Victor Davis Hanson
MUELLER’S LEGACY IS HIS BEING GUILTY OF OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE
Some 450 days ago we were treated to melodramatic announcements from the media about the start-up of Robert Mueller’s “dream” and “all-star” team.
Reporters gushed in the general hysteria of the times that Mueller would no doubt soon indict President Trump, some of his family, and almost anyone else in his campaign—and therefore end the Trump aberration.
Although that Mueller mandate of collusion was never formally defined, much less explained as a criminal offense, the media salivated at the idea that Mueller’s whiz kids nonetheless were going to find it and no doubt thereby usher in impeachment.
Now we have gone from melodrama to bathos.
WHY FACEBOOK IS DOOMED TO FAIL IN CHINA
In July, Facebook quickly withdrew its pending subsidiary in the province of Zhejiang, China.
The social media giant, along with Google, Twitter, and Instagram (which is also owned by Facebook) is eager to reach China’s potential audience of 731 million internet users, but it has been blocked in the mainland for almost 10 years.
The subsidiary aimed to establish a new innovation hub as well as finally dip a toe in the Chinese market, but Facebook’s plan to enter China is doomed to fail.
This is not the first time Facebook has attempted to have a piece of the pie. It won’t be the last. Facebook is still trying, but it needs to understand it will be all but impossible for it to survive in China. Here’s why.
TRUMP’S PLAN TO CHANGE THE WORLD
The President and First Lady arrive in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, May 20, 2017
President Donald Trump has a plan to defeat radical Islamic terrorism off the battlefield, judging from the publicly available evidence.
The plan is simple, if extraordinarily ambitious: Reform Islam.
More specifically, the aim is to induce Muslim leaders to reject jihad and terrorism, and to embrace and promote a moderate practice of Islam.
Trump’s public calls for an end to Islamic terrorism made headlines, but largely unnoticed has been a larger and concerted plan to reform Islam by eliminating the root cause of such violence: the extremist ideology that fuels jihad.
The president called upon Muslim leaders to fundamentally reform Islam by rejecting terrorism and global jihad during his landmark speech in the Saudi capital of Riyadh on May 21, 2017.
“There can be no coexistence with this violence. There can be no tolerating it, no accepting it, no excusing it, and no ignoring it,” the president insisted. There are clear signs he is succeeding. Here’s how.
PUTTING AMERICANS FIRST
When the Wicked Witch meets Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” she demands the ruby red slippers the Kansas farm girl is wearing. The Good Witch advises Dorothy otherwise. “Their magic must be very powerful or she wouldn’t want them so badly,” she says.
The Magnitsky Act is something like those ruby red slippers.
Originally passed by Congress in 2012 and named for the Russian accountant found dead in his jail cell after exposing fraud involving Russian officials, it authorized the president to block travel visas and freeze bank accounts of individual Russians deemed guilty of human-rights abuses.
In 2016 it was expanded so it could be applied to other human-rights abusers anywhere in the world. We know its power the same way we know about the power of Dorothy’s red slippers: The bad guys obsess about it.
Like Turkish Dictator Recip Erdogan, who’s feeling the heat of President’s Trump’s Americans First foreign policy of using the Magnitsky Act to force the freeing of Pastor Brunson.
TIME FOR TRUMP TO PLAY AN ACE IN THE HOLE
Time to shut these three guys out of the game
You return from a great vacation and POW — reality hits like a punch in the nose.
The pain begins when you remember that the hapless Jeff Sessions is still the attorney general of the United States.
It sharpens with the realization that Rod Rosenstein, officially Sessions’ deputy but really the boss of the Justice Department and FBI, continues to get away with the biggest partisan heist of modern times.
Rosenstein is guilty of three main sins. Here are all three, plus how Trump can trump all three with an ace in the hole.
THE RISE OF THE TECH FASCISTS
Fascist is a big word not to be bandied about (though it too often is these days), so let me make myself clear.
I've spent about ten minutes of my life on InfoWars and think Alex Jones is a boring blowhard of little interest except to those who want to spend their lives worrying about whether there was a second gunman on the Grassy Knoll.
