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De Omnibus Dubitandum - Lux Veritas

Sunday, June 30, 2019

To Spit in Someone's Face is Disgraceful. Unless You're on the Left.

By Rich Kozlovich

On June 30, 2019 an article by Thomas Lifson entitled, "Just days after Eric Trump spat upon by waitress, WaPo publishes op-ed justifying harassment of restaurant customers over politics," saying:
"The Washington Post is all-in on stoking the fire of public harassment of Trump supporters, denying them public accommodations. So much for civility and mutual respect."
The article went on to say:
"That’s the only conclusion to draw from this op-ed (non-paywall version here)  published by the largest newspaper in our nation’s capital, written by Stephanie Wilkinson, the owner of the Red Hen Restaurant that kicked out Sarah Sanders and her family while dining there. The paper proudly tweeted out its contribution to the loss of civility."  (Editor's Note:  That non-paywall version didn't work for me. RK)
The left is constantly spewing out clabber about how conservatives need to be more civil, but in reality, it's the left that lacks civility. The last thing the left wants is for conservatives to treat them the way they treat conservatives.   

Furthermore, they not only lack civility, they lack consistency of thought.

Sarah Sanders, at the Red Hen restaurant, was asked to leave because the owner didn't like President Trump.  The owner claims she has no regrets for asking Sanders to leave, after all, it's her business and she can refuse to serve anyone she pleases, for any reason she pleases. 

Really? 

What if Sanders was black, and the owner didn't want to serve blacks?  Wasn't that resolved as a civil rights issue with the government forcing businesses to accept blacks, and fining them out of business if they didn't comply? But that's different.  That supports leftist narratives. 

If either of these restaurants were in the South and this was done to a black patron by a white wait person, the federal government would have been all over them, and the media would be frothing at the mouth, including the Washington Post.

The upside to this? Once more we see the left for who they are versus who they say they are. Eric Trump refused to press charges against this snotty little creep, but that was a mistake. Not only should he have prosecuted her, he should have sued her.

Many years ago Cleveland had a journalist by the name of Dorothy Fuldheim, who was nationally recognized and who all the women thought was spectacular.

I thought she was a loon. 

Even though I really didn't like her, there was one occasion, while she was in her 80's and speaking publicly, a young man threw a pie in her face. I thought that was absolutely one of the most outrageous things I'd seen in my life, at least up until that point in my life. That had to have been in the 70's. Outrageous behavior is now becoming the norm, not the exception.  


I just couldn't imagine anyone throwing a pie in the face of a woman in her 80's! My reaction? I thought he should have been taken out, tied to a tree and whipped. The fact I didn't think well of Dorothy Fuldheim is immaterial. Some things are just wrong. 


When Robbie Alomar spit in the face of that umpire, he should have been suspended for at least two seasons, and starting with those playoff games.  Alomar claimed the umpire called him some name, and truthfully, I think he did, because the incident was an ongoing provocation by Alomar, which pushed the whole thing beyond professional boundaries. 

As a side bar, while in Cleveland Robbie wasn't like his brother who everyone liked and respected.  According to newspaper reports (after he left), he was poison in the locker room. But, it was amazing to me how everyone wanted to make nice over that.  Personally, I would have suspended him for life.  If he'd been on a real job, he would have been fired....for life!

Spitting in someone's face is a disgusting act, and this person who spit in Eric Trump's face needed to be taught a lesson, a lesson the rest of these creeps need to learn. There has to be negative consequences for negative actions, because some things just aren't right!

Then we have Mad Maxine Waters who thinks it's just fine and dandy for "anti-Trump fanatics to continue protests of administration officials — even when they are engaged in non-governmental activities", saying:
“If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere.”
But that's the difference between leftists and conservatives. The left has no absolute moral foundation. Nothing is right, nothing is wrong, only the narrative counts.

And that always has to be based on the latest philosophical flavor of the day. 

To be a leftist is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.  The pillars of leftism are not, "liberty, equality, fraternity".  They are hate, jealously, greed and violence, and there are no boundaries to any of that on the left.

That's history, and that history is incontestable.



Katie Hopkins explores Europe's loss of its Homelands


A new 42-minute documentary titled Homelands by British pundit Katie Hopkins (embedded below) is a cautionary tale for Americans. In England, Belgium, Italy, France, sovereignty and national culture are threatened by immigrants who openly reject the language, mores, laws of their host nations. European nationals, including former immigrants who have assimilated, are pushed out by a growing number of radical Moslems who are taking over towns, boroughs and sections rendering them “no-go zones” by menacing existing neighbors. Women and girls not clad in Islamic garb, as well as men going about diurnal chores are all threatened and harassed in their own countries.

Hopkins travels and interviews citizens of all ages who no longer feel at home in their respective cities. The globalist leaders like Merkel, Macron and May are indifferent and impotent in dealing with the problem.

The second half of the film concentrates on the plight of Jews in France. In spite of the street theater marches and perfunctory denunciations by politicians, all French Jews are in peril from marauding and violent Moslem gangs. An unprecedented number of French Jews have left with an equal number preparing to do so. ......To Read More.....

For bee alarmists, Groundhog Day comes in June

Will activists finally admit their sins and break out of their pesticide-blaming time loop?

Paul Driessen

Did you think Goundhog Day only comes in February?

For anti-insecticide zealots and others in the environmentalist movement who’ve been preoccupied for years with bees and “colony collapse disorder,” it actually comes every June.  That’s when the Bee Informed Partnership – a University of Maryland-based project supported by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) – releases the results of its annual survey of honeybee colony losses and health.

In Bill Murray’s 1993 “Groundhog Day” movie, cynical TV weatherman Phil Connors is condemned to relive the same day over and over in a little Pennsylvania town until he learns the right “life lessons.” Each June, eco-campaigners work themselves into a carefully orchestrated lather over bee losses, getting caught in a time loop of endlessly repeating the same false and misguided claims about the BIP report.

Last week’s BIP report predictably garnered the usual hyperventilating headlines, sounding almost as alarming as in recent years. The 38% 2018-19 over-winter colony loss rate was the highest in the 13 years the survey has been taken. Combined with in-season (summer) honeybee colony losses of 20.5% this yielded an overall annual loss rate of 40.7% (computed using a special BIP methodology).

That’s slightly higher than 2017-18’s reported 40.1% overall loss rate and 2.9% higher than the average annual loss rate calculated since 2010. Hit the panic button.

Environmental worrywarts moved seamlessly into their annual spasm of anxiety and dire prognostication.  “Honey bees are no longer disappearing suddenly and mysteriously. They’re dying persistently, and in plain sight,” the Washington Post lamented.

Will there be enough honeybee colonies left to pollinate California’s lucrative almond crop next winter? an environmental “investigative news organization” agonized. (Ironically, but predictably, this story was posted four weeks after the USDA predicted another record almond harvest in the state.)

Is the BIP report further evidence that the hyperventilating media and eco-campaigners were correct about the “bee-pocalypse” they’ve been “documenting” for the last half-dozen years? Hardly!

