A cautionary tale:
With the holidays upon us, I would like to share a personal experience about drinking and driving. As you know, some of us have been known to have brushes with the authorities from time to time, often on the way home after a “social session" with family or friends.I was out for an evening with friends. We had more than several whiskies followed by a couple of bottles of rather nice red wine and vodka shots. Although I was extremely relaxed, I still had the presence of mind to realize I was way over the limit. That's when I did something I've never done before; I took a taxi home! Sure enough, there was a police roadblock but since it was a taxi they waved it past and I arrived home safely, without incident.This was a real surprise to me the next morning because I had never driven a taxi before. I don't know where I got it and now that it's in my garage I don't know what to do with it. Give me a call if you want to borrow it.
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Well it's a New Year and I am back at my post driving my liberal friends crazy with facts.
It was not Trump who said ISIS/ISIL was the J.V Team yet, Trump haters are attacking him for wanting to re-establish a degree of comity between the Russian- American relationship, if possible.
I repeat my Happy New Year message to the sore losers : "suck it up you sniveling wimps!"
Linking Syria and Obama. Always the fault of others.(See 1 below.)
Well it's a New Year and I am back at my post driving my liberal friends crazy with facts.
A few random ones:
Obama always blames someone else. He must never have heard about Truman's "Buck" or where it stopped.
Also, Obama told Trump he was going to do every thing in his power to make for a smooth transition and then began to plant political IED's in his path starting with America's abstention in the U.N, followed by Kerry's disgraceful and duplicitous speech and restrictions on offshore drilling etc. .
I also remember Obama told Republicans: "Elections have consequences, and at the end of the day, I won."
Ironic, now that the Democrats have lost they cannot understand/embrace what Obama meant by his arrogant and demeaning comment
Finally, after having tried a recount and other acts to delegitimize Trump's victory the Democrats have settled on getting rid of the Electoral College and, failing that, I understand they plan to delay and obstruct Trump's Cabinet appointments.
Trump won the popular vote in 31 states to Hillary's 19 and DC. 62% to 38%. Hillary took California and now is president of Hollywood.
I repeat my Happy New Year message to the sore losers : "suck it up you sniveling wimps!"
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Erick Erickson writes that Republicans are taking back government but reports suggest Democrats will resist at least 8 of Trump's Cabinet appointments and if they do it will cost them more votes as they turnoff the public even more. (See 2 below.)
The best thing Trump has going for him is not luck, it is stupid Democrats who keep shooting themselves in their feet because they refuse to take their heads out of the sand. (See 2a below.)
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What say Kerry? (See 3 below.)
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Hezbollah remains biggest threat to Israel. (See 4 below.)
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Hanson de-mystifies the 2016 election. (See 5 below.)
This from an American citizen who fled Castro, is a good friend and fellow memo reader a business success and a conservative who knows the threat from the left having experienced it first hand. (See 6 below.)
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Megyn Kelly departs FOX for NBC.
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Erick Erickson writes that Republicans are taking back government but reports suggest Democrats will resist at least 8 of Trump's Cabinet appointments and if they do it will cost them more votes as they turnoff the public even more. (See 2 below.)
The best thing Trump has going for him is not luck, it is stupid Democrats who keep shooting themselves in their feet because they refuse to take their heads out of the sand. (See 2a below.)
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What say Kerry? (See 3 below.)
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Hezbollah remains biggest threat to Israel. (See 4 below.)
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Hanson de-mystifies the 2016 election. (See 5 below.)
This from an American citizen who fled Castro, is a good friend and fellow memo reader a business success and a conservative who knows the threat from the left having experienced it first hand. (See 6 below.)
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Megyn Kelly departs FOX for NBC.
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Dick
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1) WORST PRESIDENT EVER: Obama’s Actions and Inaction Created the Current Nightmare in Syria
In the 2nd Presidential debate in St. Louis on October 9, 2016, Hillary Clinton said: “The situation in Syria is catastrophic.”
For once, Hillary was right. The US’s involvement in Syria under Obama is nothing short of a nightmare. This was not the case in early 2009 when Obama was sworn in as President. Today US-backed and armed Syrian groups are fighting other US-backed groups because the Obama White House stirred up war in Syria but then lost control in the process.
According to Eric Margolis via Strategic-Culture.org, because of the Obama Administration’s astounding incompetence the US military decided to support its own rebel groups and the CIA did the same. As would be expected, fighting soon erupted between the US backed groups which no one could keep track of.
Ultimately, Obama’s plan in Syria included the US, Saudi Arabia and Turkey arming and financing ISIS to attack Syria. As a result 450,000 Syrians are dead and at least half of the 23 million have become refugees.
