"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’"
— Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Ozimov, 1920-1992, American scientist, prolific writer, and professor of biochemistry at Boston University.
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US Scientist Reveals Devastating Report After Inspecting North Korea’s Nuclear Facilities… Not Good, WESTERN JOURNALISM, Caterine DeCicco
An American nuclear scientist who visited a secret nuclear complex in Yongbyon, North Korea, claims that Kim Jong Un’s regime is not bluffing when it comes to the dictatorship’s nuclear weapons capabilities.
As he recounted in an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday on CBS, Sig Hecker — who was once in charge of helping design nuclear weapons for the U.S. — was invited to North Korea and shown evidence of the country’s nuclear capabilities.
Hecker was at one time the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, which is known as the “birthplace of the American atomic bomb,” according to CBS.
Hecker described his shock at being invited to North Korea, and said he was also shocked when the U.S. government allowed him to travel to the infamously hostile nation.
“I was immensely surprised by how much they showed me and with the openness with which they showed and explained that to me,” he said..(See 1 below)
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Unable to understand why Hillary lost. (See 2 below.)
And One more thing , was sent to me and I found humorous but also poignant. (See 2a below.)
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Israel, freedom frightens. (See 3 below.)
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Democrats and liberals hate spending money on defense because of the waste and it restricts what they can spend to buy votes through welfare..
We live in a sick and dangerous world. Democrats won't be able to finance illegal immigration once our nation no longer exists. or is controlled by the Chinese. or Soros sponsored fascists An extreme concern? Want to test it by gutting our military? Want America to become Chicago, then go along with the Durbin's of this world. Think I am crazy then I suggest you read Sinclair Lewis': "It Can't Happen Here "
Cutting of the military reminds me of an apocryphal story about Max, my father's peddler father.
The undocumented story (reported in the New York Times) goes like this: My paternal grandfather lived in Tuscaloosa and during The Depression he had a mule and was a peddler of shoes and clothing. Times were tough, so he fed the mule less every day. Finally the mule died. Max was allegedly heard to say: "if I had known the SOB was going to die I would not have fed him at all. "( See 4 below.)
Corrupt unions and their Siamese twin - the Democrat Party. (See 4a below.)
Want a return to an honest FBI or want an FBI like Obama's IRS? (See 4b below.)
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Trump's military doctor reported on his health today and I was bemused how interested, and seemingly concerned, the mass media were about his health. Is it because most wish he would drop dead and if so hopefully before the 2018 election
As to his vulgarity, his doctor replied he probably gets it from watching too much TV and listening to you reporters repeat what he did not say. (See 5 below.)
Meanwhile, in the next few days we will learn, what I believe we should have already known, Democrats cannot allow DACA to be resolved because it remains a powerful campaign issue which goes like this: we feel for you illegal immigrants who were brought here by your illegal parents. We want to help you become citizens because you have worked hard and been positive for America.
Our problem is we cannot allow Trump, a foul mouthed Republican, we believe, to get credit for what we want you to have from us. Why? Because there is another pesky election coming up in Nov. 2018 and if we hold you hostage we might win, take over The House and be in a position to impeach Trump ,whom we all know, is insane.
How do we know he is insane? Because he said I will pass a bill that my supporters do not want me to do and I will take the heat for doing so. This is not what sane politicians would say.
Yes, we have been "futzing" around with this issue for well over a decade and have had more than three opportunities to pass it but it did not serve our immediate political interests. Bear with us, we are on your side. Be patient.
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Military deployment and insights about where you might be going. (See 6 below.)
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Dick
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1)US Military Quietly Conducts Exercises in Anticipation of War With NKorea, NEWSMAX, Solange Reyner
The U.S. military has conducted training exercises in North Carolina and Nevada in case a war with North Korea breaks out, and next month will train more than 1,000 reserve soldiers on how to set up so-called mobilization centers that move military forces overseas in a hurry, according to a report in the New York Times.
President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un have exchanged heated rhetoric in recent months as Kim has increased testing of missiles of various range – and a hydrogen bomb in September.
Trump recently told South Korean President Moon Jae-in that he would consider having a dialogue with Kim “at the appropriate time, under the right circumstances,” but the recent exercises were likely conducted under orders by Defense Secretary James Mattis to be ready for potential military action against North Korea, according to two dozen current and former Pentagon officials who spoke to the Times.
In North Carolina at the Fort Bragg military base last month, 48 Apache gunships and Chinook cargo helicopters conducted exercises under live artillery fire to assault targets. In Nevada at Nellis Air Force Base, 119 paratroopers jumped out of C-17 military cargo planes during practice runs that mimicked a foreign invasion.
The Pentagon in February also plans to send more Special Operations troops to the Korean Peninsula ahead of the start of the Winter Olympics, which take place in South Korea beginning Feb. 9.
Derek Chollet, an assistant secretary of defense during the Obama administration, told the Times the exercises could be routine, “as simple as these guys reading the newspaper.”