First, the alarmists who routinely over-react to the annual BIP survey forget (or ignore) its limitations. As the report makes clear, the survey is entirely voluntary, returned by beekeepers who take time to fill it out. It consequently does not even purport to be a scientific sampling of American beekeepers. It is a compilation and analysis of responses from those who voluntarily self-report. The results show this.

The roughly 4,700 beekeepers who responded this year account for only about 12% of all US honeybee colonies. Professor Dennis Van Engelsdorp – founder of the Bee Informed Partnership  – showed in his own research that hobbyist and small-scale beekeepers (who account for the majority of the BIP respondents) have more severe parasite and pathogen infestations of their honeybee hives than large-scale commercial beekeepers. That increases colony loss rates.

Interestingly, while BIP survey results go up and down from year to year, the overall trend line over the survey’s first dozen years has been downward. But that may reflect small-scale beekeeper experiences.

In any case, US honeybee colony numbers aren’t shrinking; they’re growing, regardless of what the latest BIP survey results find. The USDA’s actual census of beekeepers and their colonies – which actually is systematic and scientific – shows that the overall number of US honeybee colonies grew by 4% in 2018.

Indeed, in releasing the latest BIP results, Van Engelsdorp himself said, “We’re not worried about honeybees going extinct.  We’re worried about commercial beekeepers going extinct.” Hive infections, long distance travel and other aspects of the business have driven more beekeepers to other professions.

Second, there’s good news in the latest Bee Informed Partnership survey. Finally, after years of misleading media and activist rhetoric seeking to pin the blame for honey bees’ problems on agricultural pesticides –neonicotinoid insecticides in particular – attention is now focusing where it should have been all along: on Varroa destructor mites. These tiny, nasty critters and the multiple virulent diseases they spread to honeybee colonies are the foremost scourge of our beloved, and vital, insect pollinators.

This year’s BIP survey announcement and most of the resulting press coverage emphasized this point.

It’s about time. Neonics have become the world’s most widely used insecticides because they work – and pose minimal risks to bees. Some are sprayed on fruits and vegetables, but nearly 90% are used as seed coatings for corn, wheat, canola and other crops. They are absorbed into plant tissues as crops grow.

That means they target only pests that actually feed on the crops, particularly during early growth stages. Since they don’t wash off, they reduce the need for multiple sprays with insecticides that truly can harm bees, birds, fish, other animals and non-pest insects. And they are barely detectable in pollen and nectar – which is why neonic residues are well below levels that can adversely affect bees.

That makes it ironic, and outrageous, that relentless anti-pesticide campaigners – especially those who profess to be alarmed about the “plight of the bumblebee” and want to ban neonics – have said virtually nothing about Varroa mites. Nor have they proposed any plan to deal with this scourge.

Thankfully, recent USDA research has identified a promising new approach of using RNA interference (RNAi) to disrupt the reproduction of another bee parasite, Nosema ceranae – the honeybee’s second-worst scourge. USDA is also reporting progress in efforts to breed more Varroa-resistant or Varroa-tolerant honey bees, which somehow have better hygienic habits: removing mites from one other.

Activists and journalists concerned about bees and pollinator health should have focused on this all along – particularly since available Varroa treatments no longer work as well, due to the mite’s uncanny ability to develop resistance to treatments. Instead, years of energy and millions of dollars have been wasted pursuing a wrong-headed crusade against neonic insecticides that are irrelevant to any challenges facing honey bees and other pollinators. 

Phil Connors finally escaped from his time loop after he ended his disdain for small town Punxsutawney, began performing good deeds and told Rita he truly loved her. Maybe now – finally – self-professed bee advocates and environmental crusaders will wake up from their Groundhog-Day-in-June time loop and devote some time, effort and honesty to addressing the real problems that affect honey and wild bees.

Maybe they will also stop treating modern conventional farming like an evil pariah, and organic farming like a planetary savior. Maybe they will stop repeating the organic food industry’s Big Lie: that it doesn’t use pesticides. In fact, as Professor David Zaruk explains on his RiskMonger.com website, organic farmers employ a dozen highly toxic “natural” pesticides and over 3,000 other “approved” pesticides.

Several are highly toxic to bees: acetic acid, copper sulfate, pyrethrins, hydrogen peroxide, azidirachtin, rotenone, citronella oil, eucalyptus oil and garlic extract, and spinosad. Several are very toxic to humans: boron can affect people’s brain, liver or heart; rotenone has been linked to Parkinson’s disease; nicotine sulfate is a neurotoxin that has actually killed several gardeners; and copper sulfate can readily and severely injure a user’s brain, liver, kidneys, stomach and intestinal linings, skin and eyes ... or even kill!

But again, Varroa is the villain, the real, enduring threat to bees – not pesticides, synthetic or organic.

Unfortunately, persuading environmentalists to acknowledge these realities is not likely. They have too much ideology, power and prestige invested in their campaigns against synthetic pesticides and conventional farming – to say nothing of the billions of dollars they’ve gotten from organic interests.

Bottom line? Lies, deception and fraud are unethical, immoral and illegal no matter who engages in it, devises the strategies or finances the campaigns. These environmentalist campaigns have been employed over and over because they work – and because too many legislators, regulators, judges and journalists have repeated, approved and applauded them. It will be an uphill battle to change that dynamic.

Let’s hope a few brave lawmakers start applying the same standards of truth and ethics across the board.

Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of many articles on the environment. He has degrees in geology, ecology and environmental law

The Economic Benefits of Reducing the Regulatory Burden

June 29, 2019 by Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty
 
When I assess President Trump’s economic policy, I generally give the highest grade to his tax policy.

But as I pointed out in this interview from last year, there’s also been some progress on regulatory policy, even if only in that the avalanche of red tape we were getting under Bush and Obama has abated.




But perhaps I need to be even more positive about the Trump Administration.

For instance, I shared a graph last year that showed a dramatic improvement (i.e., a reduction) in the
pace of regulations under Trump.


For all intents and purposes, this means the private sector has had more “breathing room” to prosper.

Which means more opportunity for jobs, growth, investment, and entrepreneurship.

To what extent can we quantify the benefits?

Writing for the Washington Post, Trump’s former regulatory czar said the administration has lowered the cost of red tape, which is a big change from what happened during the Obama years.
Over the past two years, federal agencies have reduced regulatory costs by $23 billion and eliminated hundreds of burdensome regulations, creating opportunities for economic growth and development. This represents a fundamental change in the direction of the administrative state, which, with few exceptions, has remained unchecked for decades. The Obama administration imposed more than $245 billion in regulatory costs on American businesses and families during its first two years. The benefits of deregulation are felt far and wide, from lower consumer prices to more jobs and, in the long run, improvements to quality of life from access to innovative products and services. …When reviewing regulations, we start with a simple question: What is the problem this regulation is trying to fix? Unless otherwise required by law, we move forward only when we can identify a serious problem or market failure that would be best addressed by federal regulation. These bipartisan principles were articulated by President Ronald Reagan and reaffirmed by President Bill Clinton, who recognized that “the private sector and private markets are the best engine for economic growth.”
But how does this translate into benefits for the American people?

