Quote of the Day!

Biden Administration is a disaster mitigated only by the quieter political atmosphere that has naturally resulted from replacing a deafening human tornado with a waxworks dummy.  Conrad Black

America Gone Mad

A report from abroad: Knowledgeable British and Europeans not only do not think America is back, they think it has gone mad. 

By Conrad Black October 26, 2021

After three weeks in Europe and extensive discussions with dozens of well-informed and highly placed individuals from most of the principal Western European countries, including leading members of the British government, I have the unpleasant duty of reporting complete incomprehension and incredulity at what Joe Biden and his collaborators encapsulate in the peppy but misleading phrase, “We’re back.” 

As one eminent elected British government official put it, “They are not back in any conventional sense of that word. We have worked closely with the Americans for many decades and we have never seen such a shambles of incompetent administration, diplomatic incoherence, and complete military ineptitude as we have seen in these nine months. We were startled by Trump, but he clearly knew what he was doing, whatever we or anyone else thought about it. This is just a disintegration of the authority of a great nation for no apparent reason.”

From the European perspective, American leadership of the West has produced excellent results and very few unpleasant surprises since the United States stepped into that role under Franklin D. Roosevelt in World War II. At that time, the entire future of Western civilization rested essentially upon the shoulders of just two men, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and it was the epochal good fortune of all of us that they were more than equal to their great task. The level of acuity and success of the subsequent administrations, as the competence of government of any nation must, has fluctuated. But the emphasis was on continuity, and the containment policy elaborated in the Truman Administration was generally followed through to the great bloodless victory of the West, as the Soviet Union crumbled and international Communism as we had known it evaporated..........To Read More.....

 

The Democrats’ Topsy-Turvy Spin Machine

The media can’t cover for Joe Biden’s “Gong Show” administration indefinitely.

By Conrad Black  July 12, 2021

The guessing game of how long the levitation of the Biden presidency can be taken seriously seems to be entering a new phase. The deluge of illegal entries into the United States at the southern border is now running at a rate of closer to 3 million than 2 million a year and yet we still see and hear the bobbling talking head of the Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas assuring us, “The southern border is closed.” 

The media has provided almost no coverage of this calamitous invasion. A recent Trafalgar poll found that 56 percent of Americans don’t think Joe Biden is “fully executing the duties of his office,” yet the docile White House press corps continues to ask him about his ice cream and other such probing questions of national interest. Apart from a rising stock market and a quieter atmosphere, the record of the new administration is one of almost complete failure. 

The oceanic influx of unskilled labor at the southern border cannot fail to aggravate unemployment and depress the incomes for the vulnerable sectors of what, under President Trump, was a fully employed workforce. The administration has reduced domestic oil production and squandered the country’s status as an energy self-sufficient state. These are all familiar issues to those who follow public affairs, but the 95 percent Democratic-supporting media preserve the cocoon of a fairyland Biden presidency, whose bumbling chief flatters himself with comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt..........To Read More....

The GOP’s Trump Solution

At some point, the former Republican establishment will have to familiarize itself with the consequences of being defeated by Donald Trump within its own party.

  By Conrad Black April 12, 2021

 

The Wall Street Journal on Friday published an editorial headlined “The GOP’s Trump Problem.” It gets things terribly wrong. The GOP is Trump’s party and it is the Wall Street Journal that has the Trump problem. 

Having been commendably supportive of the former president through most of his term, the Journal joined in the general embarkation of NeverTrumpers over the ostensible election results. The theory that inspired this headline is Trump had his chance but lost the election in a manner practically indistinguishable from defeated incumbents Jimmy Carter in 1980 and George H. W. Bush in 1992 (when there were no suggestions of questionable results). The editors suggest further that Trump had exhausted any grounds he had for contesting the fairness of the counting of ballots, and that it was his duty to go quietly into that good night and do everything that he could to elect Republican senators in Georgia to preserve the Republican majority in the Senate and to enhance the likelihood of the reelection next year of Governor Brian Kemp of Georgia and his secretary of state Brad Raffensperger.............To Read More.....

My Take - Interesting piece in contrast with these two diametrically opposing views.

• Kasich: Trump’s ‘Ugly’ Name-Calling Will ‘Continue to Shrink’ Republican Party 
• Flake: Trump ‘Plays Well to the Base, But It’s a Shrinking Base’

Here's the thing. These two are losers.  Flake really is a flake and Kasich, whom I've met, suffers from a serious case of weird compounded by a massive infection of hubris, and both suffer from the Mind Projection fallacy, where they see what's in their head, whether it's real or not.  Will Trump shrink the GOP?  Yes!  By driving out the invertebrates, collaborators and self-serving traitors like these two, and John Boehner, who's absolutely a disgrace, and if reports are correct, a drunk. 

 

 

Biden’s Big Bill Full of Nonsense Signifying Trouble

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun| April 1, 2021

President Biden’s infrastructure bill is a shopping cart full of left-wing causes, most of which have nothing to do with infrastructure. There is nothing in principle particularly wrong with omnibus bills covering a number of different policy objectives, but such misnomers as this proposal and the preceding Covid relief bill, 90% of which had nothing to do with the coronavirus, are irritating and insulting to the intelligence of the public.