Because ISIS went rogue the US turned to the Kurds to assist who were then attacked by US ally Turkey. Russia next entered the mess and supported Bashar Assad, the leader of Syria. Predictably Russia attacked US backed groups while claiming to attack ISIS.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++“Hatred for the US is now seething in Turkey and across the Mideast.”To address the Syrian mess that Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton created, Obama decided to bring US troops back to Iraq to help clean up the mess.In a recent speech by Obama about the disaster in Syria, Obama indicated that the mess is not the fault of the US and other outsiders, who imported jihadis and even weapons from Libya to overthrow Syrian president Assad. Obama believes the mess is Assad’s fault for resisting the foreign-backed overthrow of his government.
2) Today the GOP Begins Taking Back America
Eight years ago, Democrats convened this day on Capitol Hill to usher in a Congress that would work hand in hand with an incoming Democrat White House. They had lots of things they could have done. But they chose to focus on Obamacare.
Today, the GOP can begin rolling that back. The GOP can begin rolling back Dodd-Frank. The GOP can begin rolling back Lilly-Ledbetter. The GOP can begin defunding Planned Parenthood. The GOP can begin setting up another generation of conservative leadership on the United States Supreme Court.
Eight years ago, the Democrats said they’d never let a crisis go to waste. They pit American against American to advance a divisive agenda without consensus. They did not think they needed it. Even today the Democrats think they are unaccountable and the election was stolen from them. They have not recognized they lost the trust of the American people. They have not recognized they tried to force Americans to embrace a radical agenda contrary to American norms. Now they can watch as the GOP undoes all their advances.
Make no mistake, there will be claims of “overreach.” Anything the GOP does will be attributed to overreach. But the GOP promised to repeal Obamacare. It must. The GOP promised to protect coal miners and the energy sector. It must. The GOP promised to free up the states to be engines of innovation. It must.
The GOP must seize now on its gains. The Democrats were willing to throw away their majority in the name of permanent political change. The GOP should make sure every last bit of it is unraveled.
2a)The Luck of the Donald--------What Does Trump Know About Russia?
By William McGurn
“Everything in life is luck.” The words are attributed to Donald Trump and they continue to make regular appearances in the press notwithstanding that the president-elect long ago declared it fake news. “I never made this ridiculous statement,” he tweeted in 2014, in language that sounds much closer to the spirit of @realDonaldTrump.
Even so, it takes nothing away from Mr. Trump’s stunning Nov. 8 victory to note that he enters the Oval Office a very lucky president. For notwithstanding the formidable challenges ahead—a dangerous world in which American leadership has been diminished, an anemic domestic economy that has led record numbers of Americans to give up hope of finding work, to name two—the curious politics of the moment has set him up for some bigly successes early on. The irony is that it is not so much Mr. Trump’s friends as his enemies who have put him in this lucky position.
The list is long. So let’s start from the top:
Barack Obama. Remember President Obama’s vow that he wasn’t going to wait for Congress to act? Well, he didn’t. And it wasn’t just executive orders. On everything from the nuclear deal with Iran and the Paris agreement on climate change to fossil fuels, immigration and transgender bathrooms, the administration has relied principally on executive authority to impose the Obama agenda.
But as this editorial page has noted, what can be done by the pen can be undone by the pen. By relying on executive power instead of the hard work of persuading Congress to pass legislation, Mr. Obama has set Mr. Trump up for some wonderful photo-ops as the new president uses his own executive authority to undo large chunks of the Obama legacy.
John Kerry. Put it this way: If you wanted to make Mr. Trump an instant hero to Israel, what would you do? The answer is you’d have America abstain from a U.N. Security Council resolution condemning the Jewish state—and then have the secretary of state give a speech like the one he just delivered knocking the coalition government of Benjamin Netanyahu as the “most right-wing in Israeli history.”
Whatever Mr. Kerry thought he was doing, his out-the-door slap at Israel is of a piece with the booing that the mention of Jerusalem received at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. At the beginning of this presidential race Mr. Trump raised fears about how pro-Israel he would be when he said he’d be “neutral” between the Israelis and Palestinians. Now he’s a hero simply for not insulting and demeaning the elected choice of the Israeli people the way Mr. Obama has.
Sally Jewell. Throughout the election Mr. Trump made coal miners his special cause, promising to restore mining jobs killed by Obama-era regulations. Interior Secretary Jewell is apparently hard at work making it easier for Mr. Trump to show he’s making good on his promise. The vehicle is an 11th-hour rule that would give federal regulators more power to deny coal-mining permits.
Here’s the gift: The rule goes into effect a day before Mr. Trump is sworn in as president. That leaves 60 legislative days for Congress to stop it from going into effect under the Congressional Review Act. Already Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has promised that Republicans will use that act to kill the regulation. Which will likely end with a nice ceremony with Mr. Trump surrounded by grateful coal miners as he announces how he and his party have saved the industry from another coal-killing regulation.
