Saturday, December 29, 2018

op ed review 12/30


THIS WEEK’S NEWS
Christians at risk of extinction in land where Christmas began

No Christmas Truce in the Culture War: Gun Controllers Indoctrinate Kids with Toy Gun Turn-in….”each child received one politically correct toy in exchange “for whatever water pistols, Nerf guns and other toy guns they turn[ed] in.”

Trump Admin Moves Toward New Work Requirements for Food Stamp Recipients, Democrats horrified.
Ag Secretary responds:  “More than 20 years ago, Democrats and Republicans came together to reform our welfare programs to restore the system to what it was meant to be: “a second chance, not a way of life,” in the words of then-President Bill Clinton. Over time, without any changes in the underlying welfare reform legislation of 1996, that ideal has been watered down by out-of-control administrative flexibility in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Today, at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, we are taking steps to restore integrity to SNAP and move people toward self-sufficiency.”
Under pressure from Trump, China cuts tariffs on 700 more items.

Coordinated attacks on President Trump, prepping a case for impeachment:
New York Times editorial:  “Trump Imperils the Planet.” 
MSNBC host:  “Trump presidency threatens a ‘pandemic ... across the world’”
Obama National Security Advisor Susan Rice declares that President Trump “does more to undermine American national security than any foreign adversary.”

Twice-Deported Illegal Immigrant Commits Four Shootings, A Robbery, Two Police Chases, Two Police Shootouts, Automobile Theft in 24 Hours
Young California Police Officer, a Legal Immigrant, Killed by an Illegal Alien.
Another migrant caravan — with estimates of as many as 15,000 participants — is preparing to leave Honduras on January 15
Flashback:  In 2006 Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which mandated the construction of multilayer pedestrian fencing along about 600 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. It passed with big, bipartisan majorities: 283 votes in the House and 80 in the Senate. Some top Democrats who are still in the Senate today supported the fence: Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein, Ron Wyden, Debbie Stabenow, and Sherrod Brown.
Senator Rand Paul thinks he knows where we could find the funding to build the wall. Instead of rebuilding Afghanistan, we could use that money for the wall and our own national security.

Over Christmas, an eight-year-old migrant boy died while in the custody of the Border Patrol.  Media meltdown followed, but where was the outrage when 18 migrants died in custody under the Obama Administration?

The Knights of Columbus -- the 125+-year-old Catholic fraternal and good-works organization – is,  in the minds of some Democratic Senators, an extremist and unworthy organization. 
“Dem senators flirting with a religious test for judicial nominees”  No Catholics need apply?

Tiny Ecuador demonstrates world's stupidest idea: Dumping America to become China's lapdog.

Students launch Satanic club at NC State

The Hungarian government has hit out at the Financial Times naming George Soros their “Person of the Year”. “To the Financial Times, he’s Person of the Year, but to many ordinary citizens, Soros is an enemy of their democracy.”

EU moves to outlaw phrases such as 'man-made', 'manpower' and 'mankind' in favor of gender-neutral terms under new PC guidelines for translators.

Though Latino voters are a key part of the Democratic coalition, there is a larger bloc of reliable Republican Latinos than many think. And the GOP’s position among Latinos has not weakened during the Trump administration, despite the president’s rhetoric against immigrants and the party’s shift to the right on immigration.   In November’s elections, 32 percent of Latinos voted Republican.

The New York Times is pressuring credit card giants to monitor customers’ buying habits and blacklist gun purchases.
Two men showed up to the Coastal Farm & Ranch store in Marysville, WA, grabbed four nail guns, each worth over $400, walked out of the store and got into a Honda Civic. They didn’t expect to be surrounded by about six customers with guns raised.

The Jesuit order for decades used Gonzaga University’s campus to house priests who had been removed from active service in the priesthood due to accusations of sexual abuse

Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi is spending the government shutdown at a luxury resort in Hawaii, where room accommodations range from $899-a-night for a standard room to $4,899-a-night for the presidential suite.
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COLUMN OF THE WEEK
Michael Walsh  12/21  “You Have Been in Afghanistan, I Perceive’”

President Trump’s decisions to withdraw from Syria and to start drawing down the number of our troops in Afghanistan should come as welcome news to all Americans. The pointless wars in the Middle East and the Hindu Kush have been going on since 9/11—longer if you count the entirely unnecessary incursion into Iraq in 1991—and have brought only misery in their wake. If Trump does nothing else but put an end to the endless wars bequeathed to us by the house of Bush, his will have been a consequential presidency.