The president is absolutely right to wish to address inadequate roads and bridges and railways and other notorious shortcomings of the country's basic services, and he is right to address the hydroelectric system in Texas, which failed so badly in the recent storms. This is one of the few areas, along with healthcare, where President Trump had promised action and failed to deliver it, and President Biden does deserve credit for moving to address these problems.

However, there are two particularly serious failings in the measure that he revealed in Pittsburgh on Wednesday afternoon. It is the largest peacetime tax increase in American history and it attempts to attach to infrastructure improvement climatological and environmental goals that have nothing to do with the purported subject to the legislation and are in themselves substantially spurious.........To Read More.... 

 

• Exclusive — Scalise: Biden ‘Infrastructure’ Bill Uses ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Send More Jobs to China’ ‘They’re Not Even Being Honest’ About Keystone XL
• Exclusive – Gohmert: Biden Unveiled Infrastructure Plan to ‘Distract’ from ‘Horrors’ of Border Crisis
• ‘Go Green’: Biden ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Includes Effort to ‘Improve Our School Kitchens’ to ‘Prepare Nutritious Meals’
  
  

In Defense of Diana West

September 13, 2013 By M. Stanton Evans @ CNSNews

(Editor's Note:  How did the federal government become so infested with leftists?  This article clarifies how that happened during the FDR years, and he had to know it!    

I originally posted this in 2013 as a link.  However, given events as they're unfolding, I think it absolutely important to get as much coverage of this as possible, ergo, I've decided to post the entire piece without permission.  

If CNSNews or M. Stanton Evans object I will adjust it back to a linked article. Also, for transparency sake, I took a public position defending Diana West against Radosh and Horowitz during their irrational and illogical attacks against her, online and in my articles.  

If you haven't read American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character or Stalin's Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt's Government, I wholeheartedly recommend you do so. RK)

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War.

At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by Communists and Soviet agents, linking the presence of these forces to U.S. policies that appeased the Russians or served the interests of the Kremlin.

For making this critique, Ms. West has been bitterly attacked by writers Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz, Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black, and a considerable crew of others. The burden of their complaint is that she is a "conspiracy theorist" and right wing nut whose views are far outside the mainstream of historical writing, and that she should not have presumed to write such a book about these important matters. 

Though the professed stance of her opponents is that of scholarly condescension, the language being used against Ms. West doesn't read like scholarly discourse. She is, we're told, "McCarthy on steroids," "unhinged," a "right-wing loopy," not properly "house trained," "incompetent," purveying "a farrago of lies," and a good deal else of similar nature.  All of which looks more like the politics of personal destruction than debate about serious academic issues.

From my standpoint, however, what is going on here seems to be something more than personal. Having delved into these matters a bit, I think I recognize the process that's in motion:  the circling of rhetorical wagons around a long accepted narrative about the Second World War and the Cold War conflict that followed.

This narrative  sets the limits of permissible comment about American Cold War policy, bounded on the one side by Roosevelt and Hopkins, representing generally speaking  the forces of good (appeasing Moscow, e.g. , only in order to win the war with Hitler), and on the other by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, the supposed epitome of evil.  Between these boundaries, variations are allowed, but woe betide the writer who goes beyond them. Ms. West has transgressed in both directions, sharply criticizing Roosevelt/ Hopkins and speaking kindly of Joe McCarthy.

(Full disclosure: I provided a cover endorsement for Ms. West's book, and wrote a book of my own some years ago examining the myriad cases of McCarthy.  Based on that background, I can testify that conventional views about him are almost totally devoid of merit, based as they are on extensive ignorance of the archival record.)

Especially galling to West's critics is her contention that Washington in the war years was so riddled with Communists and Soviet agents as to be in effect an "occupied" city  -- an image that seems to have sparked the greatest anger and most denunciation of her thesis.

By using the "occupied" image, Ms. West is of course not saying Soviet tanks were patrolling the streets of Washington, or that Red martial law was imposed on its cowering citizens.  What she is arguing instead is that Soviet agents, Communists and fellow travelers held official posts, or served at chokepoints of intelligence data, and from these positions were able to exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy.  Though ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this view is overwhelming.

It is for instance abundantly plain, from multiple sources of Cold War intel, that Communist/pro-Soviet penetration of the government under FDR was massive, numbering in the many hundreds.  These pro-Red incursions started in the New Deal era of the 1930s, then accelerated in the war years when the Soviets were our allies and safeguards against Communist infiltration were all but nonexistent. The scope of the problem was expressed as follows in an FBI report  to Director J. Edgar Hoover:

"It has become increasingly clear... that there are a tremendous number of persons employed in the United States government who are Communists and who strive daily to advance the cause of Communism and destroy the foundations of this government. Today nearly every department or agency is infiltrated with them in varying degree.. To aggravate the situation, they appear to have concentrated most heavily in departments which make policy, or carry it into effect..."

Pro-Red penetration was especially heavy in such war-time agencies as the Office of Strategic Services and Office of War Information, which were thrown together in a hurry at the outset of the conflict, with little thought for anti-Communist security vetting.  But the problem was acute also in old-line agencies such as the State and Treasury departments, both of which by war's end were honeycombed with Soviet agents.( Making matters worse, anti-Soviet officials and diplomats were in the meantime being purged from their positions.)

