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I understand one's dislike of Trump's persona. I understand how one finds his unorthodox style of governance and campaigning a turn off. However, to hate Trump also suggests you hate the blue collar worker who is the backbone of America's middle class, you also hate those who defend our nation and most of all you hate our black citizens whose lives Trump's economic policies have given a jump start as well as those who favor better education opportunities for our youth, particularly the underprivileged.
Perversely, a vote against Trump also places you favoring open borders and sanctuary cities, illegal immigration, takeover by government of more of our GDP and reverses the economic gains we have made in the last 3 years among other favorable accomplishments.
When it comes to Trump's foreign policy initiatives it suggests you oppose our policies toward Israel and NATO's re-balanced contributions as well as leveling the playing field involving trade, our improved standing among nation's of the world among other matters. (See 1 and 1a below.)
And:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/
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Three worthy articles. Star Parker is a friend and fellow memo reader::
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What Do Democrats Fear in Donald Trump? Greatness
James Carville says Trump is the greatest threat to America since the fall of communism. It is easy to laugh away such a declaration, but I think there is an invaluable truth expressed. Trump is as important in stature as the United States' most formidable military and political opponent of the twentieth century. Trumpism as an ideological force has the mass and acceleration of a Soviet Empire that threatened to conquer the world. Nobody speaks about the Bush Doctrine in such terms. Nobody confuses the Obama Doctrine or the Carter Doctrine as projecting that kind of power. Yet here we are, just three years after the election, and somehow the belittled and mocked hotel owner from Queens has stumbled into creating a movement that matches in strength and potency what took Marx, Lenin, and Stalin over a century to perfect. Consider the fear that Carville and his ilk must harbor about what is to come.
What does he see that makes him tremble so? In a word, greatness.
How could he not? When you see a man being endlessly ridiculed and scorned brush off those insults with ease and smile back, you know something is different. When you watch a 6'3" sack of energy bustling across the stage four or more times a day in suit and tie before tens of thousands of spectators watching his every move, and he seems more rested and comfortable than the press gallery a third his age, you know you haven't seen this before. When his enemies spend years using the combined forces of corporate media, the legal system, and the intelligence agencies to dispose of him one way or another, and the man responds with an off-the-cuff one-liner that shows he could not care less, you know you are dealing with something rare.
Carville hates the man because he knows what he is. Donald Trump is a world-historical figure. He is not merely a part of history; he is an agent warping it with his own gravity. His ideas and actions represent a firm break from the prevailing paradigms of the past. His is an original voice arguing aggressively against the status quo. If everything about this moment feels different, that's because it is. We are all witnesses to history's play, but few generations see a world-historical figure ascend to its stage.
The media are blind to the moment, but future historians will see. Almost everything in the public sphere is now defined in relation to Donald Trump.
He stood on the dais during his inauguration and practically said, "See all these Republicans and Democrats and their great plans for our country? I'm going to destroy them all and burn down most of what they've built since World War II." No wonder both sides joined hands with the Deep State and attempted to do by coup what Hillary could not. Winning the American presidency is one thing, but shining a bright light on what the American government has become is something else entirely.
Consider how many powerful ideas Donald Trump has cast into the national consciousness. He has exposed both major parties as socialist globalist cults more concerned with government health care and foreign nation-building than a policy for American freedom. He has exposed how free trade can never be free when based on slave labor. He has exposed how the silent destruction of towns across the Midwest came not from China's comparative advantage, but from American companies' use of slavery by proxy. He has redirected investment away from Wall Street and toward Main Street for the first time in over thirty years and has unleashed three decades' worth of pent up entrepreneurial energy in the very towns long deemed dead. He has questioned how the federal government can have any legitimacy if it fails at enforcing its very own immigration laws.
Not one Nobel laureate imagined this American renaissance of GDP and stock market surge, record-low unemployment, wage growth, and low inflation in one bubbling cauldron. It took a change agent. Not one foreign policy mandarin suggested unleashing the entrepreneurial spirit of the American oil man in order to destroy our enemies' power over us permanently. It took a change agent. Not one State Department official questioned why the United States was still subsidizing Europe's generous socialist welfare system seventy years after WWII. It took a change agent. Nobody wondered why we were enriching China at our own expense and preparing for a world where a communist dictator would lead. It took Donald Trump.
Without worry or apology, Donald Trump stands before the world with a giant mirror, and the world does not like what it sees. At a time when Western governments have found common cause with murderous dictators in demanding limits to free speech and free minds, Donald Trump goes to Poland and excoriates European socialism as the newest iteration of human bondage. He celebrates the very Western civilization that the West now works to bury. More than anyone on the world stage, he argues for individual freedom as the indispensable ingredient for civilization itself and free nations as the essential bulwark against international governance and tyranny. In speech after speech across the globe, he stands alone and pushes back against the weight of history's currents.
