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More from Zito. (See 1 below.)
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Tomorrow Mueller will appear before two committees bent on hanging Trump. The Justice Department weighed in on how he should conduct himself. (See 2 below.)
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Dennis Prager spoke to The Senate Judiciary Committee as an invitee of Sen. Cruz. (See 3 below.)
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Hanson asks a rational question. (See 4 below.)
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The four top Radical Democrat Candidates who want to be president are:
Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
Each is flawed . Let's take a quick peek.
Kamala has a habit of attacking those she wants to bring down such as Al Franken, Justice Kavanaugh, Joe Biden and, of course, President Trump. She rose to prominence by associating with powerful people.
I believe she would stop at nothing to destroy anyone in her way.
Next we have Joe Biden who has not been right about a major subject since birth and his most recent "dufuus" was telling the nation we have nothing to fear from China. He also embraces, out of loyalty, all of Obama's bankrupt policies in the hope he will receive his blessing. Finally, Biden's convictions are paper thin.
Next we come to Bernie Sanders. Bernie is Jewish but really not Jewish. He is a Socialist but not really a socialist.because he likes to own many homes. He chose not to work most of his life and then he became a Senator and now is worth millions of dollars but he cares deeply for the poor.
Finally, we come to Elizabeth Warren. She thought she was a Cherokee until she found out it hurt her chances to become president. Then she took a DNA test and learned what most Americans already knew. It served it's purpose because she was able to snooker Harvard for a high paying teaching job and then she too became a Senator.
Warren believes everything about America needs to be changed like an infant with dirty diapers.
There you are folks. A quick summation of the leading candidates. There are some 15 or 16 other also runs some were thought to be contenders but they faded because they proved to be empty suits and could not match the superior talents of the aforementioned four. Before you think about voting for any of these four think consider whether you believe their ideas, have merit and they will take us to the promised land.
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Dick
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1) From Western Pennsylvania to West Point to the Pentagon
Esper said there is a lot about military culture that people who have never served don’t understand: how diverse service members, for instance, are and how you have to adapt to that immediately upon the day you show up for boot camp.
“When I went to West Point, I was there with cadets from 50 other states and territories. Cadets from other countries, and you learn all of these things about our country, about our culture, our heritage, our ethnicity. At the end of the day, you come back, we all wear green, and we all consider ourselves an Army. We don't look at each other as black or white. As gay or straight. As Catholic or Protestant or Muslim. It is one Army, And you know what? I went to combat with 101st Airborne division, I shared a foxhole literally with a fellow officer who was from Guam,”
Click here for the full story.
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2) DOJ tells Mueller to limit testimony to his public report
By Jim Hayek
The Justice Department on Monday told former special counsel Robert Mueller that he should limit his Wednesday testimony before Congress to the four corners of his public report on Russian interference.
“Any testimony must remain within the boundaries of your public report because matters within the scope of your investigation were covered by executive privilege, including information protected by law enforcement, deliberative process, attorney work product, and presidential communications privileges,” Associate Deputy Attorney General Bradley Weinsheimer wrote in a letter to Mueller that was obtained by The Hill.
“These privileges would include discussion about investigative steps or decisions made during your investigation not otherwise described in the public version of your report,” Weinsheimer wrote.
“Consistent with standard practice, Department witnesses should decline to address potentially privileged matters, thus affording the Department the full opportunity at a later date to consider particular questions and possible accommodations that may fulfill the committees’ legitimate need for information while protecting Executive Branch confidentiality interests,” he added.
It was already expected that Mueller was unlikely to speak beyond what is spelled out in the redacted version of his 448-page report on Russian interference into the 2016 election and possible obstruction of justice by President Trump. The new letter all but guarantees that.
Weinsheimer noted that he was responding to a July 10 letter from Mueller that requested guidance from the department “concerning privilege or other legal bars applicable to potential testimony in connection” with the subpoenas issued by the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees for his appearance.reiterated statements made by Attorney General William Barr that it is ultimately Mueller’s decision to testify. He emphasized that Mueller should not reveal anything related to the redacted portions of the report — which conceal grand jury material, details on ongoing investigations, classified material and information on third parties.
Mueller, who is now a private citizen after leaving his post as special counsel, is slated to testify in back-to-back hearings before the Judiciary and Intelligence panels on Wednesday, a combined appearance that is expected to last roughly five hours.
