Ryan Gives Surprisingly Pro-Trump Speech at Republican Convention

On Tuesday night, House speaker Paul Ryan gave a surprisingly enthusiastic speech on behalf of Donald Trump, imploring Republicans to give it their all in 2016 and "unify this party" in the interest of achieving "a conservative governing majority."

Here is an edited version of Ryan's remarks:

"…Democracy is a series of choices. We Republicans have made our choice. Have we had our arguments this year? Sure, we have. You know what I call those? Signs of life, signs of a party that's not just going through the motions, not just mouthing new words for the same old stuff….

"Watch the Democratic Party convention next week, that four-day infomercial of politically correct moralizing, and let it be a reminder of all that is at stake in this election.

"You can get through four days of it with a little help from the mute button, but four more years of it?

"...Look, the Obama years are almost over. The Clinton years are way over. 2016 is the year America moves on!

"…Progressives like to talk, like our president, like to talk forever about poverty in America. And if high-sounding talk did any good, we'd have overcome those deep problems long ago. This explains why under the most liberal president we have had so far, poverty in America is worse, especially for our fellow citizens who were promised better and who need it most.

"The result is a record of discarded promises, empty gestures, phony straw-man arguments, reforms put off forever, shady power plays like the one that gave us Obamacare, constitutional limits brushed off as nothing, and all the while dangers in the world downplayed, even as the threats go bolder and come closer.

"It's the last chapter of an old story. Progressives deliver everything except progress.

SOURCE

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A Culturally Suicidal Progressive Ideology

We either reject progressive ideology, or endure a "reasonable" amount of terror as the new normal.

Unless Western society is willing to commit mass suicide — and one cannot say for certain that it isn’t — we cannot abide a bankrupt progressive ideology whose symbiotic relationship with Islamic terror can no longer be disputed.

The latest attack in Nice was perpetrated by Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, another Islamic State-recruited savage representing an equally bankrupt political system governed by Sharia Law. One whose “Religion of Peace™” component can only be separated from the whole by Muslim apostates and deluded progressives. Progressives who imagine they are welcoming one without the other into their nations. Progressives so corrupted by political correctness they are incapable of seeing — or are willing to abide — the disintegration of their own nations, lest they offend the enemies of civilization.

The roots of progressive rot run deep. The secularist welfare state, and its cultivated indifference for the nuclear family, has produced a demographic crisis whereby native populations in Europe and the United States are reproducing at below-replacement birthrates, even as those same populations have been nurtured to embrace a bounty of entitlements far in excess of what is affordable.

The progressive “solution” to the problem? Import millions of unassimilable immigrants sold as humanitarianism. Stripped of pious platitudes, this devil’s bargain should be seen for what it really is: the sacrifice of national heritage for a retirement check, and the further indoctrination of the young with the belief that cultural self-loathing is the natural order of things.

In the EU this date with cultural extinction is facilitated by appeasers like French President Francois Hollande, a socialist hypocrite who pays nearly $11,000 per month for haircuts while his nation burns, or German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who welcomed more than 1.1 million “refugees” into Germany — along with the virtually inevitable rape epidemic that attends those who view women as chattel.

Yet as bad as these feckless EU leaders are, they pale by comparison to their American counterparts. Our nation is afflicted with Secretary of State John Kerry, a terminally arrogant windbag with a long track record of undermining American interests that include betraying his Vietnam War comrades-in-arms, warning a subsequent generation of potential soldiers that only the uneducated “get stuck” in Iraq, and thanking the Iranians for the return of American soldiers they captured and humiliated as propaganda props. The same John Kerry who insists that increasing levels of Islamic State-perpetrated slaughter indicate they are “desperate” and “on the run.”

We also endure the equally arrogant and far more narcissistic Barack Obama, who accommodated the same apocalyptic-minded regime by not “meddling” while Iranian dissidents were being slaughtered in the streets in 2009, and who would now allow Boeing to sell the foremost sponsor of state terror jetliners less than a generation removed from 9/11. A commander in chief whose adamant avoidance of the term “radical Islamist,” even when San Bernardino and Orlando slaughterers openly pledged their allegiance to the Islamic State, was finally abandoned — not to identify the enemy, but rather to disparage Donald Trump and all “bigoted” Americans connecting Islam to terror.

A 2012 re-election candidate who assured us al-Qaida was “on the run” while his premature withdrawal from Iraq was enabling its reinvigoration. A man who reflexively sides with Islamist thugs, be it Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, or Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan, while funding a progressive NGO attempting to prevent the re-election of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in 2015.

A man whose nearly two-year-old promise to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State rings hollower and hollower with each successive tragedy. Did it ever occur to a single politician or journalist to ask why “degrade” is even part of the equation?

And worst of all, progressives abide an amoral Hillary Clinton, who could face the families of Americans killed in Benghazi and lie without conscience or remorse. A woman whose own tenure as secretary of state engendered a series of unmitigated disasters that began with a Russian “reset” enabling the tyrannical urges of Vladimir Putin, and ended with the devolution of Libya into another jihadist playground following her determination to remove Moammar Gadhafi. A woman so bereft of genuine accomplishments she herself couldn’t even name one in an interview with Diane Sawyer. A woman so consumed by personal interest she willingly compromised national security to avoid personal accountability — even as she has the unmitigated gall to assure us she would be “focused on the intelligence surge” to fight terror.

Their followers are equally compromised. In 2015, 28,328 people were killed in terrorist attacks, and yet progressives abide rolling out the red carpet for invaders — including an Obama administration that conspires with the UN to find “alternative safe pathways” aimed at settling as many as 200,000 woefully under-vetted Syrian refugees in America rather than the 10,000 originally announced — and then “fixing” the inevitably catastrophic results with an ever-increasing expansion of police-state initiatives. Simultaneously, they virtually ignore terrorist incubators abroad whose ability to inspire grossly misnamed “lone wolf” attacks remain as viable as ever.