Let’s look at some new research from the Council of Economic Advisers, which estimates the added growth and the impact of that growth on household income.
Before 2017, the regulatory norm was the perennial addition of new regulations.Between 2001 and 2016, the Federal government added an average of 53 economically significant regulations each year. During the Trump Administration, the average has been only 4… Even if no old regulations were removed, freezing costly regulation would allow real incomes to grow more than they did in the past, when regulations were perennially added… The amount of extra income from a regulatory freeze depends on (1) the length of time that the freeze lasts and (2) the average annual cost of the new regulations that would have been added along the previous growth path. …In other words, by the fifth year of a regulatory freeze, real incomes would be 0.8 percent (about $1,200 per household in the fifth year) above the previous growth path. …As shown by the red line in figure 3, removing costly regulations allows for even more growth than freezing them. As explained above, the effect, relative to a regulatory freeze, of removing 20 costly Federal regulations has been to increase real incomes by 1.3 percent. In total, this is 2.1 percent more income—about $3,100 per household per year—relative to the previous growth path.
Here’s the chart showing the benefits of both less regulation and deregulation.


The chart makes the change in growth seem dramatic, but the underlying assumptions aren’t overly aggressive.

What you’re seeing echoes my oft-made point that even modest improvements in growth lead to meaningful income gains over time.

P.S. My role isn’t to be pro-Trump or anti-Trump. Instead, I praise what’s good and criticize what’s bad. While Trump gets a good grade on taxes and an upgraded positive grade on regulation, don’t forget that he gets a bad grade on trade, a poor grade on spending, and a falling grade on monetary policy.
 

The Geller Report

By Rich Kozlovich

I've decided to include a regular update on Pamela Geller's website, The Geller Report.  Below are links to the June, 29, 2019 Report, along with some older posts.

I keep hearing leftists and Islamists say Americans don't uderstand Islam.  I agree, but they use that as a justification for multiculturalism and immigration into western lands.  So I think it's important to present as much information about Muslims and Islam as possible.  We can see what Islam really stands for by their actions. 

History is the solid foundation leading to clarity, which leads to understanding. And once everyone understands what Islam is really all about, the world will start making better decisions about the Muslims and this immigration jihad that's penetrated the western defensvie wall of Judaic/Christian values. 

Values rejected by western leaders.That leaves them to deal with the real foundational values of Islam - greed, lust, hate and violence.
Older articles.

"Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.  Please contribute to our ground-breaking work here."

The Muslim Plot to Bomb a Black Church the Media Won't Talk About

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 10 Comments Thursday, June 27, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

“The best news is when you call get ready for jihad,” Mustafa Mousab Alowemer wrote in a public housing project in Pittsburgh. “I will spill my blood for the victory of my religion.”

Northview Heights, the low-income housing project, is 90% African-American. Or at least it was.

Then a flood of Syrian Muslim refugees showed up. Obama had promised to admit 10,000 Syrian migrants in 2016. The terrorist who plotted a massacre at a black church was one of them.

The Alowemer clan arrived at JFK airport in New York City. The same airport through which other terror refugees, including the World Trade Center bombers, had penetrated the United States. Instead of staying in New York, they were resettled in Pittsburgh joining a growing Syrian enclave there.

Northview Heights’ tenant council head told reporters that the Alowemers had “isolated themselves”. They had spent all their time with their fellow Syrian Muslims while avoiding their black neighbors.

But Mustafa Alowemer was not unaware of his black neighbors. He was plotting to kill them. When the FBI and the police descended on the housing project, neighbors learned how close the call had been.

The Syrian Muslim refugee’s target was the Legacy International Worship Center, a small black church on a narrow street with battered slum houses and cracked concrete. The international part reflected the multicultural population of African-Americans and African immigrants, including Nigerian Christians.

The Christians of Nigeria had been subjected to some of the most brutal Islamic massacres in a decade. The Nigerian Christians who had come to the United States were, unlike the Alowemer clan and other Syrian Muslim migrants, authentic refugees fleeing religious persecution, rather than economic migrants. They thought that they were safe in Pittsburgh. But Islamic terror had followed them here.

In Northview Heights, Alowemer plotted the massacre of the Christians whom he called, “Mushrikeen”, an Islamic religious term which condemns Christians and Jews as infidels and deems them to be fair game for mass murder.

“This house is still for the ones who go to church because they are Nigerians,” the Syrian Muslim ranted. “They are all polytheists. We, we, take revenge for our brothers in Nigeria.”

Alowemer plotted to plant a bomb backpack on the side of the gray brick church and then head for a mosque to secure his alibi. The timer would set off the bomb, but by then, the terrorists would claim that they had been at their morning prayers. And other Muslims in the mosque would be their alibi.

But while Alowemer wanted an alibi, he wanted to hear the sounds of the massacre at the black church.

The ISIS supporter’s plan was to be close enough when the bomb went off to hear the blast.

He imagined his attack would “shock the enemies of Allah almighty everywhere and all over America” and his goal was to prevent Christians from “going to their churches and instill fear in their hearts.”

At the bomb site would be an ISIS flag and a message, “We’ve arrived.”

The Alowemer clan arrived in America nearly three years ago. On August 2016, the black church bomber was admitted as a refugee to the United States.

Donald Trump had first won popular support in 2015 by calling for a, “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Earlier he had said, "I'm putting the people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they're going back.”

Obama had doubled down, raising the number of Syrians entering the country from 2,000 to 10,000.

“I don’t want people coming in from the terror countries!” Trump had argued a few months before the Pittsburgh terrorist was admitted as a refugee “I don’t want them, unless they’re very, very strongly vetted.”

Obama insisted in his Thanksgiving message, which falsely compared Syrian Muslim migrants to the pilgrims, that, “No refugee can enter our borders until they undergo the highest security checks of anyone traveling to the United States.”

“Refugees have to be screened by the National Counter Terrorism Center, by the F.B.I. Terrorist Screening Center. They go through databases that are maintained by D.H.S., the Department of Defense and the intelligence community,” the White House spokesman contended.

How good were Obama’s security checks that allowed the black church bomber into America?

“I was raised in Jordan on loving the Jihad and the Mujahdeen,” Alowemer told the man he thought was his accomplice. “I met some Jordanian brothers, some of which did the Nafir in Raqqah, and I, alongside some brothers, were arrested three times in Jordan, because I was one of the supporters.”

The Syrian Muslim refugee had been arrested three times for associating with ISIS fighters and for supporting ISIS.

Despite that he was admitted as a refugee to the United States.

If the robust screening and vetting couldn’t intercept a man who had been arrested three times by an allied country for ties to ISIS, there’s no reason to think that it can or will stop any terrorist.

The black church bomber proved that a travel ban was not an overreaction, but a vital necessity.

Alowemer plotted terrorism against his black neighbors while living in public housing. He graduated from Brashear High School, an English as a Second Language school teeming with a migrant population.

After President Trump’s travel ban was signed into law, a meeting of Syrian migrant students was held at Brashear High School which contained at least 30 Syrians.