Nevertheless, the group censorship of Mr. Jones, led by our friends in Cupertino, the makers of the ubiquitous iPhone -- I've had a half-dozen myself and am typing this on a MacBook -- is one of the scarier developments of our time, if not potentially the scariest.
So what Apple is doing picking on the basically irrelevant Jones is a form of corporate virtual signaling, a particularly dangerous form if you believe in the Bill of Rights.
Yes, I know they're a private company not subject to government restrictions, but they are bigger, richer, and more powerful than almost every government on the planet, maybe more, which leads me to their noxious and equally powerful comrade-in-tech-arms.... FACEBOOK.
THE ELITES’ WAR ON NORMAL AMERICANS
Recently, Politico reporter Marc Caputo was angered at rude hecklers at a Trump rally who booed beleaguered CNN correspondent Jim Acosta.
So Caputo tweeted of them, “If you put everyone’s mouths together in this video, you’d get a full set of teeth.”
I suppose Caputo meant that Trump voters intrinsically lacked either the money to fix their teeth or the knowledge of the hygiene required to take care of them or the aesthetic sensitivity of how awful their mouths looked. Or Caputo was simply rehashing the stereotypes that he had seen on reality TV shows like “Duck Dynasty” and “The Deadliest Catch.”
Or none of the above: the journalist grandee was just stupid.
That last alternative seems most likely since Caputo then escalated and called them collectively “garbage people.” What did “garbage people” mean? That by birth or training such toothless, smelly people were subhuman, like refuse?
Could he have said something similarly degrading about the attendees of an Abolish ICE! or Black Lives Matter! rally and still have his job?
THE MEDIA CAN DISH IT OUT BUT CAN’T TAKE IT
Jim Acosta has the sadz.
The untalented little man who rudely shouts unimportant questions at important people while in the employ of the ninth most trusted name in news out of ten, got heckled at a Trump rally in Tampa, Florida. Sad panda. The hecklers chanted "CNN sucks," which, okay, is true, but they were none too polite about it.
Acosta didn't like it. He reported, "Honestly, it felt like we weren’t in America anymore."
But, like virtually everything Acosta reports, this is just a reflection of his small-minded biases. The fact is, having a group of people scream at you and denigrate you is exactly what it feels like to be in America — if you don't happen to be a coastal elite.
It has felt this way for the last twenty years at least. Every television show you watch, every movie, every woman's magazine, every comedian, and, yes, every news program tells you you suck. Your country sucks. Your culture sucks. Your religion and your morals suck. And you personally are one of those dumb racists who clings to his Bible and talks funny.
Every day. From every outlet. All the time. And now people are angry. Wonder why.
Join the forum discussion on this postTHE CHILDREN’S NEWS HOUR
Having thrown in its lot with #TheResistance, the media now faces its inevitable, if not actually imminent demise.
Jobs in the newspaper industry continue to disappear, as physical publishing becomes an increasingly unprofitable occupation and advertisers bail for greener pastures.
On television, ratings for the cellar-dwelling CNN—once the premier brand in the cable-news racket—are abysmal. Yet the network stubbornly persists with an outmoded formula designed to keep its dwindling audience in a state of perpetual dudgeon, with zero appeal to anyone not already converted to its Manichean worldview.
Once upon a time, a gig in the Washington bureau was the ne plus ultra of the reporting vocation, inhabited by middle-aged wise men, who spoke soberly and dressed the part, knowing that the brass ring of Dean of the Washington Press Corps could be theirs someday.
Today, a collection of small children, the legacy sons of other network personalities, and supermodels graces the sets and standups at the news networks, chirping away in mouthfuls of clichés and infantile pronouncements about the President.
THE LEFT ARE LOCUSTS OF CULTURE
There is a scene in the 1996 movie Independence Day where the character (US President Whitmore played by Bill Pullman) mind-melds with the alien, and receives a sudden understanding of the peril the Earth is in.
“I saw... its thoughts. I saw what they're planning to do. They're like locusts. They're moving from planet to planet... their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource they move on... and we're next.”
For some time now, I’ve thought this applies to the Left. Certainly, entire fields of endeavor, entire expanses of human knowledge, science, and interest, seem to collapse in the wake of an infestation by the Left.
