Buy American - Please get rid of your slaves.
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In the space of a few weeks the Trump Administration has blown two optics. First Trump holding a bible allowed the Trump Haters to claim hypocrisy. Had Trump gone to the church and said he was there to signify his disgust at those who burn places of worship, and let it go at that, if would have made it difficult for the mass media to attack Trump. However, nothing is 100% when it comes to the mass media's seeking an excuse to bash the president.
Now we have the Burr episode of firing an important Justice Department Attorney who refused to resign so Trump had to do so and had every legal right but the optics look bad from a political standpoint.
Anytime you give Schumer a chance to appear as the nation's great/virtuous defender you might as well realize you have given him the knife to cut your throat.
Optics and perception are everything and if they control events what comes later by way of denial and even truth faces insurmountable hurdles. One should know from my review of "Shame" he who goes first generally wins the race as liberals did when they rushed to embrace their disassociation ploy connected with the claim America was evil.
The Berman Resistance
The grandstanding former U.S. Attorney is no political martyr.
The Editorial Board.
So here’s the plan. We need to remove a U.S. Attorney because he’s investigating associates of the President. Let’s wait until four months before the election, and let’s do it on a Friday night so it looks suspicious and the guy can refuse to step down and make himself a martyr to the Resistance. Yeah, that’ll fool everybody.
That’s what the media and Democrats want everyone to believe about President Trump’s weekend dismissal of U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman. It’s more accurate to say this looks like a fiasco of bungled execution by the Administration and self-indulgence by Mr. Berman that is being overplayed as an abuse of power. In other words, it’s your average Trump melodrama.
Mr. Berman has been U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York for more than two years under a judicial appointment but was never nominated or confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump has every right to fire Mr. Berman as an inferior officer in the executive branch. Attorney General Bill Barr was negotiating with Mr. Berman over a transfer to another senior job on Friday when the Justice Department issued a statement that Mr. Berman is “stepping down,” which is standard Justice Department language in these cases
The White House said at about the same time that the President would nominate SEC Chairman Jay Clayton to replace Mr. Berman. The highly competent Mr. Clayton, a New Yorker, had planned to leave the Administration but said he’d stay for the U.S. Attorney job.
Mr. Berman then issued a grandstanding press release late Friday saying he wouldn’t go until a successor was nominated and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Trump finally fired him on Saturday at Mr. Barr’s recommendation, and Mr. Barr said in a letter to Mr. Berman that his deputy, Audrey Strauss, will replace him until a successor is confirmed.
That should end this as a legal matter. Mr. Berman doesn’t have squatter’s rights to the job, and there is no violation of law or abuse of power here.
The political cost is a different story. The Washington Resistance to Mr. Trump is portraying this as an attempt to protect his political allies. Mr. Berman has prosecuted Mr. Trump’s former associates, including attorney Michael Cohen, and the hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. He’s also said to be investigating Deutsche Bank’s business dealings with the Trump Organization before Mr. Trump was President.
But our Justice sources say Mr. Berman’s active investigations don’t involve Mr. Trump’s allies, except a minor one related to Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani. Replacing Mr. Berman with Mr. Clayton or anyone else won’t make investigations go away. The minute anyone moved to shut one of them down, the news would leak and career prosecutors would resign. Mr. Barr’s Saturday letter to Mr. Berman said he tasked Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz with examining any “improper interference” with current investigations. If this is a coverup, it’s the most inept in history.
The shame is that all of this wastes more of Mr. Barr’s political capital. The AG is trying to clean up the Justice Department after its 2016 campaign abuses, and U.S. Attorney John Durham is investigating what happened and why. But the media and the FBI and Justice officials who spied on Trump campaign officials, promoted the false Steele dossier, and lied to the FISA court are desperate to tarnish Mr. Barr before Mr. Durham reports. That’s what’s really behind all the outrage over what should be a routine replacement of a U.S. Attorney.
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How Cultural Revolutions Die — or Not
Unlike coups or political revolutions, cultural revolutions don’t just change governments or leaders. Instead, they try to redefine entire societies. Their leaders call them “holistic” and “systematic.”
Cultural revolutionaries attack the very referents of our daily lives. The Jacobins’ so-called Reign of Terror during the French Revolution slaughtered Christian clergy, renamed months, and created a new supreme being: Reason.
Mao cracked down on supposed Western decadence such as the wearing of eyeglasses, and he made peasants forge pot iron and intellectuals wear dunce caps.
Moammar Qaddafi’s Green Book cult wiped out violins and forced Libyans to raise chickens in their apartments.
The current Black Lives Matter revolution has “canceled” certain movies, television shows, and cartoons, toppled statues, tried to create new autonomous urban zones, and renamed streets and plazas. Some fanatics shave their heads. Others have shamed authorities into washing the feet of their fellow revolutionaries.
But inevitably cultural revolutions die out when they turn cannibalistic. Once the Red Guard started killing party hacks too close to Mao, it began to wane.
If toppling Confederate statues is required, what then about Nancy Pelosi’s own mayor father, who once, as Baltimore’s mayor, dedicated honorific statues to Confederate generals?
If racists understandably do not deserve their names on national shrines, what to do with the iconic liberal graduate program at Princeton, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? It was named for a president who did more to further segregation and racial prejudice than any chief executive of the 20th century.
Stanford and Yale, coveted brand names of the progressive professional classes, are named after men whom protestors now deem racists.
It is easier to target Fort Bragg, the iconic military base named after a Confederate general, racist, and military mediocrity than to see one’s MBA or Ph.D. lose its Yale luster, or to confess that a liberal presidential icon perpetuated racism.