Harry Reid. In 2013 the then-Senate majority leader was determined to stop the then-Republican minority from blocking Obama nominees. So he pushed through what the New York Times called “the most fundamental alteration of its rules in more than a generation.” Under the Reid rules, President Obama needed only a simple majority to get his nominees through, not the 60 votes to stop a GOP filibuster.
Plainly this made it easier for President Obama. But President Trump will enjoy the same advantage in a Congress where his party already has a majority in both houses.
Ted Cruz. When Justice Antonin Scalia died in February, the Texas senator ran an ad highlighting the importance of the Supreme Court on issues from the Second Amendment to religious liberty, highlighting a clip from an old interview in which Mr. Trump called himself “very pro-choice” and concluding “we cannot trust Donald Trump with these decisions.”
In May Mr. Trump responded by releasing a list of jurists broadly in the Scalia tradition. Now he can claim a mandate because he had released these names. So once again, Mr. Trump’s critics—in this case constitutional conservatives—have set him up to make good on one of his most important campaign promises.
Right now the punditry is chattering on about how Mr. Obama is using his remaining time in office to box Mr. Trump in. Maybe. But so far Mr. Trump has been blessed by his enemies’ bad judgment.
And nothing they are now doing suggests his luck—or their bad judgment—is going to change.
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3)PA daily cartoon:
Israel murders Santa Claus,
claiming Santa was a terrorist
- PA daily uses Santa image to repeat libel that Israel kills and harasses innocent Palestinians, claiming they are terrorists
Israeli soldier: "He tried to carry out a stabbing operation."
Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zlberdik
Exploiting the Christmas spirit, the official Palestinian Authority daily used Santa Claus to promote the PA's libel that Israel "executes" innocent Palestinians, under the pretext that they tried to carry out terror attacks.
The cartoon above shows an Israeli soldier standing above a bleeding Santa Claus who was just shot at a security checkpoint. The soldier says: "He tried to carry out a stabbing operation."
A mosque and church are seen among the buildings in the background. [Official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, Dec. 28, 2016]
Palestinian Media Watch has documented that PA and Fatah leaders have reiterated this libel numerous times, even about terror attacks that were documented by security cameras.
After many Palestinian terrorists were killed while carrying out stabbing attacks during the terror wave in 2015-2016, the PA started to claim that Israel planted the knives next to the "innocent" Palestinian "victims."
This cartoon from Fatah's Twitter account also expresses the libel:
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4)
5)
4)
| Analysis: Hezbollah now serves as the biggest threat to Israel | ||
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| The Institute for National Security Studies' (INSS) annual report released Monday points to a significant strengthening of Hezbollah, which surpassed Iran as the greatest danger to Israel on the think tank's threat rankings. Iran was ranked the biggest threat to Israel last year, as Hezbollah appeared to be bashed and bloodied from its involvement in the Syrian civil war and deterred from challenging Israel. Over the past year, however, the IDF and the defense establishment have seen Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah survive the Syrian quagmire and continue to bring significant, game-changing weaponry from Iran to Lebanon. Israel now sees Hezbollah as a real threat. The commanders of the organization's weapons warehouses in Lebanon stopped merely counting the unfathomable number of missiles they possess long ago and have instead turned to cataloguing the missiles by their quality. The results should greatly concern everyone in Israel. Hezbollah today possesses precision weaponry that can hit any point on the map in Israel. Hezbollah has the ability to deter the Israeli Air Force and its stealth capabilities, to deter the Israeli Navy and its missile boats and to deter the IDF ground forces, even with all of the coordination improvements it has boasted of in the past year. While the IDF finally learned to use the same language throughout all of its branches, Hezbollah waged war and gained operational experience which even the best of Israel's conscription forces do not possess. The last of Israel's conscription soldiers with war experience are currently finishing their army service, whereas Hezbollah has thousands of soldiers with war experience controlling the Lebanon-Syria border. The IDF can defeat Hezbollah in a matter of days, on the condition that the person giving the orders will be brave enough to let the army do what it is capable of. The price will include thousands of innocent people killed in Lebanon. However, the alternative is Israel being dragged into a violent and dangerous conflict that will include hundreds of victims on its side, an abandoned northern third of the country and a war that will truly threaten the Jewish State's existence for the first time in 44 years. The public must take into account two important things: one, the IDF is preparing for the worst and pushing the conflict off as much as possible; and second, if the Home Front Command recommends keeping a transistor radio with batteries at home, it is envisioning a scenario in which all other communication channels collapse. The biggest headache for the defense establishment is decreasing the gap between what the public thinks - that Hezbollah is not a serious threat - and what the reality is. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ |
Victor Davis Hanson Dismantles Myths of the 2016 Election Breaking through the media distortions.