I used to think this happened because of the Left’s charming habit of hiring only on political conformity, and not on talent, intellectual ability or even interest in the field.
No, Leftists really are like locusts. They can’t help destroying.
THE ORIGINS OF OUR SECOND CIVIL WAR
Globalism, the tech boom, illegal immigration, campus radicalism, the new racialism . . . are they leading us toward an 1861? How, when, and why has the United States now arrived at the brink of a veritable civil war?
Almost every cultural and social institution — universities, the public schools, the NFL, the Oscars, the Tonys, the Grammys, late-night television, public restaurants, coffee shops, movies, TV, stand-up comedy — has been not just politicized but also weaponized.
Donald Trump’s election was not so much a catalyst for the divide as a manifestation and amplification of the existing schism.
We are now nearing a point comparable to 1860, and perhaps past 1968. Left–Right factionalism is increasingly fueled by geography — always history’s force multiplier of civil strife.
What has caused the United States to split apart so rapidly?
DON’T HATE ME FOR TELLING YOU THIS
Sara Cox and her children wait at the gates of U.S. Steel in Granite City to welcome President Trump.
[Neil Steinberg is a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat – and as such feels right at home reporting for the liberal Chicago Sun-Times. Last Thursday (7/26), he was in Granite City, Illinois to watch President Trump speak to the steelworkers at the recently reopened U.S. Steel plant. While he can’t help imparting his anti-Trump bias, he has the honesty to tell his Sun-Times readers – who are as anti-Trump as he is – what he learned. Full video of the President’s speech below --JW]
Donald Trump is a charming man, and people like him.
Up in Chicago we forget that. Between the attacks on immigrants, on Democrats, on the press, and the FBI, and the Justice department … well, the list goes on and on, doesn’t it? We see the damage, to our institutions, to our social fabric, our nation’s reputation, to groups and individuals, and assume he’s a reviled figure, ripe to be driven from office.
Not true. Not down here, at U.S. Steel’s sprawling works, Trump embraces and is in turn embraced.
“The moment of a lifetime,” said millwright Earl Evans, one of about 400 workers who came in on their own time to hear the President speak. “Finally someone doing something for America.”
DEMOCRATS HIT PEAK OUTRAGE
The socialists are having a moment. At least if you believe the media
But if the socialists were really having a moment, their big show wouldn’t be a 28-year-old birdbrain whose big achievement was beating a boring white guy in a Hispanic district he didn’t even live in.
The Democrats are adopting socialist ideas wholesale. After all, socialism polls brilliantly with the four core Dem bases of angry government workers, angry college students, angry welfare recipients, and San Francisco eco-billionaires who keep all their money in Caribbean banks.
But that’s because the Democrats have no ideas except hating Trump and Republicans. The socialists think they’re winning. But they’re just the guys shouting things at a crazy mob. And the mob is not really for anything, it’s just enraged. It doesn’t want to build, it wants to tear down.
In other word. the Democrats have hit ‘Peak Outrage’.
TRUMP AGAIN PROVES HE’S THE DEMOCRATS’ NIGHTMARE
“The United States and the European Union together count for more than 830 million citizens and more than 50 percent of the global GDP. In other words, together, we’re more than 50 percent of trade. If we team up, we can make our planet a better, more secure, and more prosperous place.They must be burning whatever gallons of midnight oil they have left at MSNBC, CNN, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc. -- all the propaganda organs of the Democrat Party.
Already today, the United States and the European Union have a $1 trillion bilateral trade relationship — the largest economic relationship anywhere in the world. We want to further strengthen this trade relationship to the benefit of all American and European citizens.
This is why we agreed today (7/25), first of all, to work together toward zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods.” –President Trump with EU President Juncker, White House, July 25
They’re desperately trying to figure out how to downplay the agreement Donald Trump just made with European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker, but it's not going to be easy.
This is the beginning of a massive free trade deal between Europe and the U.S. with zero tariffs outside the auto industry. If even half of it comes true, there will be a (okay, why not?) YUUUGE growth in trade benefitting both sides of the Atlantic. What a nightmare for the Democrats.