Demands for English as a second language had rocketed from 180 to 1,200 at Pittsburgh public schools.

Brashear High School had suffered some of the worst damage from the migrant flood with 270 students: some from terror nations like Yemen, Somalia and Syria. 22% of students are immigrants or refugees.

A graduation video shows a student in black cap and gown coming on stage while the mistress of ceremonies clumsily pronounces his name, “Moustafa Alo-wey-mer.” He glances to the side and walks off. Even while this classic ritual of Americana is underway, the new graduate is plotting mass murder.

A few weeks later, the FBI comes for him.

“I long for the promise of Allah, he promised me paradise, he motivated me for martyrdom,” Mustafa Mousab Alowemer wrote in his nasheed addressed to the leader of ISIS. “I long for the land of the Caliphate. I am expecting to raise the banner. I will spill my blood for the victory of my religion.”

Mustafa had never been an American. He had always been a citizen of the ISIS Caliphate.

Local elected officials in Pittsburgh however had made it clear that they had learned nothing.

“In debates over the refugee crisis the past several years, as people from around the world have sought to flee violence and misery and seek better lives for their families in the United States, I have always been consistent in our message: we welcome all refugees and immigrants,” Mayor Peduto insisted.

The targets of this Syrian Muslim refugee were refugees. He had sought to massacre Nigerian Christians and Yazidis, telling ISIS that the Yazidis, the “enemies of Allah, have big celebrations and that they are here in big numbers” and offering to provide the Islamic terrorists with their location.

The arrest of the refugee black church bomber makes it clear that there is an irreconcilable choice.

Pittsburgh and America can accept refugees fleeing Muslim terror. Or they can accept migrants from Muslim terror countries. But to welcome “all refugees” is to terrorize true refugees and immigrants.

The bombing of a black church strikes deep into the nerve center of the civil rights movement.

Democrats claim that stopping attacks against black churches should be a major law enforcement priority, but their own policies brought the latest black church bomber into the heart of Pennsylvania.

And yet we know that this terror plot against a black church will pass. It will receive far less scrutiny and horror than the attacks carried out against black churches by white men. The Democrats who want to talk about white supremacy and white nationalism, don’t want to discuss Islamic supremacism.

What happens when an Islamic supremacist tries to bomb a black church? Silence.

But on Wilson Avenue, in Pittsburgh, in a formerly African-American neighborhood that is losing its character, a worn church with red doors stands witness to the bigotry whose name we may not speak.

The bigotry of Islam nearly killed here, as it slew thousands in black churches across Nigeria.

Mustafa Alowemer failed. The next one of the thousands of Syrian Muslim migrants may succeed.


Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation.

Thank you for reading.

Jimmy Carter: Donald Trump is an illegitimate president, put in office by the Russians

By - on

You would think that America’s second worst modern day President would go into obscurity, especially given his advanced age. Instead, the thoroughly despicable Jimmy Carter falsely referred to President Trump as an illegitimate president in an interview this past Friday.

That’s not all Carter said. When asked about President Trump’s reaction to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, Carter stated “we tried when I was president, we tried to put human rights as a measuring stick in every incident.” Carter is lying. President Carter abandoned the pro-America Shah of Iran, enabling the murdering mullahs to take over the once thriving state.

Carter was also an ally of the murdering terrorist Yasser Arafat, despite his horrific human rights violations against the people of Israel. Even to this day the viciously anti-Semitic Carter slanders Israel when defending itself against Palestinian terrorists, and will often refer to Israel as an apartheid state.

President Carter was a pathetic and incompetent president. 40 years after his presidency many are still suffering for his ineptitude and his appeasement of human rights abusers who thrived during his administration. No rational person should take anything Carter says seriously..............To Read More...

My Take - Carter was a disgrace as President, and even the Democrats thought so, but he's an even bigger disgrace as a past President.  He had the dubious honor of being the dumbest man to ever occupy the White House, at least until Obama rescued him. Now he's only the second dumbest. 

A great deal of what we've had to contend with these last decades was caused by his incompetent administration, including the the Community Reinvestment Act, which caused the housing bubble that exploded creating a worldwide economic downturn.  But worse yet, he allowed the Shah of Iran to be overcome, which caused the Middle East to become a breeding ground for governments that supported Islamic terrorists. 

For this moron to publicly get on a stage and criticize anyone else is disgraceful, and moreover, for anyone to invite him to spout on about geopolitics or national politics in public is not only disgraceful, it's a clear demonstration of leftist stupidity, and insanity. 

But that's what's telling.  There was a time when Democrats thought he was the dumbest man to ever occupy the White House.  Now the collective intelligence of the Democrat Party is on par with Jimmy Carter.  They're all dumb as dirt.

Joking With Putin: A Sampler

Editorial of The New York Sun June 29, 2019

What is one supposed to make of the "new furor," as the New York Times put it, that has erupted over President Trump's joke about Russia's meddling in our presidential election? This thighslapper happened when the American leader he sat down with the Russ strongman, Vladimir Putin, on the sidelines of the Group of 20 summit at Osaka and a reporter piped up to ask whether Mr. Trump would tell Russia not to meddle in American elections.

“Yes, of course I will,” Mr. Trump retorted. Then, as the Times related, the American president turned to the Russ leader and, “with a half-grin on his face and mock seriousness in his voice,” told him “Don’t meddle in the election, President.” Mr. Putin “smiled and tittered,” as the Times put it. At which point Mr. Trump pointed at another Russian “in a playful way” and said again, “Don’t meddle in the election.”............... To Read More.....


Saturday, June 29, 2019

P&D Today: 2020 Democratic Debates and More

By Rich Kozlovich

I really love these debates.

I never watch them at this stage because ....wellllll.....they're stupid, and my tolerance level for stupid is around......zero.....or less! 

I do admire those with the internal fortitude who do watch them and report on them.  As for me, the desire to reach in and pull out their tongues is almost overwhelming.  However, I have to say this, even though no one else seems to be saying it, I'm actually embarrassed for them.  It's patently obvious, they clearly have no shame.  Maybe I'm the only one that finds them embarrassing?  If so, that's really embarrassing......... for the nation.

Today's posts will deal exclusively with the debates and the views of what used to be called the "loyal opposition".  A term that no longer applies.  There's a reason why the Democrat Party is called the "party of treason". 

They're exposed as intellectually vacuous, and morally unsound, boarding on treason.  Everything they support undermines the American identity, the American culture, the American economy and the Constitution.  Their hate for all of that is apparent, and their goal to destroy America is clear.  Here's what I find distubing about that.   We have to assume they're the brightest pebbles in the Democrat Party brook.  Which means all the other pebbles in that brook must really be a dull gray, and they make up over 40% of the American electorate.

They've played the personal attack card, hate the rich card, hate the Constitution card, the race card and the gender card so often they have nothing else to offer, and they will use it against anyone who stands in their way.

I really like these debates because these loons eviscerate those they've been supporting for years, and Biden is feeling the effects of the philosophical underpinnings of the Democrat party.  Hate, greed and selfishness.  Truth be told, I find them to be disgusting in everything they believe, they say, and they do!  And that disgusting behavior is exemplied in their debates.

