An explanation of Arab reality-denial

Historian David Pryce-Jones: Writing of the Arab defeat of 1973, he observes, "It appeared impossible to admit this disaster, indeed parties of school children are taken round the military museum in Cairo that presents as victory a war that ended with Israeli tanks closing on Cairo. In their culture, the dread of shame is so strong it enforces denial of reality. Mistakes are inadmissible, and repetition therefore takes the place of correction."

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Trump Detroit Speech Separates GOP Wheat from Chaff

Donald Trump’s speech before the Detroit Economic Club was an economic conservative tour de force and there is no longer any excuse for anyone who claims to be a believer in free enterprise and limited government to not support the GOP nominee.

Don’t like Obama’s pen and phone approach? Trump announced that he will rescind Obama’s Executive Orders, effectively wiping out his extra-Constitutional legacy. Hillary Clinton will expand the Constitution ripping pen and phone approach taking away power from the people’s representatives in Congress.

Concerned that having the highest corporate tax rate in the world is harming economic growth? Trump’s tax plan lowers this corporate tax rate encouraging investment in America rather than draining mid-sized and small business, which don’t have armies of accountants, of the profits needed to reinvest and grow their businesses. Hillary wants to raise the corporate tax rate making this a very simple choice.

Perhaps regulatory overreach is your bête noire? Trump’s speech made it clear that he will rip Obama’s job killing regulatory expansion out by the roots, curtailing the power grabs at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Departments of Labor, Interior and various agencies ranging from the IRS to the National Labor Relations Board to the Federal Communications Commission.  Freeing American business from just some of the trillions of dollars of economic costs attributed to Obama’s regulatory spree will be a boon for workers and will give hope to those who have either abandoned or never entered the workforce that they can prosper in 21st century America.

Hillary, on the other hand, promises more of the regulatory onslaught that has played a role in making the last decade the worst in terms of economic growth since the Great Depression. Accepting Obama’s new normal of sub 3 percent annual growth is consigning America to a declining future and our young people to a world where the American dream is an Ozzie and Harriet illusion.

And if you are concerned about what you think Donald Trump’s trade policy will be, he made it clear that the goal is not to be isolated, but instead to negotiate better deals for America. Hillary Clinton on the other hand claims to oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership while her confidante, Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia publicly assures Wall Street that once elected Hillary will once again support it.

Even after Trump’s triumphant economic address which hit all the touchstones of free market policy, with a direct contrast to Hillary Clinton, Senator Susan Collins announced that she will not vote for him largely because she thinks he is uncivil.

It is ironic that every six years, Senator Collins asks GOP conservatives to hold their noses and vote for her because she votes for a Republican for Senate Majority Leader, but in denouncing Trump for tone, she admits that lower taxes, growing the economy, rolling back the Obama regulatory machine and establishing a trade policy that helps Mainers from having their jobs offshored are not what is important to her.

The choice is stark. Trump’s economic vision is largely a conservative one designed to get the government out of the way and allow American business and workers to compete on a fair playing field in the world economy. Hillary’s economic policies continue the slide toward national insolvency, giving more power to D.C. and strip-mining the nation’s wealth to engorge the public employee unions who support her. Now, any GOP leader or consultant who still supports Hillary or continues playing the absurd #NeverTrump game can no longer claim that protecting free enterprise is a primary goal.

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The Left’s War on Grit

Eric Bolling

I hate the question, “What’s the secret of your success?” There is no secret to being successful. Ask anybody who is successful and they will say some version of the same thing—perseverance, mental toughness, or my personal favorite: grit.

Grit is getting up again and again after being knocked down to continue the fight. Grit is going over, around, or straight through obstacles to reach your goals—no matter how much it hurts to do so. Grit is the power to try, fail, and rebuild yourself in a nation of endless possibilities. Grit is the soul of the American spirit.

But in our society, we value grit less every day. Thanks to radical leftists, the liberal media, and collectivist stalwarts teaching our kids at all educational levels, “grit” is no longer considered an essential component of success—or of the American character. We value our personal security and our personal liberty, but they’re not the same thing. Sometimes, the freedoms we enjoy under personal liberty can shake the foundations of our personal security.

Here’s the thing: To be gritty and tough, you have to take risks, and by definition with risk comes the possibility of failure—a lack of security. The grit comes in when you fail, get back up, dust yourself off, and keep trying, as many times as it takes for you to get the job done.

That’s why grit is such an essential component of the American character. We’ve always been a mentally tough people—because we had to be. You can’t survive slavery or brave weeks on a rickety ship on the Atlantic without some serious grit, folks.

Grit, however, is anathema to liberals. Gritty, free-thinking citizens are harder to control. Oh, sure, liberals love to spout happy talk about perseverance and the American dream, but they are doing everything they can to make sure there is only one path to this dream: through the government.

What they don’t realize is that if the government is the way, it actually isn’t the American dream anymore. Because the American dream is about building something for yourself, not about being handed something by someone else, especially not a bloated, inefficient, deck-stacking government.

