"Facts can be ignored or denied, but they will always have their revenge.”
— Chris Ladd, American writer, former GOP precinct committeeman, creator of PoliticalOrphans.com, and author of the 2015 book, The Politics of Crazy.
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I just returned from a two day trip to Europe. Actually I went to New York and took a subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn on the F Line. It was a twelve or so stop ride and then a much later return I encountered : several people sleeping in the subway as I walked through the turnstiles, about a third of the passengers were Asians. Two lesbians, totally tattooed, were making love holding onto the hand rail. A Spanish guitar player came on board and serenaded us and then passed his hat for tips. On the return trip a woman was crying hysterically, another woman sitting next to me was reading documents in Korean, one man had his scalp shaved and what hair he had in a pony tail Mohawk was colored green and he was holding a bicycle. When we exited, Lynn and I took a stroll and saw advertisements for million dollar condos and $5000/month rentals and we saw a woman breast feeding her baby out in the open. Brooklyn has come a long way from that "Tree" that grew there and is becoming very gentrified and very, very expensive. Dogs were all over leading their masters and mistresses and pooping everywhere. Paper and trash was everywhere as well, the weather was gorgeous and the streets were filled with Americans but few were speaking English.
No wonder our bar bell nation does not understand Trump and those poor deplorable souls who make up middle America. The bar-bellian's live in their own cocoon which is unlike anywhere else.
Everything Trump does regarding tax reform angers many Liberals and radical progressives because when you legislate tax relief only those who pay taxes benefit. Obviously those who pay taxes are wealthier than those who receive the benefits from the taxes paid by those who have earned income through work and entrepreneurship and some though inheritance others through luck and winning lotteries.. DUH!
Everything Trump does regarding sanctions against Iran, Russia, China and N Korea will cause angst among many Liberals and radical progressives who thought the Iran Deal and hostage payoff was brilliant and will buy peace, cowering before China and Russia will bring peace and threatening the destruction of N Korea's missile capability is American war mongering.
Everything Trump does to press for ending Obamacare causes heartburn among many Liberals and radical progressives who believe more government control over a greater chunk of GDP, our individual freedoms and delivery of personal health care is healthy.
Everything Trump does to support parental choice of the type of education their offspring receive both angers and threatens many Liberals and radical progressives who believe they know best and most want education unions to continue delivering mush.
Everything Trump does to accomplish/enact his agenda evokes severe reactions from most Liberals, radical progressives, the mass media and certainly the vast majority of the Democrat Party.
Why? There are many reasons. The more prominent are as follows:
a) He won and Democrats lost and they cannot swallow this bitter pill.Same for the mass media.
b) Trump is a cad and his behaviour is not presidential. Bill Clinton was a class act and Hillary is not deplorable.
c) Trump colluded with Russia in order to enrich himself and his family. After an entire year of investigations, leaks and false reporting there is no evidence to support this claim but that is irrelevant.
d) By attacking Trump at every turn and blocking his agenda Democrats hope they will regain control of Congress and then be in a better position to impeach him and even the score against what Republicans did to "Ole Bill."
e) Attacking Trump for being a racist, a misogynist, a liar and a narcissist throws sand in his gears and evokes tweet responses which lowers his acceptability.
f) Finally, by attacking/smearing Trump, Democrats know most Republicans are "wusses" and will not defend him for fear of bringing attention to themselves.
Dignity never works for Republicans because Democrats approach politics with drawn knives. Can Republicans adjust? I seriously doubt it because they are too busy running away from their campagn commitments (See 1 below.)
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Tillerson makes the perfect Secretary of State. Trusting, dull, patient, believes words more effective than weapons. I always preferred Bolton. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Retail shopping and high overhead have been undercut by Amazon. Will the same happen to movie theaters? The ability to stay home and watch films and be entertained can create the same problems for Hollywood.
Will humans begin to live a life where they stay home more and interact through technology? Will this behaviour impact energy demand and lend credibility to the prediction that self driving cars are the future and thus, car ownership will decline as car rental rises? Will zoo attendance increase now that there are no more circuses? Will meal preparation and home delivery impact fast food restaurants? Lot of changes coming as cities become more crowded, traffic explodes and crime increases. (Click here: The War On Cars - YouTube)
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Off to Athens in the morning.
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Dick
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1)
Subject: I can't spare this man. He fights.
by Evan Sayet
My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask
me if I'm not bothered by Donald Trump's lack of decorum. They ask if I
don't think his tweets are "beneath the dignity of the office." Here's my
answer:
We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man
of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies
and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried
statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so
desperately prized "collegiality" as John McCain? We tried propriety - has
there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were
always the same.
This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality
and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife
fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.