In his only public remarks on the investigation on May 29, Mueller indicated he did not want to testify before Congress. He also said any testimony would not go beyond his report, stating, “The report is my testimony.” Democrats eventually subpoenaed him to testify last month.
In a brief interview Monday evening, Mueller’s spokesman Jim Popkin told The Hill that the former special counsel would stick closely to the details of the report in his public appearance.
“As I think he made crystal clear then, you can expect him to stick as much as he can to the four walls of the Mueller report,” said Popkin, pointing to his May 29 statement.
Popkin said that Mueller would make an opening statement to Congress that would not be viewed by the Justice Department beforehand. He also said Mueller would make the public version of the report a statement for the congressional record.
Mueller has been preparing for his testimony with a small group of attorneys from the special counsel’s office using space provided by his former law offices of Wilmer Hale, Popkin said.
Democrats are hoping for Mueller to bring to life portions of his report that paint a damning picture of Trump’s efforts to thwart and gain control of the investigation.
Some have tempered expectations, saying they don’t expect the hearing to yield new information, but said nonetheless that the hearing will be successful if they’re able to shine a light on what the special counsel’s investigation found.
Mueller did not reach a conclusion one way or another on whether Trump obstructed the Russia investigation, saying that the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion prevented him from even considering the question. Mueller is unlikely to answer questions Wednesday about whether he would have charged Trump if not for that opinion.
Mueller’s report also details numerous contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, however the investigation found insufficient evidence to charge associates of the campaign with conspiring with Moscow to meddle in the election. Trump and his allies have heralded that result as vindicating him of allegations of “collusion” with Russia.
Still, Mueller’s marathon appearance on Capitol Hill could generate bad headlines for the White House, attracting wall-to-wall media coverage and elevating some of the more unsavory details of his exhaustive report.
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3)Last week, at the invitation of Sen. Ted Cruz, I spoke to the Senate Judiciary Committee about Google's having placed more than 60 Prager University videos on its restricted list. Any family that filters out pornography and violence cannot see those particular videos on YouTube (which is owned by Google); nor can any school or library.
This statement is as much about what I and PragerU stand for as it is about Google:
It is an honor to be invited to speak in the United States Senate. But I wish I were not so honored. Because the subject of this hearing — Google and YouTube's (and for that matter, Twitter and Facebook's) suppression of internet content on ideological grounds — threatens the future of America more than any external enemy.
Before addressing this, however, I think it important that you know a bit about me and the organization I co-founded, Prager University — PragerU, as it often referred to.
I was born in Brooklyn, New York. My late father, Max Prager, was a CPA and an Orthodox Jew who volunteered to serve in the U.S. Navy at the start of World War II. My father's senior class thesis at the City College of New York was on anti-Semitism in America. Yet, despite his keen awareness of the subject, he believed that Jews living in America were the luckiest Jews to have ever lived.
He was right. Having taught Jewish history at Brooklyn College, written a book on antisemitism and fought Jew-hatred my whole life, I thank G od for living in America.
It breaks my heart that a vast number of young Americans have not only not been taught how lucky they are to be Americans but have been taught either how unlucky they are or how ashamed they should be.
It breaks my heart for them because contempt for one's country leaves a terrible hole in one's soul and because ungrateful people always become unhappy and angry people.
And it breaks my heart for America because no good country can survive when its people have contempt for it.
I have been communicating this appreciation of America for 35 years as a radio talk show host, the last 20 in national syndication with the Salem Radio Network — an organization that is a blessing in American life. One reason I started PragerU was to communicate America's moral purpose and moral achievements, both to young Americans and to young people around the world. With a billion views a year, and with more than half of the viewers under age 35, PragerU has achieved some success.
My philosophy of life is easily summarized: God wants us to be good. Period. God without goodness is fanaticism and goodness without God will not long endure. Everything I and PragerU do emanates from belief in the importance of being a good person. That some label us extreme or "haters" only reflects on the character and the broken moral compass of those making such accusations. They are the haters and extremists.
PragerU releases a five-minute video every week. Our presenters include three former prime ministers, four Pulitzer Prize winners, liberals, conservatives, gays, blacks, Latinos, atheists, believers, Jews, Christians, Muslims and professors and scientists from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and a dozen other universities.
Do you think the secretary-general of NATO; or the former prime ministers of Norway, Canada or Spain; or the late Charles Krauthammer; or Philip Hamburger, distinguished professor of law at Columbia Law School, would make a video for an extreme or hate-filled site? The idea is not only preposterous; it is a smear.
