Sunday, September 9, 2018

Ripping At The Very Fabric of Our Society. Obama The Peacock. More Terrible Puns.

.j;
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The greatest threats to America and assorted democracies is not war, though that will always be an existential fact of life, but more subtle efforts to undermine freedom from within, disrupting social life through cyber attacks and inane protests funded by the likes of Soros.  In essence, the goal of the radical left is to  spread chaos, increase discord among the populace and distrust of public institutions. These are the new indoctrination methods of choice.  Following Saul Alinsky's playbook is the current  battle plan and, frankly, it is proving effective.

I should also add electing radicals, in the guise of smooth talking Obama types, is critically important and Soros, Speyer and their like are committed to spending hundreds of millions to finance their campaigns as the Democrat Party moves far left and, in some cases, literally off the sanity cliff.

These tactics are catching 'deplorables' and those who want to retain what our Republic has achieved off balance. The radical termites have been burrowing for years, digging their tunnels and under-girding our society's stability. This began as far back as Wilson's presidency by loading university faculties with left wingers who have been educating generations of impressionable, youthful students who have bought into their socialistic concepts and many later went on to become mass media "darlings."

From there, the venom of radicalism has spread to local elected political entities like departments of educations and lower level candidates for office. Now we have major cities run by left leaning mayors, the most obvious is Bill de Blasio in New York, an avowed Communist leaning trouble maker. He may be loony but he is able to stir the passions of the racially aggrieved.

The radicals among-st us  have purposely supported positions that help to create disunity. Two perfect examples are the attacks on those who believe open border advocacy is racist and the recent anti-American symbol attitudes/attacks by personnel among NFL players and you know the rest.

This leads us to today where campus freedoms, particularly protection of speech and speakers, are under attack and the growing prospect of impeachment of our current president increases because of  an unwillingness on the part of angry Democrats to accept the lawful decision/results of voters.

All of these anti-American passions are being stirred and encouraged to weaken our unity, faith in our institutions, create tensions among the have and have not's while challenging the benefits of capitalism.

Our Republic rests on a fragile foundation and subtle incessant attacks from all directions are having a deleterious and weakening effect.  That said, the greatest attack on the pillars of our republic has been the destruction of the family which first began with the departure of black fathers and now the statistics are virtually comparable in the white family.  The lack of a father results in less discipline, particularly for sons. The absence of a male role model has negative  financial implications as well as social ones .  Sons of fatherless families are more likely to have a criminal record, participate  in anti-social activities, do poorer in  school and are more susceptible to drugs.  The weakened family structure is, perhaps, the greatest threat to a coherent and cohesive society. (See 1 below.)


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Once again I feel compelled to re-post op-eds I just did in the preceding memo.

Obama is the consummate hypocrite and far too many Americans are incapable of seeing through  his wordy smokescreen of blame shifting, lies and utter nonsense.  Obama did not belong in The White House but in a zoo and not in the money house but free to parade the entire grounds as the peacock he always was and remains. (See 2 and 2abelow.)
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More terrible  puns. (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)

Why Trump's Record Trumps the Media's Spin

The media is determined to prove that Donald Trump is unfit to be president.


