op ed review 8/20
Bad week, The Russia story is fizzling, so media moves on to
“Trump the racist”. Conrad Black has a good summary of what happened: “This terrible incident started as a
reasonable civic demonstration by Southern traditionalists who were not hostile
to African-Americans but object to the shamed renunciation of a great American
heroic and folkloric figure from “Gone With the Wind,” to The Band’s “The Night
They Drove Old Dixie Down,” to “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Robert E. Lee was not a
precursor of Bull Connor, Strom Thurmond, James Earl Ray, or the unreformed
George C. Wallace.
These original local groups did not wish or seek the attention of the Ku Klux
Klan, or the American Nazis or the violent hooligans who appeared in strength
flaunting vivid racist symbolism, who were the most remarkable feature in
Saturday’s tragic events. As the day approached, it became clear that the other
side of the issue….was being reinforced by more militant leftist
organizations…Antifa and Black Lives Matter (whose name suggests that any sane
person had ever said otherwise). As the
day unfolded, it was clear that orders had been given to the local police to ensure
that a serious fracas occurred. The police did nothing to disperse the armed
groups on each side, on several occasions herded them toward each other to
encourage combat, and then withdrew at times to facilitate the violence. It must
be assumed that orders for insufficient law enforcement..ultimately (came) from
the governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe…..a former Democratic Party chairman.
The debacle ensued;
the peaceful majorities on both sides were shouldered aside by the violent
thugs on the extremes….President Trump’s comments on Saturday, Sunday, and
Monday were accurate and appropriate, and as usual the national media either
eagerly grasped the flame-thrower handed them by the professed Nazi
demonstrators and accused the president of mollycoddling David Duke and the
Klan, or they were gulled by the anti-Trump spin of the media and Virginia
officials into condemning the president for ambivalence between Klansmen and
Nazis on one side, and decent advocates of racial equality on the other, as if
any such clear confrontation of wrong with right had occurred……”
“Media working overtime to prove Trump is a racist..”
Was it a setup? “Evidence is turning up that this character,
Jason Kessler, who organized the suspicious and supposed Alt-Right
demonstration in Charlottesville, Va. that blew up in everyone's face, is a
cunning lefty holdover from the Occupy Wall Street movement and a former Barack
Obama supporter. I smell Soros money,
sabotage, and Democrat dirty tricks.”
“…the discovery of a craigslist ad posted last Monday,
almost a full week before the Charlottesville protests, is raising new
questions over whether paid protesters were sourced by a Los Angeles based
"public relations firm specializing in innovative events" to serve as
agitators in counterprotests.”
David Horowitz: What
“Unite the Right” actually demonstrated was that the assortment of neo-Nazis,
pro-Confederates and assorted yahoos gathered under the banner of the
“Alt-Right” is actually a negligible group…(attracting) only a few hundred
people. Compare that to the tens of thousands who can readily be marshalled by
two violent groups of the left – Black Lives Matter and Antifa – and you get an
idea of how marginal “white supremacists” are to America’s political and
cultural life. Yet “white supremacy” and its evils became the centerpiece of
all the fake news reporting on the event, including all the ludicrous attacks
on the president for not condemning enough a bogeyman the whole nation
condemns, and that no one but a risible fringe supports…..Omitted from the
media coverage were the other forces at work in precipitating the battle of
Emancipation Park, specifically Black Lives Matter and Antifa, two violent leftwing
groups with racial agendas who came to squelch the demonstration in defense of
the monument.
Trump’s Error: Failing to Follow the Left’s Talking Points
John Lott: “Has the
media ever so deliberately and consistently misinterpreted what a president
said?”
To the media, it’s black and white: Antifa are the moral
equivalent of WWII soldiers fighting the Nazis.
Now three prominent Republicans — Senator McCain, Senator Rubio,
and Mitt Romney — have endorsed the left-wing media’s preferred narrative that
only two factions were present in Charlottesville during the awful events of
last weekend: white supremacist Nazis and “Americans standing up to defy hate
and bigotry.”
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/08/16/mccain-romney-rubio-join-republicans-antifa-club/
Political commentator and former Congressional Black Caucus
director Angela Rye demanded that all memorials and likenesses of George
Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Robert E. Lee be taken down.