Liberals, by nature, just aren’t comfortable with risk. The dirty little secret of liberalism is that, at least in today’s form, it’s not liberal at all. Liberals don’t want “liberty.” They can’t handle the messiness of real democracy in a dynamic republic. Instead of allowing individual citizens to pave their own way in life, liberals want a bunch of technocratic “experts” to decide what is best for the rest of us.

So, it is very much in the left’s interests for the citizenry to be soft, docile, and obedient. That’s why liberals have spent decades putting forth what I sometimes call the “softness doctrine,” which tells Americans that the ideal person is conformist, collectivist, and in need of government assistance in nearly every aspect of life.

Think of the 2012 Obama campaign’s “Life of Julia” nonsense as the perfect example. This slideshow tells the life story of the fictional cartoon character “Julia” and how she benefited from a benevolent government literally from cradle to grave.

Grit, however, is anathema to liberals. Gritty, free-thinking citizens are harder to control.

It’s also perfect nonsense. Do you think it was an accident that the Obama team created a cartoon to tell this story? It’s fitting that the tale is told in the same media form as a Disney fairy tale, because Julia’s life is just as much a fantasy as Cinderella’s or Snow White’s. It’s the Joe Camel of political advertisements.

This is how they spread the “softness doctrine.” Our government, media, and academia are brainwashing all of us—especially our kids—into being mushy blobs of fragile self-esteem, all in the name of “progressivism.”

As they do with masculinity itself, today’s liberals treat grit like an anachronism from a time when people hadn’t evolved enough to live in the progressive paradise that they believe is just around every corner. Grit is unnecessary. You don’t have to be mentally tough, because if you have a problem, a supposedly benevolent government will take care of it for you—and take care of you.

While this cotton candy philosophy may make sense to sophomoric college students and sheltered media elites, those of us who have fought in the trenches of our own lives, the global economy, and the nation’s politics know better. You can’t save everyone, and when you try to do so, you end up doing much more harm than good.

This isn’t just a social problem—though it most certainly is that—it is also an economic and national security problem. Do you think China and Russia will sit back and let us continue to be the most powerful nation in the world once we’re too soft to fight for market share—or even our homeland?

As a nation, we need to toughen up, stop whining, and get to work.

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DOJ action against Baltimore police part of national takeover of local police

Americans for Limited Government today issued the following statement in response to findings by the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division against the Baltimore Police Department:

“The courts in Baltimore have already found that Baltimore police were not guilty of any criminal wrongdoing in the death of Freddie Gray. The Department of Justice Civil Rights Division reopening and pouring salt in this wound is a travesty both for the people of Baltimore, and for law enforcement officers across the country who risk their lives every day to keep the peace. If not for the DOJ’s callous politicization of incidents in Ferguson and Baltimore, communities and police might have already come together in an honest dialogue on how to prevent future tragedies. Unfortunately, President Obama would rather attempt to score cheap political points with key voting constituencies than to allow reconciliation.

“The DOJ action in Baltimore is just the first step by the Obama administration to federalize police activity in that city. Eventually, this will become a federal court order consent decree, where the DOJ will sue Baltimore, and the city will settle without contest, agreeing to federal regulation, as has been done in cities across the nation. This regime has been endorsed by a representative of the UN Human Rights Council, and involves DOJ entering into consent decrees with cities to regulate every aspect of policing, including searches, stops and the use of force. This is the nationalization of local policing done through judicial fiat that Congress would never approve.

“What is truly sad is that after almost 8 years in office President Obama continues to be the divider in chief, seeking political gain from creating discord.”

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Obama Hid the Truth About ISIS

A special congressional joint task force has officially confirmed what has been suspected for months: The Obama administration through U.S Central Command scrubbed intelligence reports showing the rise of ISIS as a critical threat to the United States and the world. The reports were altered for political purposes to present a rosier, less threatening picture of the terror army to the American people. In other words, the administration wanted to prove ISIS was a "jayvee" team as President Obama claimed in September 2014.

According to a report released Tuesday by the task force, the scrubbing and changing of reports was done at senior levels, not by low level intelligence analysts.

"After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, U.S. Central Command’s most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command’s intelligence products to downplay the threat from ISIS in Iraq.  The result:  consumers of those intelligence products were provided a consistently ‘rosy’ view of U.S. operational success against ISIS.  That may well have resulted in putting American troops at risk as policymakers relied on this intelligence when formulating policy and allocating resources for the fight," Congressman Mike Pompeo, who served on the joint task force which investigated the matter, said in a statement Thursday. “The cultural breakdown in Central Command’s intelligence process resulted from an administration-wide understanding that bad news from Iraq and Syria was not welcomed.  Claims that ISIS was the ‘JV team’ and that al-Qaeda was ‘on the run’ were both a result—and a cause—of the politicization of intelligence at CENTCOM.  This intelligence manipulation provided space for both ISIS and al-Qaeda to grow and it put America at risk."

“Intelligence products always contain some level of uncertainty.  But during this period, nearly every error was in one direction:  downplaying the threat from radical Islamic terror consistent with the administration’s narrative that this threat was not significant.  I urge the Department of Defense Inspector General to hold accountable the intelligence leaders that failed our service members fighting our wars on the ground,” he continued.

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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.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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