Yet, Google, which owns YouTube, has restricted access to 56 of our 320 five-minute videos and to other videos we produce. "Restricted" means families that have a filter to avoid pornography and violence cannot see that video. It also means that no school or library can show that video.
Google has even restricted access to a video on the Ten Commandments ... Yes, the Ten Commandments!
We have repeatedly asked Google why our videos are restricted. No explanation is ever given.
But of course, we know why: because they come from a conservative perspective.
Liberals and conservatives differ on many issues. But they have always agreed that free speech must be preserved. While the left has never supported free speech, liberals always have. I therefore appeal to liberals to join us in fighting on behalf of America's crowning glory — free speech. Otherwise, I promise you, one day you will say, "First they came after conservatives, and I said nothing. And then they came after me. And there was no one left to speak up for me."
Thank you.
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4)Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Get along? Apparently no—at least until after 2020. Two examples summarize why.
“We don’t need any more brown faces that don’t want to be a brown voice,” said U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), one-quarter of “the squad” sowing havoc among Democrats in the House. “We don’t need black faces that don’t want to be a black voice. We don’t need Muslims that don’t want to be a Muslim voice. We don’t need queers that don’t want to be a queer voice.”
Of the Republican Party, MSNBC anchor Chris Hayes said the other day: “It must be peacefully, nonviolently, politically destroyed with love, compassion and determination, but utterly confronted and destroyed. That is the only way to break the coalition apart… Not by prying off this or that interest. They are in too deep. They have shamed themselves too much. The heart of the thing must be ripped out. The darkness must be banished.”
In other words, the new progressive message is that we all must vote monolithically and predicated on our superficial appearance, religion, or sexual orientation. And the Trump base must be destroyed, though annihilated with “love” and “compassion.”
Love It—Or What Actually?
All are presently shocked that Donald Trump would dare suggest that if anyone did not like the United States, then perhaps he or she might, of their own volition, consider leaving the country.
Trump apparently was directing his ire exclusively at particular first-generation congresswomen and suggesting that their anti-American furor logically might lead such unhappy U.S. citizens to consider voluntary deportation
Perhaps no politician should ever advise American citizens with whom he disagrees to leave the country. But Trump did not suggest mandatory departures—in the manner that Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) had wanted Trump supporter and immigrant Sebastian Gorka deported.
Trump was not talking of some grand swap in the explicit fashion that NeverTrumpers have variously wished for the Trump Republican and/or white working-class base to be forcibly exported and replaced by Latin American border crossers.
So wrote Bret Stephens of the New York Times: “So-called real Americans are screwing up America. Maybe they should leave, so that we can replace them with new and better ones: newcomers who are more appreciative of what the United States has to offer, more ambitious for themselves and their children, and more willing to sacrifice for the future. In other words, just the kind of people we used to be—when ‘we’ had just come off the boat.”
Columnist Max Boot narrowed the theme somewhat by suggesting only Republican lawmakers and grandees should be deported and replaced. “If only we could keep the hard-working Latin American newcomers and deport the contemptible Republican cowards—that would truly enhance America’s greatness,” Boot wrote. That’s harsh.
At least Chris Hayes only wishes to destroy the Trump base with love and compassion in his heart.
Trump himself post facto rebuked his rally supporters for chanting “send her back”—a likely reference to sending naturalized U.S. citizen and loud critic of America, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), back to Somalia.
But Trump’s larger point was exasperation that he was tired of being constantly smeared as a racist and fascist. He was especially piqued at U.S. congressional representatives and the Left at large, who transfer their current unhappiness with America back to its very founding and innate nature—and the accompanying monotonous baggage of name-changing, statue-toppling, and nonstop censuring and boycotting.
Certainly, then, it was logical that anyone who harbored such existential animus toward the United States might take Trump’s advice, end their current torment, and thus gladly and voluntarily free themselves from an oppressive land. After all, we are told migration in general is a fluid and good thing and that some 20 million entering America, even illegally, is a very good thing indeed.
Americans recently supported such anger at gross ingratitude when Southern California-residing Mexican immigrants, legal or otherwise, a few years ago booed the American soccer team of the country they most desperately sought to enter and cheered the Mexican team, whose country they had done all they could to leave.