Where does this end?
Al Sharpton calls for removal of Jefferson Memorial.
Some lefties call for the destruction of Mt. Rushmore.
But
a majority of Americans in a new poll believe that statues honoring leaders of
the Confederacy should remain as a historical symbol. Of the 1,125 adults
surveyed, 62% believe they should remain. Even a majority of African-Americans
oppose their removal.
Here’s a truly repugnant statue: a growing number of people on social media
are calling for the removal of Communist dictator Vladimir Lenin’s statue in
Seattle.
Predictably, no one has demanded that statues of former Democratic
senator and KKK icon Robert Byrd be removed…..
Meanwhile, Trump rolls back the Obama land grab: Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is wrapping up
his review of nearly two dozen national monuments targeted for downsizing or
elimination by the Trump administration.
The Interior Department won’t be removing monuments to
Confederate soldiers at national battlefields that are “an important part of
our country’s history,” according to a spokesman. “The National Park Service is
committed to safeguarding these memorials while simultaneously educating
visitors holistically and objectively about the actions, motivations and causes
of the soldiers and states they commemorate,”
Food stamp enrollment went down over the past year in 46 out
of 50 states
Trump
Immigration Crackdown Leads to Higher Construction Wages
Miami-Dade complies with Trump to change its ‘sanctuary’
status.
President Trump announced in his weekly radio address Friday
that migrants who enter the United States cannot receive welfare in the first
five years after their arrival.
U.S. Has 3.5 Million More Registered Voters Than Live Adults
— A Red Flag For Electoral Fraud
Officials in College Park want to make their city the
largest in Maryland to give undocumented immigrants a right to vote in local
elections
Illegals living in Los Angeles County were handed almost
$1.3 billion in welfare payouts between the months of 2015 and 2016.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told Rep. Dana Rohrabacher
that he is ready to provide information proving Russia did not hack the
Democratic National Committee.
Former NSA Technical Director Bill Binney outlines how the
2016 DNC emails were actually taken by a leaker using a portable storage
device, and not taken by a computer hack initiated by the vast Russian
enterprise.
Oregon has passed the nation’s most “progressive” abortion
bill, requiring state insurers to provide free abortions for all, including
illegal immigrants.
Deep State Rewards James Comey With Millions Of Dollars In Post-FBI
Compensation
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
President
Trump's statements regarding the tragic events in Charlottesville have created
a firestorm that, even by the unique Trump-era standards, appears
unprecedented. Unless Trump can undo the damage, it could cripple his
administration.
In
his presidential memoir, "Decision Points," President George W. Bush
wrote about the fallout from 2015's Hurricane Katrina and his own mishandling
of the situation. In particular, he admitted that a photo taken of him flying
over New Orleans was a huge mistake. "That photo of me hovering over the
damage suggested I was detached from the suffering on the ground. That was not
how I felt. But once that impression was formed, I couldn't change it."
To
be clear, Bush was unfairly maligned for what happened in New Orleans, where
state and local officials had completely botched their jobs. But Bush made
himself a target by having to be dragged from vacation, by FEMA's inept
response to the disaster, by bad PR decisions, and by dumb statements like
"heckuva job, Brownie." His approval numbers, already driven down
into the 40s by the Iraq War, plunged after Katrina into the 30% range and
never once reached pre-Katrina levels. Democrats
took Congress a year later, and Bush's ability to enact his second-term agenda
ended.
Trump,
too, has been unfairly maligned. But like Bush, he's made the situation much
worse. His initial statement blaming "both sides" after a white
supremacist drove a car into a crowd of counter-protestors, killing one and
injuring many others, received widespread opprobrium. By Monday, Trump had
apparently recognized his mistake, and issued an unequivocal statement:
"Racism is evil — and those who cause violence in its name are criminals
and thugs, including KKK, neo-Nazis, white supremacists and other hate groups
are repugnant to everything we hold dear as Americans." But then came
Tuesday's news conference.
Trump
started by saying that his first statement, issued on the day of the massacre,
wasn't as definitive because he didn't feel he knew all the facts. "I
didn't want to go quickly and just make a statement for the sake of making a
political statement," he said. That's perfectly reasonable.