I really love these debates!

Please enjoy the 14 posts I've chosen.
  1. Democratic socialism newspeak



Democratic socialism newspeak

June 29, 2019 By Benjamin Powell

Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders unveiled his vision of “democratic socialism” during a recent speech at George Washington University. Unfortunately, he did more to confuse the meaning of democratic socialism than to clarify it.

The words capitalism and socialism have meanings, so let’s get things clear up front. Capitalism is an economic system based on private ownership of property coordinated through voluntary exchange in markets.

Socialism is an economic system that abolishes private property in the means of production -- the land, capital, and labor used to make everything -- and replaces it with some form of collective ownership. Whenever socialism has been implemented at a national level, collective ownership in practice has meant state ownership and government plans have replaced markets as the primary mechanism to coordinate economic activity.

Capitalism and socialism can be thought of as two poles of a spectrum. Some countries are more capitalistic, and some are more socialistic, but all fall somewhere between these two poles. This is where Sanders starts mucking things up.

He claims that “unfettered capitalism” is causing economic problems in United States. The reality is that capitalism in the United States is far from “unfettered.” The Economic Freedom of the World Annual Report is the best measure of where on the socialism-capitalism spectrum a country lies. In the most recent rankings the United States scored an 8.03 out of a possible 10 points, and even a 10-point score would fall short of “unfettered.” .......To Read More....


Smackdown: Marco Rubio calls bee ess on de Blasio's claim to have no idea he was quoting Che Guevara

June 28, 2019 By Monica Showalter

Sometimes, a leftist just has to be called on his lies.

Exhibit A: New York's mayor, Bill de Blasio, who was in Miami for the Democratic debates and decided to stay around for a day, heading over to an airport workers' strike and yelling (in that perfectly fluent Spanish of his):
"Hasta la victoria, siempre!" de Blasio shouted. The phrase translates to, "Until victory, always!," and is attributed to Guevara, a key figure in the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro.  "We will be with you every step of the way," de Blasio added as he spoke to the crowd.
After that, de Blasio remembered where he was, probably hearing from the locals. Then he remembered he was running for president, not chief Sandinista, and then he backtracked. According to Fox News:...........Fortunately, Sen. Marco Rubio, whose family fled the horrors of Castrodom, was there to take out the trash....... To Read More

My Take - Another example of how intellectual vaccuous these candidates for the left are.  Che hated homosexuals and dispised blacks, and he an icon of the left.

Kamala Harris: victim in chief

June 29, 2019 By Jonathan F. Keiler

Kamala Harris is not so much the anti-Trump, as she is bizzaro Trump. The consensus winner of Thursday’s debate, she did so by playing to her strengths, that is her sex and racial identity.

Like Trump, Harris is a bully. Trump is the old-fashioned type bully from the schoolyard, a big kid who commands attention and has playful but derogatory nicknames for all his lessers. Harris represents the modern bully. A kid who commands attention by playing the victim, and who hurls forceful accusations of abusive behavior against other kids, adults or anyone that gets in the way.

She played that role to a tee on Thursday, with Democratic front-runner Joe Biden as her primary target. In a clearly planned and deliberate attack on the former vice-president, Harris essentially accused Biden of hurting her feelings, by negotiating forty years ago with a couple of segregationist fellow senators. Then to make clear that it wasn’t just her feelings as a fifty-something woman (and U.S. senator herself) that were hurt, she claimed that the forced busing that Biden opposed, would have kept her from being sent to a better school as a child, by implication, hurting little Kamala too........To Read More.....

Buttigieg's knee-jerk compulsion to scold Christians pops up again at second debate

June 28, 2019 By Monica Showalter

If you ask me to pick a winner at the Democratic debate on night two in Miami, I would have said Pete Buttigieg. He came off as reasonable, clear-thinking, pithy, and pleasant. He respected time limits. I didn't agree with him on anything, but he gave a sense of coming from rational grounding. Maybe his leftie ideas could be tempered with real-world realities. Maybe he could be persuaded...

But then, then, then, then...he couldn't stop himself. The transcript:
We have to talk about one other thing, the Republican Party likes to cloak itself in the language of religion. Now, our party doesn't talk about that as much, largely for a very good reason, which was we are committed to the separation of church and state. We stand for people of any religion and no religion. But we should call out hypocrisy, for a party that associates itself with Christianity."
Buttigieg whipped out for about the umpteenth time his unsolicited opinion about just how un-Christian all those inadequate, wicked, dare-I-say sinful Christians out there really are, hooking his argument up to the border surge issue. Gotcha. Bad Christians. Not like good-Christian me, that paragon of all virtue-signals.

It was about as attractive as a fart in church................. To Read More

Not the party that Joe grew up in

June 29, 2019 By Silvio Canto, Jr.

How crazy left obsessed with skin color are the Democrats? The answer is "very." Just ask former VP Joe Biden, who was forced to say in a debate that he is not a racist.   On Thursday night, Senator Kamala Harris dropped the hammer on Biden, dropped the hammer on Biden, who looked totally startled:

Harris told Biden that she didn’t believe he was a “racist,” but considered his recent comments about being able to work with segregationist senators early in his career “hurtful.” .........“You worked with them to oppose busing,” .............. It was good politics, specially in front of that audience.  However, I am not sure that it will work in on the road to the nomination.  Does any serious person out there, left or right, think that Joe Biden is a racist because he worked with other Senators?...........To Read More....

My Take - I really like Silvio Canto, Jr., and have been following his articles for some time.  But when he asks, "Does any serious person out there, left or right, think that Joe Biden is a racist because he worked with other Senators?", I have to wonder who he thinks he's talking to ..... Republicans?  The only "serious" people in the Democrat party are seriously deranged. 

A Democratic Debate Report Card

By | June 28th, 2019

Unfamiliar faces dotted the stage or screen. That most of these candidates are still unrecognizable to the average voter is a testament to the absolute mess that is the 2020 Democratic primary.

Rather than focus on the highlights of each debate, or summarize the biggest moments, let’s take a look at the unremarkable spectacle each candidate managed to make of him or herself during this latest round of reality TV posing as a presidential debate.........To Read More....

Fiasco Captured: NY Post Sums Up The First Democratic Debates With One Solid Headline

Matt Vespa @mvespa1 Jun 29, 2019

It was a two-part debate that perfectly captured the far left lurch the Democratic Party has taken in five brief years. It was madness. We’ve gone from we cannot allow hordes of migrants flood out borders and not know who they are or where they came from to support for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. And yes, Barack Obama said the former during the 2008 election. Also, in 2008, abortion was something Democrats wanted to be safe, legal, and rare. Now, they want it to be unrestricted and taxpayer-funded. They want abortions all the way up virtually to the point of birth. It’s ..........To Read More....

Second Debate Night Circus

More heat than night one, but not any more light. 