Victor David Hanson: Thank you very much for having me. I thought I would talk about the mythologies of the election if I could. But before we go, I know you all have had this experience. People have come up to you and said, “Did you have any idea that Trump could win?” Now, everybody lies and said, of course I did. I thought he would be even, but I wasn’t sure. But I had these conversations a lot with Bruce Thornton, and we’d always come to the same conclusion. I don’t know, but there’s something strange out there going on.
And what I meant by that was, when I would walk across the Hoover Institution grounds, anybody who I thought would be voting for Donald Trump would do this. And anybody who wanted to be labeled the maverick, brave, independent scholar, the “go-to” person for the Washington Post, would say, “I’m for Hillary.” And I thought this is really an accurate barometer of what people are thinking, and so I said to my wife Jennifer, “You know every time we have somebody on the farm or we talk to a guy on a tractor, if he speaks English” — and these are all Mexican-American people — “he’s for Trump.” Can’t believe it. People who are not for Trump don’t speak English. And she said, well I have a class with 40 people and there are 38 Hispanics. I said well ask them. You don’t have tenure, but be careful how you ask them. Do it this way: is there anybody in their right mind that would vote for Trump? Seventeen people held their hand up in front of people, and then you saw the statistics that he had two to three points higher minority representation among minority communities than did Romney or McCain. And it was just striking.
The other thing that I think has happened in this election, unfortunately, is — I know I’m not quite unbiased — is that we’ve lost friends and family, relationships. I know that I thought I knew people at the National Review. I’ve been writing there for 14 years, and then I would read things, and I could not believe it. It wasn’t that I disagreed with them or they disagreed with me, it was the level of venom and condescension. I would pick up the Wall Street Journal and read Bret Stephens. I talked to George Will and I could not believe it. And then I talked to people in my family, and the same thing.
But there was one commonality that you may have experienced. That the people who were voting for Hillary or not voting wanted to provoke something. So every time I would see my brother or other brother, they wanted to talk about it. They wanted to put you on the spot. At Hoover when I saw somebody, they wanted to say, “How dare you.” Nobody in this room went up to somebody who they’ve known for a long time and say, “How dare you vote for Hillary.” They may have thought that, but –and it’s thematic of this whole election that Trump’s rallies were supposedly violent, rigged, we know now, by the DNC, and now we see the real violence in the post election. So there were all these bizarre emotions.
One of the things, one other statement before I go into mythologies: This had a lot to do with class. I know people said, “Well how can Trump be a populist. He’s a billionaire.” But he was a billionaire in a way that offended the sensibilities of the coastal corridors. Maybe it was the orange hair or skin or the queen’s accent or his personal tastes and appetites, but whatever it was, people of the elite did not like him for class reasons because he would talk to conservatives and you would look at his agenda and it was pretty conservative, and they’d say, “Well, he doesn’t believe it” or “he was a Democrat.” But they applied a different standard to him that was inexplicable other than they had a class disdain for what he represented.
I thought something was going wrong when I would go up to Palo Alto. I had this unique experience in my life where I live in the second poorest county in the United States, southern Tulare Fresno County, and then I work in one of the most affluent in Stanford-Palo Alto-Menlo Park, and it’s two different worlds. And people up there were convinced that Trump would not only lose but lose in a landslide, and then people out in the foothills of California really thought that he might win in California. I would ride a bike in the month of Michigan, in the month of September in Michigan. I was teaching at Hillsdale. Everybody had a Trump sign, and you would stop and talk to them, and they were just certain he was going to win. I thought this doesn’t make sense. And so I think a lot of you were not as surprised as we otherwise should have been. Because after all, he had no money comparatively speaking. He did not have a ground game. He did not have opposition research. He did not have bundlers. He did not have celebrity endorsements. He did not have establishment. He did not have the media. He had everybody against him. So they say, “Well Hillary won the popular vote.” Yeah, but it’s astounding that he was even close because he had nothing in conventional terms for him other than a message that resonated.
One of the big mythologies of the election was it’s unusual we’ve never had anything this vulgar, this crude in American history. By the standards of American election it was pretty tame. In 1824 basically John Quincy Adams stole the election from Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson got it back in 1828, but if you go back and look at what they called one another. Jackson was supposedly an assassin, a bigamist, his wife was a prostitute supposedly. It reminded me of the Athenian democratic elections and politics where Demosthenes stands up in the De Corona and says, “My opponent, Aeschines, I will not mention the fact that his mother ran a house of prostitution from a cemetery.”
George McGovern called Richard Nixon 12 times in public a Nazi in the 1972 election. 1944, right in the middle of the battles in the Pacific at Leyte Gulf, Franklin Roosevelt said of Thomas Dewey we don’t fight Nazism and fascism overseas just to turn it over to the same people here in the United States. Think of that.