But
the news conference degenerated from there. Eventually, after repeated
questions from the press, Trump was left sputtering about how there were
"some very fine people on both sides" and complaining that the left
will soon want to take down statues of George Washington because he was a slave
owner. The reaction to Trump's Saturday statement was tepid compared with the
fury that came next — from all sides.
John
Podhoretz, writing in the New York Post, called Trump's comments
"horrifying." Charles Krauthammer called it "a moral
disgrace." Pennsylvania Republican Charlie Dent said Trump "must stop
the moral equivalency! AGAIN, white supremacists were to blame for the violence
in #Charlottesville." Steve Scalise — the Republican congressman who
was very nearly killed by a left-wing, Bernie Sanders-supporting terrorist
berated Trump — tweeted: "I don't understand what's so hard about this.
White supremacists and neo-Nazis are evil and shouldn't be defended." Trump
disbanded his CEO Strategy Council after several CEOs defected because of his
comments.
Admittedly,
many of his Republican critics never liked Trump much. But even stalwart Trump
supporter Laura Ingraham conceded that Trump wasn't acting presidential, but
instead got "caught in the pundit trap like he became a pundit." Former
Klan leader David Duke, however, thanked Trump "for your honesty &
courage to tell the truth."
Like
Bush before Katrina, Trump's poll numbers are already low. If they go any
lower, his approval could end up in the 20% range. And the risk now is that
everything Trump does will be viewed by the press and his critics through a
"white nationalist" lens, with critics trying to cast every
conservative policy as racist, while Republicans run and hide.
Can
Trump recover? Sure. There's a long way to go before he's up for re-election.
Plus, unlike during Bush's second term, the country isn't bogged down in an
unpopular war and the economy appears to be strengthening. But will he? Will
Trump have the discipline and determination to do what's needed? Will he find a
convincing way to call for calm, tone down the volume, and bring the nation
together? Will he start to focus on enacting his much-needed pro-growth
economic agenda?
We
certainly want him to succeed. Aside from the theatrics, the Trump
administration has been pushing solid, free market, conservative reforms that
promise to return the country to strength, growth and prosperity. But given
Trump's tendency toward erratic and self-defeating behavior, his recovery from
this episode isn't guaranteed.
One
can only hope that someone close to Trump will be able to convince him of the
danger he's in and the stakes should he fail to confront it.
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“The statement — “fine people on both sides” — was
problematic in that it was easy to take out of context. But what Trump meant
is where he ended up — that decent people come down on both sides of the statue
debate. It was not decent people dominating either protest. His muddling of the
point doesn’t invalidate it. In any case, watching the press conference or
reading all of Trump’s remarks leaves one with a very different
perspective than reading the Leftmedia’s cherry-picked quotes. And that’s their
intent.”
-PatriotPost
“The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) issued a
statement demanding that ‘every street, every school, every flag, and every
public memorial honoring those who took up arms in defense of white supremacy
and slavery’ be removed or have its name changed. That’s an interesting
position for CAIR to take since it would require that every mosque in America
be shut down. Mosques are dedicated to the teachings of Muhammad and Muhammad
owned
slaves.”
-Gary
Bauer
“I don’t oppose changing college dormitory names and
removing statues that honor Confederate generals or soldiers. When decisions
are reached after respectful discussions and peaceful consensus, such change is
the lifeblood of democracy. But the coercive demand for purity, enforced by
violence, often feels staged for political effect aimed at Trump. The surge of
sensitivity seems especially odd given that the issue was not as prominent
during the tenure of Barack Obama, America’s only black president.”
-Michael Goodwin
“The use of hate to blame others, the refusal to take
personal responsibility for one’s life, is going on and has been going on in
our nation ‘for a long time’ on ‘many sides.’ Being honest about this does not
justify the vile white supremacist violence and murder in Charlottesville. But
to claim that these distorted individuals are the exclusive locus of bigotry in
America does not help our cause.”
-Star
Parker
___________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
An
Obama-tied activist group training tens of thousands of agitators to protest
President Trump’s policies plans to hit Republican lawmakers supporting those
policies even harder this week, when they return home for the congressional
recess and hold town hall meetings and other functions. Organizing for Action,
a group founded by former President Obama and featured prominently on his new
post-presidency website, is distributing a training manual to anti-Trump
activists that advises them to bully GOP lawmakers into backing off support for
repealing ObamaCare, curbing immigration from high-risk Islamic nations and
building a border wall.