During the Proposition 187 frenzy in California, I never quite figured out why one of my students, here illegally from Mexico, waved the Mexican flag while participating in a ritual, free-speech area burning of the U.S. flag—all to showcase his anger at being exposed to deportation to Mexico. I suggested at the time he instead just carry a handwritten placard, “Please, I will do all I can from now on legally to stay in your wonderful country.”
Politically Correct Hatred
Ilhan Omar presents a most exasperating case because on the one hand she poses as an avatar of the successful immigrant, while on the other she neurotically whines that America has failed utterly to meet her expectations when she fled a Kenyan refugee camp to enter the United States.
Her fervent anti-Israelism is fueled by an equally despicable and loud anti-Semitism. And she rarely seems to acknowledge that a foreign country welcomed her in extremis, subsidized her upbringing and education, and, quite unlike her tribalist, racist, and anti-Semitic native Somalia, relegated matters of race, gender, class, and religion to insignificant status or indeed saw them as advantages to be rewarded in electing her to Congress.
Omar herself was so desperate to gain citizenship or legal residency for her apparently own British residing brother that she may well have concocted a fraudulent marriage him. If true, she may have committed several U.S. tax and immigration felonies. And that makes her ingratitude all the more unappealing—and her present apparent exemption from legitimate federal investigative scrutiny into her possibly serial illegal conduct all the more unbelievable.
So, the larger landscape of the new age of acrimony is not a sudden loss of manners, but rather a complete progressive meltdown at the election of Donald J. Trump.
Opposing Obama?
We now forget that half the country was quite upset by the 2008 election of Barack Obama, not because of his race, but out of concern that he had been the most partisan voting senator of the era in the entire U.S. Senate.
Opponents were taken aback when he boasted, shortly before his victory, about fundamentally “transforming” the country. During the campaign he had urged his supporters to take a gun to a knife fight and to “get in their faces” (which targets did he signify by “their”?), as well as writing off the Pennsylvania working class as backward gun and bible clingers, and his own grandmother as a “typical white person” (what did he mean by “typical” and did it apply to 230 million Americans?). The idea of Obama as a healer was a myth and analogous to the fable of a Noble Peace Prize winning global activist.
Obama mocked charges that Trinity Unity Church of Christ of Chicago was fueled by racism, by swearing he could no more disown Rev. Jerimiah Wright—his anti-Semitic, racist, and anti-American personal pastor, whose kindergarten banal sermons on the “audacity of hope” became the inspiration for Obama’s second book—than the grandmother who raised and nurtured him.
What did Obama mean when he weighed in during the Trayvon Martin affair by remarking that Martin might have resembled the son he never had? Did he need to slander the police in the Skip Gates affair or demagogue the Ferguson melodrama?
What exactly were Obama’s own injunctions about knowing when to quit making lots of money, or to acknowledge that one does not build his own business, or to realize that it is not a time to profit ever to apply to his post-presidential, lucrative self—or was all that just transitory boilerplate demagoguery aimed at a particular class of which he had not quite yet joined?
Congressional Republicans and conservative media announced they wanted no part of Obama’s promised radical progressive “transformation,” especially his plan to nationalize health care. They nonstop promised that they would do their best to stop him.
Indeed, fringe groups at the time (including Donald J. Trump) had trafficked in crazed birther conspiracies. And the Tea Party’s reason to be in 2010 was to defeat and destroy the Obama Democratic congressional majority.
Obama in the heated climate of the times was certainly attacked as a liar for his false assurances about Obamacare, and as a dunce who thought there were 57 states, that corpsmen was pronounced with a hard “p,” and that Hawaii was in Asia—though no one sought to call in a Yale psychologist to ascertain whether his apparent puerile ignorance was proof of dementia.
Critics serially pounced on the fact that Obama’s signature “autobiography” or “memoir” was mostly mythographic fiction. They pointed out that his past modus operandi of winning a senate election in Illinois was to count on state employees and the toady media illegally leaking the confidential divorce records of his primary and general election opponents who otherwise might well have defeated the future president.
Obama’s minions were pilloried as Orwellian figures who monitored the communications of Associated Press reporters and James Rosen of Fox News, who jailed a minor videomaker to scapegoat him for the Benghazi mess, and who went after journalist critic Sharyl Attkisson. Obama likely knew that his own FBI and CIA were in violation of federal law in their zeal to ensure a Hillary Clinton continuum and the destruction of the Trump candidacy.
