Category: Politics

Michelle Malkin:

Two adult men, occupying lofty perches as law professors, argued this week that the voting age in the U.S. should be lowered to 16 because some high school survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting who want gun control "are proving how important it is to include young people's voices in political debate."

Read it all. 

There is really nothing so idiotic that it won't be embraced by some destructive leftist. And you are still a member of the Democrat Party?

If breathing is a sufficient condition for voting, then cats and dogs should have the vote. So I should have three votes, my own and two cat proxies. The cat lady down the street, who is reputed to have nine cats, should be allowed ten votes. After all, cats and dogs and children and illegal aliens and felons have an interest in clean air and clean water and other things affected by political arrangements. So why shouldn't they have a vote?  

If I have to explain to you why, then you are too obtuse, morally or intellectually or both, to profit from any explanation. Do you remember that race-hustler Jesse Jackson? He wanted felons to have the vote. He wanted people who lack the sense to order their own lives to have a say in how a society, or rather our lives, should be ordered. But of course the destructive leftist is not interested in right ordering, but in any ordering that grants him and his ilk maximum power. So it is no surprise that leftists never miss an opportunity to assault our Constitutional rights.

Vile, mendacious, and stupid. In that order.

Victor Davis Hanson:

The Trump catharsis has shown that about 10 percent of the Republican Party, the NeverTrumpers, was largely apolitical. That is, former cornerstone positions of deregulation and tax reform, oil and gas production, charter schools, deterrent foreign policy, restoring friendship with Israel and moving the embassy to Jerusalem were apparently always secondary to the more important criterion of offering a mild, sober and judicious frown to progressivism, through discerning losers like George H.W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney.

Such a Republican elite was so embedded within American establishment institutions as to be both immune from the economic stagnation of an Obama neo-socialist revolution (remember income inequality soared under Obama) and in no real need of a Reagan revolution or Trump’s often messy radical push-back against progressivism.

Its creed was not really, as advertised, the ethics of “losing nobly is better than winning ugly,” but rather the snobbery of “losing a cultural image is worse than winning a political agenda.” Put more bluntly, it is better to put up with a socialist with a “perfectly creased pant” than a prairie-fire conservative in rumpled Walmart slacks.

The acendancy of Trump has been wonderfully clarifying. He has forced the Democrats to show just how far Left they have moved, and he has exposed the Republican bow-tie brigade as do-nothings whose main concern has always been the preservation of their status and perquisites.

The hyperventilation of one Will Stancil at The Atlantic brought a wry smile to my face:

There are plenty of ways to explain this creeping acquiescence. Institutions abhor abnormality; even in politics, parties would often rather fight along familiar lines. The passage of time makes Trump’s America seem less strange. Politicos are wary of challenging a president presiding over a thriving economy. And on some level, Trump benefits from the basic dynamic that sustains any cult: His version of reality is so absurd that the only way to peacefully coexist with it is to accept his behavior as normal.

So Trump is a cult leader with an absurd version of reality?

What might these  absurdities be?

That it is a legitimate function of the federal government to enforce the nation's borders?  That there is a distinction between legal and illegal immigration? That every nation has a right to look to its own interests first? That an immigration policy must be to the benefit of the host country? That there is no right to immigrate? That, to put it mildly, it is a very bad idea to allow the immigration of those who do not accept our values but are pledged to the overthrow of our institutions and the values they embody?

Unsure what FISA-Gate is all about? Victor Davis Hanson explains it clearly and how it differs from Watergate. His piece concludes:

Barack Obama was a progressive constitutional lawyer who expressed distrust of the secretive "Deep State." Yet his administration weaponized the IRS and surveilled Associated Press communications and a Fox News journalist for reporting unfavorable news based on supposed leaks.

Obama did not fit the past stereotypes of right-wing authoritarians subverting the Department of Justice and its agencies. Perhaps that is why there was little pushback against his administration's efforts to assist the campaign of his likely replacement, fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Progressives are not supposed to destroy requested emails, "acid wash" hard drives, spread unverified and paid-for opposition research among government agencies, or use the DOJ and FBI to obtain warrants to snoop on the communications of American citizens.