“You’re not seeing any massive military movements,” indicating that a decision has been made to go to war, he added.
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2)
Subject: FW: Hillary should have won!
2)
Subject: FW: Hillary should have won!
I’m Still Trying To Figure Out How Hillary Lost The Election…..
Was it the Russian Uranium Deal?
Was it Wikileaks?
Was it Podesta?
Was it Comey?
Was it having a sexual predator as a husband?
Was it Huma Abedin’s sexual predator husband Anthony
Weiner?
Was it because the Clinton Foundation ripped off Haiti?
Was it subpoena violations?
Was it the congressional testimony lies?
Was it the corrupt Clinton Foundation?
Was it the Benghazi fiasco?
Was it pay for play?
Was it being recorded laughing because she got a child
rapist off when she was an attorney?
Was it the Travel Gate scandal?
Was it the Whitewater scandal? Was it the Cattle Gate scandal? Was it the Trooper-Gate scandal?
OR….
Was it the $15 million for Chelsea’s apartment bought
with foundation money?
Or her husband’s interference with Loretta Lynch & the
investigation?
Or happily accepting the stolen debate questions given
to her?
Or her own secret server in her house and disdain for
classified information?
Or deleting 30,000 emails?
Or having cell phones destroyed with hammers?
Was it the Seth Rich murder?
Was it the Vince Foster murder?
Was it the Gennifer Flowers assault & settlement?
Was it the $800,000 Paula Jones settlement? Was it calling half the United States deplorable? Was it the underhanded treatment of Bernie Sanders?
Was it Bill’s impeachment?
Was it the lie about being under sniper fire in Bosnia?
Was it the $10 million she got for the pardon of Marc
Rich? Or the $6 BILLION she “lost” when in charge of
the State Department? Or because she is a hateful, lying,
power-hungry, overly-ambitious, greedy, nasty person?
Gee, I just can’t seem to put my finger on it…
2a) Politcally caloric Food For Thouhgt:
3) Arab Regimes Terrified by Israel's Freedoms
By Giulio Meotti,
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"A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. The real culprit, he argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East. Ben Saïd was forced to pull out of an Arab film festival last year because he had worked with Israelis.
"A Lebanese director, Ziad Doueiri, did something even "worse": he filmed some scenes on Israeli land!
""No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic. This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam". — Saïd Ben Saïd.
Fifty years have passed since many Arab countries were humiliated by Israel in 1967 in a war the Arabs started, with the explicit goal of destroying the Jewish State and throwing the Jews into the Mediterranean Sea. Today, Israel has solid diplomatic relations with two of these countries -- Jordan to Egypt -- while Saudi officials speak with their Israeli security counterparts about the Iranian threat.
But although the Middle East is engulfed in a new wave of internal destabilization, and Iran has recently experienced a new wave of protests in which people chanted "we don't want an Islamic Republic", the great taboo for the Arab and Muslim world is still that of cultural exchanges with the hated "Zionists".
A prominent Tunisian-born French movie producer, Saïd Ben Saïd, after being forced to pull out of North Africa's most prestigious film festival, recently issued one of the frankest denunciations of anti-Semitism in the Arab world. He revealed, in an op-ed for the French daily Le Monde, that an invitation to preside over the jury of the Carthage Film Festival had been rescinded because of his work with the Israeli film director, Nadav Lapid, and for having participated on a panel at the Jerusalem Film Festival earlier this year. The real culprit, Ben Saïd argued, was the prevalence of anti-Semitism fueled by Islamic extremists across the Middle East:
"No one can deny the misery of the Palestinian people, but it must be admitted that the Arab world is, in its majority, antisemitic... This hatred of Jews has redoubled in intensity and depth not because of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but with the rise of a certain vision of Islam".
Writers, novelists, journalists, politicians, bloggers, filmmakers: there are plenty of Arab and Muslim artists who have paid a heavy price for having broken through the iron curtain that has been put around Israel.
Amin Maalouf, who has both a Lebanese and a French passport, gave an interview to an Israeli channel, i24. Perhaps he thought that having won the Goncourt Prize (France's greatest literary recognition), having received the Legion of Honor, and being among the "Immortals" of the French Academy would have protected him. Of course it did not. Right after his interview with the television channel, requests to deprive him of his Lebanese citizenship and put him on trial began at once.
A Lebanese director, Ziad Doueiri, did something even "worse": he filmed some scenes on Israeli land! When he returned from the Venice Film Festival, the Lebanese police were waiting for him at the airport. He was arrested, interrogated for three hours, and accused of "collaborating with Israel".
Because Lebanese director Ziad Doueiri filmed some scenes in Israel, when he returned from the Venice Film Festival, Lebanese police arrested him at the airport, interrogated him for three hours, and accused him of "collaborating with Israel". (Photo by Vivien Killilea/Getty Images for Palm Springs International Film Festival)
Boualem Sansal, an acclaimed Algerian writer, should have received the Prix du Roman Arabe for his book "Rue Darwin". The jury, however, who had actually selected him, later retracted the award and cancelled it. The reason? Sansal had made a trip to Jerusalem to attend an Israeli literary festival.