SUPPORTING IRANIAN VOICES
Protestors for regime change confronting police, Tehran, June 25, 2018
[This is the full text of the speech by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, California last Sunday, July 22. It is an inspiring call for regime change in the Islamofascist Mullahcracy of Iran and deserves to be read entire. –JW]
Thanks for the kind introduction and thanks for hosting me here at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library. It’s a very special place and an honor for me to be here.
We have many members of the Iranian American community with us this evening. This is just a fraction of the quarter million Iranian Americans in Southern California alone. We have many Iranian American guests from all across the United States here as well. Thank you.
I recognize the Iranian diaspora is diverse. There are many faith backgrounds and many different walks of life, and that’s a good thing, and not all Iranian Americans see things the same way. But I think everyone can agree that the regime in Iran has been a nightmare for the Iranian people, and it is important that your unity on that point is not diminished by differences elsewhere.
To our Iranian Americans and our Iranian American friends, tonight I want to tell you that the Trump administration dreams the same dreams for the people of Iran as you do, and through our labors and God’s providence that day will come true.
TRUMP’S FIVE RULES FOR RULING THE WORLD
It’s the middle of 2018. And after spilling several small rivers of black ink (digital and virtual) analyzing, smearing, belaboring, insulting and fact checking President Trump, the media still doesn’t understand him.
That’s not surprising. The media has been writing about America for much longer than that and has even less of a clue about how people live outside its preciously hip urban and suburban bubbles.
But there are 5 simple rules for understanding President Trump. They define how he’s lived his life until now. And what still drives him at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. If you understand them, you will get what he’s doing. If you don’t, there’s always a job waiting at the New York Times.
AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. BRENNAN
Obama and his CIA Director John Brennan
Dear Mr. Brennan,
I understand that you are a political opponent of the current President of the United States. I understand that you are an American citizen, and you have the right to freedom of speech. I encourage you to utilize that right. I encourage you to speak your mind. I encourage you, as I do all Americans, to be heard.
I implore you, however to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.
None of this is true.
You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad. You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have never heard a shot fired in anger.
HOW FAR WILL DEMOCRATS GO?
There was no honeymoon for the unlikely winner of the 2016 election.
No prior president has been under investigation for 80 percent of his first two years in office, by an investigatory team that is so patently compromised by conflicts of political interest, and so unable to find collusion or wrongdoing in a sea of what is likely to turn out to be FBI, CIA, and Justice Department criminality in 2016.
There is no respite from the war against Trump. The NFL, the NBA, late-night comedy shows, cable news, sitcoms, Hollywood movies, books, and music have all found ways to turn their genres into anti-Trump theater.
There is no respite; there is no refuge—not the Super Bowl, not the Emmys, not the Grammys, not the Oscars. Almost every aspect of American culture has been weaponized to delegitimize Trump.
What is the cause of all this hate, furor, and sheer mania? And what’s to stop it from getting worse?
A CLEAN START
[We are pleased to introduce a new column for To The Point, CyberTex by TTPer Tex Manchester. As one of the world’s top experts in cybersecurity, Tex will informing you on the real secrets of protecting your online privacy. This is an exclusive for TTPers only. He says he honored to join us. We are honored to have you, Tex! –JW]
Fellow TTP’ers, I am honored and humbled to join Dr. Wheeler and all of the esteemed columnists here in this “Oasis for Rational Conservatives.” While you’ll see me on the Forum discussing politics, this and future columns will take things in a different direction:
- How can the layman protect his or herself and their families from the cybersecurity threats facing them each day?
- With the flood of “advice” online, how can people educate themselves on what these recommendations actually defend you against?
- And more importantly, what do they not do?
WAS RUSSIAN ELECTION MEDDLING TO HELP THE LEFT TAKE OVER THE DEMOCRAT PARTY?
The Russia conspiracy theory hinges on the single creaky claim that the Democratic National Committee hacks were a Russian plot to elect Trump. The theory and all its illegitimate stepchildren, including Robert Mueller and his infinitely expanding corps of prosecutors, lives or dies by the DNC hacks.