The last time we have seen a Republican fight was Lee Atwater in the ’88 Bush election. Last time somebody wanted to win rather than to lose nobly, and when he got done with Michael Dukakis, he was a wimp and a tank, he had polluted Boston Harbor and he let Willie Horton out thousands of times over again. And that was the last time Republicans said that they were going to do that, and then they stopped so that John McCain wanted to lose nobly like old Ajax, I suppose. Never mentioned Reverend Wright, Jeremiah Wright. You get the impression had Trump run in 2008 we would have never heard the end of Reverend Wright. Had he run in 2012 he would have jumped out and grabbed Candy Crowley’s, I hope, microphone, and he would have reacted.
And I’m mentioning that because that was very important. People you talk to said I’m tired of losing. For people who are wealthy and have connections and influence, losing nobly is an option. But for people at the end of things, a worker out of a job, or somebody who can’t afford to get his teeth fixed, losing is bad. They don’t want to lose. And as one person said to me, if he’s going to lose at least I like him to screw things up. And I think what he meant was we got a Samson now and he’s got his arms around the Philistine pillar, and if he loses, he’s going to tear down the whole damn temple with him. Like that Apple commercial where you run and throw the ball and chain into the screen and smash it. That was a sense of anger that people had over Trump.
So this election was not that much different than some of the acrimonious elections we’ve had. Trump was no more a crook or a wheeler/dealer than John Kennedy. I mean his fortune was more transparent than the Kennedy fortune. It was more transparent especially than the LBJ communications fraudulent fortune, and yet these people were called landmark figures in American political history. His personal appetites reflected the life of Manhattan. It did, but they were no more or, I should say, they were less excessive than those of John Kennedy or Bill Clinton who were both considered feminists.
So it was hard to take the idea that we had a singularly crude candidate seriously. He said things that we regret, but — I don’t want to contextualize things, but I’ll just take two examples of his most egregious things. When he said of John McCain I prefer people to not be captured, but to capture others or kill others. That came right out of the mouth of George Patton. Patton said, “You don’t join up this Army to get captured or killed. You join this Army to kill or capture.” So it was an old refrain that Trump had haphazardly picked up, I think.
As far as the Mexican judge, that was the worst complaint that he said that a pending case was settled, was going to be settled by a Mexican judge, and everybody got outraged. And I thought, how many times in my life has everybody said Victor Hanson is Swedish American? Not once. They said he was Swedish. You’re Mexican. I never heard anybody in Fresno County say, “Are you Armenian American?” They always says he’s an Armenian. They don’t mean that he lives in Armenia. That was the way people talked. Trump knew that. And then I thought, if I had just said I was going to build a wall and cut off the United States from Mexico, would I want a judge who was a member of the San Diego Lawyers of La Raza, the race, whose etymology goes back to fascist Spain? And then I thought, is this so terrible? My mother was an appellate court judge. First female appellate court judge in California, and she used to call me and say, “You know this corporation is in a sexual harassment suit and they’re trying to avoid my court.” And she said, “That’s what people do,” and that’s what people do. They act like humans. And so his problem is that if anything he’s too transparent. He’s not Nixon. He’s the anti–Nixon. He’s too authentic. He’s too raw and brass and people did not understand that and so they equated that with being the singularly crude candidate, which he wasn’t.
And by the way, I remember when Hillary said that she thought that he was a singularly crude candidate. She said we go high when they go low. I’m thinking, when have you ever done that? Every politician goes low. The only difference with Trump is he was honest enough to say that he never goes high. And, I thought that was so unusual because Michelle Obama, do you remember in 2008, she said, “How can Hillary Clinton who can’t manage her own house, manage the White House?” And then I thought, this is the woman who said, “I’ve never proud of my country”? Never proud of my country? I though wow. “Downright mean country.” They “raised the bar on me”? This is her husband who said bring a gun to a knife fight, get in their faces, punish our enemies. You didn’t build that? He was the most divisive president in memory.
So that was a mythology as well about the Clintons and the Obamas being sober and judicious campaigners. Another one was this campaign was not about issues. The irony was that both of them were, they had such high negatives that they sort of canceled each other out and turned the campaign to issues. Because nobody in their right mind on the left went to the Trump web site and went to the Hillary web site and said, “Oh, there’s no difference.” There was a world of difference. There was far more difference than in 2012 and 2008. Trump, whatever you think of him, was far more antithetical to his opponent than either Romney or McCain had been. If you go down the list on Second Amendment, abortion, taxes, regulation, immigration, Obamacare, there was a world of difference. This was a campaign about issues. That’s why people voted the way they did. I think that was another complete fabrication.