 by Christian Whiton
My first reaction to the anonymous anti-Trump op-ed in the New York Timeswas perhaps unusual for a resident of the swamp, which has been so hyper this week: I chuckled, rolled my eyes, and didn’t even make it to the end of the article before losing interest.
It probably helps that I spent the week in Colorado and Utah, where seemingly no one cares. In the conversations in which I have participated or overheard, this subject has come up zero times. Muted televisions in airports and hotel lounges, which still carry CNN and its angry commentators out of habit, are blissfully ignored as life happens.
Most people outside the swamp either know what the media is up to or just don’t care anymore.As someone who has held appointed positions in two Republican administrations including the incumbent one, I fall in the former category. I’m quite familiar with the methods the media uses to get unattributed disgruntled junior staff to convey the agenda it desires, which is what’s happening here.
I’m also familiar with the nature of an administration, in which many people who “work for the president” or “work in the White House” may have never met the man who sits in the Oval Office, and who certainly have never provided (or withheld) advice or information that matters to government policy.
Next to the White House sits the imposing Eisenhower Executive Office Building. Across Pennsylvania Avenue from that building is the ugly New Executive Office Building, which is neither new nor executive. It overlooks townhouses surrounding Lafayette Park that provide offices for still more officials. All of these people say they work for the White House, as all are administratively part of what is known as the Executive Office of the President. President Trump probably knows the names of about 3 to 4 percent of these people, tops. Fewer still provide him advice that matters.
Given Anonymous’s citation of foreign policy, veneration of John McCain, and repetition of the banal and disproved trope that Trump prefers dealing with autocrats like Vladimir Putin, I’d guess—and it is only a guess—that the disgruntled author comes from the mid-levels of an agency like the State Department or the ranks of staffers at the National Security Council.
The latter say they work for the president and could stretch the truth to being part of the population of “Trump appointees” cited in the op-ed, even though they are mostly career bureaucrats detailed temporarily to the NSC from agencies like the State Department, Department of Defense and the CIA. Most of these people are patriotic and diligent, although some inevitably pursue their own agenda, especially when a Republican sits atop the executive branch. Luckily, this cohort of staff matters less in the Trump administration than any other in modern time: Trump has pulled policymaking up to the level of his cabinet and himself.
This deprecated level of bureaucrats is the most likely source of the media’s move against Trump this week. Along with the anti-Trump Bob Woodward book, whose unattributed fictions have already been refuted by on-the-record statements from cabinet officials, the New York Times and yet-to-be uncovered middlemen trotted out this op-ed simultaneously—somewhat suspicious timing. It would have been easy to find a disgruntled appointee or detailee to write something like this, especially when provided anonymity. Any decent political campaign could orchestrate it—and the New York Times is a very decent political campaign.
The media’s objective was to get the Washington commentariat focused on how Trump, in their estimation, is unfit to be president, and to do so at the beginning of the traditional post-Labor Day home stretch of the campaign season.
They have largely succeeded in this goal, but in so doing, failed again to learn the lesson that was so easy to conclude from the 2016 election and Trump’s steady popularity levels since then. That lesson is that the media and the commentariat no longer determine public opinion.
No matter how many outraged opinion pieces or news articles (but I repeat myself) the New York  Times produces, no matter how many smarter-than-thou analysts with non-prescription eyeglasses mope about sadly on CNN, no matter how many Obama fan boys and girls left in the White House press corps shriek at the president whenever in earshot, it just doesn’t matter anymore.
The economy hums. Trump keeps us out of foreign entanglements. Wages increase. America’s traditional meritocracy replaces the Democrats’ grievance-based society. Life happens.
And while the New York  Times op-ed was a nice try by the media, they must on some level, deep down, grasp the new reality: no one hears their screams.
Christian Whiton was a State Department deputy special envoy from 2003 to 2009.  He serves as a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest and the author of  Smart Power: Between Diplomacy and War  .
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2)

Obama Calls Benghazi A Wild Conspiracy Theory. Benghazi Hero Levels Him.


Former President Barack Obama suggested on Friday that outrage over the 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi — which resulted in the deaths of four Americans — was a result of "wild conspiracy theories."
Obama, trying to help the Democrats in the 2018 midterms, attacked President Donald Trump while speaking at the University of Illinois where he accepted the Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government.
"But over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican party," Obama said.
Obama then attacked Republican members of Congress, accusing them of embracing "wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi."
Shortly after Obama made his remarks, Kris Paronto, a former Army Ranger who was a private security contractor working for the CIA at the CIA annex in Benghazi, slammed Obama.
Paronto, who is credited with saving approximately 20 people during the attack, wrote on Twitter:
Kris Paronto
Benghazi is a conspiracy @BarackObama ?! How bout we do this,let’s put your cowardly ass on the top of a roof with 6 of your buddies&shoot rpg’s&Ak47’s at you while terrorists lob 81mm mortars killing 2 of your buddies all while waiting for US support that you never sent🖕🏼