Far from being lowly spear carriers on the fringes,  pro-Soviet operatives in case after case ascended to posts of great power and influence. Among the most famous-though only three of a considerable number-were Alger Hiss at the State Department, Harry D. White at the Treasury and Lauchlin Currie at the White House. All of these, as we now know, were Soviet agents, well positioned to affect the course of American policy in matters of concern to Soviet dictator Stalin.

A prime example of such policy impact occurred during the earliest wartime going, in the prelude to Pearl Harbor. At this time, Soviet agents White and Currie maneuvered  to prevent a truce between the United States and Japan, which might have freed up the Japanese military for an assault on Russia, an attack Stalin was desperate to fend off while he was embroiled in Europe with the Nazis.

In this maneuvering,  White worked with the Soviet intelligence service KGB, and in parallel with the efforts of a  Soviet spy combine in Tokyo, headed by the German Communist Richard Sorge.  The Sorge group sought to persuade the Japanese that there was no percentage in attacking Russia-- that there were much more inviting targets to be found down south in the Pacific. One such target turned out to be the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.

In the State Department, while Alger Hiss would become the most notorious Soviet agent of the war years, he was far from going solo. According to a long concealed but now recovered report compiled by security officers of the State Department, there were at war's end no fewer than 20 identified agents such as Hiss on the payroll, plus 13 identified Communists and 90 other suspects and sympathizers serving with him.

Like the FBI report saying "nearly every department" of the Federal government was infiltrated by Communist apparatchiks, these staggering numbers from the State Department security force look suspiciously like the description of a de facto "occupation" given in Ms. West's supposedly unhinged essay.

At the Treasury, there were at least a dozen Communists and Soviet agents, headed by Harry White, who exerted influence on a host of issues.  In late 1943, to cite a prominent instance, White and his fellow Soviet agent Solomon Adler, Treasury attaché in China, launched a disinformation campaign to discredit our anti-Communist ally Chiang Kai-shek, deny him U.S. assistance, and turn U.S. policy in favor of the Communists under Mao Tse-tung.

This campaign, aided by  Adler's State Department Chungking roommate John Stewart Service and other U.S. diplomats in China, succeeded, with results that we are still living with today.  Meanwhile, an identical propaganda campaign was waged by U.S. and British pro-Red officials to discredit the anti-Communists of the Balkans, in order to deliver control of Yugoslavia to the Communist Tito. This, too, succeeded, resulting in the communization of the country and capture and murder by Tito of his anti-Communist rival, Gen. Draza Mihailovich .

In the  summer of 1944, White and his pro-Moscow Treasury colleagues played a crucial role in devising the so-called "Morgenthau plan" for Germany, which would have converted the country into a purely agrarian nation. They were involved as well in plans to turn two million desperate anti- Soviet refugees over to the Russians, and a slave labor proviso that would  herd millions into the Soviet Gulag.

All these projects would be promoted in the run-up to a 1944 Roosevelt- Churchill summit in Quebec, later becoming American policy in Europe. At an in-house meeting just before the summit, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. met with a group of his staffers and praised them for the excellent plans they had developed. Of these advisers no fewer than six would later be identified under oath and in secret security data as ideological Communists or Soviet agents. That  amazing line-up of pro-Moscow assets at a single U.S. Treasury meeting would once more seem to justify the "occupied" description.

As to how such improbable things could happen under FDR, a post-script to the above is  suggestive. Though Roosevelt signed off on the Morgenthau plan at Quebec, when he was later challenged on it by War Secretary Henry Stimson, he said he didn't know how he could have done so-that he "had evidently done it without much thought."  As that response implied, the President at this time was failing badly in his powers, and would fail even more dramatically in the months to follow.

Which leads to a provisional wrap-up of this discussion.  The culmination of the policy debacle of the war years occurred in 1945 at Yalta, where the American delegation headed by FDR made innumerable concessions to the Russians: slave labor for the Gulag as post-war "reparations" to the Kremlin , turning anti-Soviet refugees over to Moscow, Soviet control of Manchuria's ports and railways-presaging the Red conquest of China.  A leading member of the American delegation that agreed to all of this was none other than the now famous Soviet  agent, Alger Hiss.

In court histories and Roosevelt biographies, we're told that Hiss at Yalta was no big deal-an insignificant figure without substantive influence on the proceedings.  As the archival records show, this is grossly in error.  In fact, Hiss in the Yalta discussions was a ubiquitous  and highly active presence, dealing as a virtual equal with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and speaking out on numerous issues-China prominent among them-voicing the "State Department" or "United States" position in  backstage meetings.

Scanning these records, it's obvious that Hiss was far more conversant with issues and events at Yalta than was his inexperienced nominal chieftain , Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. (all of two months on the job). As with Joe McCarthy, our historians might be  advised to consult the primary data on such matters, rather than re-cycling Hiss-was-no-problem comment from secondary sources.

Granted, getting at the primary data takes some digging, as many relevant records have been buried, censored or omitted from official archives.  Presidential secrecy orders, disappearing papers, folders missing from the files, two manipulated grand juries (that we know of) used to cover up the extent and nature of the penetration ; all these methods and more were employed in the 1940s to keep the shocking story from Congress and the public.  And, sad to relate, in some considerable measure the cover up continues now, in court histories that neglect  archival data to repeat once more the standard narrative of the war years.