June 28, 2019 Joseph Klein

Two white male septuagenarians were the headliners of the second Democrat primary debate held in Miami on Thursday night. Barack Obama’s vice president Joe Biden and Socialist-Democrat Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, leaders of the pack so far in early polling, had the opportunity to go head-to-head, without the distraction of “rising star” Senator Elizabeth Warren on the same stage. She had her place in the spotlight on what turned out to be Wednesday night’s undercard. But the expected jousting never took place. Sanders and Biden largely ignored each other and tried to stick to their respective talking points. Sanders was the revolutionary demanding major transformational change. Biden was the experienced public servant who knew how to get things done. The only issue that they directly sparred on directly with each other was the war in Iraq, which Biden voted for as senator and Sanders opposed.

After the two main contenders, the middle of the pack at Thursday’s debate was represented by California Senator Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. The also-rans included John Hickenlooper, Colorado's former governor; Colorado Senator Michael Bennet; New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand; California Representative Eric Swalwell; writer and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson; and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

There is hardly any difference in terms of the leftward-leaning direction the candidates want to take the country. The differences among the candidates lie in their styles of delivery and the speed of transformative change they want to bring about..........To Read More.....


Ideoloons

June 29, 2019 By Deana Chadwell

One look at the lineup of Democrat presidential candidates and I have to wonder what we’re coming to -- is this the best the party can come up with? Really?

If the Democrats make up roughly half the population, then why are these people the cream that’s risen to the top? If they’re the top, what on God’s green earth is at the bottom?  But what about religious beliefs?

Even religion should be subjected to the verification requirement -- why would we want to believe something false? Any god worth his salt would leave a trail of evidence. As a Christian I have no trouble lining up the historical/archeological substantiation for the claims made by the doctrines of my faith. It isn’t blind. Even the Resurrection stands the test of logical reality (See the writings of J. Warner Wallace or Lee Strobel).

Christians have no need to harden into belligerent, dangerous ideologues. We don’t have to kill those who disagree with us. We don’t need to rape their daughters or knife them in the streets. Ironically, the existence of those who do these things merely verifies the Christian doctrine of original sin and the teachings about idolatry........... The most dangerous idolatry of all is the leftists’ tendency to idolize themselves. .........To Read More....

Democratic Debate Debacle: Part II, Darkness Falls

Paul Curry  Jun 28, 2019

In 1977 "Star Wars" took Hollywood and the world by storm. A new genre was not only introduced, but perfected. People were justifiably certain that no film, let alone a sequel, could actually compare. Then came "The Empire Strikes Back." Darker, more nuanced, and by many accounts, superior. When would we ever witness such a sea change again? Well, on June 27th, 2019 that question was answered.

On Wednesday night, when the closing bell rang on the first Democratic presidential debate, many were justifiably certain that we had seen the pinnacle of progressive hysteria. But where Wednesday seemed like a cast of not ready for primetime players, screaming for socialism, open borders, and identity politics, Thursday night’s cast were the angry, grizzled, and pugnacious players in the race to the left. Not only more hysterical than their preceding contenders but mean spirited and ready to do anything to win. Well, at least the ones that seemed to know why they were there. (Marianne Williamson, Andrew Yang, you know this is for the presidency, right?)..........

The Democrats showed not only how extreme they have become but how low they are willing to sink, not as politicians, but as people in general, to achieve their leftist aims. And they defined themselves in the process............To Read More....

The Democrat debate farce

June 28, 2019 By E. Jeffrey Ludwig

Hilarious, inconsequential, and pure bilge being passed off as serious political worldviews. The first two Democrat debates were the height of farce.

 They featured hilarious, inconsequential, and pure bilge being passed off as serious political worldviews. What characterizes a farce? A farce is a literary piece that "contains highly improbable situations, stereotyped characters, violent horseplay, extravagant exaggeration."

Collinsdictionary.com suggests that "[i]f you describe a situation or event as a farce, you mean that it is so disorganized or ridiculous that you cannot take it seriously." .........It is hilarious to hear 20 persons boasting "I am the best" when their tirades and self-aggrandizement lacks substance and evidence. While laughing uproariously, we can reject them all.........To Read More

 

The Democrats showed not only how extreme they have become but how low they are willing to sink, not as politicians, but as people in general, to achieve their leftist aims. And they defined themselves in the process.

Matt Vespa @mvespa1 Jun 28, 2019

The past two days have been quite revealing. I mean a lot of us knew this concerning the Democratic Party’s philosophical trajectory, but the whole country now knows we have a full-blown socialist party. They want open borders, they want to destroy private health insurance, they want to confiscate firearms, raise taxes, and provide not just taxpayer-funded abortion, but allow abortions virtually up to the moment of birth. They bash law enforcement and think all of this is going to be the winning recipe for getting some of the Rust Belt voters to come back into the fold..........To Read More....

The debates: Democrat contempt for America and Americans laid bare

June 29, 2019 By Patricia McCarthy

If there were ever two evenings that exposed the economic idiocy of the Democratic Party, it was both debate nights. Every single candidate promises a wish list of free things for all, including a $1,000-a-month income (Yang) courtesy of the government.

College will be free; health care will be free, even for illegal aliens; abortion will be free on demand; student debt will be erased; etc.

 Not one of them explains where all this money will come from; perhaps they think they can just print it. They always claim that it will come from the undeserving rich, but it never does. There are not near enough rich people to plunder for that much money. It would be extracted from middle-class taxpayers, as Bernie Sanders admitted, because that is where the most money is.

 Like all socialists, they mean to take from people who work and provide for those who do not work or produce. Every one of them is as economically illiterate as Ocasio-Cortez, but they are all old enough to know better.

 It was a pathetic display of ignorance and shameless pandering. They still think the American people are easily manipulated with their bluster. But then the moderators are themselves well known leftists who have worked hard every day of their lives since 2015 to defeat Trump and promote impeachment.

 For what should he be impeached? Because they are mad that he won......... ..The difference between Trump, who loves this country, and all twenty Democrat candidates who seem to hate everything about America could not have been clearer in these two debates. .......... To Read More

Watch: All Democratic Presidential Candidates Say They Would Give Health Insurance to Illegal Aliens

Craig Bannister | June 27, 2019
 
The 10 Democrat candidates participating in Thursday night’s presidential debate were unanimous in their response when asked to raise their hands if their government-run health care plan would cover illegal aliens. Every candidate on stage raised his or her hand when asked:
“A lot of you have been talking about government health care plans you proposed in one form or another. This is a show of hands question and hold them up so people can see. Raise your hand if your government plan would provide coverage for undocumented immigrants.”...........See More....

 
 
 
 

The dystopian Democrat debates


The interaction among 20 Oval Office wannabes who took the stage Wednesday and Thursday in the first live televised Democrat debates provided the first opportunity to take the measure of our opponents. A total of 12 debates among the leading candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are scheduled to take place through next April.

I say “our opponents” because these people are not only President Donald Trump’s opponents, they are my opponents, as well. I suspect that most of the people reading this article also consider these Democrat socialists their adversaries, too. The reality is that one of these individuals will get the Democratic Party’s nomination next year and if he or she is elected, our lives will change forever, even more profoundly and irreparably than when Barack Obama was elected almost 13 years ago and undertook his toxic measures to “transform” America.

