidding and that same press becomes a propaganda organ for the regime, we are in desperate danger.
People now find it harder and harder to obtain unfiltered news that is not editorialized by political partisan mandarins posturing on TV screens or in the pages of once respectable newspapers? Perhaps Jefferson and Burke knew that once upon that slippery slope it led to the abyss into which nation states fall, embrace tyranny and ultimately perish.
The hope remains that the Far Left Democrat party with its willing executioners in the MSM and its insane alliance with anti-American Islamists such as Keith Ellison will, by their very own hateful acts, self-destruct by alienating an increasing majority of Americans.
The hope also remains that a President Trump will indeed "drain the swamp," end the rampant corruption that assails the nation state, and allow truly principled journalists and reporters to rebuild the shattered fourth estate free of government manipulation and indoctrination so that it no longer acts as a fifth column.
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