Diana West's important book is a valiant effort to break through this wall of secrecy and selective silence.  Her work in some respects touches on matters beyond my ken-such as Soviet treatment of American POWs-- where I am not competent to judge .  But on issues where our researches coincide-and these are many-I find her knowledgeable and on target, far more so than the conventional histories compared to which she is said to be found wanting . As the above suggests, her notion of wartime Washington as an "occupied" city, and the data that back it up, are especially cogent.

 

U.S. Set To Test How Much Ruin Nation Can Take

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | January 15, 2021 

Assertions that 2020 was a crazy year are literally true. It is clear that we should never have listened to, or at least taken seriously, the advice of public-health experts to shut down the economy of the Western world in order to “flatten the curve” of the increase in the incidence of the coronavirus. 

There was early evidence of the inordinate vulnerability of elderly people and those with other significant ailments, and there was also plenty of evidence that a great many people had minimal symptoms or none at all, that we were only detecting a small minority of those who contracted the coronavirus, and that 80% of those who were deemed to have died from it had in fact died with it and other ailments, making the identification of the cause of death difficult..............To Read More....

Democrats Descend To Appalling State Of Incivility

By Conrad Black Special to the Sun, September 15, 2020

Seven weeks from the 2020 election, American politics have reached such an appalling state of incivility that there is no precedent for it in American presidential history.

Of course, there was terrible acrimony between Jefferson and Hamilton, and by and against Andrew Jackson, and in the awful contentiousness leading up to and through the Civil War. Theodore Roosevelt called William Jennings Bryan a “logothete and a human trombone.” Many raved against Franklin D. Roosevelt as a communist.

As a young man, I was shocked to hear on the radio in 1956 someone say of President Eisenhower (whose memorial is being unveiled in Washington this week): “I cannot vote for a sick old man with one foot in the grave and the other in his mouth.” The Nixon era produced its own levels of opprobrium, ending in crowds singing “Jail to the chief,” and it became tiresome to hear Ronald Reagan described, in the words of Washington legal eminence Clark Clifford, as “an amiable dunce.”
None of this has prepared us for the sea-to-sea, round-the-clock mud-slinging of the 2020 campaign.

None of this has prepared us for the sea-to-sea, round-the-clock mud-slinging of the 2020 campaign.
I wrote last week how I was shocked that Peggy Noonan described President Trump in the Wall Street Journal on September 5 as “a malignancy metastasizing in the oval office.” A week later, she fell to mind-reading, as less distinguished journalists and indifferent historians frequently do, and announced that the president, a graduate of the New York Military Institute and the greatest White House friend the American military has had at least since General Eisenhower, believes with the elder son of the Godfather (in the famous Coppola film), that people who join the armed forces are fools because their personal interests are not directly involved..........To Read More....

Democrats Levy Phony Campaign Against Trump

By Conrad Black Special to the Sun August 7, 2020 

The Democrats became so addicted to their need for President Trump to be permanently under a cloud of criminal suspicion for their press lackeys to celebrate endlessly, that their present discomfort is considerable as the weight of prosecutorial scrutiny shifts to another — that is, to their — foot.

The performance of the former acting attorney general, Sally Yates, at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday was the most dignified and plausible attempt yet by any serious Obama Administration official to try to maintain the fiction that its justice department and intelligence agencies didn’t go rogue and assault the Constitution.

Ms. Yates maintained what has become the quaint, almost twee, Democratic preoccupation with Russia — an affected paranoia that nostalgically recalls the piping days of the Cold War when the Kremlin and American leaders routinely intimated an ability to obliterate the other..........Does anyone, except the Stelter-Tapper-Blitzer-Scarborough nether region of liberal cable-loopies, still pay any attention to this bunk?............All of these Democratic myths are fraying at the edges...............To Read More...

My Take - Okay, I've never seen the word twee in my life, unless it involved someone with a speech impediment who couldn't pronounce the letter "r".  But it's a word and it has a definition. 

twee - /twē/ adjective British adjective: twee; comparative adjective: tweer; superlative adjective: tweest - excessively or affectedly quaint, pretty, or sentimental

Since I wouldn't be surprised to find 99.9% of the well read population of the world would have to look it up, the only question I have is, why use it? 

Tags: Coronavirus | Donald Trump | Health Topics | Trump Administration

By Conrad Black

It's almost unbelievable that the Democrats have allowed themselves to be so completely out-maneuvered by President Trump in the coronavirus and economic crises. They are all calling for an indefinite protraction of the economic hemorrhage, with unemployment increasing by hundreds of thousands every day, even as the incidence of the virus declines.

The Democrats started out with every advantage: the crisis came out of the blue and burst over the administration. As soon as there was any hint of how aggressive and dangerous the virus was, the anti-Trump press went wild — frightening the public with visions of a bubonic plague that threatened the life of everyone despite the fact that approximately 98% of people under 65 who get the coronavirus, survive it.

At first, Trump was a bit blase'  about "the flu." But then, as he noted the potential scope of the problem and stopped direct flights from China on January 31, he was accused of "racism" and "xenophobia" by those pendants of the Democratic weltanschauung, likely presidential nominee Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

As drastic forecasts of immense numbers of fatalities started tumbling out of ostensibly credible centers of epidemiology, the new refrain was that Trump was a moronic enemy of science......To Read More...