Moreover, progressives remain mindlessly wedded to the standard-issue narrative that the majority of Muslims side with Western nations, when nothing could be further from the truth. Is America or the EU witnessing a mass uprising of condemnation from Muslim communities following these attacks? Are Muslims turning in the potential time bombs living in their midst? Is there a major movement among young Muslim men to liberate their own societies from the scourge of terror?

No, no and no. Instead we get terrorist co-conspirators CAIR and a corrupt media bemoaning a wave of “Islamophobia,” as if increased skepticism of Islamic intentions following actual atrocities is irrational. We get reports of jihadists able to plot their attacks from the safe confines of separatist enclaves like Schaerbeek and Molenbeek, where the populace protects its own, and cowardly progressive politicians look the other way while they do so. And on both sides of the Atlantic, able-bodied male “refugees” prefer indulging the in bounties of EU and American welfare state largesse.

Moreover, we get the Islamic State openly admitting they’re infiltrating refugee populations, and fulfilling promises to attack the West during the month of Ramadan.

“[Nice] is a security failure on a colossal level,” stated counterterrorism expert Aaron Cohen. No doubt it was. But what precedes that failure is an infuriating progressive denialism that make genuine security virtually impossible.

Western society is at an inflection point. We either reject progressive ideology, or endure a “reasonable” amount of terror as the new normal. Better to declare war against every Islamic terror group, and ignore progressive surrenderists who insist you can’t stamp out an idea.

This struggle is not about ideas. It’s about willpower, perseverance and the triumph of civilization over savagery. And while we’re at it, finally and forcefully dismissing the intellectual degeneracy of those who would literally abide the West’s destruction to preserve their open border, multiculturalist, one world fantasies.

SOURCE

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Who Gets Absolute Moral Authority?

Michelle Malkin

It seems like yesterday when Champion of Wimmin Maureen Dowd, bemoaning the lack of sympathy for anti-war mom Cindy Sheehan, declared in The New York Times that "the moral authority of parents who bury children killed in Iraq is absolute."  No ifs, ands or other hedging qualifiers. Absolutely absolute.

And it was just a blink of an eye ago that the same New York Times spilled barrels of adulatory ink on the 9/11 widows known as the Jersey Girls. Remember them? The quartet of Democratic women parlayed their post-terror attack plight into powerful roles as Bush-bashing citizen lobbyists.

Their story, the lib narrative-shaping paper of record reported, was a "tale of a political education, and a sisterhood born of grief."

Moms and widows deserved special consideration in the public square, the argument went a decade ago. Their experience and their testimony warranted respect, deference and the national spotlight.

But then, as now, only a special class of victims is entitled to cash in the Absolute Moral Authority card. Not all parents and spouses who have lost loved ones can join the Club of the Unquestioned and Unassailable.

On Monday night at the Republican National Convention, Pat Smith shared her own tale of a political education born of grief after her diplomat son, Sean Smith, died in the Benghazi terrorist attack. Hillary Clinton, she passionately insisted, "deserves to be in stripes!"

GQ sports writer Nathaniel Friedman showed his compassion for Smith's loss and pain by tweeting, "I don't care how many children Pat Smith lost I would like to beat her to death."

MSNBC host Chris Matthews, who had helped make Cindy Sheehan a media star and urged her to run for Congress based on her status as a grieving war mom, fumed that Pat Smith had "ruined" the entire convention with her heartfelt testimony. The smug Democratic political operative turned TV bloviator, who had also elevated the Jersey Girls' celebrity status with multiple bookings on his show, couldn't bear to speak Smith's name:

"I don't care what that woman up there, the mother, has felt. Her emotions are her own, but for the country in choosing a leader, it's wrong to have someone get up there and tell a lie about Hillary Clinton."

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., chimed in on the same network that he was disgusted with how the GOP convention was using Smith to "exploit a tragedy."

GOP-bashers heaped similar derision on father Jamiel Shaw Sr. and mothers Sabine Durden and Mary Ann Mendoza, who all spoke at the convention about losing children to criminals who had slipped illegally through open borders and revolving deportation doors. "Progressives" sneered at Shaw as an "Uncle Tom" for pointing out that Latino gangbangers targeted his black son because of his race. The intolerant tolerance mob also accused Durden of being "fooled" and Durden and Mendoza of being "exploited for apocalyptic theater."

Will these horrified hang-wringers be as outspokenly offended next week when the Democratic National Convention dedicates an entire evening to the so-called Mothers of the Movement?

Among the sainted moms of the Black Lives Matter movement who will speak on Hillary Clinton's behalf are Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner; Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin; Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontre Hamilton; Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis; Lesley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown; Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley, mother of Hadiya Pendleton; and Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland.

Each of these cases lumped under supposedly unjustified gun violence and systemic racism is complicated and distinct. For starters, Bland hanged herself when her friends and family wouldn't bail her out of jail after she had kicked a police officer. Two of the "children" involved in police shootings (Brown and Hamilton) had assaulted cops during their fatal encounters.

But drop all questions and doubts. "These mothers have worked tirelessly to raise awareness around the issues that surround their children's deaths," the liberal Huffington Post reports.

Because these women endorse race-baiting, gun-grabbing narratives and left-wing candidates, no one working in the mainstream media will ever challenge their parental prerogative to participate in politics on behalf of their loved ones.

Moms who have lost their children to Democratic incompetence, corruption and open-borders treachery are out of luck. The dealers of Absolute Moral Authority play with a loaded deck.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on A WESTERN HEART.

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