The great Egyptian writer Ali Salem has seen his career destroyed forever for having visited Israel. In 1994, a few months after the Oslo Accords were signed, the famous Egyptian satirical writer traveled to Israel and wrote the book, My Drive to Israel. Theaters abandoned and boycotted his plays.
The Nobel Laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz was persecuted by the Islamic fundamentalists, not only for his "secular spirit", but above all the support which, at the time, Mahfouz provided to President Anwar Sadat for having signed the Camp David "peace" treaty with Israel. In 1979, the Arab countries boycotted the publication of Mahfouz's novels. They are still officially unavailable in some Middle Eastern countries.
The most well-known Iranian blogger, Hossein Derakhshan, ended up in jail; he was accused of "spying for Israel." His "crime"? A visit to Israel two years earlier to "show the daily life of the Jewish people" and to expose anti-Semitic prejudices.
Even the most famous Arab poet, the Syrian Adonis, was expelled from the Arab Writers Union for having met with Israeli intellectuals in Granada during a UNESCO conference.
These Arab and Muslim regimes are terrified of Israel, a comparatively microscopic 20,000 square kilometers, compared to the 33 million square kilometers of the Arab and Muslim world. In an immense crescent that sweeps from Casablanca to Mumbai, Israel is the only free state in the region.
In Saudi Arabia, blogger Raif Badawi was imprisoned and flogged. In Jordan, the writer Nahid Hattar was murdered for "blasphemy". In Egypt, the novelist Ahmed Naji was jailed for "obscenity". And Iran increased the bounty for the murder of writer Salman Rushdie.
Israel is the only Middle Eastern state where journalists enjoy absolute freedom of expression and can safely challenge the military and government. It is a Jewish country where publishing houses translate Arab authors; the opposite does not happen in the Middle East. It is the only country where artists and writers are not censored or told by the state what to write, what not to write, or how to behave. This is what Arab and Muslim dictatorships fear: that their own artists might be "infected" by these "unruly" "Zionists".
The West, where people care about pluralism and cultural freedom, needs strongly to support these Arab and Muslim writers and artists who have dared to visit Israel and become "unruly" to boot. It means betting on freedom and progress instead of on autocracies and an artificial, failed "peace". These Arab artists are far more brave and honest of all those European pseudo-intellectuals who embrace the boycott of Israel, the only free and open country in the Middle East.
Giulio Meotti, Cultural Editor for Il Foglio, is an Italian journalist and author.
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4)The Pentagon’s Fading Readiness
By The Editorial Board
4)The Pentagon’s Fading Readiness
The first priority in a budget deal should be more money for defense.
By The Editorial Board
Congress is trying to reach a budget deal to extend government funding that expires this month. One issue are the caps on defense spending under the 2011 Budget Control Act, which tried to force Congress to do something about the deficit by threatening automatic cuts. This has imposed useful discipline on non-entitlement spending, but the military has been hit harder than domestic accounts.
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The military is operating at a high tempo in multiple theaters, even as funding has dropped and become more erratic. The Congressional Research Service says the Defense Department has operated under continuing resolutions, which are stopgap measures that limit spending flexibility, for more than 36 months since 2010. Compare that with fewer than nine months in the preceding eight years.
This means fewer resources for equipment maintenance and soldier training. Some of this could have contributed to the Navy’s collisions in the Pacific last year that killed 17 sailors. The Navy’s investigation revealed that training practices failed—for instance, crew members “were not familiar with basic radar fundamentals.” Ships are deployed at sea more often and for longer. A prescient 2015 Government Accountability Office report found that ships based in Japan had “no dedicated training periods” as a result of the deployment pace.
A mere five of 58 brigade combat teams in the Army are prepared to “fight tonight,” according to the House Armed Services Committee. And—levity moment—by one account half of the Air Force’s aircraft major weapons systems would be eligible for an antique license plate in Virginia. The Air Force is also short about 2,000 pilots, up from 1,500 roughly a year ago, and the deterioration of equipment can lead to an exodus of talent.
Of note is a precipitous increase in Class A flight mishaps, which inflict $2 million in damage to aircraft or loss of life. The Marine aviation Class A mishap rate has been rising above the historical norm. The Navy’s rate is better but both suffered fatal accidents last year, including an October crash of a Navy trainer jet that killed both pilots.
The forces behind these tragedies vary but an ominous trend is reduced flying hours for pilots, which is in large part a function of funding. General Joseph Dunford explained to Congress why this metric is essential.
“On a day-to-day basis you may not be able to see the difference between” a pilot flying 30 hours a month and a pilot with 15. But in the event of an in-flight emergency, “the pilot that has 30 hours will immediately feel much more comfortable and confident in their ability to deal with an anomalous situation, be able to control their physiological response. And you and I may never find out about that incident. On the contrary if the pilot has 15 hours a month we may very well find out about it because it’s a Class A mishap.”