It’s the Democrats Who Are Facing Moment of Truth

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | February 4, 2020

Tomorrow the Democratic Party is scheduled to be removed from the life support system that has sustained it these past four years: the fraudulently and almost certainly illegally confected condition of Donald Trump being under a legal and ethical cloud............Yet as the impeachment controversy demonstrated and as all polls confirm, the Republican Party is now rock-solid behind the president. The Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who told Republican congressional candidates four years ago that they would “drop (Trump) like a hot rock,” has smoothly conducted his partisans toward the quick dismissal of this unfounded impeachment effort..............

For more than three years we have heard that “The walls are closing in” on Mr. Trump, with the “drip, drip, drip” of cumulative damaging revelations. Those predictions apply with perfect accuracy to the Democrats...........

The Democrats have an inadequate group of implausible candidates, appear to be fixing up their convention to sandbag Bernie Sanders again and perhaps to make an energetic effort to sell themselves to Michael Bloomberg...........

For good measure, whatever tatters are left of the ethical gap with Mr. Trump will almost certainly be blown away by the conclusions of U.S. Attorney John Durham when he has finished looking at the official harassment of the Trump campaign in 2016............

The Democrats’ walls are not closing in — they are crumbling, and they are about to be overrun by the fierce army of the president’s scores of millions of supporters, those whom the Democrats reviled as focused on “guns and religion,” the “deplorables” who, we learned from House impeachment managers last week, must not be allowed to reelect the country’s leader...........To Read More...

New Anti-Trump Ploy Is Conjuring A Recession

CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | August 23, 2019

The latest ploy of the anti-Trump press phalanx, and their weekly echo chamber of assorted Democratic candidates and legislators, is to try to move the voter-approval needle by insisting an economic recession is about to occur. The problem is, it isn't.

As weeks pass without a recession or even increasing objective statistical hints of a recession, the continued trumpeting of a recession becomes self-stifling. Not even the economically illiterate mouthpieces of CNN and MSNBC can keep a straight face for long predicting recession when there are no signs it is happening.............Continue Reading

Language Is First Casualty of the 2020 Campaign

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | August 13, 2019

Election campaigns, especially those that begin as prematurely as this one, are rarely the optimal occasions for intelligently original use of language. Still, the present pre-electoral shouting match in the United States is setting records in several categories. The Trump-haters have plumbed the depths of opprobrious adjectives and have now routinized the misapplication of the word “Nazi” and other terminology of the Third Reich to this president and administration.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in my observation the first to compare the crowded but adequate detention centers on the southern border, where the detainees are fed as if they had free passes at McDonald’s, as “concentration camps.” She avoided the evidently tendentious expression “death camps,” but there is no reason to imagine that most Americans would know the difference.

However, with the eruption of outlandish billingsgate that followed the El Paso and Dayton shootings, Beto O’Rourke, as the apparently least intelligent of the Democratic presidential candidates, was the first out of the starting blocks to call the president a Nazi.........To Read More....

My Take - I saw the interview with Trapper Jack and watched Beto babble on unendingly, like a high school kid begging for the adults attention.  The thought I walked away with from that interview?  Can you imagine having to listen to this kid babble on saying nothing for four years?  Oh, wait, we had that for eight years with Obama.  Only he was much better at saying nothing.  

As for George Will?  Who cares? He's toast!  The right overall will no longer read him and the left doesn't care what he has to say.  He's an arrogant elitist beyond belief, and as a result, he threw himself into the abyss, and will never recover.  His nose is stuck so high air that he would drown in a rain storm.

Why the Left So Despises Donald Trump

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun | July 26, 2019

Like many others, I have for some time been trying to understand Trump Derangement Syndrome, the phenomenon of otherwise reasonable people reacting irrationally to some peculiar quality of the president, a quality especially in evidence when he is in the presence of his supporters.

Some of it is easy enough to comprehend. Unlike any president since at least Jackson, Mr. Trump was elected by attacking the entire political class from right to left and practically all leaders of both parties and the parties themselves. He managed to stir up enough discontent to win the nomination of one of the parties and then got just enough votes in the right places to win the election...........Continue Reading

EU Is Britain's Biggest Failure Since George III

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | July 12, 2019

The long nightmare of Britain's relations with the European Union, the greatest failing of British government since the American Revolution, is finally coming to a climax. The flamboyant former mayor of London, Boris Johnson, is almost certain to be the next leader of the British Conservative Party and prime minister.

The crisis began when former prime minister David Cameron promised “full-on treaty change” and came back from Brussels with less than Neville Chamberlain brought back from Munich. He had promised a referendum offering his almost imperceptibly altered treaty or a complete break, Brexit it is called, certain that his countrymen could not possibly vote to leave Europe. If he had brought back May’s eventual proposal, voters would have approved it...........To Read More...

My Take - Finally, someone who sees and articulates this clearly.  The EU was always going to have serious problems, and their solutions were always the same. Irrationally imposed mandates on the countries by bureaucrats who were as out of control, as are the EPA and other bureaucracies making laws that are called regulations that no one votes on. 

Black talks about warnings from Margaret Thatcher and Charles De Gaulle as to the unworkability of a unified Europe.  But long before that the Iron Chancellor of Germany himself, Otto Von Bismarck, noted in the late 1800's that Europe wasn't a country like the American states, which shares a common language and culture.  Europe was nothing more than a geographical designation.  A land mass with different languages, and seriously different cultures. 