1b)

Obama Returns, Gives A Speech Reminding Americans Of Why Trump Is President 

By Ben Shapiro


On Friday, former President Barack Obama gave a speech at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The central conceit of the speech was that President Donald Trump had broken American politics. And the central lie of the speech is that time began on November 8, 2016 – that the collapse of America’s social fabric and civic institutions had nothing to do with Barack Obama. The reality of the situation, of course, is that Trump is a symptom of the slow-rolling collapse of those institutions, brought about in large part by the disingenuous gaslighting in which Obama engaged for a decade: promoting a better discourse while engaging identity politics, championing supposed honesty in politics while simultaneously presiding over an administration rife with malfeasance, and demonizing opponents while claiming to fly above the fray.

Now, Obama is back – just in time to run in front of the presumed Democratic 2018 victory parade. Obama watched his party crash and burn during his two terms, losing the House, the Senate, and finally the White House – but now he’s back to offer moral guidance to the country he castigated throughout his tenure in office.
As President Trump put it, Obama is indeed “very good. Very good for sleeping.” Or at least, for rallying the Republican base driven mad by Obama’s preening scorn for Americans who don’t agree with him.
Obama began by laying out the idea that America exists without a ruling class:

The point Washington made, the point that is essential to American democracy, is that in a government of and by and for the people, there should be no permanent ruling class. There are only citizens, who through their elected and temporary representatives, determine our course and determine our character.
This, coming from Obama, is rich. This is the president who declared he would rule with pen and phone, whose 2012 DNC proclaimed that government is the only thing we all share, who expanded executive authority to draconian new heights. But according to Obama, Trump is the big problem.
This is a common theme from Obama: everything was great until Trump. Obama explained that America has “operated under some common assumptions about who we are and what we stand for.” He simply suggested that big government liberalism was the founding ideology, and that we all agreed on it (we didn’t). He said that we all agreed on foreign policy (we didn’t). He suggested we all agree on the “collective responsibility” for health care and the need for heavy environmental regulation and government hiring programs (we don’t).
But Obama ignored all the real disunity to suggest that Trump is to blame for everything wrong with the country:

I’m here today because this is one of those pivotal moments when every one of us as citizens of the United States need to determine just who it is that we are. Just what it is that we stand for. And as a fellow citizen — not as an ex-president, but as a fellow citizen — I’m here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.
Obama declared 2016 the most important election of our lifetimes,
too. But this one is different. Why? 
The status quo pushes back. Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because it helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege. And you happen to be coming of age during one of those moments. It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause. He’s just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years, a fear and anger that’s rooted in our past but it’s also born out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes.
Again, the gaslighting runs strong in Obama. Obama suggests he’s for a better politics, but everyone who disagrees with him is “fearful of change.” Politicians who oppose him are corrupt – but not Obama, who would never want to keep us “divided” or “angry.” Not Obama, who called his opponents “bitter clingers” and whose hand-chosen successor labeled her opponents “deplorables.”
Obama was a big part of the problem. But Obama can’t recognize that. Over and over in this speech, Obama avoided blame for problems he gravely exacerbated.
Here’s Obama on the economy:

So we pulled the economy out of crisis, but to this day, too many people who once felt solidly middle class still feel very real and very personal economic insecurity.
Whose fault is that? The Republicans, of course. But the economic growth statistics with a Republican Congress? He gets the credit.
Here’s Obama on foreign policy:

