op ed review 8/19
THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Capping a major victory, President Trump signed a $716
billion defense bill Monday that authorizes hundreds of new planes, ships and
tanks, increases troop strength and raises military pay, modernizes the U.S.
nuclear arsenal and tightens control of government contracts with Chinese
technology companies.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/aug/13/donald-trump-signs-new-defense-policy-bill-rebuild/
Youth unemployment hits 52 year low.
New Rasmussen poll: Trump Approval Ratings with Black Voters
Soars to New All-Time High at 36%
According to new approval numbers compiled by...CNN,
President Trump is better off than President Ronald Reagan was at this point in
his presidency.
“As the Senate moves toward confirming Supreme Court nominee
Brett M. Kavanaugh, President Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
are leading a lower-key yet deeply consequential charge to remake the entire
federal judiciary.”
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo may have just handed Republicans
a ready-made campaign ad for his rumored 2020 presidential bid – by declaring
Wednesday that America “was never that great.”
Top police officials in Massachusetts have accused
Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of insulting rank-and-file officers when she
said the criminal justice system was "racist ... from front to back"
earlier this month.
Hillary Clinton praises 11 year old student who refused to
stand for the Pledge of Allegiance: saying 'Keep up the good work'
Dim bulb: Chelsea Clinton claims Roe v. Wade was a huge
economic boost, helping to add $3.5 trillion to U.S. economy.
A Muslim immigrant from Jordan who was enraged when his daughter
converted to Christianity was sentenced to death by a Texas jury after being
convicted in 'honor killings' of his son-in-law and his daughter's friend.
Sweden
is Burning: Will Swedes finally wake up
and deal with their immigration problem?
More than half of the annual inflow of foreign refugees
arriving in the United States are on food stamps, a government report reveals.
Federal and state Govts. spent $2.5 billion to jail criminal
migrants in 2016, most here illegally.
Trump’s Welfare Ban for Immigrants Would Be $57.4B Tax Cut
for Americans.
Out of a nation of 300 million, about 20 people attended the
white supremacist rally in Washington DC that got nonstop media coverage last
weekend. “(The Left’s) foundational narrative requires racism to be rampant and
ubiquitous, making necessary a powerful state driven by social justice warriors
who will prevent the evil racists from taking over. That’s why they were so
excited about the events they expected in Charlottesville (and DC), and why
they weren’t about to let this event’s complete non-occurence affect their
coverage.”
Despite the fact that the counter protesters chanted “f**k
the police,” shot fireworks at law enforcement, and attacked a woman in a Trump
shirt, CNN called them an “anti-hate group.”
“The mainstream media completely failed to
report on Antifa members in DC yesterday, some of whom went on to assault
police officers, carrying a banner which openly advertised their intention to
put bullets in their political enemies.”
Mainstream media reports weepy story about an illegal alien
who was caught by police while taking his pregnant wife to the hospital. They
left out the part that he is a murderer.
It was another bloody weekend in the city of Chicago
recently with 12 dead and 80 others non-fatally shot. Sixteen of the shooting
victims were children. No arrests were made due to a lack of community help. It seemed to be a yawner for most liberal
media outlets like run of the mill street violence events have become.
No surprise: Gallup
poll shows Democrats View Socialism More Positively than Capitalism
The June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between high-ranking
members of the Republican presidential campaign staff and a Russian lawyer with
Kremlin ties remains the cornerstone of claims that Donald Trump colluded with
Russia to steal the election. A growing body of evidence, however, indicates
that the meeting may have been a setup -- part of a broad effort to tarnish the
Trump campaign involving Hillary Clinton operatives employed by Kremlin-linked figures
and Department of Justice officials.
What a great idea: Hungary's
populist government abolishes gender studies courses
WSDOT leader says he won't reduce traffic congestion because
it’s “too expensive or futile.”
Interior Secretary and former Montana congressman Ryan Zinke
blasted “environmental terrorist groups” over their mindless lockstep
opposition to proper forest management including logging as being a major
contributing factor to several massive fires burning up the West.
Strzok fired. A former assistant FBI director says this was entirely
justified – he, Comey and McCabe disgraced the FBI.
Peter Strzok was barely out on the pavement in front of FBI
headquarters before he started a ‘GoFundMe’ campaign. At first he was asking
for $150,000. When the money started pouring in, he raised his goal to
$350,000. As I write, his goal is $500,000 and he has managed to attract
$417,000 from 10,000 credulous souls. Everyman’s guide to success and riches in
the FBI. 1. Join the bureau. 2. Do bad stuff and get fired. 3. Hit the jackpot.
CNN Demands Manafort Jurors Names And Addresses Be Released
So They Can Be Stalked And Harassed
After “deliberate censorship of conservative ideas,” Facebook
reversed itself and issued an apology to PragerU for “mistakenly” removing
several videos and limiting the reach of others.