Trying to elect Trump by releasing damaging insider information from the DNC never made any sense. The DNC was already a dysfunctional organization that was being run by the Clinton campaign. Undermining its leadership had little impact on the election, but a great deal on control of the DNC.
When you want to understand the motive of a crime, follow the money. See who benefited from it, not casually, but deeply and significantly enough to justify the effort and risk of undertaking it.
The hacks targeted Clinton allies and sought to undermine their influence within the Democrat Party. That’s not a plan to help Trump win. It is a plan to take over the DNC.
Let’s look at what the Russians were actually doing during the election.
SEND IN THE MARINE
My decision to be a Democrat was never a decision. Born into a family of Democrats, it was just expected of me. It was understood.
I was elected National President of the College Democrats of America in 1999, and now I’m a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Wisconsin in 2018. My campaign slogan is: Send In The Marine.
While my choice was made clear to me through the experience of my marriage, the birth of my three children, my acceptance of Jesus Christ as my savior, my time fighting as a US Marine in two wars, and my experience in business since leaving the Marine Corps, it came at personal cost.
My parents have since turned their back on me, my wife, their grandchildren, and their extended family. Adding to this, they decided to make the maximum contribution to my Democrat opponent in my campaign for U.S. Senate in Wisconsin, an intentional personal blow that made headlines across the country.
It was deliberate – and it is a true representation of the intolerance of a political philosophy that stands on the false platform of tolerance.
THE MEDIA CAN’T ADMIT TRUMP’S SUMMIT WITH PUTIN WAS A SUCCESS
President Donald Trump scored a diplomatic win on Monday (7/16) at his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Finland.
The media, the Democrats, and the Never Trump contingent declared immediately that Trump had failed. But they were bitterly prejudiced against the meeting from the start, to the point where many insisted that Trump cancel it.
To them, looking at the summit through the lens of “collusion,” the summit could only be the ultimate payoff for Putin’s election meddling in 2016.
But viewed through the lens of diplomacy, the summit was a milestone in U.S.-Russia relations.
Judging from their remarks at the press conference that followed, the two leaders touched on every major important area of foreign policy:
TRUMP’S FOREIGN POLICY IN ONE WORD: RECIPROCITY
Critics of Donald Trump claim there is no rhyme or reason to his foreign policy. But there is – it’s called reciprocity.
Trump tries to force other countries to treat the United States as it treats them. In “Don’t Tread On Me” style, he also warns enemies that any aggressive act will be replied to in kind.
The underlying principle of Trump commercial reciprocity is that the United States is no longer powerful or wealthy enough to alone underwrite the security of the West. It can no longer assume sole enforcement of the rules and protocols of the postwar global order.
This year there have been none of the usual Iranian provocations—frequent during the Obama Administration—of harassing American ships in the Persian Gulf. Apparently, the Iranians now realize that anything they do to an American ship will be replied to with overwhelming force. They can be taught.
GROWING RESISTANCE TO CHINA’S PERFIDY
The hard edges of China’s global soft power projection have been put under the microscope in a June 19 White House document entitled How China’s Economic Aggression Threatens the Technologies and Intellectual Property of the United States and the World.
The 35-page statement, attributed to White House economic adviser Peter Navarro, accuses the Chinese party-and-state apparatus of using spies, hackers, state-owned enterprises, front companies, as well as ethnic Chinese scholars and students resident in the US to “threaten the technologies and intellectual property of the United States and the world.”
Along with numerous reports in the Western media about PRC efforts to buy cultural and political influence in the US, the EU, and Australia, the White House document speaks to increasing awareness of the hard edges of Chinese soft power projection: namely, gathering intelligence and pilfering IPR (intellectual property rights) so as to speed up China’s transition to a full-fledged superpower.
Espionage, illegal IPR acquisition, and influence peddling have become part and parcel of China’s soft power push. The result has been an unprecedented pushback from Western nations.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT BLACK ABORTION?
As Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination tees up another national debate about “reproductive rights” is it too much to ask that abortion’s impact on the black population be part of the discussion?
When the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade in 1973, polling showed that blacks were less likely than whites to support abortion.