Once a cultural revolution gets going, there can be no contextualization of the past, no allowance for human frailty, no consideration of weighing evil vs. good.
Eventually, the architects of cultural upheavals always make two miscalculations.
One, they presume that destroying things will never apply to themselves, given their loud virtue-signaling.
Two, if they are fingered by the mob, they assume they can somehow use their clout and influence to win exemption.
In other words, once cultural revolutions turn anarchic and eat their own, they lose support. When quiet sympathizers conclude that they too may targeted, they turn on their former icons to survive.
We are seeing that now. Liberal sympathetic bystanders are wondering whether downtown arson and looting will go private and reach their suburban homes. Do they really want their marquee universities or the Washington or Jefferson Monuments defaced or renamed? What happens when calling 911 gets a constant busy signal? When a liberal mayor or black police chief or progressive governor or white leftist who diverges from the party line is targeted by the mob, then who really is safe?
Answer? No one.
And so the cultural revolution sputters to irrelevance.
What deflated the #MeToo movement was the high toll that the accusations took among the Hollywood and cultural elite. Suddenly, when their own careers were destroyed, progressive celebrities began demanding evidence and insisting on presumed innocence.
What burns out these cultural upheavals is that today’s revolutionary can be denounced as tomorrow’s sell-out. No leader wants to share Robespierre’s rendezvous with his own guillotine.
There is one caveat.
Sometimes cultural revolutions don’t die out — if they are hijacked by a thug or killer. The National Socialist movement was an irrelevant nihilist mob of crazies until Adolf Hitler turned it into his personal genocidal cult. A murderous Stalin resuscitated the absurdities of Lenin’s failing Bolshevism.
The present madness will wane like a virus, as it eats its own and terrifies its sympathizers that they may be next — unless, of course, a would-be Napoleon uses a “whiff of grapeshot” and turns the mob into his personal cult.
The armed rapper Raz Simone, who some say lords over CHAZ, the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (recently renamed CHOP, the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest”) in downtown Seattle, so far has neither the diabolic talent nor the resources to spread his anarchy.
Dissident generals may be misguided, but they remain patriots. So far, we have seen no Napoleon emerge to claim that he is the only man who can lead today’s urban revolutionaries to victory.
A final thought: Cultural revolutions not only eventually die without cruel dictators, but they can spawn dramatic push backs. Ronald Reagan was the answer to the radical Sixties. Revolutionaries are now sowing the wind, but they have little idea of the reactive whirlwind they may soon reap.
© Tribune Content Agency
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I believe I am a typical thinking southerner in that I am conservative, never understood how our Constitution guaranteed everyone the right to pursue happiness and all our rights came from God and then we proceeded to enslave and discriminate because of color and for economic reasons.When I was in law school taking Constitutional Law, in 1956-1960, I do not recall whether we had black students or not but if we did we did not have many. The discussion of segregation actually never came up in class and I had a very good professor, a woman , for the course. Our Dean was the retired dean of Yale's Law School, Wesley Sturges, the avowed father of arbitration law. Wesley was from Maine and we were very close. I spent several evenings at his home with his charming wife and Sean their beautiful Irish Setter who would come to class and could sniff out those who were un-prepared.
Because I was married, had a daughter and worked part time it took me another semester to graduate. The time I spent in law school was devoid of any social life and the Viet Nam War was still ongoing. Miami was yet to experience the large influx from South America and Cuba. The period was halcyon-like.
60 years later the nation is being torn apart by issues that reared their head and should have been resolved but never were and frankly, will not be resolved if they continue as they are because the BLM , unlike MLK's time, is not winning much sympathy from the like's of me.
I am socially liberal but fiscally conservative and I want to see everyone, who is a legitimate citizen, have full opportunities to pursue their happiness and goals However, I also realize, for a variety of reasons, there will always be those on the bottom and those on the top but America offers opportunities that no other nation does and that is part of our problem. The key is to narrow the spread between the top and bottom and I know no better way than through capitalism, free markets and a better educated work class. Those that want to come here have problems getting in and believe doing so illegally is acceptable and many who hate America, refuse to go elsewhere and apparently want to destroy our nation.
Our immigration laws no longer serve our nation nor those who want to apply legally and need to be changed. It is way past time to do so and I would hope Members of Congress care more about what is best for America than what is best for themselves.
If citizens want to change our republic in order to make it better and assure opportunities are open and equal to all regardless of color and ethnicity and are willing to work within the system, I believe that is what is great about our nation. History has shown it is doable.
However, if they want to destroy America and are unwilling to work within the system to accomplish these desirable goals then I have nothing but contempt for them and it grows with the passing of each day.
America is not perfect. No nation on earth is perfect. America simply stands head and shoulders above virtually all others and our Constitution points the way toward the path to accomplish these changes. Freedom is what sets us apart.
Nevertheless, change often must be kick started/ associated with passion to be successful .However, when passion spills over and drives looters, anarchists and troublemakers into the streets and rioting and destruction ensues any empathy I may have ends. I regret the recent events that served as a trigger. That they became an excuse to destroy my nation is equally inexcusable.
That is where I am and my above stated reasoning describes where I am coming from and I always invite comment.
Meanwhile, The Supreme Court decided not to hear police immunity cases. My view, for what it is worth, is police should be immune from law suits but not the departments in which they serve. We are too litigious a society, have far too many lawyers/capita and suing police distorts/disrupts the ability of police to be effective. If police do wrong then the suit should be brought against the department and the department can then decide whether to fire the officer involved.
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