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Trump is trying to energize voters in the hope he can reverse and/or stem the tide of mid-year election history. If Americans believe we were economically better with Obama's efforts then they should stay home and let Maxine Waters take over one of the most important committees in Congress and then call for Trump's impeachment.
If this is what will benefit America then have at it because that should be a fair trade for Trump's boorishness.
The way I see Trump is the way I saw "Ole" Bill. Bill has a huckster, hillbilly, lout but he actually was a fairly decent president policy wise, a gifted politician and, though you knew he was a womanizer, a smarmy charmer. Then he left The Oval Office and capitalized on having been president laundering wealth through a foundation and engaging in some fundraising activities that were despicable.
Trump's immediate predeccessor was an empty shell. Yes, with the help of technology, he was able to make a speech which was syrupy, full of platitudes and also full of intellectual garbage. His domestic and foreign policies were a disaster, some actually unconstitutional, his economy was tepid at best and he was a racist. His agency appointees were tragic and his contempt for our military was evident and caused early retirement of some of our most capable leaders. (See 1 below.)
As for Trump, in 17 months he decided to become, and then became, president after never being engaged in politics, being a TV star, a fabulous marketer and product brander. In his former life he was also an unmitigated womanizer, a billionaire real estate developer and remains a peacock.
Now he is energizing voters by telling them about his accomplishments which only he can do because the mass media will never give him a fair shake, and he is doing it by telling them they are not deplorables and can feel good, not embarrassed, about being patriotic old fashioned Americans. At 70 years of age this man is busting his butt for those in a party which actually has mixed feelings about him and do not know whether they should support him out of fear his negatives might rub on on them. Typical wimps.
One can only hope Trump's accomplishments are understood and appreciated and if that means swallowing boorishness in order for the benefits to persist, so be it.
The problem Trump actually has to endure is that he is the leader of the wrong party. Were he leading the Democrats they would love him, the mass media would be praising him because winning is everything to them. Democrats and the mass media are the true whorish party and entertainers whereas Republicans remain tentative and unappreciative of Trump's appeal to the common "man." (See 1a below.)
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This from a very long time friend, fellow memo reader and former defense/criminal attorney. (See 2 below.)
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Dick
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1) All the Times Obama Funded Terrorism
It seems like every week there is more bad news for former president Obama. The things he was able to keep under wraps as president are now slowly leaking as Trump works to drain the swamp. In fact, there hasn’t been a bit of good news for 44 since his protégé, Hillary Clinton, lost the election.
What’s crazy is how the apologists stand by him in the face of it all. Sure, Trump has said a lot of mean things, but when you compare their actions, there is no question as to their natures. Obama directly, deliberately funded terrorism on multiple occasions. Instead of chanting “lock her up,” we should be demanding to lock him up. Let me show you.
The Iran Deal
You’ve heard plenty about this travesty already. Pretty much everyone knows that the roughly $2 billion in cash that Obama gave to Iran was used to fund terrorism. A whole list of groups worked to destabilize regions like Yemen, murder infidels and generally bolster Iran’s influence throughout the Middle East. The payout was literally blood money, and Obama has faced no repercussions for it. It’s disgusting.
What many people don’t know is that this was actually a lesser evil in Obama’s dealings with Iran. Besides the cash payout, he also worked to unfreeze assets. That alone could be considered reasonable negotiating, but the details around it are damning.
First, Obama and his cronies did all of this before the nuclear deal was signed. That means he directly violated American and international sanctions, and he did it all while telling Congress the opposite.
What’s even worse is that these illegal monetary efforts were to the tune of $6 billion. Like the cash he gave Iran, this channeled money has been linked to terrorist and illegal activities throughout the Middle East. It’s no exaggeration to say that countless innocents died as a result of this action. If this were Obama’s only crime, it would be enough to merit an international tribunal. Sadly, this is the top of the list.
Fast and Furious
This is another story that most people at least partially understand. Under the guise of a sting operation, Obama officials funneled guns to cartels in Mexico. While previous stings had used similar tactics to some levels of success, Fast and Furious was riddled with corruption. In the end, ATF and other U.S. law enforcement helped cartels obtain illegal weapons. That’s already bad.
What’s worse is that the justification for these actions didn’t hold true. They weren’t able to take down any significant parts of the cartels through these stings.
Of course, all of that pales in comparison to the ultimate crime committed here. An American Border Patrol Agent was brutally murdered by weapons supplied by Obama’s people to the cartels. Once again, Obama supplied means to terrorists, and the result was a loss of innocent life. His hands are irrevocably stained in blood.
A Big Check to Al-Qaeda
Now that we’ve covered the well-known crimes, we’ll get into darker territory. This story only recently broke. We now know with certainty that the Obama Administration cut a check to the primary financial backers of Al-Qaeda. The group is known as ISRA, and they were deemed a terrorist organization as far back as 2004. They are also largely credited with founding Al-Qaeda and funding multiple terrorist groups.