I don't find anything "dignified," "collegial" or "proper" about Barack
Obama's lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to
ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I
don't see anything "dignified" in lying about the deaths of four Americans
in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I
don't see anything "statesman-like" in weaponizing the IRS to be used to
destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was
"articulate" and "polished" but in no way was he in the least bit
"dignified," "collegial" or "proper."
The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the
Children of the '60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is
held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war
they've fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies
from day one - the violent take-over of the universities - till today.
The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side
fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who
stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity,
collegiality and propriety.
With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America's
first wartime president in the Culture War.
During wartime, things like "dignity" and "collegiality" simply aren't the
most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was
a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of
the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime
rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be
holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, "I cannot spare
this man. He fights."
General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime,
this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt
applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would
barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.
Trump is fighting. And what's particularly delicious is that, like Patton
standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel's, he's
shouting, "You magnificent bastards, I read your book!" That is just the
icing on the cake, but it's wonderful to see that not only is Trump
fighting, he's defeating the Left using their own tactics.
That book is Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals - a book so essential to the
Liberals' war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire
Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton's senior thesis. It
is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our
book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky
dedicated his book to Lucifer.
Trump's tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing
exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.
First, instead of going after "the fake media" - and they are so fake that
they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60
years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet
Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson,
Missouri - Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky
suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as "the most powerful
weapon of all."
Everyone gets that it's not just CNN - in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton
and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence
and whose "reporting" is in no way significantly different than CNN's - CNN
is just a piker.
Most importantly, Trump's tweets have put CNN in an untenable and
unwinnable position. With Trump's ability to go around them, they cannot
simply stand pat. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two
choices.
They can either "go high" (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of
herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and
begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on
their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria
and demagoguery.
The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start
honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party
they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read:
propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.
Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported
then-candidate Barack Obama's close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid
Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the
true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright's, church.
Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama
administration's weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political
opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about
the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration's
cover-up.
This makes "going high" a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other
option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next "nothing
burger" and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it's
"worse than Nixon."
This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they
become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new
effort at even faker news than before and faker "outrage" only makes that
much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been
right about the fake news media.
And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly
embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they
have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly
fake that, even with the liberal (lower case "l") libel laws protecting the
media, they've had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.
Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality,
with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen
for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to "dox" -
release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit
violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in
that it clearly wasn't meant just for him. If it were, there would have been
no reason for CNN to have made their "deal" with him public.
Instead, CNN - playing by "Chicago Rules" - was sending a message to any
and all: dissent will not be tolerated.
This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has
backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.
So, to my friends on the Left - and the #NeverTrumpers as well -- do I wish
we lived in a time when our president could be "collegial" and "dignified"
and "proper"? Of course I do. These aren't those times. This is war. And
it's a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past
50 years.
So, say anything you want about this president - I get it, he can be
vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don't care. I
can't spare this man. He fights.
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2) Tillerson’s Korea Confusion
The Secretary of State offers happy talk about Chinese cooperation.
Rex Tillerson said Tuesday that the U.S. isn’t North Korea’s enemy and it doesn’t seek regime change as a way to neutralize the rogue regime’s nuclear weapons threat. But Kim Jong Un may have his doubts. Later the same day White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders answered a reporter’s question about the possibility of a pre-emptive military strike on North Korea by saying, “The President’s not going to broadcast any decisions, but all options are on the table.”
So why is the Secretary of State trying to take options off the table? There are two interpretations of Mr. Tillerson’s “no regime change” pledge. One is that he believes Kim Jong Un will negotiate away his nuclear weapons if the U.S. gives him security assurances and a big enough incentive. This would mean Mr. Tillerson has learned nothing from three decades of failed talks and the North Koreans’ own statements that it will never give up its nukes.
An alternative explanation is that Mr. Tillerson still hopes to convince China to help solve the North Korean problem, so he is playing the good cop in the dialogue with Beijing. While President Trump tweets his disappointment with China’s inaction and CIA Director Mike Pompeo hints that the U.S. should work toward the overthrow of Kim Jong Un, America’s leading diplomat offers cooperation to reduce the risk of a crisis on China’s doorstep.
Mr. Tillerson tried to play down his boss’s accusations that China failed to stop the Kims. “Only the North Koreans are to blame for this situation,” he said. “But we do believe China has a special and unique relationship because of this significant economic activity to influence the North Korean regime in ways that no one else can.”
That is true, but China is not going to be charmed into cutting off trade with North Korea. Years of futile U.S. pleading show that Beijing wants the Kim regime as a buffer state and perhaps as a thorn in the U.S. side. Nothing short of an imminent crisis will persuade China’s leaders that they should risk intervention in a dispute that they see as Washington’s responsibility to resolve.