One of the big myths was that Trump was the divider who had ruined his party, and Obama-Hillary were uniters who would save the Democratic Party. Nothing could have been further from the truth. As we look out at the Democratic Party, it’s in ruins. It’s in wreckage. The Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders wing jackals are fighting over a dead carcass with the strays left from the Hillary campaign. Think about it.
What happened to the Democratic Party was that it got lured by this pied piper called Obama so at one point 8 years ago, if you were ambiguous about gay marriage or women in combat or transgendered restrooms, 8 years later if you were ambiguous you were a homophobe, racist, sexist, etc. They had moved their party so radically to the left, and they could do it because of the unique ability of Barak Obama to get constituencies to come out and vote en mass for him, which were not transferable to an older white woman with a shrill witch-like voice like Hillary. It wasn’t going to happen. So what he had done is, as Obama rides off into the sunset to a very, very lucrative 1 percent, you-didn’t-build-that lifestyle, his legacy is this. All of his initiatives will be overturned or destroyed by Donald Trump. They will.
But he’s leaving one other legacy. He’s saying to the Democratic Party, I left a legacy and ideological agenda that only 40 percent of the country believe in, and you’re stuck advancing it and yet you can’t get elected because you don’t have the personal narrative that I have. And so it’s one of the most nihilistic legacies. He’s ruined the Democratic Party. It has been reduced. No senate, no house, no presidency, no Supreme Court, no state legislatures, no state governments. It is a municipal party now. Nobody divided and ruined it more than Obama.
In contrast, for all of the wisdom of my colleagues at The National Review, Weekly Standard, Wall Street Journal, this is a moment where, have you noticed the people who were never Trump are, themselves, trying to hide how giddy they are because they look at this thing, and they say, House, Senate, presidency, Supreme Court picks, 3,000 federal appointees, state legislatures. We’ve never had anything like this. Even George Bush didn’t quite do this. Wow. This is amazing.
And then they say, “Well, except for immigration and trade, we’re not that divided.” And so, Trump united people and he united the party and he left it in much greater shape. If anybody in their right mind had said in September Donald Trump is going to win Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and there is such a thing as the Reagan Democrat, blue collar workers, the missing Romney voters, but whoever they are, they were there. So all the things that were supposed to be mythological, these people, they don’t exist — they do exist. People say they’re gonna not vote, but they were secretly for Trump. “Oh, that’s a myth.” That happened. And that was because he was able as a billionaire orange guy from Manhattan to appeal to workers who said, I think the country is in decline. I think that people don’t listen to me, and I look at TV every day and I feel like I’m a stranger in a strange land. The Latino vote, the white vote, the black vote. I’m tired of that. I just want people to be treated as people.
And the other thing is, this elite never lives by the ramifications of their own ideology. If you live in California you have the highest power bills in the country and they’re all adjudicated by people on the coast who live in perpetual 70-degree weather. I live in Selma. I go in August and Mexican-American people are in Walmart because it’s 110 outside. They can’t afford the air conditioners. I drive up to my picturesque ivory tower and go to the top of the ivory tower. I’ve never turned on the air conditioner and heat in 10 years, and yet the people who live there are telling other people they’re tired of having water. I drove over to Palo Alto the other day. I see all these boarded up homes whose wells have gone dry. I see all this land idle, and I think to myself, the people who did this depend on imported water from Hetch Hetchy Reservoir. Do they ever cut off their own water and say take it, please? We don’t believe in transference of water. It’s bad ecology. Never. They all want high-speed rail, and where do they first try it out? Down in Hanford, California on a bunch of farmers.
So people think, you look at the Guccifer, you look at the hacked Colin Powell emails, you look at WikiLeaks. What you see is not just smugness and arrogance, but it’s people who deliberately intend to dictate to other people, and they feel that their education or their sensitivity or their influence, whatever it is, insulates them from having to live what they advocate. And Trump was able to expose environmentalism as boutique environmentalism. And he was able to say there is such a thing as fair rather than just free trade.
When I grew up, there were four of us that went to college from Selma High School, and I remember coming back in 1971 and I talked to people I grew up with, and they said, “You really blew it, Victor. What a waste of time. I’m working at the Fruehauf Trailer.” “I’m working at Upright Harvester.” “I’m working at Del Monte.” “I’m working at CalCan.” These were all great jobs. And then we read in the National Review that the answer to that is that these people are losers. They’re just stupid. They should just move. As if everybody in Selma with an 88-year-old mother is supposed to put his house on his back, get on a motorcycle, drive to North Dakota and be a fracker. That’s the kind of attitude that the establishment had to people. And if you wanted to read the voice of Aslan about immigration, you don’t need to. All you had to do was read the Wall Street Journal. The positions were exactly the same. Open borders, let the market adjudicate capital and labor. And that’s written by people who have never had a dead dog found on their lawn or they’ve never been hit by somebody who had, as we say in Fresno County, the “three no’s”: No insurance, no registration, no driver’s license.