The details of this story go back to Sudan in 2014. As part of a humanitarian effort, Obama approved roughly $700,000 in aid to a group known as USAID. That all seems fine. Before the money cleared, members of the Treasury Department noted that part of USAID’s ledger included giving $200,000 of that money to ISRA. The Department made this known to Obama and his people. At that point, they approved the check. They knowingly, willingly, deliberately gave $200,000 to Al-Qaeda’s best financial support group.
After that, they approved additional aid to go to the same group. While not all of the money can be cleanly tracked, we know for certain that at least some of those funds were used to pay for terrorist activity. That’s strike three Mr. Obama. But, we’re not done yet.
Hezbollah Trafficking
In perhaps the greatest crime committed by Obama and his Administration, they actively worked to keep Hezbollah trafficking channels open. This story is so bad that it even ran on Politico — clearly condemning Obama and his people. When even the far left admits that Obama did something bad, you know it’s completely unjustifiable.
In 2008, the DEA put together a special team to track Hezbollah’s international crime syndicate. Over a span of several years, they managed to infiltrate and document the whole thing. They had clear proof of international crimes, and they were ready to move forward with operations that would draw key Hezbollah leaders into countries where they could be apprehended. The team had done their task and they were primed to actually take Hezbollah down.
But, when they applied to get these plans approved, they were stonewalled by the Obama Administration. Obama’s CIA director went as far as to try and justify the evils of this terrorist organizations in an attempt to stall any action by the special task force.
What was really happening? Obama feared that taking down Hezbollah would stall or destroy his negotiations in the Iran nuclear deal. So, Hezbollah’s $600 billion syndicate was left intact. They successfully funneled arms from Russia to Syria and Iraq, and their efforts helped Assad, ISIS and other terrible regimes kill tens of thousands in the Middle East– perhaps even hundreds of thousands.
All of this blood is on Obama’s hands, and he did it to push forward the Iran nuclear deal. This is a deal that doesn’t actually inhibit Iran’s nuclear program. Instead, it sanctions their right to keep nuclear material and develop ballistic missiles. It also included multiple cash packages that have directly funded terrorism. Obama saved Hezbollah in order to guarantee the autonomy of the most dangerous extremist regime in the world. Even more, he added nuclear rights to that autonomy.
That’s the short list. I’m sure that in time we’ll learn of even more terrors, but this is more than enough. Obama has carried out war crimes that make Kim Jong-Il and Saddam Hussein look like amateurs. Simply put, he is the godfather of global terrorism.
1a)Progressive Regression
By Victor Davis Hanson
Donald Trump has certainly changed the rules of presidential behavior, through his nonstop campaign rallies, tweets, and press conferences. What his critics call lowering the bar of presidential decorum by unfettered and often crude invective, Trump dubs the “new presidential.”
His style has become a sort of “don’t-tread-on-me” combativeness. In truth, Trump at home and abroad is mostly retaliatory. His theory seems to be that no slight should go unanswered. When Trump retorts in kind or trumps the original attack, he believes he adds yet another brick to his wall of deterrence—and exposes the sometimes dormant and disguised irrational hatred of the Left.
But what the Left loses in its slugfests with Trump are some once-supposed cherished leftist principles, justified by the short-term advantage of nullifying the Trump agenda.
Indeed, it is eerie that almost all the canons of progressive orthodoxy no longer apply. And they will no longer be taken seriously after Trump is long gone. Certainly, those lost principles will be impossible to reassert when Democrats return to power and seek sanctuary in the very ideas they have now so utterly trashed.
Liberals, who now warn of Trump’s “war on the press” long ago excused Eric Holder’s monitoring of the Associated Press reporters and Fox News’s James Rosen. And they had no problem with John Brennan lying under oath when he claimed the Obama CIA had not monitored the computers of Senate staffers (he would lie brazenly again under oath about drone collateral damage and his role in seeding the Steele dossier).
Likewise, they snoozed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lied to Congress in his denial of government surveillance of U.S. citizens.Both were seen at the time to be useful liars. Their partisanship and exemption from any consequences for past lying under oath led to lucrative cable news gigs—proof, as it were, of their innate Trump hatred. Their legacy is that lying under oath now is not a sin, much less illegal.
So Much for Civil Liberties
When Trump appeared on the national scene, an all-out assault on civil liberties followed, in a manner that is now irrevocable. The Left destroyed for good the idea that progressives are the protectors of constitutional freedoms.
If fear of Trump, some connected with the National Security Council under Obama helped to surveil American citizens, unmasked them, and leaked their names to the press. The press, hand-in-glove, complied in spreading such unsubstantiated dirt.