In the intervening decades, those views shifted. Leaders of black civil-rights organizations today are joined at the hip with abortion-rights proponents such as Planned Parenthood – resulting in the enormous outsize toll that abortion has taken on the black population post-Roe.
In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers. Nationally, black women terminate pregnancies at far higher rates than other women as well.
The little discussed flip side of “reproductive freedom” is that among blacks, abortion deaths far exceed those via cancer, violent crime, heart disease, AIDS and accidents.
A LIBERAL LAW PROFESSOR’S CASE FOR BRETT KAVANAUGH
The nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be the next Supreme Court justice is President Trump’s finest hour, his classiest move.
Last week the President promised to select “someone with impeccable credentials, great intellect, unbiased judgment, and deep reverence for the laws and Constitution of the United States.” In picking Judge Kavanaugh, he has done just that.
In 2016, I strongly supported Hillary Clinton for president as well as President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Judge Merrick Garland. But today, with the exception of the current justices and Judge Garland, it is hard to name anyone with judicial credentials as strong as those of Judge Kavanaugh.
He sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit (the most influential circuit court) and commands wide and deep respect among scholars, lawyers and jurists.
Judge Kavanaugh, who is 53, has already helped decide hundreds of cases concerning a broad range of difficult issues. Good appellate judges faithfully follow the Supreme Court; great ones influence and help steer it.
A CONSERVATIVE COURT DECADES IN MAKING FOR DECADES TO COME
“The judge’s job is to interpret the law, not to make the law or make policy. So read the words of the statute as written. Read the text of the Constitution as written, mindful of history and tradition. Don’t make up new constitutional rights that are not in the text of the Constitution. Don’t shy away from enforcing constitutional rights that are in the text of the Constitution.”President Trump’s selection of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court last night (7/09) culminates a three-decade project unparalleled in American history to install a reliable conservative majority on the nation’s highest tribunal, one that could shape the direction of the law for years to come.--Judge Brett Kavanaugh, June 2, 2016
All of the years of vetting and grooming and lobbying and list-making by conservative legal figures frustrated by Republican appointees who drifted to the left arguably has come down to this moment, when they stand on the precipice of appointing a fifth justice who, they hope, will at last establish a bench firmly committed to their principles.
“They’ve been pushing back for 30 years, and, obviously, the announcement tonight is a big step in the right direction,” said Curt Levey, the president of the Committee for Justice, a conservative activist group, who has been working toward this goal full time since 2005. “It’ll be the first time we can really say we have a conservative court, really the first time since the 1930s.”
SEX, LIES, AND THE DEEP STATE
At the heart of the effort to bring down President Trump were two affairs.
Unlike the bizarre lies about Moscow hotel rooms and prostitutes in the Steele dossier that was used by the Clinton campaign and its allies to smear President Trump and generate an investigation against him, these affairs truly took place.
And they didn’t just expose the malfeasance of four people, but of a corrupt political culture.
The affairs between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page in the FBI, and between Senate Intelligence Committee security director James Wolfe and New York Times reporter Ali Watkins, did more than betray the spouses of Strzok, Page and Wolfe.
For the Deep State, running a coup piggybacked on an affair and prostituting a reporter are virtues not sins.
The legitimate body of government tests for ethics. The parallel Deep State tests for corruption. The men and women who went after President Trump didn’t just cheat on each other, they cheated on America.
SUDDENLY, TRUMP SNOOKERS PUTIN IN SYRIA
When Russian President Vladimir Putin gave the green light to Russian aerial bombing of rebel-held positions in southwestern Syria two weeks ago, he knew he was asking for trouble.
And he appears to be getting plenty of it.
Since the Russia-led operation against Deraa began, Israeli commentators have assessed that Putin wished to wrap up the offensive ahead of his July 16 summit with President Donald Trump in Helsinki so that he could present Trump with a fait accompli.
A Russian triumph would convince Trump that U.S. operations in Syria are futile, and he would have accept Russia’s predominance, with Iran in the war-torn country.
Yet, just within the past few days Trump has turned the tables on Putin. Here’s what’s happening.
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY HAS A DEATH WISH
Last week I thought the Democrats were having a nervous breakdown. I was wrong. It's worse. They actually have a death wish or what Freud called a "death drive" (Todestrieb).