____________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Michael Walsh
The #NeverTrumpumpkins define themselves by their visceral
distaste for the president. He offends their fastidious sensibilities, outrages
them with his unfiltered Twitter musings, and violates their sense of propriety
with his secular hedonism and sheer joy in his own vulgarity. That he’s also
delivering the most conservative administration in history is, to them, beside
the point—because Trump neither represents nor embodies “movement”
conservatism. And therein, for them, lies the problem.
Movements are, almost by definition, attractive to the young
and the emotionally immature. Followers love to follow; even more, they love to
memorize catechisms and rote talking points, which they parrot on the air and
in column inches, as if by simply asserting their “principles” they are proving
them as well.
Eventually, though, both content and context are lost and
only the talking points remain. The argument from authority becomes as circular
and self-referential as any obscure religious contretemps, and of interest only
to the anointed. Which is why they fall upon each other with the glee of
zealots who have been given orders to purge the heretics by any means
necessary.
I have coined a term for this state of affairs:
“preenciples.” You know what they are: smaller government, less regulation,
free trade, federalism, etc. It’s a creed, constantly professed, acolytes of
(fill in the blank: Mises, Hayek, Strauss, Buckley) reassuring each other that
by consulting the sacred texts they will always have the correct views on the
issues, and thus ensure their place among the elect.
Political creeds, however, are generally the provinces of
the Left, which believes in history’s “arc” and “iron laws”—“scientific”
dialectical materialism, socialism, communism, and the rest of the intellectual
charlatanism (including psychiatry and sociology) that has followed in the wake
of Rousseau, Marx, Lenin, and Mao. “Little Red Books” and Five-Year Plans are
the staples of this form of political worship….
To my ears……the constant harping in some quarters on
“movement” conservatism is reminiscent of everything I’ve ever heard from the
Left, or experienced in East Germany and the old Soviet Union. I’m not
suggesting that “true” conservatism involves replacing one (transient) set of
“preenciples” with another one, albeit far older. Rather, my argument is that conservatism
isn’t a movement at all. Nor should it be. Rather, it’s a simple acknowledgement
of timeless verities and a willingness to defend them against malevolent
faddishness masquerading as “progress,” whose object is the destruction of our
culture and its replacement with… well, nothing. In short, it’s a recognition
of great cultural peril, and the willingness to do something about it.
Think of the struggle between Right and Left in military
terms. We are the defenders of the citadels of Western culture, which are our
hard-won patrimony. Leftists are the attackers, always seeking to undermine, to
sap, to breach, to assault; for them, as for Hillary Clinton in her Wellesley
senior thesis, “there is only the fight.” They stay awake nights trying to
figure out new ways to bring the walls down; as I like to say, they never stop,
they never sleep, they never quit.
But attackers have a problem: they generally need three times
the manpower of the defenders in order to win. A well-defended, confident
citadel, with plenty of provisions, doughty defenders, and at least one supply
line, can hold out forever. Constantinople eventually fell to the Muslims after
700 years of battering, and then only because the Western Roman Empire had
collapsed a thousand years prior, and Byzantium’s relationship with the
emerging nation-states of Europe was often fraught; the Crusaders, after all,
sacked the city even before the Turks did.
On the other hand, in 1565, the 6,000 or so Knights
Hospitallers and other fighters on the island of Malta
held out against Turkish force numbering nearly 40,000. And, of course, in
World War II both Leningrad and Stalingrad repelled the might of the Wehrmacht
after prolonged and deadly sieges.
The “conservative” advantage, then, lies not in a set of
policy prescriptions but in its bedrock beliefs, which center on the necessity
of preserving, protecting, and defending the Western civilization that eventually
codified those principles in the U.S. Constitution, and which itself is now
under attack. By articulating a set of policy principles, “movement”
conservatism puts those principles on the negotiating table, and over the
course of the past 75 years or so, has gradually bargained them away for a mess
of pottage.
Real conservatism, however, conserves. It understands
what’s a stake, whom to fight, and how to win; after all, it has more than
3,000 years of experience, much of which was recorded and remains accessible
today. The Left tries to combat this disadvantage (via its control of the
educational system) by delegitimizing and eradicating the past. By cutting us
off from our cultural wellsprings, they hope to disarm and demoralize us. Don’t
let them.
For in the end, the only truly “conservative” principle is
to conserve. It may not be pretty, it may not be couth, but it’s all
that really matters. We win, they lose, as a great man once said.
______________________________________________________________
FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“Over the past 50 years, more than $16 trillion has been
spent on poverty programs. The majority of those programs have simply made
poverty more comfortable by giving poor people more food, health care, housing,
etc. What’s needed most is to get poor people to change their behavior.”