The political shame is that money to address these problems is being held hostage in a left-right crossfire. Democrats are trying to extract a dollar more in domestic spending for every new dollar deployed to the military. A faction on the right complains about runaway federal spending.
Both are taking the wrong hostage. Democrats may not appreciate the reminder but the U.S. still has to defend itself no matter the funding for food stamps. The GOP can rile up voters about federal debt, but the main fiscal problems are entitlements, which won’t be touched in a budget deal.
It’s true that defense would help its case by not wasting money through procurement fiascoes like the F-35 fighter. Yet continuing resolutions have made waste more pronounced by forcing the military to spend only on the most pressing problems and delay the rest. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer put it memorably when he said that thanks to inefficiencies since 2011 “we have put $4 billion in a trash can, poured lighter fluid on it, and burned it.”
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The 2011 budget deal served a purpose but by now it is eroding America’s defenses. We’d prefer if Congress increased money for defense and reformed entitlements, but that isn’t going to happen this year. The fallback should be a deal for two years of increased spending for budget clarity. Last year’s defense authorization suggested a $700 billion top line: More than $46 billion for fixing up aircraft and $16 billion for mitigating “critical munitions shortages,” among other priorities.
U.S. military dominance isn’t inevitable, and there are ample signs it is eroding. A spending deal won’t correct every Pentagon dysfunction, but the services need more political and financial support. The result without it will be more risk for the men and women of the military and less security for the other 99% of Americans.
4a) Organized Labor’s Lawbreakers
At least 143 union leaders have admitted to crimes since 2016.
By The Editorial Board
The federal government’s felonious list includes the presidents of more than 30 union locals, as well as more than 60 officials who held a treasurer or secretary-treasurer post. The crimes overwhelmingly involve top brass stealing from the union, and the incidents range from pilfered thousands to multi-million-dollar embezzlements. Union members are the victims.
For instance, Tamika Bullock was a secretary-treasurer for the boilermakers union in Chesapeake, Virginia, who last November pleaded guilty to embezzlement. She had stolen more than $20,000 from an account that was supposed to aid workers coping with a serious illness or economic crisis. She used some of that money to go on a cruise.
Raymond Ventrone of the boilermakers Pittsburgh local embezzled at least $1.5 million from the union. Ventrone dropped $527,000 on Louis Vuitton purses and $38,000 on drums, and a U.S. Attorney recounted how the former business manager’s house was “literally lined with Best Buy purchases.”
David Fleury, president of a bricklayers local in Rockford, Illinois, stole more than $250,000 from the union, spending heavily on gambling and vacations. David Sager, president of the steelworkers union in Middleburg Heights, Ohio, embezzled hundreds of thousands, which he used in part for tickets to see Carrie Underwood, Disney on Ice and Sesame Street Live.
The list goes on, and the extent suggests problems that go beyond temptation and human nature. One issue is probably the lack of adequate financial controls, especially given how much money unions get in member dues. The cash is handled by union locals, which means many opportunities for corruption. National union outfits like the AFL-CIO should provide education and technology to help locals keep track of the money. Public companies face internal and external audits and scrutiny by multiple regulators. The Labor Department conducts organized-labor audits, and in 2016 nearly one in five led to a criminal case.
Corruption stories spread by word of mouth, and they may help explain the continuing decline in union membership when workers have a choice about joining. Why pay dues for minimal benefits if there’s a good chance the money will be stolen? This crime spree is one more reason for more states to pass right-to-work laws that let workers decide if they want to pay those dues.
4b) Wanted: An Honest FBI
The bureau’s handling of the Trump and Clinton probes dispirits a veteran.
“I do not recognize the agency I gave 28 years of my life to.”
The speaker is James Kallstrom, the agency his beloved Federal Bureau of Investigation. Like current special counsel and former FBI Director Robert Mueller, Mr. Kallstrom served as a Marine officer in Vietnam. Unlike Mr. Mueller, Mr. Kallstrom came up through the FBI ranks, eventually becoming an assistant director and heading the bureau’s largest field office in New York. Over his career Mr. Kallstrom is credited with revolutionizing the bureau’s electronic surveillance, as well as leading big cases ranging from the probe into the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 to mob investigations such as the one that helped send the “Teflon Don”—Gambino crime boss John Gotti —to prison.
Today Mr. Kallstrom has emerged as a critic of the FBI investigations into Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Over coffee in Manhattan he tells me that “99% of FBI agents are dedicated professionals. But the leadership in Washington has harmed the bureau’s reputation.”
It isn’t so much the conclusions he objects to—though he has his doubts—as the irregular way the investigations have been conducted. If the FBI finds itself discredited, he says, it’s because of its own behavior and not any campaign against it.