Could this failure have been avoided by keeping the bureaucrats under control? No!  Europe has always been a divided continent with no shared vision, other than an underlying social paradigm for socialist systems.  Which is exactly what the left is working to impose on the United States. 

The EU will soon collapse, but this eventual outcome should have been obvious to the most casual observer.

Democrats Are Painted Into a Corner

If the Democrats are really tempted by impeachment, bring it on

By Conrad Black, Special to the Sun | May 23, 2019

Since the day after the 2016 election they have been threatening this, placing their chips on the Russian-collusion fantasy and then on the phantasmagoric charade of obstruction of justice. The attorney general accurately gave the ingredients of the offense of obstruction of justice in his four-page summary of the Mueller report: a corrupt act for corrupt purposes in contemplation of a legal proceeding.

The attorney general, William Barr, the then deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein, and the Justice Department counsel concurred that none of the elements was present in the conduct of the president as recounted by Mr. Mueller. The dream died, except in the febrile imagination of the Democrats, who launched an unfounded attack on the attorney general’s integrity.............

But in their desperation and denial after the unimaginable victory of someone pledged to clean out the entire political class that has ruled America since the Reagan years, the Democrats paid $10 million for a false dossier on Mr. Trump, corrupted and politicized the intelligence services and the FBI, set up an echo chamber of self-verification with the national media Trump had already reviled as dishonest, and provoked the creation of a special counsel to look into Trump–Russian collusion.

The Republican congressional leaders sat on their hands to see if the leader none of them had supported would be impeached, and the Democrats and their scripted press choristers smugly carped and waited like noisy crocodiles for their victim to be reduced to inert helplessness. Guess what.
Mr. Mueller did his best, with a character assassination of the president from selected Star Chamber testimony of no legal relevance and an attempt to pull the pin on a damp grenade by citing a series of legally innocuous facts and declaring an inability to exonerate for obstruction, though collusion with Russia was hopeless....................

The Democrats are left at a crossroads: keep swinging like punch-drunk prizefighters lashing out when they hear the bell of a passing streetcar, or abandon the impeachment ship while there is still room in the lifeboats.  The president has won his spurs with his own party. While they waited as mute and spineless spectators, he wrestled the Russian-collusion leopard off his back and slew it.

The porcine judiciary chairman, Jerry Nadler, a virulent enemy of Mr. Trump for 30 years, splutters with righteousness, but he has no legal right nor the decisive political support to start all over again after Mr. Mueller has come up empty-handed.............If Speaker Pelosi can’t restrain the far-left imbeciles from voting impeachment............Democrats have painted themselves into a corner. They must put up or shut up, impeach or back down. .............Their attempt at regicide has failed completely; it’s still a bit of a long shot, but they might just manage suicide, not from justified conscientious shame, but out of witless antagonism............To Read More.....

Justice for Conrad Black

Editorial of The New York Sun | May 15, 2019

Conrad Black stood before a federal judge in Chicago to hear his final prison sentence, all that was left of the fraud case against him was a single count. He was given a chance to make a statement. “I never ask for mercy," he told the judge, "but I do ask for avoidance of injustice." It was a sad thing for our country and for newspaperdom, we wrote at the time, that his request was denied.

All the greater the glory today, when President Trump reached for the ultimate tool our Constitution provides for the crafting of justice. The president used his pardon power to void the injustice in a case that should never have been launched. In the constitutional and legal sense, the pardon makes things the same as if Conrad Black had never been convicted at all.

There was never a moment in this case that we doubted Conrad Black’s innocence. Nor was that simply because his company was one of the founding partners in the New York Sun and he one of its founding directors. He’d already sold his interest and resigned from the Sun’s board. Nor was it because — as Humphrey Bogart put it — “he was your partner, and you're supposed to do something about it.” ...............To Read More......

George Will’s Spleen Defeats His Good Sense

By Conrad Black| January 24th, 2019

Once again, it is my unpleasant duty to take issue with my friend of nearly 40 years, the eminent commentator George Will. On January 18, he published a column in the Washington Post entitled, “The Shabbiest U.S. President Ever Is an Inexpressibly Sad Specimen.” Will has deployed his formidable polemical talents very consistently in describing the president before and since his inauguration as a vulgar, uncultured, impulsive, frequently infantile, erratic, shallow, and in his present position, dangerous man.

Unfortunately, some of the president’s less likeable foibles vest Will’s strictures with some plausibility. But as in his many previous verbal assaults on this president, Will’s policy objections to the administration are sparse and unsubstantial.

Will grants himself extreme liberties in psychoanalyzing the president, imputing motives to him, and mind-reading generally. He is, as he has sometimes said, like all of us, an “unlicensed psychiatrist,” an admission which acknowledges the unrigorous nature of these reflections, however entertainingly formulated.

Among President Trump’s many unusual accomplishments, he has reduced a number of America’s, and other countries’ most distinguished commentators to repetitive and vertiginously escalating invective almost devoid of serious analysis. Will and many others, every week, are just putting old wine in new bottles.

Will’s January 18 column describes “this incessantly splenetic presidency.” That is inaccurate as a description of Trump, but is a fair description of Will and many other commentators, who would, in earlier times, deserve to be read assiduously and considered seriously. Donald Trump is generally behaving more or less as he has in all the 40 years he has been a well-known public figure. It is George Will and many other generally less exalted observers of the Washington political scene who have abandoned all claims to reasoned analysis, and have been completely predictable and steadily more extreme in their disparagement of the president and his administration...........To Read More....