Even though we took out bin Laden and wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, got Iran to halt its nuclear program, the world’s still full of threats and disorder that come streaming through people’s televisions every single day.
Well, actually, Obama’s policies increased those threats and radically contributed to that disorder. But whose fault is it really? Republicans, of course.
Here’s Obama on political division:

And even though your generation is the most diverse in history with a greater acceptance and celebration of our differences than ever before, those are the kinds of conditions that are ripe for exploitation by politicians who have no compunction and no shame about tapping into America’s dark history of racial and ethnic and religious division. Appealing to tribe, appealing to fear, pitting one group against another, telling people that order and security will be restored if it weren’t for those who don’t look like us or don’t sound like us or don’t pray like we do, that’s an old playbook. It’s as old as time.
This from the president who tut-tutted actual riots, who suggested without evidence that police departments across America were systemically racist, who declared that a slain black teenager could have been his son, who deployed his vice president to say that Mitt Romney wanted to put black people “back in chains.” But the problem, as ever, is Republicans.
Here’s Obama on America’s broader problems:

A politics of fear and resentment and retrenchment takes hold and demagogues promise simple fixes to complex problems. No promise to fight for the little guy, even as they cater to the wealthiest and most powerful. No promise to clean up corruption and then plunder away. They start undermining norms that ensure accountability and try to change the rules to entrench their power further.
This from the president who used executive privilege to shield his “wingman” attorney general from the consequences of gunrunning to Mexican drug cartels, whose IRS was weaponized against conservatives, whose EPA and HHS and DOJ were rife with corruption, who promised dozens of times not to rewrite immigration law unilaterally but did so anyway, who lied about the Iran deal and Obamacare at whim. But the problem, of course, is Trump.
Here’s Obama on how every problem is the fault of Republicans:

But over the past few decades, the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has unfortunately found a home in the Republican party. This Congress has championed the unwinding of campaign finance laws to give billionaires outside influence over our politics. Systematically attacked voting rights to make it harder for young people and minorities and the poor to vote. Handed out tax cuts without regard to deficits. Slashed the safety net wherever it could, cast dozens of votes to take away health insurance from ordinary Americans, embraced wild conspiracy theories like those surrounding Benghazi or my birth certificate, rejected science, rejected facts on things like climate change, embraced a rising absolutism from a willingness to default on America’s debt by not paying our bills to a refusal to even meet much less consider a qualified nominee for the supreme court because he happened to be nominated by a Democratic president.
Yes, division and resentment and paranoia are the fault of those conservatives, who are behind every problem! That’s not divisive or resentful or paranoid in the slightest, apparently. It’s not divisive to link together those who questioned why the Obama administration lied about the causes of Benghazi with idiots who questioned where Obama was born. It’s not divisive to lump together First Amendment advocates with corporate cronies. It’s not divisive to blame America’s debt on Republicans while ignoring your own spending habits. It's not resentful to blame the wealthy for the problems of the country, to threaten bank CEO's with "pitchforks." It's not paranoid to blame Republicans for every failure of your own programs.