FISA-gate may become a more worrisome scandal than either Watergate or Iran-Contra. Why? Because our defense against government wrongdoing — the press — is defending such actions, not uncovering them. Liberal and progressive voices are excusing, not airing, the excesses of the DOJ and FBI.

Apparently, weaponizing government agencies to stop a detested Donald Trump by any means necessary is not really considered a crime.

Hold onto your (pussy)hats boys and girls, things are going to get nasty. 

Related articles

MARK LEVIN: Obama Likely Knew Hillary Clinton PAID FOR FISA Warrant To Surveil Trump Campaign – RedWireNews.com

Andrew Klavan:

It now seems very likely the FBI and Department of Justice deceived a FISA court with an uncorroborated piece of Democrat-funded oppo research in order to obtain a warrant to spy on American citizen Carter Page. If, as seems reasonable to conjecture, the broader target turns out to have been the Donald Trump presidential campaign for which Page had recently worked, the needle on the scandal meter will begin to edge up into the red zone.

Let’s put it this way: if this sort of thing had gone on under President Trump or even George W. Bush, the Times would have announced the news in front-page headlines so large it would have taken two strong men just to carry the letters to the press room. An enormous collection of Times reportage on the subject—with a black cover and some title like “The Path to Tyranny”—would have been on the bookstore shelves within the month.

Klavan on Experience

Ben Stein:

Thank God that Trump won. Otherwise, this deeply disturbing behavior of the DNC/MSM/Deep State/Russia cabal would go utterly unnoticed and we would continue to snooze as the left emasculated the Constitution.

Three cheers for Devin Nunes. And a special prosecutor now, if you please, to go after the people behind the phony dossier and Mr. Steele and the FISA warrant. These are real crimes. Real subversion of the justice system. What Nixon did was a high school boy’s snatching hubcaps by comparison. Will the media ever be held accountable?

Of course not. Not one person has ever been charged or prosecuted for the tens of millions of deaths under Stalin. The left takes care of its own. The right has a conscience. Big difference. But maybe we have a fighter this time.

Meanwhile, back to the stunning anger, rage, and sullenness of the leftists and the Black Caucus at Mr. Trump’s first State of the Union. Did you notice their jeering silence at praise of family, the military, the police, the churches? As Tucker says, this isn’t just chance. The left in America really hates authority, does not respect their families, despises knowledge, loathes their police. This isn’t an act. This is how they feel.

This is the DNC/MSM People’s Cultural Revolution à la Mao Tse-tung 1965-72. This is an attempt at demolishing the roots of order and decency and replacing them with racial zeal. This is what the Dems have become.

What President Trump has done is to force the American Left to show its true colors. Thus far, Obama, Hillary, and their ilk have been quite successful at camouflaging their true goals, except perhaps for Obama's letting of the cat out of the bag with his "fundamental transformation of America" remark.  Mr. Trump has wittingly or unwittingly enraged them to the extent that they, wittingly or unwittingly, cannot hide their real views and attitudes any longer.

So now, thanks to Trump, you know if you didn't already what the Democrat Party really stands for.  And so, for those of you who are still Democrats, I put the question: 

Why are you still a Democrat?

Our old friend Malcolm Pollack gets to the heart of the matter:

It became very clear indeed that the actual state of the Union doesn’t really interest them [the Democrats] much at all; the only thing that matters to them is the state of their power over it — which is at a providentially low ebb for at least the next several months. All of this was never supposed to happen, and the Left is very, very angry about it.

What’s that you say? The Democrats are simply upset over the fate of the poor “Dreamers”? This is now shown to be obviously, transparently false. In these last days, Mr. Trump has offered legal status to approximately two million of them. This is far more generous than anything Barack Obama ever put on the table, and is an offer, I’m sure, that any “Dreamer” would accept without a moment’s hesitation. It would grant them their fondest hope — and if the Democrats truly cared about them, as they so ostentatiously pretend to do, they would leap at the proposal themselves (which, I should point out, is as unpopular with many to Mr. Trump’s right as it is on the far Left).