The world has noticed. It is Donald Trump to whom Nigerian Christians turn for survival from Islamic terror. It is Donald Trump who has strengthened Israel by keeping promises his predecessors lacked the fortitude to see through. It is Donald Trump whose name is often whispered by freedom-fighters in Venezuela, whose American flag is respected by regime protesters in Iran, and whose image is waved by thousands demanding freedom in Hong Kong. Nobody clamoring for freedom is waving pictures of Angela Merkel in the air, but in Hong Kong and Taiwan, a photoshopped image of Donald Trump as Rocky Balboa is easy to find. At a time when the German chancellor argues for limiting free expression, those people most desperate to escape China's yoke see the American president as the only fighter who might help set them free. He is our American president, but he belongs to the world now, too.
Because he is actively working to destroy entrenched ideas and institutions, his opposition is clear-eyed and equally aggressive. Rather than the traditional political tug-of-war that pits adverse interests against each other without significant movement toward any direction, President Trump as a world-historical driver of change is engaging in pitched battle with winner-takes-all stakes.
Whether he ultimately succeeds in shifting various equilibriums is irrelevant to his role in history. In victory or defeat, he represents a firm marker against which past and future events will be viewed. What his fiercest adversaries are only now realizing is that Trump has shifted the trajectory of history permanently. He is not operating on their terms; they are all actors in the Trump Era.
How do you go up against an era? That's like going up against a season. Whether you like it or not, summer and winter are with us. No wonder James Carville is afraid.
1a) PLO’s Abbas Emerges As Incredible Shrinking Man
Mr. Avni, who is based at the United Nations, is a contributing editor to The New York Sun and can be followed on Twitter
By BENNY AVNI, Special to the Sun
Mahmoud Abbas, like the protagonist of the eponymous 1959 horror movie, is the Incredible Shrinking Man — even here at the United Nations.
Mr. Abbas likes to be addressed as President of the State of Palestine. In reality he wields little influence in the West Bank. He lost Gaza to his rival, Hamas. His Fatah lieutenants and erstwhile allies are openly gearing up for a succession battle that will likely turn bloody. Even in his 15th year of a 4-year elected stint as president, the 84-year old Mr. Abbas refuses to name a successor.
Then, there’s the ever-vanishing Israeli Left. Former allies in Israel increasingly dismiss Mr. Abbas as irrelevant, even as they profess to side with the Palestinian Arabs’ struggle for a state. A former prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Tuesday in a joint press conference with Mr. Abbas that he’s “the only partner who represents the Pal people, and he manifested the will to negotiate.”
Mr. Olmert, who as premier presented Mr. Abbas with far reaching concessions only to be rejected, has lost any political base in Israel since he was incarcerated over corruption-related charges. Yet contrary to expectations of what would happen today, even Mr. Olmert urged Mr. Abbas not to reject President Trump’s peace plan.
The rejection, it was clear, was precisely the reason Mr. Abbas came to Turtle Bay, his most important constituency, has been the one he calls the international community. And now it too is slipping away.
“One hundred and forty countries recognized us” as a state, Mr. Abbas told the Security Council Tuesday. Then he listed all those that supposedly joined his battle against the latest detailed American blueprint for peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The attempt to unite Turtle Bay against America, however, quickly hit the skids. The much-hyped Security Council session the Palestinian Arabs organized Tuesday was no more than a collection of canned speeches. Mr. Abbas was hoping for much more. Backed by Tunisia, Indonesia, and South Africa, he prepared a resolution dismissing the Trump plan and condemning it as violation of all past United Nations resolutions.
Mr. Abbas was hoping for a united front. Fourteen of the 15 Council members would support his America-bashing, while America by its lonesome would be forced to wield a self-defeating veto.
Oops. Even after softening the resolution’s language by removing America’s name (but still condemning Mr. Trump’s plan), Mr. Abbas failed to get nine supporters, the minimum needed to bring a proposal for a vote. So, at least for now, the proposed resolution has been shelved.
Meanwhile, Tunisia fired its envoy to the United Nations, Moncef Baati, who had coordinated the drafting of the anti-American resolution. On Tuesday Mr. Baati’s deputy, Tarek al-Adab, denied a connection between the firing and the resolution’s drafting, but Tunis’s difficult position is clear: On the one hand, holding the rotating Arab Security Council seat, it must represent the lowest Arab common denominator, which is a reflexive rejection.
Yet, the new Tunisian government is more moderate and more pro-American than its predecessor. Under Washington’s pressure, therefore, Mr. Baati had to go so Tunis can get on America’s good side.
Tunisia’s dilemma is indicative of new trends across the Arab world. Leaders are tired of Mr. Abbas’s endless shenanigans and are eager to strike mutually beneficial deals with Israel. Futile solidarity with Palestinians who can’t, or won’t, get their act together gets them nowhere.
So yes, Mr. Abbas can still unite trite, old bodies like the Arab League or the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, which was formerly known as the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The Organization and the League have united in rejection of Mr. Trump’s plan.
Individual Arab leaders, though, send other signals. Last week the de-facto ruler of Sudan, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, met with Prime Minister Netanyahu at Entebbe, and according to Arab press reports, Washington is trying to organize a similar meeting between Mr. Netanyahu and the Saudi crown prince, Mohammad bin Salman.