In Defense of Diana West

September 13, 2013 By M. Stanton Evans @ CNSNews

(Editor's Note:  This is how the federal government became so infested with leftists.  In 2013 I posted this piece as a link.  However, given events as they're unfolding, I think it absolutely important to get as much coverage of this as possible, ergo, I've decided to post the entire piece without permission.  If CNSNews or M. Stanton Evans object I will adjust it back to a linked article. Also, for transparency sake, I took a public position defending Diana West during her during the attacks by Radosh and Horowitz.  On line and in my articles.  RK)

Out of the public eye and far from the daily headlines, a fierce verbal battle is currently being waged about the course of American policy in the long death struggle with Moscow that we call the Cold War.

At ground zero of this new dispute is author Diana West, whose recent book, American Betrayal (St. Martin's), is a hard- hitting critique of the strategy toward the Soviet Union pursued in the 1940s by President Franklin Roosevelt, his top assistant Harry Hopkins, and various of their colleagues. Ms. West in particular stresses the infiltration of the government of that era by Communists and Soviet agents, linking the presence of these forces to U.S. policies that appeased the Russians or served the interests of the Kremlin.

For making this critique, Ms. West has been bitterly attacked by writers Ronald Radosh and David Horowitz, Roosevelt biographer Conrad Black, and a considerable crew of others. The burden of their complaint is that she is a "conspiracy theorist" and right wing nut whose views are far outside the mainstream of historical writing, and that she should not have presumed to write such a book about these important matters. 

Though the professed stance of her opponents is that of scholarly condescension, the language being used against Ms. West doesn't read like scholarly discourse. She is, we're told, "McCarthy on steroids," "unhinged," a "right-wing loopy," not properly "house trained," "incompetent," purveying "a farrago of lies," and a good deal else of similar nature.  All of which looks more like the politics of personal destruction than debate about serious academic issues.

From my standpoint, however, what is going on here seems to be something more than personal. Having delved into these matters a bit, I think I recognize the process that's in motion:  the circling of rhetorical wagons around a long accepted narrative about the Second World War and the Cold War conflict that followed.

This narrative  sets the limits of permissible comment about American Cold War policy, bounded on the one side by Roosevelt and Hopkins, representing generally speaking  the forces of good (appeasing Moscow, e.g. , only in order to win the war with Hitler), and on the other by Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, the supposed epitome of evil.  Between these boundaries, variations are allowed, but woe betide the writer who goes beyond them. Ms. West has transgressed in both directions, sharply criticizing Roosevelt/ Hopkins and speaking kindly of Joe McCarthy.

(Full disclosure: I provided a cover endorsement for Ms. West's book, and wrote a book of my own some years ago examining the myriad cases of McCarthy.  Based on that background, I can testify that conventional views about him are almost totally devoid of merit, based as they are on extensive ignorance of the archival record.)

Especially galling to West's critics is her contention that Washington in the war years was so riddled with Communists and Soviet agents as to be in effect an "occupied" city  -- an image that seems to have sparked the greatest anger and most denunciation of her thesis.

By using the "occupied" image, Ms. West is of course not saying Soviet tanks were patrolling the streets of Washington, or that Red martial law was imposed on its cowering citizens.  What she is arguing instead is that Soviet agents, Communists and fellow travelers held official posts, or served at chokepoints of intelligence data, and from these positions were able to exert pro-Soviet leverage on U.S. and other allied policy.  Though ignored in many conventional histories, the evidence to support this view is overwhelming.

It is for instance abundantly plain, from multiple sources of Cold War intel, that Communist/pro-Soviet penetration of the government under FDR was massive, numbering in the many hundreds.  These pro-Red incursions started in the New Deal era of the 1930s, then accelerated in the war years when the Soviets were our allies and safeguards against Communist infiltration were all but nonexistent. The scope of the problem was expressed as follows in an FBI report  to Director J. Edgar Hoover:

"It has become increasingly clear... that there are a tremendous number of persons employed in the United States government who are Communists and who strive daily to advance the cause of Communism and destroy the foundations of this government. Today nearly every department or agency is infiltrated with them in varying degree.. To aggravate the situation, they appear to have concentrated most heavily in departments which make policy, or carry it into effect..."

Pro-Red penetration was especially heavy in such war-time agencies as the Office of Strategic Services and Office of War Information, which were thrown together in a hurry at the outset of the conflict, with little thought for anti-Communist security vetting.  But the problem was acute also in old-line agencies such as the State and Treasury departments, both of which by war's end were honeycombed with Soviet agents.( Making matters worse, anti-Soviet officials and diplomats were in the meantime being purged from their positions.)

Far from being lowly spear carriers on the fringes,  pro-Soviet operatives in case after case ascended to posts of great power and influence. Among the most famous-though only three of a considerable number-were Alger Hiss at the State Department, Harry D. White at the Treasury and Lauchlin Currie at the White House. All of these, as we now know, were Soviet agents, well positioned to affect the course of American policy in matters of concern to Soviet dictator Stalin.