That these orders have seemingly resulted in the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis is not necessarily a bad thing. Trump is a churning force, as his track record already shows, and if his appointees disagree with his policies, then they go, not the policies. Just ask Jeff Sessions and Rex Tillerson. Like John Kelly, currently on his way out the door as White House chief of staff, Mattis is a distinguished officer in the United States Marine Corps—but no conservative. As anyone who understands the USMC knows, Marine officers are not ideologues; indeed, by training they are apolitical, owing their allegiance to the Constitution and the commander-in-chief. I’m not sure whether this is still true today, but when I was a kid growing up on various Marine duty stations, they didn’t even vote.

A great many on the Right disagree with Trump. They fear “chaos” and “instability.” But we have been living for decades with presidents (George H.W. Bush, take a bow) who made a fetish of stability and in so doing condemned the world to the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and hoping for a different result. Thus we have had the eternal “peace process” between the Israelis and the Palestinians for the simple reason that no one seriously desires a definitive solution.

Nonetheless, a solution is only a solution when it is dispositive. This is something our current generation of politicians and warfighters do not wish to acknowledge: hence, the endless war that Bush I began against Saddam Hussein for no particular reason (did or does anyone really care about Kuwait?); was left unfinished; was restarted in the wake of 9/11 by Bush II—again, for no particular reason, since Saddam had little or nothing to do with the attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. Here we are, 18 years later, with only dead and maimed American soldiers to show for it. Neither Iraq, if it survives, nor Afghanistan will ever be Jacksonian democracies, nor do their inhabitants wish them to be.

This is not to denigrate the heroism of our troops, nor their skills. They may well be, as many say, the best warriors we’ve ever put in the field. But, just as in Vietnam, they’ve been allowed to fight, but not to win. Essentially, they’ve been told to play to an eternal draw, just enough to keep the lid on things over there, but not to materially affect the political structures in place. Thus, by mouthing the liberal pieties in Bush II’s second inaugural address about how the desire for freedom is the natural human condition (it plainly is not) and that America’s duty is to spread the gospel of liberty throughout the world (ditto), our rulers have obscured the lethal realities of our presence overseas.

These are not easy, or happy, conclusions to reach. But we must ask: what have we gotten from our misadventures?

Saddam may have been a tyrant, but he was just one of many, especially in that part of the world. Whether he abused his own people (what tyrant doesn’t?) may have been cause for editorial-page fretting, but not for bellicosity. In effect, both Bushes made the same mistake JFK and LBJ made in Vietnam: thinking that inside every foreigner was an American yearning to get out, when even a cursory glance at the history of Southeast Asia or the Islamic ummah should instantly have disabused them of that notion.

Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, nothing has changed and nothing ever will change. The last outsider to have any effect on the region was Alexander the Great, and he did so at the point of his sword. Since then, Islam has come and gone and come again, the British fought two wars there, and the Soviets first signaled their systemic vulnerability by not being ruthless enough in their attempt to conquer the “country.” Had they applied the same tactics they used on Hitler’s Germany to Afghanistan we might be living in a very different world today, but they did not. And so now the Soviets have vanished while the Afghans live on in their remote and savage land.

As for Syria, the last foreign occupiers to have a positive effect on that parlous place were the Crusaders, who established the Principality of Antioch, which included Aleppo, in the late 12th century; it collapsed about a century later. Since then, Syria has been the plaything of various warring Muslim factions but offers no menace to American national security, and is far too weak seriously to threaten Israel. As in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, we have no strategic or economic interests in those areas, especially as the United States has emerged once again as the world’s leading energy producer.

The way to deal with these places, therefore, is to withdraw and leave them to their own devices. Sure, the Russians will fiddle around the edges if only to keep their hands in the game and to create an object lesson for their own restive Muslim minorities. So what? The “kingdom” of Saudi Arabia in all likelihood won’t last much longer than Bohemond’s did. As for the religious clash between Sunni and Shi’a Islam, represented on the chessboard by the Saudis and the Iranians, we can only hope that they both lose, and lose badly.