Mr. Abbas’s last-ditch attempt to emerge from isolation is an appeal to anti-Trump sentiments in America itself. On Tuesday he waved a letter rejecting Washington’s peace plan, which he claimed was signed by 107 House reps and 12 Senators — including, he boasted, “even presidential candidates.”
Indeed, if elected, Bernie Sanders, for one, would reverse many of Mr. Trump’s pro-Israel moves. Other Democrats may be tempted to stiffen opposition to Israel’s policies. Yet according to polls, American voters still favor Israel over the Palestinians by large margins, so no American president could stray too far from supporting Jerusalem. Moving the embassy to Jerusalem originally passed the two houses of Congress by an almost unanimous vote.
In any event, any American attempt to rely on Mr. Abbas is bound to hit a wall. As Israel’s envoy at the world body, Danny Danon, told stunned Council members Tuesday, “Progress toward peace will not be made so long as President Abbas remains in his position.” This incredible shrinking man’s is rapidly losing his cause.
Mr. Avni, who is based at the United Nations, is a contributing editor to The New York Sun and can be followed on Twitter
1b) The Democrats Gave In to Radicals and Gave Up on Common Sense
Trump’s personality and policies hastened the party’s leftward shift, but it was a long time coming.
By Joseph Epstein
George Orwell noted the nervousness of people on the left when confronted by those even further to the left. This nervousness stems from leftists’ fear that they will be taken for impure in their own leftism, that their thought and actions don’t go far enough, that they are, finally, not really on the bus. In America during the 1930s, Communists mocked liberals for their weakness, and liberals worried about not measuring up. Hence the phenomenon of the “fellow traveler,” someone who sympathized with the Communist Party but couldn’t bring himself to join it.
Orwell’s observation remains in play. In the mid-1960s, Stokely Carmichael and other young black militants pushed the American civil-rights movement leftward, and away from its goal of integration. Liberals, unable to face down this left-wing pull toward Black Power, knuckled under. A gloriously successful campaign for equal rights based on conscience and dignity devolved into an angry, incoherent movement based on guilt and victimhood. The last thing allowed was the concession of progress of any sort in racial matters. Impressive civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, and A. Philip Randolph were replaced by such dubious figures as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. The movement never recovered.
The same phenomenon appeared in American universities. In faculty meetings everywhere, small groups of the most radical professors were able to get their way through political pressure. Liberals, generally in the majority, were worried (if not terrified) of seeming to be on the wrong side. When they didn’t give in completely, they sought compromises that invariably favored the radicals. Standards and intellectual authority in universities have given way to political correctness and identity politics.
The same scenario is playing out in the Democratic Party. Since nominating George McGovern in 1972, the party has moved progressively leftward. If the Democrats may by now be said to have a center, it cannot hold, as William Butler Yeats has it in his poem “The Second Coming.” Among today’s Democrats, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”
By ceding moral authority to the far left, the Democrats have lost the power to counter bizarre proposals with simple common sense. When a freshman congresswoman proposes a wildly improbable Green New Deal, instead of responding as Democrats of an earlier day would have—“Whaddya, kiddin’ me?”—they now take it seriously and several adopt it. When two other freshman Democrats make anti-Semitic pronouncements, no one in a party overwhelmingly the choice of Jewish voters has the authority to tell them to knock it off. When Democratic presidential candidates propose to provide free health care for all, or eliminate college tuition and college debt, or enlarge and pack the Supreme Court, or eliminate the Electoral College, all this is taken in earnest. And the Democratic Party is being held hostage to identity politics, so that no national ticket can ever again be without a black or female candidate.
Donald Trump’s aggressive personality has hastened the Democrats’ radicalization. Party members measure the intensity of their idealism by their hatred of Mr. Trump. The tone and temper of the contemporary Democratic Party encourages—indeed fully supports—this sad condition.
Consider Speaker Nancy Pelosi. A serious and skillful politician, she was finally pushed by her party’s left wing into permitting a hopeless impeachment proceeding that violated her own sensible criteria: that the reasons for impeachment be compelling, the evidence for it overwhelming, and the support for it bipartisan. When the impeachment failed in the Senate, as she had predicted it would, it drove her to the distinctly un-Pelosian act of tearing up her copy of the State of the Union address on national television.
What is to be done? No one has a good answer. Perhaps the only hope is that the Democrats put together a nightmare ticket— Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker, say, or Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris —and the party is so crushingly defeated in November that it returns to its long-lost political seriousness.
Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment.”
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2) Will this new laser interceptor bring calm to southern Israel ? This video may offer a clue
Rafael releases footage from series of tests on new system, unveiled several weeks ago. Laser-based system has "soft kill" and "hard kill" methods to address the threats of objects flying close to the ground.
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems announced Wednesday that it had successfully carried out a series of tests on the Drone Dome system, during which multiple mock UAVs were intercepted by means of a laser beam. The targets were successfully engaged during the day and at night.
new system, once fully phased into service, will help southern communities near the Gaza Strip deal with ongoing harassment by Palestinian terrorists who constantly send incendiary balloons and explosive kites across the border.
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