What nonsense.
But according to Obama, the problem is everyone Obama dislikes. All we have to do is agree with Obama, and voila! Problem solved. According to Obama, conservatism should be ackshually agreeing with him.
Unfortunately, Obama explained, conservatism has been corrupted, says the most powerful Leftist leader of this generation. Conservatism now means “allowing dishonest lenders to take advantage” of people, says the man who presided over the creation of a legal regime that endorses “too big to fail.” Conservatism now means failing to pay for programs, says the man who blew out the deficit. Conservatism now means “undermining our alliances, cozying up to Russia,” says the president who destroyed an alliance with Israel on behalf of kowtowing to Iran, who handed over Syria to Putin, who insulted Mitt Romney’s anti-Russian foreign policy as the policy of the 1980s, who pledged Putin’s agents “flexibility” in return for kind treatment for the 2012 election, who undercut the defense capabilities of Eastern European nations so as to ensure a “reset” with Putin. Conservatism means ensuring people have health insurance, says the president who lied about keeping your doctor and your insurance program.
No, said Obama, conservatism is the problem.
And then Obama got to his own new program – a supposed unity program that could provide for a better America. What was this program? Higher minimum wage; Medicare for all (no, he wasn’t lying in the slightest when he stated that Obamacare wasn’t a first step toward nationalized health care); forcing corporate boards to include workers; reversing tax cuts; cap and trade; opposition to walls (“Walls don’t keep out threats like terrorism,” Obama states, ignoring that Israel’s wall has done just that).
His unity program, it turns out, is just Leftism.
But he’s unifying, don’t you understand. Because, in the end, if you disagree with his policies, you should vote Democrat anyway. Why? Because “you should still be concerned with our current course and should still want to see a restoration of honesty and decency and lawfulness in our government.”
Except that Obama wasn’t honest, decent, or lawful. Obama states in this speech that we should be nonpartisan in our support for freedom of the press, and says that he never threatened to shut down opposing outlets; but Obama targeted James Rosen of Fox News and bugged the Associated Press. Obama states in this speech that we should not “pressure the attorney general”; but Eric Holder called himself Obama’s “wingman.” Obama says we’re supposed to stand up against discrimination; but he went to Jeremiah Wright’s church for decades, took photos with Louis Farrakhan, and had Al Sharpton as a regular White House guest.
So, what makes Obama unifying? That he doesn’t want to fight “fire with fire, say whatever works, make up stuff about the other.” Except he’s done that for his entire political career. Obama says, “We need cooperation among people of different political persuasions,” but can’t name a single major bipartisan initiative he promoted. Obama says we “won’t win people over by calling them names or dismissing entire chunks of the country as racist or sexist or homophobic” – after doing just that for much of his career, including in this speech. Obama says we don’t need a messiah after playing one on television (remember his infamous remarks after the Iowa 2008 primary in which he predicted that history would see that as the moment the oceans began to recede?).
Obama’s demagoguery predated Trump’s demagoguery, and contributed to Trump’s rise. To say otherwise is to promote full-scale ignorance of history and politics. Obama drove the Right mad. Now Trump has driven the Left mad.
No wonder, in the words of Charlton Heston in Planet of Apes, it’s a madhouse.