They literally want to extinguish themselves and/or their party, or many of them do. At least they're acting that way.
That was the first thing that crossed my mind watching the explosion of demonstrations by liberals and progressives to abolish ICE and US border control. It’s their greatest cause célèbre since, well, whatever was their greatest cause célèbre three days before.
The polls show the vast majority of Americans think they're cracked and want, as do citizens of almost all countries, secure borders and legal immigration.
So why are they doing this? Do they secretly want open borders? Are they actually wannabe socialist revolutionaries out to change American society at its core? Or is it……
BREAKING THE LEFT
[This Forum post by Joe Katzman responding to The Brittleness of the Left needs to be read by all TTPers. You are encouraged to share your thoughts]
The impulses of the Left you will always have with you. But that doesn’t mean we can’t raze the treasonous infrastructure and personalities that make up its modern variants, and makes them effective:
- Arrest and jail the leftists who have abused their position with rampant illegality. Time for Justice.
- RICO against the Antifa/ BLM/ Occupy types, their funders, and those that provided material aid.
- Break the pedophile and human trafficking networks that stretch from Hollywood and beyond, and publicly hang them around the Left’s neck.
THE JOY OF MAD MAXINE AND PELOSI GALORE
How delicious is it that the face of the Democrat Party is that lovely duo, Maxine Waters and Nancy Pelosi? They are the gift that keeps on giving.
So deluded as to why Trump won, they seem to think their particular brand of madness that includes the public shaming of anyone and everyone in the Trump administration is going to win back the House and Senate for their party.
It is by now undeniable that the Hate-Trump Left has gone stark-raving mad. Its members have lost all semblance of sanity, decorum, and class.
It can be lost on no one that the Democrats care not one bit for American citizens. Thousands of them have been murdered by criminal illegals, who are most often given a pass by the courts for numerous DUIs, drug crimes, and gun crimes for which Americans would be imprisoned.
The crimes of members of MS13 are not at all different from those of ISIS – vicious beyond imagination. And yet the Democrats defend them, seeks to embrace their arrival here. How is it possible for them to think this is a winning electoral strategy?
THE AGGRESSION OF MEXICO UPON THE UNITED STATES
This Sunday, July 1st, Mexico could elect one of its more anti-American figures in recent memory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Obrador has often advanced the idea that a strangely aggrieved Mexico has the right to monitor the status of its citizens living illegally in the United States.
Lately, he trumped that notion of entitlement by assuring fellow Mexicans that they have a “human right” to enter the United States as they please. For Obrador, this is an innate privilege that he promised “we will defend” — without offering any clarification on the meaning of “defend” other than to render meaningless the historic notion of borders and sovereignty.
Obrador went on to urge his fellow Mexicans to “leave their towns and find a life in the United States.” He has naturally developed such a mindset because he assumes as normal what has become, by any fair standard, a historically abnormal relationship.
Facts are stubborn, however, and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts.
THE FBI’S CRIMINAL CLINTON COVERUP
James “Coverup” Comey
[Note – this is Sidney’s follow up to her The FBI, DOJ, and Hillary Clinton’s Huge Weiner Problem last week (6/20)]
The Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Hillary Clinton have a huge problem that is even bigger than we first realized.
Massive evidence is accumulating that James Comey, with Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok and others at the Obama FBI and DOJ covered up the motherlode of Clinton criminal culpability. Here’s what we know so far.
WE ARE CLOSE TO SOMEONE IN THE TRUMP CIRCLE BEING MURDERED
Does someone from the Trump family, the Trump Cabinet, or even the Trump administration have to be assaulted or worse, killed, before we accept the fact that a growing number from the far-left have put a rhetorical bounty on their heads?
If has-been actor Peter Fonda suggesting Barron Trump be "ripped from his mother's arms and put in a cage with pedophiles" does not horrify you with the obscene brutality of its message, nothing ever will.
From this cauldron of bubbling and putrid hate filled from the twisted minds of enraged liberal politicians, "journalists," entertainers, and academics, spews forth the dangerously deranged like Fonda who have proven there is no line they will not cross to inflict "punishment" and harm upon anyone connected with President Trump.