Even to casual observers, it has been obvious for months
that the left is orchestrating a tightly-coordinated campaign to undermine and
delegitimize the current presidential administration. We now know how the left
is running this non-stop smear campaign and who is pulling the puppet strings.
We now have the Media Matters Playbook.
One thing overlooked in the uproar over Charlottesville is
that this was, evidently, merely a dress rehearsal for a much larger-scale
effort planned for this Autumn. Activist groups on the left evidently have
something big in store for November 4th. The idea seems to be a revival of the
1971 “Days of Rage” – an effort to shut down the country as a whole to force a
change in government.
A
system of sorts has been perfected to destroy the most effective conservative
spokesmen on the Fox News Channel, and it operated with stunning efficiency
over the last few days.
Things are looking up for the Democratic Socialists of
America. With a membership of 25,000, it is now the largest socialist group in
America since the Second World War. And last weekend in Chicago, it held its
largest convention, by a considerable margin, in its history.
Portland: Far-left masked Antifa members showed up at
the Patriot Prayer ‘Freedom March’ to disrupt and attack Trump supporters.
Antifa must be designated a terrorist organization. Masks should also be banned
for public protesters.
London council planners have told developers that a new
housing development must include a gay bar - and they will send inspectors to
check that it´s gay enough.
_____________________________________________________________
ISLAM
Two Islamist inspired terror attacks in Spain, thirteen
dead, more than 100 wounded.
Three knife-wielding attackers 'shouting Allahu Akbar' stab
at least nine people in Finland leaving 'one dead'.
The al Qaeda´s terror group´s chief bomb maker has published
a blueprint for new attacks on U.S. transportation systems, including planes,
trains, and boats, which the terror group views as "prime targets,"
according to a copy of a lengthy manifesto that provides a guide for would-be
terrorists to launch attacks.
Denmark´s "hug a jihadi" program: authorities are
trying to change the minds of potential Islamic extremists by supporting them
and offering them kindness rather than treating them as outcasts and criminals.
The method is referred to by some as the “hug a terrorist” or "hug a
jihadi" model of de-radicalization. "I want you to imagine Rob
O´Neill, the guy who shot bin Laden, kicking open the door in his compound, and
he´s armed with warm cookies and a ´Let´s Cuddle´.
___________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Ben Stein: “Yes, of
course I hate anyone who even hints at sympathy for the Nazis. The monstrous
evil of those demons is unmatched. But they have the right to speak when not
inciting violence and when not committing violence. Otherwise, the Constitution
is trash. For Trump to point out that while the KKK and the Nazis are
nauseating, they have free speech rights, is not only correct, but actually brave
of him.:
Ann Coulter: “When
Liberals Club People, It’s With Love In Their Hearts” “Liberals have Republicans over a barrel
because they used the word “racist.” The word is kryptonite, capable of turning
the entire GOP and 99 percent of the “conservative media” into a panicky mass
of cowardice.”
This week, the CBS News program “On Assignment” included a
long feature on what it described as the near eradication of Down syndrome in Iceland.
Medical miracle? No, viewers learned that this was accomplished with genetic
screening and abortion on a countrywide scale.
The attempt to find systemic police bias has come to this:
the difference between an officer saying “uh” and saying “that, that’s.”
According to Stanford University researchers, police officers in Oakland,
California, use one of those verbal tics more often with white drivers and the
other more often with black drivers. If you can guess which tic conveys
“respect” and which “disrespect,” you may have a career ahead of you in the
exploding field of bias psychology.
Stossel: “Why aren´t
there more women criminals?! Men in jail outnumber women by a ratio of 14-to-1.
This isn´t fair! We need more affirmative action! These disparities must be
caused by sex discrimination because everyone knows there are no real
differences between genders.”
Obamacare
Lives But Your Hospital Is Dying
_____________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“It must be always be remembered; there is nothing more
difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than
a new system. For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the
preservation of the old institution and merely lukewarm defenders in those who
gain by the new ones. ”
-Machiavelli
posted by gary at
9:39 AM
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