After closely watching the two debates last Wednesday and Thursday nights, which aired live on NBC and MSNBC – and in Spanish on Telemundo – (video debate 1 here, video debate 2 here) and reading the 42,000 words of the debate transcripts (part one here and part two here), it is easy to conclude that these candidates seem to represent the living embodiment of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. Lies, lies, and more lies were the order of the day – just as in 1984. The events’ success was palpable, however – Thursday’s debate drew more viewers (over 18 million) than any other primary election debate among Democrats in the history of American television...........

The Democrats are our enemy and, as Sun Tzu recommended in The Art of War, we must get to know and understand the enemy as a first step to defeating them – or we will be toast...........To Read More.....

Friday, June 28, 2019

Cartoon of the Day


A Soros DA Pulled Off the Biggest Islamophobia Hoax

Posted by Daniel Greenfield 5 Comments Wednesday, June 26, 2019 @ Sultan Knish Blog

Four years ago, Craig Stephen Hicks, a mentally unstable man prone to terrorizing his neighbors in a Chapel Hill condo, regardless of race and creed, shot three of his neighbors.

The three neighbors whom he shot over a parking dispute were Muslim.

Hicks, a mentally unstable leftist, was a militant atheist, but no hater of Muslims. In a post about the Ground Zero Mosque, he wrote, “I'd prefer them to most Christians as I was never coerced in any way by the Muslims to follow their religion, which I cannot say about many Christians.”

“I’ve defended Muslims. I know Muslims,” he later told police. “I take pity on them, the way society treats them like they are lesser people.”

“The FBI opened an inquiry into the brutal and outrageous murders of Yusor Mohammad Abu-Salha, Deah Shaddy Barakat, and Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha in Chapel Hill, North Carolina,” Barack Obama issued a statement five days after the murders. “No one in the United States of America should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.”

Obama had frequently urged Americans not to jump to conclusions after Islamic terrorist attacks, but this time he was the one eagerly jumping to the wrong conclusion.

Hicks had confessed to the murder. And the killings had been caught on video. Nor did he try to put up much of a defense. There was no chance that he might escape justice and no need for the feds. But Islamist pressure groups had been lobbying aggressively to treat the murders as a hate crime or, even, as an act of terrorism, despite the absence of a single piece of supporting evidence for such a charge.

The only two pieces of evidence that Hicks had been acting out of hatred for Muslims when he shot his neighbors over a parking dispute was that he was a militant atheist and that they were Muslim.

Over four years later, the trial is over and no better evidence of bigotry was ever presented.

But the official conclusion is that Hicks, who had a history of threatening many of his neighbors over parking issues, was a bigot. Or at least a bigot who was suppressing the awareness of his bigotry.

Chapel Hill Police Chief Chris Blue apologized for his department's former factual position that the shootings had been about a parking dispute. “What we all know now and what I wish we had said four years ago is that the murders of Deah, Yusor, and Razan were about more than simply a parking dispute. The man who committed these murders undoubtedly did so with a hateful heart."

Murder is always a hateful act and murderers generally have hateful hearts. But Chief Blue was trying to appease Islamist groups without deviating too much from the facts, by imputing Islamophobia.

But the trial became a circus when Satana Deberry, a leftist pro-crime candidate allegedly backed by George Soros, defeated her credible predecessor to become the DA of Durham County.

District Attorney Roger Echols had wanted the death penalty. Satana ruled out the death penalty. The new radical DA had a very political agenda in mind. Not to punish Hicks, but to prove he’s a bigot.

“It is about cold-hearted malice and murder,” Satana Deberry insisted. “It is not about parking.”

The two are not incompatible. Malicious murders are committed over petty things all the time. But while Deberry was not particularly bright, she owed her new job to her ideological fidelity.

“It is about exposing the hate, bias and privilege that substituted for the lives of Razan, Yusor, and Deah,” Deberry ranted. She claimed, that Hicks’ “hate of Islam drove him to kill three innocent people.”

“He did not shoot the first available people – someone in the parking lot; he didn’t shoot at someone who happened by,” Assistant DA Kendra Montgomery-Blinn argued.

Hicks specifically picked fights with a variety of people he believed were parking in his spot. When he came to the door, he complained that his neighbors had three parked cars and there was no free space.

That his actions weren’t random doesn’t prove that he was motivated by hatred of Muslims.

But Montgomery-Blinn, a chair of the Durham People's Alliance and a director of the Innocence Inquiry Commission, had already disgraced herself after the Duke Lacrosse case, and had few standards.

And the target was easy enough.

When Hicks finally showed up in front of the judge, he complained that he had wanted to plead guilty and take the death penalty years ago. His attorneys didn’t put up very much of a fight.

In a bizarre turn of events, the prosecution used Samuel Sommers, a diversity expert from Tufts, to argue that Hicks may have been suffering from unconscious bias, arguing that there was a reasonable likelihood that, "their ethnic and religious backgrounds played a role in how Hicks perceived them, interacted with them and ultimately shot and killed them."

A reasonable likelihood that some parts of the shooter’s brain might have somehow reacted differently to his three victims does not make for hate crimes charges. Or, indeed, for any kind of evidence.

Lawyers for the defendant attempted to object to the circus by pointing out that there was no point to it. Hicks was pleading guilty and already getting the maximum possible sentence, three life terms without parole. The unconscious bias circus had no point and wasn’t accomplishing anything.

But the real point wasn’t to convict Hicks, who could have been tried, sentenced and put on death row a year after the crime, if the system had been willing, but to indict the entire country for his actions.

It was also to prove the unprovable, that Hicks was an Islamophobe.

Legitimate court proceedings would never have allowed the prosecution to repeatedly make claims that could not be proven and for which there was no evidence. It would have also kept out claims about unconscious bias, which even the “expert” making them refused to conclusively treat as absolute.

In April, Mohammed Abu Salha, the father of two of the women, was invited to testify at a hearing on hate crimes and white nationalism. “How many have to die until our government unequivocally stands up against bigotry in all forms, including white nationalist violence?” he demanded.

The man who had shot his daughters was a leftist opposed to white nationalism. But facts had never mattered in Chapel Hill. And as the trial ended, they mattered even less.

Farhana Khera, the head of Muslim Advocates, an Islamic group representing Abu-Salha, argued that we must, "take action to end the bigotry and hate that took the lives of his children. Congress must take this threat seriously. State lawmakers must enact strong hate crime laws and social media companies must do more to curb hate speech."

“The FBI must reprioritize its counterterrorism resources toward fighting white nationalist violence.”

Hicks had never posted anything to social media. But the real agenda was right there in the conclusion.

The actions of one mentally unstable man fighting over parking spaces was an urgent call to redirect resources from preventing another 9/11 and away from some of their terrorist coreligionist allies.

And so Islamophobia is now the official story of the 2015 murders in Chapel Hill. The case will be cited in every Islamophobia story. And yet the complete lack of evidence of bigotry, necessitating the absurd maneuver of inviting an expert on unconscious bias, shows just how unreal “Islamophobia” is.