-Walter
Williams
“Disney is putting an openly gay character in a kid’s film
for the first time. The Left is outraged that the actor playing the character
is straight. A crucial dynamic is on display here. The Left gets what it wants,
but demands more. Always more. It is never satisfied. Meanwhile, Christians
cede more and more of the culture, rarely offer a peep of protest, and make do
with whatever crumbs they are thrown.”
-Matt Walsh
“Religion is definitely on the decline in the West. Both
here and in Europe, young people are saying they refuse to believe in fairy
tales or in things they can’t see. What makes it so odd is that a majority of
the youngsters voice their belief in socialism, the biggest fairy tale of all.”
-Bert Prelutsky
___________________________________________________________________
BOOKS, FILM
“Movie Trailer For Serial-Murdering Abortionist 'Gosnell' Is
Finally Here, And It's Intense”
When it happened, the press ignored it, now Hollywood is
ignoring the movie.
On Thursday former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon
released a trailer for his upcoming film, “Trump @ War.” The trailer depicted a
diverse set of notable conservatives articulating what’s at stake in the
upcoming midterm elections.
New York Times bestseller list nonfiction: #1 is Fox News’s
Greg Jarrett’s book “The Russia Hoax”.
#2 is Fox News’s Judge Jeanine Piro: “Liars, Leakers, and
Liberals”. #5 is Dinesh D'Souza’s “Death
of a Nation.” #10 is Fox News’s Greg
Gutfeld: “The Gutfeld Monologues”
__________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has one-upped
socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: She proposes to
nationalize every major business in the United States of America. If
successful, it would constitute the largest seizure of private property in
human history.
National Abortion Rights Action League partners with ice
cream shop to sell 'Rocky Roe v. Wade' flavor
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/08/naral_partners_with_ice_cream_shop_to_sell_rocky_roe_v_wade_flavor.html#ixzz5OaEEJ11y
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
ISLAM
The liberal media cheered Ilhan Omar’s primary victory in
2016 in Minneapolis.
She won a historic victory over 44-year incumbent democrat Rep. Phyllis
Kahn, building a vast
coalition of East African
voters to defeat the incumbent in Minneapolis. The liberal media forgot
to mention Ilhan was married to her brother.
A democrat judge in New Mexico found that suspects in a
bizarre child abuse case were not a danger to the public, and released them on
bond, after their attorney blamed islamophobia. Law enforcement authorities
believed that the children were being trained for terrorist attacks, including
school shootings.
_________________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
“Trump is saying things about left-wing press outlets that
are nowhere near as nasty as what they have been saying about him since before
his inauguration. Democratic Party journalists declared war on the president,
and they now pretend that his fighting back is somehow an infringement of their
rights.”
“….The truth, though, is that the Democrats do
have an agenda. They just can't say it aloud. The reason Democrats
seek power in 2018 is to obstruct President Trump wholly and without exception,
to tie down his administration using the subpoena powers of a dozen committees,
and ultimately to lay the groundwork for his impeachment. The Democratic
grassroots expects nothing less. But the Democratic leadership understands that this
unspoken agenda is unpalatable to the rest of the country……Better to keep quiet, have Trump loom
in the background, and adapt to local circumstances as much as possible. Or as
Nancy Pelosi put it
recently, "Do whatever you have to do, just win."
Economic Boom: Media Rewrite History To Credit Obama Instead
Of Trump
10 reasons why this is Trump’s economy.
“This week, my church is holding its SoCal Harvest event for
the 29th year in a row. Formerly known as Harvest Crusade, this annual
gathering is one of the largest evangelical outreach events in the world….Some
people are pretty upset about SoCal Harvest…..because, in a series of
billboards we use to promote the event, there’s a photo of me holding a Bible.”
How the Left Is Outsourcing Censorship of the Internet
Manafort's Purge Trial
Perceptive article: “A
weekly roundup of some unfamiliar yet ultimately too familiar types.”
________________________________________________________________
INTERESTING
Massachusetts mayor boycotts Sam Adams after cofounder
thanked Trump for tax cuts. Consider switching
brands: Samuel Adams beer is brewed in
the USA. Budweiser is owned by a foreign company.
Reagan Library Shows America at Its Best: A
summer vacation trip well spent.
________________________________________________________________
WISE
WORDS
“A good moral character is the first essential in a man, and
that the habits contracted at your age are generally indelible, and your
conduct here may stamp your character through life. It is therefore highly
important that you should endeavor not only to be learned but virtuous.”
-George
Washington
“It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a
republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the
heart of its laws and constitution.”
-Thomas
Jefferson
posted by gary at
9:53 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home