So why don’t they? Why, instead, do they spit on it, and denounce it in the vilest terms? The answer is obvious: because it does not immediately give these illegal aliens the vote, and because the offer is contingent upon reducing indiscriminate immigration — legal and illegal — in the future. Let me put that another way: the Democrats will not take this offer, despite it giving so-called “Dreamers” what they most desire, because it is designed not to assure the Democrats of a continuing flood of new Democrat voters. That is all there is to it.

VDH: Stretching or breaking the law on her behalf would have been rewarded by a President Clinton.

An appropriately celebratory account of Trump's triumph in Davos. (HT: Bill Keezer)

What does 'America First' mean? It is explained in this penetrating post.

The following ought to convince you if you don't wear a pussyhat or suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Daniel McCarthy:

He won states in 2016 that had been out of reach for Republican presidential candidates for 25 years or more: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin. For all that the people who now criticize Trump had talked about broadening the Republican Party’s appeal, it was Trump who actually broadened the party in the way that counts—by winning elections rather than by scoring meaningless diversity points with the priesthood of multiculturalism.

As President, Trump has delivered relief to some 80 percent of taxpayers. The tax law just passed has also taken the teeth out of Obamacare, removing the feature most philosophically objectionable to conservatives—the individual mandate, which forced citizens to buy a private product (or at least a product whose profits lined politically connected private pockets) as a condition of living. If Obamacare truly is the great service that Democrats insist it is, now the public can freely choose to purchase it.

The economy has been performing well under President Trump, and there is no reason to be stingy about crediting him for what he has not done. After all, if free-market economics is correct, the best course a government can take is usually to leave well enough alone. Trump has done that and something more: He has sent businesses a powerful signal. Job-creation and entrepreneurship were choked during the Obama years by what Robert Higgs has called “regime uncertainty,” the fear that at any moment unexpected new regulations could make new ventures hazardous. That fear has been dispelled under Trump, who has made a start at dismantling old regulations and—even more importantly—is trusted not to impose capricious new ones.

The character of an administration—as distinct from the personal character of the President—is of the utmost consequence not only in domestic policy but also for foreign policy. Under Trump, ISIS has been smashed militarily. But the spirit that animates ISIS has also received blow after blow. Instead of Americans being cowed and timid, more worried about giving offense than asserting the justice of our civilization, there is a new vigor in the country’s words and deeds.

In the same way that the socialists and liberals who thought communism half-correct were not the men and women to bring the Cold War to a peaceful end, liberals and give-no-offense Republicans are not the ones who will annihilate the morale of Islamist radicalism. President Trump can be crude in how he expresses the will to win the war of confidence. But for too long we have had leaders who refused to speak in the language of America First and Western Civilization First, even as they invaded Iraq and brought regime change to Libya—violent actions that were spectacularly counterproductive. To see liberals now claim that President Trump’s intemperate tweets might make us more enemies—as if our bombs and nation-building escapades had not been doing that for 15 years—is telling.

Trump may go too far; others refused to go far enough. Not violent language but clarion language, in place of violent but strategically impotent actions, is what we need. That was what Ronald Reagan gave us at the end of the Cold War, in place of the futile hot wars and weak language of the administrations that preceded him. He won on the battlefield of morale. President Trump’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is a masterstroke in this regard. It merely acknowledges an on-the-ground reality, but its symbolic importance is vast. It shows Islamists and their sympathizers that their cause is losing ground, and it puts pressure on regimes such as Saudi Arabia to choose between clinging to Islamist ideology or accepting differences with the United States in a diplomatic fashion.

And these are only some of Trump's accomplishments in just one year in office. The entire article is excellent. Read it!

A little ditty from The Who to stiffen the spines of Republicans and inspire them in their stand against the filthy, mendacious Dems. Politics is war, and if you don't have it in you to fight, then get off the battlefield.  Too long have you believed that politics is gentlemanly conversation, even while absorbing blow after blow from the Alinskyite Dems.  But a leader has emerged to teach you otherwise by his example. Now learn the lesson.

Hang Tough, Republicans!

Lyrics below the fold. 

Continue reading “Don’t Get Fooled Again”