After four years, the bigotry in the Hicks case had to be manufactured because it was never there. Vague statements by Hicks, “I don’t like the looks of you people”, had to be assembled into a narrative, while his explicit pro-Islamic statements had to be ignored. Hicks wanted to be executed. Instead he was kept alive to be used to accuse Americans of a culture of bigotry. But the culture of bigotry that Islamist groups and their allies in Durham County sought is as absent in America as it is in their case.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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Thank you for reading.

He Fights

Evan Sayet Jul 13, 2017

(Editor's Note:  This was sent to me via e-mail and presented as being written by Marshall Kamena mayor of Livermore, CA, and is being circulated as such via the internet.   It was actually written by Evan Sayet, and here it is as written for Townhall.com in 2017. RK)

My Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.” Here’s my answer:

We Right-thinking people have tried dignity. There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency. We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as John McCain? We tried propriety – has there been a nicer human being ever than Mitt Romney? And the results were always the same.

This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky and the Chicago mob.

I don’t find anything “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper” about Barack Obama’s lying about what went down on the streets of Ferguson in order to ramp up racial hatreds because racial hatreds serve the Democratic Party. I don’t see anything “dignified” in lying about the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi and imprisoning an innocent filmmaker to cover your tracks. I don’t see anything “statesman-like” in weaponizing the IRS to be used to destroy your political opponents and any dissent. Yes, Obama was “articulate” and “polished” but in no way was he in the least bit “dignified,” “collegial” or “proper.”

The Left has been engaged in a war against America since the rise of the Children of the ‘60s. To them, it has been an all-out war where nothing is held sacred and nothing is seen as beyond the pale. It has been a war they’ve fought with violence, the threat of violence, demagoguery and lies from day one – the violent take-over of the universities – till today.

The problem is that, through these years, the Left has been the only side fighting this war. While the Left has been taking a knife to anyone who stands in their way, the Right has continued to act with dignity, collegiality and propriety.

With Donald Trump, this all has come to an end. Donald Trump is America’s first wartime president in the Culture War.

During wartime, things like “dignity” and “collegiality” simply aren’t the most essential qualities one looks for in their warriors. Ulysses Grant was a drunk whose behavior in peacetime might well have seen him drummed out of the Army for conduct unbecoming. Had Abraham Lincoln applied the peacetime rules of propriety and booted Grant, the Democrats might well still be holding their slaves today. Lincoln rightly recognized that, “I cannot spare this man. He fights.”

General George Patton was a vulgar-talking, son-of-a-bitch. In peacetime, this might have seen him stripped of rank. But, had Franklin Roosevelt applied the normal rules of decorum, then Hitler and the Socialists would barely be five decades into their thousand-year Reich.

Trump is fighting. And what’s particularly delicious is that, like Patton standing over the battlefield as his tanks obliterated Rommel’s, he’s shouting, “You magnificent bastards, I read your book!” That is just the icing on the cake, but it’s wonderful to see that not only is Trump fighting, he’s defeating the Left using their own tactics.

That book is Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals – a book so essential to the Liberals’ war against America that it is and was the playbook for the entire Obama administration and the subject of Hillary Clinton’s senior thesis. It is a book of such pure evil, that, just as the rest of us would dedicate our book to those we most love or those to whom we are most indebted, Alinsky dedicated his book to Lucifer.

Trump’s tweets may seem rash and unconsidered but, in reality, he is doing exactly what Alinsky suggested his followers do.

First, instead of going after “the fake media” – and they are so fake that they have literally gotten every single significant story of the past 60 years not just wrong, but diametrically opposed to the truth, from the Tet Offensive to Benghazi, to what really happened on the streets of Ferguson, Missouri – Trump isolated CNN. He made it personal. Then, just as Alinsky suggests, he employs ridicule which Alinsky described as “the most powerful weapon of all.”

Everyone gets that it’s not just CNN – in fact, in a world where Al Sharpton and Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman and Nicholas Kristof are people of influence and whose “reporting” is in no way significantly different than CNN’s – CNN is just a piker.

Most importantly, Trump’s tweets have put CNN in an untenable and unwinnable position. With Trump’s ability to go around them, they cannot simply stand pat. They need to respond. This leaves them with only two choices.

They can either “go high” (as Hillary would disingenuously declare of herself and the fake news would disingenuously report as the truth) and begin to honestly and accurately report the news or they can double-down on their usual tactics and hope to defeat Trump with twice their usual hysteria and demagoguery.

The problem for CNN (et al.) with the former is that, if they were to start honestly reporting the news, that would be the end of the Democratic Party they serve. It is nothing but the incessant use of fake news (read: propaganda) that keeps the Left alive.

Imagine, for example, if CNN had honestly and accurately reported then-candidate Barack Obama’s close ties to foreign terrorists (Rashid Khalidi), domestic terrorists (William Ayers), the mafia (Tony Rezko) or the true evils of his spiritual mentor, Jeremiah Wright’s, church.

Imagine if they had honestly and accurately conveyed the evils of the Obama administration’s weaponizing of the IRS to be used against their political opponents or his running of guns to the Mexican cartels or the truth about the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the Obama administration’s cover-up.

This makes “going high” a non-starter for CNN. This leaves them no other option but to ratchet up the fake news, conjuring up the next “nothing burger” and devoting 24 hours a day to hysterical rants about how it’s “worse than Nixon.”

This, obviously, is what CNN has chosen to do. The problem is that, as they become more and more hysterical, they become more and more obvious. Each new effort at even faker news than before and faker “outrage” only makes that much more clear to any objective observer that Trump is and always has been right about the fake news media.

And, by causing their hysteria, Trump has forced them into numerous, highly embarrassing and discrediting mistakes. Thus, in their desperation, they have lowered their standards even further and run with articles so clearly fake that, even with the liberal (lower case “l”) libel laws protecting the media, they’ve had to wholly retract and erase their stories repeatedly.

Their flailing at Trump has even seen them cross the line into criminality, with CNN using their vast corporate fortune to hunt down a private citizen for having made fun of them in an Internet meme. This threat to “dox” – release of personal information to encourage co-ideologists to visit violence upon him and his family -- a political satirist was chilling in that it clearly wasn’t meant just for him. If it were, there would have been no reason for CNN to have made their “deal” with him public.

Instead, CNN – playing by “Chicago Rules” – was sending a message to any and all: dissent will not be tolerated.

This heavy-handed and hysterical response to a joke on the Internet has backfired on CNN, giving rise to only more righteous ridicule.

So, to my friends on the Left – and the #NeverTrumpers as well -- do I wish we lived in a time when our president could be “collegial” and “dignified” and “proper”? Of course I do. These aren’t those times. This is war. And it’s a war that the Left has been fighting without opposition for the past 50 years.

So, say anything you want about this president – I get it, he can be vulgar, he can be crude, he can be undignified at times. I don’t care. I can’t spare this man. He fights. Evan Sayet is the author of The KinderGarden of Eden: How The Modern Liberal Thinks. His lecture to the Heritage Foundation on this same topic remains, some ten years later, by far the single most viewed lecture in their history. Evan can be reached at contactevansayet@gmail.com.