I won’t mention the pundit, and he was giving me a big lecture that he had been very worried about me because he said to me, “Some of your op-eds on illegal immigrations are starting to worry me, and you’re an educated person. You’ve got to be careful.” I said, “Have you ever had a dead person on your property?” I said, “The world, Mr. So and So, is divided into two people: Those who have had a dead person on their property and those who haven’t. Those who’ve had a dead person on their property oppose illegal immigration. It’s that simple.” He just looked at me and said, “What planet have you stepped in from?” And that’s the point, isn’t it?
A couple of other things. Horace, the great Latin poet in the first book, The Eleventh Ode, had a poem. You know it, Carpe Diem: Seize the Day. The first, the stanza right before it says, “As we speak a jealous age passes by” meaning time is very precious, and the stanza after Carpe Diem: Seize the Day is “don’t worry about what brings tomorrow.” You can’t control tomorrow. So as we speak, Trump is being attacked every day. They’re going to go after Trump University. They’re going to go after his business dealings, his family, his wife’s immigration status. Believe me, they’ll find another thing. He will die from a thousand cuts so he has a race to get this agenda through. Everybody says, have you noticed all these people who wanted to destroy him, now are saying he must be magnanimous. Do you know what magnanimous means? It means having a great soul, as Aristotle said. But what was the context? The context of magnanimity is the following. It’s not to go to Munich. That was not magnanimous. That’s getting people killed. Magnanimous, being magnanimous is defeating the opponent, putting your foot on his neck, humiliate him, and then saying I feel so sorry I’m not gonna quite smash your throat. You can only be magnanimous when you win. Magnanimity is refined to victors. You don’t be magnanimous until you defeat the enemy.
So what Trump has to do in the next 100 days before he’s inaugurated, and then the next, he’s got to get this agenda through as quickly as he can. He’s got to get these cabinet posts, and then the irony will be — because I think a lot of the people on the left don’t believe in anything other than power. The funny thing is they will start to have a secret admiration that he could do things that they didn’t because Obama, remember, had the House, had the Senate, had the people behind him, and he couldn’t do anything, but being a nihilist. And that agenda will fail. But they’ll say, “My God, he actually did something.” And then second of all, I don’t really think that they always believe in the utility or the efficacy of their own agenda, and they have a sick perverse delight to see what would happen if somebody didn’t listen to them and actually enacted an agenda because they think it might work and that was the case with Reagan. I mean, Reagan Airport was named for him and the Democratic Senate didn’t oppose it because they did see that Reagan brought the economy back. So if he has to move very quickly, and if he thinks that he’s going to reach out or be magnanimous or stall, or trim, he’s going to fail. He’s only got a very few hours.
And, finally, I want to talk just a second on this election as it was a referendum on who is wise and who is stupid. There’s a great play by Euripides, The Bacchae, and one of the refrains is “what is wisdom, sophia“? And the Greeks have a dichotomy between the Sophocles, the wise person, and the Sophistes, the wise–ass person, or the Sophists. And what they were trying to tell us is that with material progress, wealth, luxury, influence, comes moral regress. You’ve got be very careful. So when you look at this WikiLeaks or what in the world is a man like Colin Powell, sober, judicious, beloved, whining in an email that Hillary has jacked up her election prices so much that there’s not going to be enough crumbs for him. Or scheming about getting somebody in the Bohemian Grove or seeing somebody at the Hamptons. Or hearing Podesta saying that we should go after Trump’s Russian ties, but, oh, by the way, I have a wonderful Putin stock portfolio.
And you start to see that in this world that we’ve created, education is not just disinterest learning anymore. It’s not inductive. At least we have these great universities and they’re rated as such worldwide, 15 of the top 20 universities are in America, but they’re only rated because of engineering and medicine and business. It’s not liberal arts. What the universities have become is sort of like a cattle brand. You get stamped on your rear end and it says “Yale” or “Stanford,” but it has no meaning anymore. So we have all these people, Hillary – Yale, Bill – Yale, Podesta – Georgia. What did it matter in the end if they’re going to lose their soul? Who is the wise person? I was asking myself this the other day because I had this inane talk with a fellow that I work with; Ph.D., very renowned, very arrogant guy, who explained to me in great detail that only stupid idiots like me in the humanities would think that Trump could win because he was an expert in statistics, all this stuff. I thought, this guy is a complete moron. He’s wrong on everything. But, then 3 hours later I went home and I was talking to this guy. He had about three teeth missing and he was fixing a hydraulic ram on my farm, and I thought, wow, he took the seals out of a hydraulic ram – $3,000.00 piece of thing, and within 25 minutes he was doing this. I said, “Do you have to worry about your manual?” “No, I’ve done this.” And he was a craftsman, and yet we call him stupid and a loser and this other guy brilliant.