Here are a few examples of what Mr. Kallstrom finds so alien:
• Director James Comey testifies to Congress in September 2016 that he hadn’t decided to recommend against prosecuting Mrs. Clinton until after the FBI had interviewed her—but it later emerges he’d started drafting his statement clearing her weeks earlier.
• An FBI agent and FBI lawyer— Peter Strzok and Lisa Page —have an affair that opens them up to blackmail and poses a clear conflict of interest in working together. Even so, they fail to recuse themselves from the Mueller investigation.
• This same FBI duo exchange messages that later get Mr. Strzok dumped from Mr. Mueller’s team, here talking about an FBI “insurance policy” against Mr. Trump’s winning the election, there talking about how to keep hidden from colleagues what looks like a leak to the press.
• The FBI secures a FISA warrant to spy on a member of Mr. Trump’s campaign, which some news reports say relied in part on a dossier that was financed as opposition research for the Clinton campaign and which Mr. Comey himself described as “salacious and unverified.”
“I can’t tell you how foreign all this is to my experience,” Mr. Kallstrom says. “The FISA courts rely on the honesty and credibility of the investigators who sign those affidavits.”
The problem started, he suggests, when Mr. Comey allowed then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch to ensure the FBI investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s emails would go nowhere. He rattles off a list of irregularities disturbing to any investigator: the reluctance to go to a grand jury for subpoenas, the immunity deals granted Clinton associates, the farce of an FBI interview with Mrs. Clinton that had a dozen people in the room, including Cheryl Mills, who was permitted to attend as counsel when she was a potential co-conspirator, etc.
While the Justice Department, not the FBI, makes these decisions, Mr. Kallstrom says Mr. Comey did have an option: “That was the moment he should have held a press conference, to announce his resignation—and then explain to the American people why he would not stay and preside over a sham investigation.”
Mr. Kallstrom is not much more enthused about the new director, Christopher Wray. During his own recent testimony before Congress, Mr. Wray stonewalled—and suggested ridiculously that he couldn’t let Congress see classified material. “They act,” Mr. Kallstrom says, “like they work for someone from outer space rather than the president of the United States.”
Later Mr. Wray attempted an end run around the subpoena from House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes for key documents and committee access to FBI officials. Fortunately Speaker Paul Ryan backed Mr. Nunes (and the House’s ability to exercise its oversight responsibilities), informing Mr. Wray that if he didn’t produce the documents and witnesses, he faced a contempt vote.
Which leaves America still in the dark about the two fundamental questions regarding the dossier at the heart of the Trump-Russia investigation: What—if anything—did the FBI verify from the Steele dossier, and did the bureau use any unverified material to get a warrant to spy on members of Mr. Trump’s campaign?
For those who grew up in proud FBI families, including this columnist, the disclosures about these investigations are dispiriting. As Mr. Kallstrom notes, it’s bad enough for the American people if a politician is bending the law. It’s far worse if the two top institutions responsible for upholding the law—the FBI and Justice Department—are found to have compromised themselves.
“The FBI gets its strength from the trust of the American people,” Mr. Kallstrom says. “When you lose that . . .”
5) President Nobama
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.
Donald Trump continues to baffle. Never Trump Republicans still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by its supposedly odious author. Or surely it soon will be discredited by the next Trumpian outrage. Or his successes belong to congressional and Cabinet members, while his failures are all his own. Rarely do they seriously reflect on what otherwise over the last year might have been the trajectory of a Clinton administration.
Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.) Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States.
Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change, entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative state.
Of course, there were sometimes differences between the two parties, such as the George W. Bush’s tax cuts or the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare. Yet for the most part, since 1989, we’ve had lots of rhetoric but otherwise no serious effort to prune back the autonomous bureaucracy that grew ever larger. Few Republicans in the executive branch sought to reduce government employment, deregulate, sanction radical expansion of fossil-fuel production, question the economic effects of globalization on Americans between the coasts, address deindustrialization, recalibrate the tax code, rein in the EPA, secure the border, reduce illegal immigration, or question transnational organizations. To do all that would require a president to be largely hated by the Left, demonized by the media, and caricatured in popular culture — and few were willing to endure the commensurate ostracism.
Trump has done all that in a manner perhaps more Reaganesque than Reagan himself. In part, he has been able to make such moves because of the Republican majority (though thin) in Congress and also because of, not despite, his politically incorrect bluntness, his in-your-face talk, innate cunning, reality-TV celebrity status, animalistic energy, and his cynical appraisal that tangible success wins more support than ideology. And, yes, in part the wheeler-dealer Manhattan billionaire developed real sympathy for the forgotten losers of globalization.
Even his critics sometimes concede that his economic and foreign-policy agendas are bringing dividends. In some sense, it is not so much because of innovative policy, but rather that he is simply bullying his way back to basics we’ve forgotten over the past decades. The wonder was never how to grow the economy at 3 percent (all presidents prior to 2009 had at one time or another done just that), but rather, contrary to “expert” economic opinion, how to discover ways to prevent that organic occurrence.