Former National Security Advisor Susan Rice flat out lied in her denial about her involvement in unmasking. The Obama FBI and Justice Department officials deliberately misled FISA courts, on the premise that spying on American citizens even with flimsy or fabricated evidence was OK—if it at least neutered the Trump candidacy and presidency. Had they just told justices something like, “We present, as justification for these warrants of surveillance, opposition research compiled on candidate Donald Trump, and paid for by Hillary Clinton during the present campaign,” they likely would never have been able to spy on American citizens.
No one again will have much confidence either in the FISA courts or any rationale for spying on any American citizen. They will logically assume FISA requests are political efforts to spread dirt on the opposition—in the fashion that we now have no idea, in the era after Lois Lerner, what prompts an IRS letter in our mail. The legacy of the Obama Administration is that if one is not progressive and loud in the public sphere, he may well be monitored, audited, or investigated.
Reputations Stained Beyond Repair
The FBI may not recover its reputation. Certainly, the brand of its Washington office is shredded. Watching new Director Christopher Wray stumble about to reassure us about his reforms inspires about as much credulity as a pre-war French general touting the invincibility provided by the Maginot Line.
The Left more or less has canonized a parade of disreputable FBI officials. Peter Strzok violated almost every canon of professional conduct, in his personal comportment, in his blatant prevarication about his own text messages, and in his dogged pride in his conflicts of interest in using his authority to pursue a political agenda. His superior Andrew McCabe, according to the inspector general, likewise lied on several occasions.
So did former Director James Comey when he denied under oath the prominent role of the Steele dossier in FISA warrant applications. Leaking a classified government memo with the expressed intent of prompting a special counsel investigation is not what FBI directors do. Nor do they deliberately set up a president by not informing him that base accusations against him are the result of opposition campaign hit pieces, subsidized in part by the FBI.
FBI directors do not politicize investigations, in the manner Comey warped his conduct toward Hillary Clinton on the rationale she would be elected. Comey alone has pretty much destroyed any idea that in the near future the FBI Washington office can again be trusted to be disinterested.
Add in the conduct of Lisa Page and various other FBI officials—James Baker especially—who have either resigned or been reassigned. FBI apologists on the Left are excusing the very weaponizing behavior that they used to rant about in the days of J. Edgar Hoover—who, we think at least, never sought to alter the outcome of a U.S. election.
The Left is fine with the idea that the FBI, with a wink and nod from the CIA, can insert spies into an ongoing presidential campaign, on the rationale that embarrassing information might be collated, leaked, and thus useful to “insure” that a supposedly dangerous man would not be president. Should a right-wing FBI do the same with a candidate Bernie Sanders, reminding us that Sanders went to Moscow on his honeymoon and therefore was under suspicion, what would the Left say?
Any notions of conflict of interest are gone. The Obama Justice Department, FBI, and CIA destroyed that concept entirely. When Loretta Lynch met Bill Clinton on the tarmac in the course of investigations about his wife’s likely illegal behavior or the Justice Department and FBI gave immunity to Clinton’s top aides after making false statements, all credibility was shot.
Justice Department official Bruce Ohr communicated with a political campaign’s opposition research team that had hired his own wife. The deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe oversaw the Hillary Clinton email investigation shortly after his wife had received hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign donations from Clinton-related political action committees. Rod Rosenstein was knee-deep in the Uranium One investigation, the Clinton email investigation, the FISA warrant applications, and the Trump-collusion mythologies. He should have been recused long ago. If Rosenstein was not recused, there is now no such thing as an idea of recusal at all.
Liberals do not care much whether Bill Clinton received a $500,000 honorarium in Moscow or that Russian interests gave millions to the Clinton foundation shortly before Hillary Clinton urged the government to approve the sale to them of 20 percent of U.S. uranium.
If there is someday a special counsel appointed to monitor the possible illegality of the Obama FBI, Justice Department, CIA and NSC, and many of its legal team proves to be Trump donors, and a few of them are found out to be veteran counsels for Trump-related defendants, or two members are caught texting their hatred for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and bragging how they had schemed to stop such a 16-year envisioned Obama-Clinton continuum, apparently no one is going to complain of any “bias” or conflict of interests.
More Norms Annihilated
Is there still any notion of a confidential lawyer-client special relationship or disdain for stealthily taping private conversations of a client? Apparently not. Former Clintonite Lanny Davis knows the Left saw nothing wrong when the FBI seized legal records from Trump’s attorney Michael Cohen or that lawyer Cohen taped the phone calls of his own unknowing client Trump. Instead, the Left’s shrug is that if Trump was stupid enough to hire such a creepy rake, then he deserves what he gets—legal precedent and civil liberties be damned.