Beyond the terrifyingly rhetorical, is the real.
THE FBI, THE DOJ, AND HILLARY CLINTON’S HUGE WEINER PROBLEM
Remember Anthony Weiner, also known as “Carlos Danger” — the former congressman who kept texting people pictures of well, umm, that part of his name? It all made quite the splash because he is married to Hillary Clinton’s consigliere and constant sidekick, Huma Abedin.
Turns out that Anthony was such a perp — and so enthralled with his own — that he was sexting with a minor. That is a federal offense carrying up to 10 years in prison. So, he got raided by the New York Police Department and the New York office of the FBI.
They seized his laptop computer. It would have been bad enough if it had only had contained all his porn. But it posed a huge problem for the FBI, DOJ and Mrs. Clinton.
Only a few hours after the New York office of the FBI took possession of the Weiner laptop, on September 26, 2016, the FBI computer expert discovered it contained more than 140,000 emails involving Hillary Clinton. They were from multiple domain names: State.gov, Clintonemail.com, ClintonFoundation.org, HillaryClinton.com and Blackberry devices.
Here’s what happened then.
THE UNITED STATES WITHDRAWS FROM THE UN HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
SECRETARY POMPEO: Good afternoon. The Trump administration is committed to protecting and promoting the God-given dignity and freedom of every human being. Every individual has rights that are inherent and inviolable. They are given by God, and not by government. Because of that, no government must take them away.
For decades, the United States has led global efforts to promote human rights, often through multilateral institutions. While we have seen improvements in certain human rights situations, for far too long we have waited while that progress comes too slowly or in some cases never comes. Too many commitments have gone unfulfilled.
President Trump wants to move the ball forward. From day one, he has called out institutions or countries who say one thing and do another. And that’s precisely the problem at the Human Rights Council.
TRUMP’S BIGGEST WHIFFS – WRAY, ROSENSTEIN, AND SESSIONS
As FBI Director Christopher Wray started giving his response to the blistering report on the Hillary Clinton investigation, I hoped he would accept the findings as proof that the agency lost its way and must be shaken to its foundation.
By the time he finished talking, I felt naive for daring to hope.
Wray’s performance was worse than disappointing. It was infuriating proof that it will take more than one election to change the corrupt culture of Washington.
By circling the wagons, Wray shows he is unprepared to carry out big changes. That makes it three strikes at Justice, as Wray joins Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein as Trump’s biggest whiffs.
They are worse than weak links. They simply don’t see themselves as being part of the same administration.
CHRIS WRAY IS THE PROBLEM WITH THE FBI – NOT THE SOLUTION
What was going on in Donald Trump's head when he tweeted Friday (6/15) in response to the inspector general's devastating report on the FBI that "Christopher Wray will bring it proudly back!"?
Perhaps the president thought he had better things to do than face another interminable nomination battle for a new director. Or perhaps he was trying to co-opt Wray. But if the FBI is meant to come back, proudly or otherwise, Christopher Wray is not the man. He is part of the problem.
In fact, Wray's continuance as director signals the government is not serious about significantly reforming the FBI and that what changes will be made will be essentially cosmetic, lipstick on the proverbial pig. (The inspector general's report can be read that way as well.)
This is not just because Wray worked under James Comey in his first important job as assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division (2003-2005). That would be guilt by association, although in this instance it's some association. What's more important is what Wray himself has done recently or, more specifically, has not.
CELEBRITY TRUMP HATRED IS BECOMING TREASONOUSLY DERANGED
That’s because I’m treasonously deranged
Robert De Niro marched onto last Sunday night’s Tony Awards show stage like a man possessed, exuding raw fury and menace from every pore.
If you could morph his most violent, unhinged on-screen characters into one smoldering carcass of molten human hatred and ferocity, then this was that hybrid beast.
And he was intent on unleashing a verbal weapon of mass destruction at the man he despises more than life itself: Donald J. Trump.
The 74-year-old tuxedo-clad thespian stood at the microphone for several long, lingering, intense seconds, driving the Broadway audience to whoops of expectant excitement.
‘I’m gonna say one thing,’ he snarled.