A prime example of such policy impact occurred during the earliest wartime going, in the prelude to Pearl Harbor. At this time, Soviet agents White and Currie maneuvered  to prevent a truce between the United States and Japan, which might have freed up the Japanese military for an assault on Russia, an attack Stalin was desperate to fend off while he was embroiled in Europe with the Nazis.

In this maneuvering,  White worked with the Soviet intelligence service KGB, and in parallel with the efforts of a  Soviet spy combine in Tokyo, headed by the German Communist Richard Sorge.  The Sorge group sought to persuade the Japanese that there was no percentage in attacking Russia-- that there were much more inviting targets to be found down south in the Pacific. One such target turned out to be the American naval base at Pearl Harbor.

In the State Department, while Alger Hiss would become the most notorious Soviet agent of the war years, he was far from going solo. According to a long concealed but now recovered report compiled by security officers of the State Department, there were at war's end no fewer than 20 identified agents such as Hiss on the payroll, plus 13 identified Communists and 90 other suspects and sympathizers serving with him.

Like the FBI report saying "nearly every department" of the Federal government was infiltrated by Communist apparatchiks, these staggering numbers from the State Department security force look suspiciously like the description of a de facto "occupation" given in Ms. West's supposedly unhinged essay.

At the Treasury, there were at least a dozen Communists and Soviet agents, headed by Harry White, who exerted influence on a host of issues.  In late 1943, to cite a prominent instance, White and his fellow Soviet agent Solomon Adler, Treasury attaché in China, launched a disinformation campaign to discredit our anti-Communist ally Chiang Kai-shek, deny him U.S. assistance, and turn U.S. policy in favor of the Communists under Mao Tse-tung.

This campaign, aided by  Adler's State Department Chungking roommate John Stewart Service and other U.S. diplomats in China, succeeded, with results that we are still living with today.  Meanwhile, an identical propaganda campaign was waged by U.S. and British pro-Red officials to discredit the anti-Communists of the Balkans, in order to deliver control of Yugoslavia to the Communist Tito. This, too, succeeded, resulting in the communization of the country and capture and murder by Tito of his anti-Communist rival, Gen. Draza Mihailovich .

In the  summer of 1944, White and his pro-Moscow Treasury colleagues played a crucial role in devising the so-called "Morgenthau plan" for Germany, which would have converted the country into a purely agrarian nation. They were involved as well in plans to turn two million desperate anti- Soviet refugees over to the Russians, and a slave labor proviso that would  herd millions into the Soviet Gulag.

All these projects would be promoted in the run-up to a 1944 Roosevelt- Churchill summit in Quebec, later becoming American policy in Europe. At an in-house meeting just before the summit, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. met with a group of his staffers and praised them for the excellent plans they had developed. Of these advisers no fewer than six would later be identified under oath and in secret security data as ideological Communists or Soviet agents. That  amazing line-up of pro-Moscow assets at a single U.S. Treasury meeting would once more seem to justify the "occupied" description.

As to how such improbable things could happen under FDR, a post-script to the above is  suggestive. Though Roosevelt signed off on the Morgenthau plan at Quebec, when he was later challenged on it by War Secretary Henry Stimson, he said he didn't know how he could have done so-that he "had evidently done it without much thought."  As that response implied, the President at this time was failing badly in his powers, and would fail even more dramatically in the months to follow.

Which leads to a provisional wrap-up of this discussion.  The culmination of the policy debacle of the war years occurred in 1945 at Yalta, where the American delegation headed by FDR made innumerable concessions to the Russians: slave labor for the Gulag as post-war "reparations" to the Kremlin , turning anti-Soviet refugees over to Moscow, Soviet control of Manchuria's ports and railways-presaging the Red conquest of China.  A leading member of the American delegation that agreed to all of this was none other than the now famous Soviet  agent, Alger Hiss.

In court histories and Roosevelt biographies, we're told that Hiss at Yalta was no big deal-an insignificant figure without substantive influence on the proceedings.  As the archival records show, this is grossly in error.  In fact, Hiss in the Yalta discussions was a ubiquitous  and highly active presence, dealing as a virtual equal with British foreign secretary Anthony Eden, and speaking out on numerous issues-China prominent among them-voicing the "State Department" or "United States" position in  backstage meetings.

Scanning these records, it's obvious that Hiss was far more conversant with issues and events at Yalta than was his inexperienced nominal chieftain , Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr. (all of two months on the job). As with Joe McCarthy, our historians might be  advised to consult the primary data on such matters, rather than re-cycling Hiss-was-no-problem comment from secondary sources.

Granted, getting at the primary data takes some digging, as many relevant records have been buried, censored or omitted from official archives.  Presidential secrecy orders, disappearing papers, folders missing from the files, two manipulated grand juries (that we know of) used to cover up the extent and nature of the penetration ; all these methods and more were employed in the 1940s to keep the shocking story from Congress and the public.  And, sad to relate, in some considerable measure the cover up continues now, in court histories that neglect  archival data to repeat once more the standard narrative of the war years.

Diana West's important book is a valiant effort to break through this wall of secrecy and selective silence.  Her work in some respects touches on matters beyond my ken-such as Soviet treatment of American POWs-- where I am not competent to judge .  But on issues where our researches coincide-and these are many-I find her knowledgeable and on target, far more so than the conventional histories compared to which she is said to be found wanting . As the above suggests, her notion of wartime Washington as an "occupied" city, and the data that back it up, are especially cogent.