And then this was almost as if there is a God. I think there is a God. I went inside and I turned on the TV, and my wife said, “You should listen to this because he’s talking about what you mentioned,” and I mentioned it to her the other day as well and another incident. And Trump got on and he said that we need vocational training. These people are not stupid. I see them. I worked. And I’m a builder. And I think that’s what this election is about. Who is wise and who is foolish? The pollsters were stupid. The handlers with Hillary are stupid. The pundits were stupid. The people who actually can do something and don’t get credit because it’s muscular or involves craftsmanship, many times they’re just as bright as the people that we call bright. It’s really a redefinition of who’s smart and who’s stupid, and more importantly, who’s ethical and who’s amoral.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
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6)Subject: A MORE ACCURATE PERSPECTIVE
Here are the facts:
Trump won the popular vote in 31 states to her 19 and DC. 62% to her 38%.
Trump led in the total popular vote for all states except California.
Hillary won California 5,860,714 to Trump’s 3,151,821. 61.6% to 33.1% exclusive of the other candidates. Thus California gave Hillary the popular vote for all states as claimed by the Democrats and their media stooges.
But deduct her California vote from her national vote leaving her with 54,978,783, and deduct Trump’s California vote from his national total, leaving him with 57,113.976, he wins in a landslide in the other 49 states, 51.3% to her 48.7%.
So, in effect, Hillary was elected president of California and Trump was elected president of the rest of the country by a substantial margin.
This exemplifies the wisdom of the Electoral College, to prevent the vote of any one populace state from overriding the vote of the others. Trump’s Campaign Manager, Kellyanne Conway, whose expertise is polling, saw this early on and devised her strategy of “6 pathways to the White House”.
This meant ignoring California with its huge Democrat majority and going after the states that would give him the necessary electoral votes to win, FL, NC, MI, PA, OH, and WI.
At its lowest point since the civil war! Could this mean the end of the Democrat Party? When the afternoon of January 20, 2017 arrives, the Republican Party will have:
1) The Presidency.
2) A majority of the House of Representatives.
3) A majority of the Senate.
4) Almost two-thirds of all the governorships.
5) Total control of the statehouses in almost two-thirds of all the states.
And in the near future, Republicans will be able to add:
6) A majority of the Supreme Court. The above has never happened before in American history.
Think about that and let it sink in for a moment. And it's all because of one reason: Barack Obama's forcing his extreme far-left agenda on an unwilling country by executive orders, left wing judges, and obsequious bureaucrats. It's important to pass this on. With the demand that we do away with the Electoral College and take the popular vote being pushed by the media, etc, all Americans need to know that the Electoral College is working exactly as our Founding Fathers intended.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
6)Subject: A MORE ACCURATE PERSPECTIVE
Here are the facts:
Trump won the popular vote in 31 states to her 19 and DC. 62% to her 38%.
Trump led in the total popular vote for all states except California.
Hillary won California 5,860,714 to Trump’s 3,151,821. 61.6% to 33.1% exclusive of the other candidates. Thus California gave Hillary the popular vote for all states as claimed by the Democrats and their media stooges.
But deduct her California vote from her national vote leaving her with 54,978,783, and deduct Trump’s California vote from his national total, leaving him with 57,113.976, he wins in a landslide in the other 49 states, 51.3% to her 48.7%.
So, in effect, Hillary was elected president of California and Trump was elected president of the rest of the country by a substantial margin.
This exemplifies the wisdom of the Electoral College, to prevent the vote of any one populace state from overriding the vote of the others. Trump’s Campaign Manager, Kellyanne Conway, whose expertise is polling, saw this early on and devised her strategy of “6 pathways to the White House”.
This meant ignoring California with its huge Democrat majority and going after the states that would give him the necessary electoral votes to win, FL, NC, MI, PA, OH, and WI.
At its lowest point since the civil war! Could this mean the end of the Democrat Party? When the afternoon of January 20, 2017 arrives, the Republican Party will have:
1) The Presidency.
2) A majority of the House of Representatives.
3) A majority of the Senate.
4) Almost two-thirds of all the governorships.
5) Total control of the statehouses in almost two-thirds of all the states.
And in the near future, Republicans will be able to add:
6) A majority of the Supreme Court. The above has never happened before in American history.
Think about that and let it sink in for a moment. And it's all because of one reason: Barack Obama's forcing his extreme far-left agenda on an unwilling country by executive orders, left wing judges, and obsequious bureaucrats. It's important to pass this on. With the demand that we do away with the Electoral College and take the popular vote being pushed by the media, etc, all Americans need to know that the Electoral College is working exactly as our Founding Fathers intended.
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