The first words uttered by Sherlock Holmes to Dr. John H. Watson, M.D. are: “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive.” This startling deduction was made on the detective’s assessment of his future amanuensis’s physical condition: a wounded war veteran recently returned from the battle of Maiwand during the Second Afghan War. This Holmes can see at a glance, including the good doctor’s enervation from enteric fever.

But it doesn’t take Sherlock Holmes to see that the endless war has been bad for America, and the sooner it’s ended, the better for all of us. Only then can the tremendous damage to American foreign policy brought on by the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama succession of insufficient presidents be remedied, and the nation start to heal.

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FROM OTHER COLUMNS
“The reason a secure border wall has not been — and may not be — built is not apprehension that it would not work, but rather real fear that it would work only too well.”
              -Victor Davis Hanson

“To our liberal media, every illegal immigrant is assumed to be a virtuous person and more virtuous than the Border Patrol.”
               -L. Brent Bozell
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LEFTIST WATCH
Democrats are lining up to support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal.” The proposal could be the largest expansion of government since the Great Society or New Deal…..could cost tens of trillions of dollars.
Ocasio-Cortez sends Christmas greeting to 'refugee babies in mangers'

California organizers cancel Women's March due to “too many white participants.”

The Left’s proposal for a “universal basic income” had a rough year.

Inside Bernie-world's war on Beto O'Rourke….As the Texas congressman's star rises, Sanders supporters turn up the heat: "Reading Karl Marx is cool. Doing a livestream while you’re doing your laundry is a gimmick."

University of Missouri official: Asking a smaller woman on a date violates Title IX…. “suggest that male students should avoid asking out female students at all, particularly when the male is physically larger than the female.”

Pope Francis criticizes nationalism and suggests people should embrace diversity.

Venezuelan Women Forced to Sell Hair, Sex, and Breast Milk to Escape Socialism
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GLOBALONEY
Climatologist counters climate-disaster predictions with sea-level report
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ARTICLES
Five Dumb Arguments Against ‘the Wall’

In one of the most remarkable Abbott and Costello routines in modern times, the economic wizards at the Fed again raised interest rates on Tuesday. Their crackerjack logic for doing so is to steer America on a course toward recession so they have the tools in hand to end the recession that they themselves created. Can anyone tell us who's on first?

The Trumpenfreude List consists of people who foolishly feuded with The Donald and wound up crashing into the sea like Icarus.  But that is nothing compared to the self-immolation of journalism. An entire trade took on President Trump, and has now watched in horror as its credibility melts away like the wax that held together the wings of Icarus…..Far from being an independent press, the Washington press corps serves as the public relations department for the Deep State.

Trump’s Syria decision was essentially correct. Here’s how he can make the most of it.
McCarthy: The Syria Fairy Tale Lives!
Defense secretaries come and go. Obama had four of them in eight years, who had some unkind things to say about his leadership or lack of it. There was no talk of chaos or of the only adult in the room leaving. But suddenly, the media are in a meltdown after "Mad Dog" Mattis announces his departure from the Cabinet after President Trump announces departure from Syria:
Mattis Is Wrong—This Scholar-General Was Righ

Victor Davis Hanson was in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart one day when he saw a young woman struggling to move a big screen television into her Honda. When he went over to help her, he noticed that she was holding an EBT card, a government-issued debit card for cash and food stamps.  Hanson told her, “You shouldn’t be using the food card to buy the big screen TV.” She told him to mind his own business……“The more you give people, the more entitlements they want,” Hanson says. “They never say, ‘Thank you, that’s so generous.’ They just think, ‘Gosh, don’t ever take that away. We need more.’” This culture of dependency, a byproduct of the entitlement state and what Hanson calls our “therapeutic culture,” is simply a display of human nature at its worst.

PRAGER: Explaining The Left, Part V: Left Vs. Right Is Brain Vs. Mind
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INTERESTING
FNC’s Sebastian Gorka To Launch Salem Network Show In 2019.

Here Are The Most Egregious Fake News Stories Of 2018

The Top 12 MAGA Moments for Donald Trump in 2018

Ten best movies of the year
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WISE WORDS
“May the father of all mercies scatter light, and not darkness, upon our paths, and make us in all our several vocations useful here, and in His own due time and way everlastingly happy.”
              -George Washington

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