Republicans lost no time in blasting Obama CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper as admitted liars who had perjured themselves while under oath before Congress. They had a field day castigating Susan Rice as a serial prevaricator on matters from Benghazi and the Bowe Bergdahl circus to weapons of mass destruction in Syria. And they tried to leverage Fast and Furious, Benghazi, and scandals at the IRS, EPA, National Security Agency, Department of Veterans Affairs, and General Services Administration for political advantage. After all, that is what American politics has at times always been—a rough and mean-spirited brawl to discredit your vulnerable enemies and thereby reacquire power by winning elections.
Yet there was never a sustained and collective Republican effort to enlist the media to remove Obama from office by means other than an election.
A Contact Sport
Republicans during the transformative Obama era were content to chalk up huge wins in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, to go to court in hopes of stopping Obama’s executive orders, to shut down the government if need be to stop excessive spending, to investigate scandals such as “Fast and Furious” and Benghazi, and to censure Attorney General Eric Holder.
But what they did not do was immediately declare Obama an illegitimate president or a president so foreign to their own liking that they forthwith sued in three states to overturn the election.
They did not stage a campaign to subvert the voting of the Electoral College, or introduce articles of impeachment right after his inauguration.
They did not sic the Bush Administration FBI, CIA, NSA, and Justice Department on Obama’s campaign, transition, and presidency, or unleash Hollywood celebrities to virtue signal their imaginative ways of decapitating, burning, stabbing, blowing up, shooting, and punching their own president.
Conservative politicians, bureaucrats, and activists did not invoke the ossified Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, or the 25th
Amendment to remove immediately Obama from office as a traitor, crook, and a crazy.
In efforts to impeach, they did not turn loose a special counsel and over a dozen right-wing government lawyers for 22 months and $35 million worth of harassment, or obsess over their president’s long (and often checkered history), as they wheeled out each week of his presidency an assortment of stale crooks, terrorists, and racists from his past—such unpleasant and indeed unhinged figures as Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and Father Michael Pfleger—or go after the Obama children, all to force him from office.
When Obama essentially got caught on a hot microphone promising Russian President Medvedev that he would be flexible after his reelection on the implementation of long-planned Eastern European missile defense if Vladimir Putin would give him a little room, Republicans did not introduce articles of impeachment on grounds he was “colluding” with a foreign power by offering a quid pro quo to Russia to de facto interfere in a U.S. election: if Putin didn’t cause trouble for the Obama reelection effort, then Putin got rewarded by no worries over bothersome missiles in Eastern Europe. Even if conservative forbearance derived only from pragmatic lessons from their own past ill-fated impeachment of Bill Clinton, they still did not seek to impeach Obama.
I don’t remember the conservative movement labeling the majority of Americans who voted for Obama as deplorable people, as irredeemables, as the dregs of society, as Neanderthal clingers to their Bibles and guns, as typical black or brown or some such color people.
Much less was there a “NeverObama” left-wing movement that repeatedly dreamed out loud of deporting the rival but hated hard-left Obama base and swapping them with illegal aliens. Mitt Romney did not go on a year-long crusade blaming dozens of things and people for his own poorly conducted 2012 presidential campaign and claiming he was “robbed.”
The Antecedents of Trump Hatred
Again, by all means his opponents can, if they so wish, ridicule, caricature, and blast Trump and hope he fails. But after trying for nearly three years to destroy the president and prematurely remove him by any means necessary before a scheduled election, please do not appeal to the better angels of our nature—while deploring the new “unpresidential” behavior of Donald J. Trump for lashing out at those who sought to reduce him to a common criminal, pervert, traitor, dunce, and Satanic figure.
Such invective was always characteristic of the new progressive agenda rather than specific to Donald J. Trump. After the 2008 dismantling of John McCain into a senile lecher and reducing Mitt Romney into a tax cheat, animal tormenter, high-school hazer, elevator owner, and enabler of an equestrian wife with MS, and after George W. Bush was reduced to Nazi thug worthy of death in progressive novels, op-eds and docudramas, Donald Trump sensed that half the country had had enough and he would return slur for slur—and so may the best brawler win.
After all, in 2019, this 243rd year of our illustrious nation, most Americans are not simply going to curl up in a fetal position, apologize for the greatest nation in the history of civilization, and say, “Ah, you’re right, Representatives Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib. It is an awful country after all—and always was.”
While one may always wish that the president and his critics tone down their venom and play by silk-stocking Republican Marquis of Queensberry rules, it is hard for half the country to feel much sympathy for the Left that sowed the wind and are reaping an ever growing whirlwind.
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