Obama was the first modern president who apparently figured out how. It took the efforts of a 24/7 redistributionist agenda of tax increases, federalizing health care, massive new debt, layers of more regulation, zero-interest rates, neo-socialist regulatory appointments, expansionary eligibility for entitlements, and constant anti-free-market jawboning that created a psychological atmosphere conducive to real retrenchment, mental holding patterns, and legitimate fears over discernable success. Obama weaponized federal agencies including the IRS, DOJ, and EPA in such a manner as to worry anyone successful, prominent, and conservative enough to come under the federal radar of a vindictive Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, or a FISA court.
Trump has sought to undo all that, point by point. The initial result so far is not rocket science, but rather a natural expression of what happens when millions of Americans believe they have greater freedom and safety to profit and innovate, and trust they will not be punished, materially or psychologically, for the ensuing successful results. The radical upsurge in business and consumer confidence is not revolutionary but almost natural. The Left and Never Trump Right claim that Trump is Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. In fact, for the first time in eight years, it is highly unlikely that the FBI, IRS, CIA, DOJ, and other alphabet-soup agencies see their tasks as going after the president’s perceived opponents.
The same about-face is true on the foreign-policy front, as the ancient practice of deterrence replaced the modern therapeutic mindset. Obama blurred, deliberately so, the lines between allies and hostiles. America experienced the worst of both worlds: We were rarely respected by our friends, even more rarely feared by our enemies; loud rhetorical muscularity was backed up only by “strategic patience” and “leading from behind.”
On the supposedly friendly side, Europe assumed that the United States would fawn after the virtue-signaling Paris Climate Accord. The Palestinians concluded that there was no shelf life on victimhood and that America simply would not, could not, dare not move its embassy to Jerusalem as the Congress had chronically showboated it would. NATO just knew that endless subsidies were its birthright and prior commitments were debatable. The West apparently lapped up Obama’s Cairo speech: But when even the European Renaissance and Enlightenment were seen as derivatives of Islam, there is not much left to boast about.
On the unfriendly side, China sensed there was little danger in turning the Spratley Islands into an armed valve of the South China Sea. Russia understood that America was obsequiously “flexible” and ready to push a red plastic reset button in times of crisis.
ISIS assumed that American lawyers were vetoing air-strike targets. Iran guessed rightly that the Obama administration would concede a lot to strike a legacy deal on nonproliferation. It was unsure only about whether the Obama administration’s eagerness to dissimulate about the disadvantageous details were due to a sincere desire to empower revolutionary, Shiite Iran as an antipode to Israel and the Sunni oil monarchies, or arising from a reckless need to leave some sort of foreign-policy signature. Kim Jung-un concluded that the eight years of the Obama administration provided a rare golden moment to vastly expand its nuclear and missile capability — and then announce it as an irrevocable fait accompli after Obama left office.
Again, the common denominator was that the Obama administration, in quite radical fashion, had sought a therapeutic inversion of foreign policy — in a way few other major nations had previously envisioned.
Trump’s appointees almost immediately began undoing all that. There were no more effective avatars of old-style deterrence than James Mattis and H. R. McMaster. Neither was political. Both long ago embraced a realist appraisal of human nature, predicated on two ancient ideas: We all are more likely to behave when we accept that the alternative is far more dangerous to ourselves, and the world is better off when everyone knows the laws in the arena. Just as Obama’s pseudo–red lines in Syria signaled to the Iranians or North Koreans that there were few lines of any sort anywhere; so too the destruction of ISIS suggested to others that there might be far fewer restrictions on an American secretary of defense anywhere
On the cultural side, the Trump team figuratively paused, examined its inheritance from the prior administration, and apparently concluded something like “this is unhinged.” Then it proceeded, to the degree possible, to undo it. Open borders, illegal immigration, and sanctuary cities are the norms of very few sovereign states. They are aberrations that are unsustainable whether the practitioner is Canada, Mexico, or the United States. Calling a small pond or large puddle on a farm’s low spot an “inland waterway” subject to federal regulation is deranged; undoing that was not radical, but commonsensical.
Trump sought to revive the cultural atmosphere prior to Obama’s assertion that he would fundamentally transform what had already been a great country. In 2008, it would have been inconceivable that NFL multimillionaires would refuse to stand for the National Anthem — much less in suicidal fashion insult their paying fans by insinuating that they deserved such a snub because they were racists and xenophobes. It was Byzantine that a country would enter an iconoclastic frenzy in the dead of night, smashing and defacing statues without legislative or popular democratic sanction.
The Un-Obama agenda was not simply reflexive or easy — given that Obama was the apotheosis of a decades-long progressive dream. After all, in year one, Trump has been demonized in a manner unprecedented in post-war America, given the astonishing statistic that 90 percent of all media coverage of his person and policies has been negative. Obama was a representation of a progressive view of the Constitution that about a quarter of the population holds, but in Obama, that view found a rare megaphone for an otherwise hard sell. One would have thought that all Republican presidents and presidential candidate would be something like the antitheses to progressivism. In truth, few really were. So given the lateness of the national hour, a President Nobama could prove to be quite a change.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
6)Veterans who have been deployed should relate to this!