The best way for the U.S. to win Chinese cooperation is to work toward regime change. While the Administration may not be able to make the fall of the Kim's its explicit goal due to South Korean sensitivities, it can continue to tighten financial sanctions and take other measures that will ratchet up pressure on the regime. The allies can also strengthen their deterrent capabilities and defenses; South Korean President Moon Jae-in agreed this week to resume Thaad missile-defense deployment.
When Mr. Tillerson disavows regime change, he undermines these efforts and signals to Beijing and Pyongyang that the U.S. might be willing to pay another round of nuclear blackmail. Saying that North Korea is not an enemy even as it threatens American cities with its new long-range missiles is obviously false and makes the U.S. look weak. The Trump Administration needs a consistent message that tough action is coming and nothing is ruled out.
2a The Military Options for North Korea
Some sort of strike is likely unavoidable unless China agrees to regime change in Pyongyang.
By John Bolton
America’s policy makers, especially those who still support the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, should take careful note. If Tehran’s long collusion with Pyongyang on ballistic missiles is even partly mirrored in the nuclear field, the Iranian threat is nearly as imminent as North Korea’s. Whatever the extent of their collaboration thus far, Iran could undoubtedly use its now-unfrozen assets and cash from oil-investment deals to buy nuclear hardware from North Korea, one of the world’s poorest nations.
One lesson from Pyongyang’s steady nuclear ascent is to avoid making the same mistake with other proliferators, who are carefully studying its successes. Statecraft should mean grasping the implications of incipient threats and resolving them before they become manifest. With North Korea and Iran, the U.S. has effectively done the opposite. Proliferators happily exploit America’s weakness and its short attention span. They exploit negotiations to gain the most precious asset: time to resolve the complex scientific and technological hurdles to making deliverable nuclear weapons.
Now that North Korea possesses them, the U.S. has few realistic options. More talks and sanctions will fail as they have for 25 years. I have argued previously that the only durable diplomatic solution is to persuade China that reunifying the two Koreas is in its national interest as well as America’s, thus ending the nuclear threat by ending the bizarre North Korean regime. Although the negotiations would be arduous and should have commenced years ago, American determination could still yield results.
Absent a successful diplomatic play, what’s left is unpalatable military options. But many say, even while admitting America’s vulnerability to North Korean missiles, that using force to neutralize the threat would be too dangerous. The only option, this argument goes, is to accept a nuclear North Korea and attempt to contain and deter it.
The people saying this are largely the same ones who argued that “carrots and sticks” would prevent Pyongyang from getting nuclear weapons. They are prepared to leave Americans as nuclear hostages of the Kim family dictatorship. This is unacceptable. Gen. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has it right. “What’s unimaginable to me,” he said last month at the Aspen Security Forum, “is allowing a capability that would allow a nuclear weapon to land in Denver.” So what are the military options, knowing that the U.S. must plan for the worst?
First, Washington could pre-emptively strike at Pyongyang’s known nuclear facilities, ballistic-missile factories and launch sites, and submarine bases. There are innumerable variations, starting at the low end with sabotage, cyberattacks and general disruption. The high end could involve using air- and sea-based power to eliminate the entire program as American analysts understand it.
Second, the U.S. could wait until a missile is poised for launch toward America, and then destroy it. This would provide more time but at the cost of increased risk. Intelligence is never perfect. A North Korean missile could be in flight to a city near you before the military can respond.
Third, the U.S. could use airstrikes or special forces to decapitate North Korea’s national command authority, sowing chaos, and then sweep in on the ground from South Korea to seize Pyongyang, nuclear assets, key military sites and other territory.
All these scenarios pose dangers for South Korea, especially civilians in Seoul, which is within the range of North Korean artillery near the Demilitarized Zone. Any military attack must therefore neutralize as much of the North’s retaliatory capability as possible together with the larger strike. The U.S. should obviously seek South Korea’s agreement (and Japan’s) before using force, but no foreign government, even a close ally, can veto an action to protect Americans from Kim Jong Un’s nuclear weapons.
China clearly has enormous interests at stake, not least its fear that masses of North Korean refugees will flow across the Yalu and Tumen rivers into its territory. Neither the U.S. nor China wants conflict between their respective forces, so immediate consultations with Beijing would be imperative once military action began. Both considerations underline why urgent diplomacy with China now to press the benefits of peaceful reunification is vital.
The Pentagon’s military planners already should be poring through the operational aspects of a potential military strike. But politicians and policy makers also ought to begin debating the military options—for North Korea and beyond, since similar issues will arise regarding Iran and other nuclear proliferators.
For decades the U.S. has opposed attempts by any state without nuclear weapons to develop them. Washington has consistently failed to achieve that objective, and the world has become increasingly nuclearized. Stopping North Korea and Iran may be the last chance to act before nuclear weapons become a global commonplace.
Mr. Bolton is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “Surrender Is Not an Option: Defending America at the United Nations and Abroad” (Simon & Schuster, 2007).
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