It used to be a progressive truism that “words matter”—as in the warning not to give voice to violent things because they may happen just because you said them. Actually, words today no longer matter at all. If they did, Madonna, Johnny Depp, Kathy Griffin, Robert De Niro, or Peter Fonda would all be socially ostracized for their threats of bodily violence to the president of the United States or his family. God forbid that such eliminationism rhetoric will spill over to the next Democratic presidency. But if it should, the Left has now lost all moral authority to condemn it.
By the same token, there is no longer any accepted limitation on presidential hate speech. No one will have a problem with calling any president a Nazi, the new Hitler, an abject traitor, treasonous, or his conduct tantamount to the mass death of Pearl Harbor, 9/11 or the Holocaust. Those who compare Trump to the worst monsters of history regularly appear on cable news and enjoy vast Twitter and social media audiences. I fear theirs will be the new standard: For every Trump Hitler who killed 6 million, we will one day hear of a new anti-Trump Stalin who killed 20 million. All one now needs to say is “President X or President Y is a threat to the United States, and so deserves what he gets.”
Security Clearances-as-First Amendment Right
We have also established a new code of behavior for ex-security and intelligence officers.
From now on, they will really never leave office. Instead, their opposition to the new administration begins the moment they become private citizens—while drawing on and sometimes monetizing their vestigial security clearances to enhance their invective against the sitting president.
Imagine the following: that as soon as Trump leaves office, a paid Fox News contributor Mike Pompeo or Dan Coates begins trashing nightly newly inaugurated President Elizabeth Warren as despicable, treasonous, or the worst something in the history of America—while still privy to some of top-secret communications of her administration. And they will wink and nod at their clearances as proof of their seriousness and of direct conduits to “sources tell me” gossip. To question why they would do so or expect security clearances at all will earn cries from Republicans of “enemies list!”
There is no longer any sense of public and private first families. If Barron Trump can be smeared and ridiculed in print and cartoons, if the president can be accused of incest with his daughter by mainstream reporters, if the first lady can be demonized as everything from an illegal alien to a former call girl, no first family is off limits. The next time a Democratic president takes office, any call for “restraint” or “have you no decency” to recreate the bubble that once protected the Obama family would be laughed at—and understandably so.
Endless Unchecked and Unaccountable Investigations
Special counsels will have no restraints. They will be sacrosanct Roman tribunes about whom any criticism will be tantamount to unpatriotic behavior. They can ignore their original mandate and wander wherever they wish on the principle that they have found their criminal and need only find the crimes by which to destroy him.
The special counsel will stock his team with partisans who hate the object of his investigation, with law firm cronies who share his views. If he fires one or two of them, he will hide the reasons for their departures and stagger their severance to avoid the appearance that they were connected—in the style of belatedly and separately disclosing the career ends of Lisa Page and Peter Strzok.
From now on, the accusation that a president is a traitor, a colluder, a lackey, a pimp, a whatever of the Russians, or a dupe of the Chinese, or of who knows what else, will be an accepted way to help stall an opposition administration, to smear it as unpatriotic, to use any low means necessary to achieve a supposed high end of destroying it.
Just watch soon what the Left has birthed. Thucydides, writing more than 2,400 years ago about the civil strife on the island of Corcyra, observed that “men too often take upon themselves in the prosecution of their revenge to set the example of doing away with those general laws to which all alike can look for salvation in adversity, instead of allowing them to subsist against the day of danger when their aid may be required.” They are not going to like the results when in their “day of danger” they cry foul and no one listens.
Content created by the Center for American Greatness, Inc. is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a significant audience. For licensing opportunities for our original content, please contact licensing@centerforamericangreatness.com . About the Author: Victor Davis Hansonis an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer (growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California) and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. He is the author most recently of The Second World Wars – How the First Global Conflict was Fought and Won (Basic Books).
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2) RE: "The full story on the conspiracy to stop Trump will come out by fall, and that will be really ugly for the Dems. It is clear there was no collusion, nor obstruction, and Manafort, in my view, will possibly have a hung jury. He will not flip on Trump. The case is just too complex for normal jurors to fathom with offshore accounts, foreign dictators, and how money was moved around through offshore shell entities. He will claim he was the rainmaker flying around the world, and Gates and others were keeping the books and doing the bad stuff, not him. The jury will not be sure what to believe. Manafort is likely guilty, and maybe after the accountants he will be, but proving that to a jury will be very hard, especially with this judge.
Cohen has no credibility, so his stories will not fly, even if true."
I disagree. My trial experience shows:
The prosecutor will read the Indictment and say it was found TRUE by the GRAND JURY. The jury will begin by believing the defendant is guilty because he was indicted, if not, why else are they in court? Sitting at the defense table, you can hear minds slamming shut.
Unless the defense is able to catch a government witness in an outright lie, the jury will continue to believe guilt.
I do believe Manafort will not flip. I believe he will serve a minimum sentence in a federal (country club) prison, probably in Florida.
I have just described the US v (Governor) Ray Blanton case, Middle District of Tennessee. G-----
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