5) President Nobama
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON
Trump is commonsensically undoing, piece by piece, the main components of Obama’s legacy.
Donald Trump continues to baffle. Never Trump Republicans still struggle to square the circle of quietly agreeing so far with most of his policies, as they loudly insist that his record is already nullified by its supposedly odious author. Or surely it soon will be discredited by the next Trumpian outrage. Or his successes belong to congressional and Cabinet members, while his failures are all his own. Rarely do they seriously reflect on what otherwise over the last year might have been the trajectory of a Clinton administration.
Contrary to popular supposition, the Left loathes Trump not just for what he has done. (It is often too consumed with fury to calibrate carefully the particulars of the Trump agenda.) Rather, it despises him mostly for what he superficially represents.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1950s-style unapologetic consumption; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump’s very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show. There is not even a smidgeon of a concession that some of Trump’s policies might offer tens of thousands of forgotten inner-city youth good jobs or revitalize a dead and written-off town in the Midwest, or make the petroleum of the war-torn Persian Gulf strategically irrelevant to an oil-rich United States.
Yet one way of understanding Trump — particularly the momentum of his first year — is through recollection of the last eight years of the Obama administration. In reductionist terms, Trump is the un-Obama. Surprisingly, that is saying quite a lot more than simple reductive negativism. Republicans have not seriously attempted to roll back the administrative state since Reagan. On key issues of climate change, entitlements, illegal immigration, government spending, and globalization, it was sometimes hard to distinguish a Bush initiative from a Clinton policy or a McCain bill from a Biden proposal. There was often a reluctant acceptance of the seemingly inevitable march to the European-style socialist administrative state.
Of course, there were sometimes differences between the two parties, such as the George W. Bush’s tax cuts or the Republicans’ opposition to Obamacare. Yet for the most part, since 1989, we’ve had lots of rhetoric but otherwise no serious effort to prune back the autonomous bureaucracy that grew ever larger. Few Republicans in the executive branch sought to reduce government employment, deregulate, sanction radical expansion of fossil-fuel production, question the economic effects of globalization on Americans between the coasts, address deindustrialization, recalibrate the tax code, rein in the EPA, secure the border, reduce illegal immigration, or question transnational organizations. To do all that would require a president to be largely hated by the Left, demonized by the media, and caricatured in popular culture — and few were willing to endure the commensurate ostracism.
Trump has done all that in a manner perhaps more Reaganesque than Reagan himself. In part, he has been able to make such moves because of the Republican majority (though thin) in Congress and also because of, not despite, his politically incorrect bluntness, his in-your-face talk, innate cunning, reality-TV celebrity status, animalistic energy, and his cynical appraisal that tangible success wins more support than ideology. And, yes, in part the wheeler-dealer Manhattan billionaire developed real sympathy for the forgotten losers of globalization.
Even his critics sometimes concede that his economic and foreign-policy agendas are bringing dividends. In some sense, it is not so much because of innovative policy, but rather that he is simply bullying his way back to basics we’ve forgotten over the past decades. The wonder was never how to grow the economy at 3 percent (all presidents prior to 2009 had at one time or another done just that), but rather, contrary to “expert” economic opinion, how to discover ways to prevent that organic occurrence.
Obama was the first modern president who apparently figured out how. It took the efforts of a 24/7 redistributionist agenda of tax increases, federalizing health care, massive new debt, layers of more regulation, zero-interest rates, neo-socialist regulatory appointments, expansionary eligibility for entitlements, and constant anti-free-market jawboning that created a psychological atmosphere conducive to real retrenchment, mental holding patterns, and legitimate fears over discernable success. Obama weaponized federal agencies including the IRS, DOJ, and EPA in such a manner as to worry anyone successful, prominent, and conservative enough to come under the federal radar of a vindictive Lois Lerner, Eric Holder, or a FISA court.
Trump has sought to undo all that, point by point. The initial result so far is not rocket science, but rather a natural expression of what happens when millions of Americans believe they have greater freedom and safety to profit and innovate, and trust they will not be punished, materially or psychologically, for the ensuing successful results. The radical upsurge in business and consumer confidence is not revolutionary but almost natural. The Left and Never Trump Right claim that Trump is Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini. In fact, for the first time in eight years, it is highly unlikely that the FBI, IRS, CIA, DOJ, and other alphabet-soup agencies see their tasks as going after the president’s perceived opponents.
The same about-face is true on the foreign-policy front, as the ancient practice of deterrence replaced the modern therapeutic mindset. Obama blurred, deliberately so, the lines between allies and hostiles. America experienced the worst of both worlds: We were rarely respected by our friends, even more rarely feared by our enemies; loud rhetorical muscularity was backed up only by “strategic patience” and “leading from behind.”