2a) We’re SurvivingTrump Just Fine
By Holman. W. Jenkins Jr.


The Donald Trump of Bob Woodward’s book is the Trump of the Helsinki press conference with Vladimir Putin: ill-prepared, bombastic and overconfident.Hysteria aside, the Woodward book shows the president as an amateur.

A press conference is a classic pseudo-event, manufactured to make the participants look good. Failing to make himself look good (as he also failed to do after Charlottesville) revealed nothing about Mr. Trump so much as his political amateurishness that even his freakish success in 2016 cannot cure.
The Woodward book is best understood as an antidote to a humorless and self-righteous press’s overintepretation of the Trump phenomenon. The Washington Post and the New York Times dwelled on the same half-dozen anecdotes: One underling called him an idiot. Another disobeyed his orders. Another snatched an unsigned letter from his desk to abort some presumptively dopey action. Et cetera.
Then came a redundant op-ed in the New York Times, by an unnamed Trump official, probably one whom Mr. Woodward didn’t find worth talking to. He claimed that he too was working to stop Mr. Trump’s bad ideas. Hooray for me, the author seemed to be saying.
Maybe we need to have a conversation about competence. Dean Acheson, President Truman’s top foreign-policy adviser, left South Korea out of the free world’s “defensive perimeter” in a speech in early 1950 and thereby may have invited the Korean War. Lyndon Johnson used questionable intelligence from the Gulf of Tonkin as a pretext to escalate in Vietnam. The Pentagon, having spent 11 years using no-fly zones to maintain a balance of power between the Iraq’s confessional communities, knew how to avoid civil war in Iraq. George W. Bush threw it all up in the air by handing the country to the Shiites and calling it democracy.
I could go on.
In the Woodward book, Mr. Trump says after the appointment of special counsel Bob Mueller: “Everybody’s trying to get me. . . . They’re going to spend years digging through my whole life and finances.”
So at least he is compos mentis about some things.
To a national-security aide who interrupts his golf program, he says, “I want to watch the Masters. . . . You and your cyber . . . are going to get me in a war.”
One might wish some other presidents had been so interested in golf.
Skeptical about U.S. purposes in Afghanistan, he tells an aide: “Why are you jamming this down my throat?”
These words could be engraved on every president’s forehead.
My purpose here is not to elevate President Trump in anyone’s estimation, but to inject some realism about the presidency. Barack Obama spun his wheels on impotent attempts to build a legacy out of expansions of the entitlement and regulatory state in ways that don’t look like much now. But he avoided major disasters. Mr. Trump is, functionally, Mr. Obama without the ambition (putting aside his odd ideas about trade) and has been rewarded with 4% growth, which is finally delivering the kind of “hope and change” that might make a difference in the lives of Mr. Obama’s “hope and change” voters.
If this is incompetence, we can tolerate it. If his tenure leads to a downgrading of the presidency and a reassertion of Congress as the proper policy maker for the country, all the better.
Instead of telling us what we already know about the Trump White House, Mr. Woodward’s investigative chops might have been better employed in getting to the bottom of the strange election that gave us President Trump in the first place.
The FBI became a vehicle by which unknown foreign agents, plus one known foreign agent, plus various U.S. partisan confederates, tried to insert unsubstantiated allegations about Mr. Trump into the campaign.
The shambolic and self-defeating public intervention of the FBI director on behalf of Hillary Clinton was set in motion by secret Russian intelligence about which the public is still being kept in the dark.

A considerable cross-section of the Obama-Bush leadership class in Washington was so alarmed about the prospect of a Trump presidency that they invented, or fell for, a story about how he was a Russian agent.
For the record, I keep hearing from Trump voters who are satisfied they got the wrecking ball they voted for, aimed at this selfsame Bush-Obama elite. No candidate for president in my lifetime came wrapped in less false advertising.
Which leaves only the problem of how to make sure the high-risk Trump presidency does the most good with the least harm. Happily, from the testimony this week, the job is well in hand among Mr. Trump’s shifting cast of helpers from mostly the same elite.
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3) I've never taken an elevator to the basement floor, that's just beneath me.

In the office she was frantically looking for her false nails only to discover she had filed them away.

I'm going to the guillotine at dawn and my wife has already collected my severance pay.

Smartly dressed poultry would be called chic hens

A family with four boys and a history of weak eyes found son-glasses very expensive.

Claustrophobic people are more productive thinking outside the box.

Con-census: counting the prison population.

A group of ballerinas were wearing their tutus. A couple of extra costumes arrived but they thought they might be tutu many.

Why did the capacitor kiss the diode? He just couldn't resistor.

When the homeless burrowing rodent found a nice golf course, he decided to gopher it.

I think Santa has riverfront property in Brazil. All our presents came from Amazon this year.

The coffee tasted like mud because it was ground a couple of minutes ago.

Geology rocks, but Geography is where it's at!

Due to the cabbage crop failure it was really hard to get ahead!

The Irish should be rich because their capital is always Dublin.

The best way to communicate with a fish is to drop it a line.

If jokes could be owned like land, then no good pun would go undeeded.

Did you hear about the guy who got hit in the head with a can of soda? He was lucky it was a soft drink.

I relish the fact that you've mustard the strength to ketchup to me.

He got fired at the coffee shop for coming to work in a T-shirt.

Show me a piano falling down a mineshaft and I'll show you A-flat minor.

What do you call a melancholy robot? A sighborg

Although Nobelists tend to have dynamite personalities, Niels was a Bohr, and Linus was a Pauling.
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