On the supposedly friendly side, Europe assumed that the United States would fawn after the virtue-signaling Paris Climate Accord. The Palestinians concluded that there was no shelf life on victimhood and that America simply would not, could not, dare not move its embassy to Jerusalem as the Congress had chronically showboated it would. NATO just knew that endless subsidies were its birthright and prior commitments were debatable. The West apparently lapped up Obama’s Cairo speech: But when even the European Renaissance and Enlightenment were seen as derivatives of Islam, there is not much left to boast about.
On the unfriendly side, China sensed there was little danger in turning the Spratley Islands into an armed valve of the South China Sea. Russia understood that America was obsequiously “flexible” and ready to push a red plastic reset button in times of crisis.
ISIS assumed that American lawyers were vetoing air-strike targets. Iran guessed rightly that the Obama administration would concede a lot to strike a legacy deal on nonproliferation. It was unsure only about whether the Obama administration’s eagerness to dissimulate about the disadvantageous details were due to a sincere desire to empower revolutionary, Shiite Iran as an antipode to Israel and the Sunni oil monarchies, or arising from a reckless need to leave some sort of foreign-policy signature. Kim Jung-un concluded that the eight years of the Obama administration provided a rare golden moment to vastly expand its nuclear and missile capability — and then announce it as an irrevocable fait accompli after Obama left office.
Again, the common denominator was that the Obama administration, in quite radical fashion, had sought a therapeutic inversion of foreign policy — in a way few other major nations had previously envisioned.
Trump’s appointees almost immediately began undoing all that. There were no more effective avatars of old-style deterrence than James Mattis and H. R. McMaster. Neither was political. Both long ago embraced a realist appraisal of human nature, predicated on two ancient ideas: We all are more likely to behave when we accept that the alternative is far more dangerous to ourselves, and the world is better off when everyone knows the laws in the arena. Just as Obama’s pseudo–red lines in Syria signaled to the Iranians or North Koreans that there were few lines of any sort anywhere; so too the destruction of ISIS suggested to others that there might be far fewer restrictions on an American secretary of defense anywhere
On the cultural side, the Trump team figuratively paused, examined its inheritance from the prior administration, and apparently concluded something like “this is unhinged.” Then it proceeded, to the degree possible, to undo it. Open borders, illegal immigration, and sanctuary cities are the norms of very few sovereign states. They are aberrations that are unsustainable whether the practitioner is Canada, Mexico, or the United States. Calling a small pond or large puddle on a farm’s low spot an “inland waterway” subject to federal regulation is deranged; undoing that was not radical, but commonsensical.
Trump sought to revive the cultural atmosphere prior to Obama’s assertion that he would fundamentally transform what had already been a great country. In 2008, it would have been inconceivable that NFL multimillionaires would refuse to stand for the National Anthem — much less in suicidal fashion insult their paying fans by insinuating that they deserved such a snub because they were racists and xenophobes. It was Byzantine that a country would enter an iconoclastic frenzy in the dead of night, smashing and defacing statues without legislative or popular democratic sanction.
The Un-Obama agenda was not simply reflexive or easy — given that Obama was the apotheosis of a decades-long progressive dream. After all, in year one, Trump has been demonized in a manner unprecedented in post-war America, given the astonishing statistic that 90 percent of all media coverage of his person and policies has been negative. Obama was a representation of a progressive view of the Constitution that about a quarter of the population holds, but in Obama, that view found a rare megaphone for an otherwise hard sell. One would have thought that all Republican presidents and presidential candidate would be something like the antitheses to progressivism. In truth, few really were. So given the lateness of the national hour, a President Nobama could prove to be quite a change.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
6)Veterans who have been deployed should relate to this!
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1. If your boss tells you to update your Gamma Globulin, Yellow Fever, Malaria, Dysentery, Tetanus and other fun immunizations...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
2. If the Mobilization Officer tells you not to waste your time bringing a radio, or any other electronic, as there is no electricity and there are no signals...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
3. If the Travel Pay folks give you a travel advance and the Per Diem rate is only $8.00/day, for everything...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
4. If the “Area Cultural” briefing is only 30 minutes long, but the briefing on communicable diseases is 3 hours long...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
5. If the “Area Cultural” briefing includes facts that some leaders in the host country keep young boys as sexual slaves...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
6. If the “Area Cultural” briefing includes facts that male members of that society have multiple wives, but also engage in sexual activity with barnyard animals...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
7. If the “Medical Briefing” includes recommendations not to walk barefoot, drink the local water, or eat ANY food on the local economy...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
8. If the “Medical Briefing” includes information that the roadside ditches not only serve as flood control, but also as a common latrine...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
9. If the Daily Report for your new assignment includes an area for “Number of Personnel Med-Evac'd” from theater for unknown diseases...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
10. If the monetary exchange rate is greater than 50 to 1 for local currency to US Dollars...
-You might be deploying to a Shit Hole.
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