The Politics of Hatred

Sen. Rand Paul is recovering from a blindside attack by his neighbor. Was it politically motivated? 

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) was attacked from behind by his neighbor as he was mowing his own lawn (think about that for a minute) in Bowling Green, Kentucky, last Friday. “Senator Paul was blindsided and the victim of an assault. The assailant was arrested and it is now a matter for the police,” said Kelsey Cooper, Sen. Paul’s communications director. Paul suffered five broken ribs, including three displaced fractures. Clearly, that wasn’t very neighborly. And as details slowly emerge, it was worse than that.

The lawyer for Rene Boucher, the neighbor who attacked Paul, claims the dispute that precipitated the attack had nothing to do with politics but was over some “trivial” matter. He insisted, “Senator Paul and Dr. Boucher have been next-door neighbors for 17 years. They are also prominent members of the local medical community and worked together when they were both practicing physicians. The unfortunate occurrence of November 3rd has absolutely nothing to do with either’s politics or political agendas.” Perhaps, but it’s no secret that Paul and his neighbor are on opposite sides of the political spectrum and evidently have not spoken to each other in years.

There is an obvious reason why Boucher’s lawyer would seek to distance his client’s motivation from anything political. If it was political, then Boucher is looking at a federal rather than a state offense, and attacking a U.S. senator “on account of the performance of official duties” carries an 8 to 20 year prison term. At the very least, Boucher faces felony rather than misdemeanor charges due to the severity of the attack.

Irrespective of how this particular incident plays out, the fact that we are questioning if politics was a motive says much about the current state of our national political climate — a political climate in which congressional Republicans are targeted for assassination by a socialist. When Democrats, the mainstream media and popular culture feel entirely justified to regularly and falsely paint Republicans and conservatives as the party of racists and bigots, when Hillary Clinton labels Donald Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables,” and when the Left sees no problem resisting and calling for the impeachment of a justly elected president simply because they don’t like him, we have a real problem. This is type of hatred is the result of one side choosing to exploit identity politics. It remains to be seen if Paul’s neighbor was indeed driven by politically fueled hatred, but there is little question that on a national level America has a dangerously growing problem with “progressive” hate.

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Network News Ignores Clinton-DNC Bombshell

The broadcast evening newscasts on three major networks on Thursday didn’t mention bombshell revelations by former Democratic National Committee interim Chairwoman Donna Brazile.

Brazile has written in a new book that she discovered evidence that she said showed Hillary Clinton’s campaign “rigged” the Democratic presidential primary.

“ABC’s World News Tonight,” “NBC Nightly News” and “CBS Evening News” all didn’t report the allegations by Brazile on Thursday evening despite it receiving considerable coverage on cable news and in print and online media. Brazile was also trending as one of Twitter’s top topics on Thursday.

In excerpts released to Politico Thursday, Brazile writes in her new book, “Hacks: The Inside Story of the Break-ins and Breakdowns that Put Donald Trump in the White House,” that it “broke [her] heart” upon discovering evidence that she said showed the Clinton campaign “rigged” the Democratic nomination system.

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Russia:  More fake news from the Left

OMG! Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross held stake in a company that ships natural gas, and actually found natural gas producers who wanted to ship it. One of them was Russia.

Stop the presses!  Actually, in this case, they probably should have stopped the presses.

The breathless reporting by NBC News and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists that Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross failed to disclose to Congress his financial stake in Navigator Holdings Ltd., a British company that ships natural gas and liquid petrochemicals, which did business with Russia — is utterly false and completely indefensible. Nothing was hidden from Congress.

So says Ross, in an exclusive interview with CNBC, saying, “That’s totally wrong. It was disclosed on the form 278 which is the financial disclosure form, in my case, three times,” Ross said.

The form with his interest in Navigator, listed openly on the Office of Government Ethics website, was filed by Ross on Dec. 19, 2016, before Ross was ever confirmed by the U.S. Senate in Feb. 2017.

That’s bad enough. But the allegation that a company that ships natural gas around the world, including from Russia — the number two producer of natural gas in the entire world second only to the U.S. — is somehow suspicious is laughable.

Just read the headlines.  “Offshore Trove Exposes Trump-Russia links and Piggy Banks of the Wealthiest 1 Percent.” “Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross benefits from business ties to Putin’s inner circle.”

This new red scare has reached a new low. This would make Sen. Joe McCarthy blush.

Navigator’s fleet includes 38 seafaring vessels that ship natural gas everywhere.

As for Russia, according to Navigator’s website, “Russia’s largest gas processing and petrochemicals company saw an opportunity to meet European demand for LPG from increased local production. A new terminal was constructed near St Petersburg, but Sibur still faced the challenge of sustaining exports during freezing winters. At the time, no adequately-sized ice class gas carriers existed. In partnership with Sibur, we explored the various vessel capabilities that would suit its intended trade routes. We then constructed four handysize vessels with ice class capability sufficient for operating in the harsh climate of the Baltic Sea.”

Does that sound incredibly suspicious? Like some espionage plot? No, it’s a business strategy to work with natural gas exporters by a company that specializes in shipping natural gas. Nothing more. It’s about as unusual as a paper boy delivering newspapers.

This company is five-by-five. A true innovator.

But the purveyors of this bit of fake news have no problems with simply playing on unfounded Russia hysteria and fears that have engulfed the U.S. press corps. This story is utterly irresponsible that fails in the most basic of fact checks or even of putting the facts it did have into any meaningful context.

To repeat, Ross did disclose his stake in Navigator prior to Senate consideration. And a natural gas shipping company doing business with a natural gas producer is not suspicious.

Are oil tankers suspicious, too? Russia exports a lot of oil, you know. Perhaps some Trump officials had ties to major oil companies.

Next thing you know, NBC News will publish secret documents that prove that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson once ran Exxon — a company that did business with Russia! Oh wait…

If this is what the state of the Russia debate in the U.S. has degenerated to, where now any business dealings are considered espionage, our discourse has become utterly poisoned by this Russia witch hunt.

What’s worse, to the extent that such innuendo apparently now leads to federal investigations and who knows what else, as in the case of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, we are in a truly dark place as nation.

To NBC and the Consortium, somehow, this rather benign business dealing proves the Trump-Russia nexus that everyone’s been looking for. It’s a despicable smear. Insanity, pure and utter bat guano. Just stop.

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How wrong they were
   
Time magazine’s cover story for the week of Nov. 6 is a classic. It blares: “The Wrecking Crew: How Trump’s Cabinet Is Dismantling Government As We Know It.” The New York Times ran a lead editorial complaining that team Trump is shrinking the regulatory state at an “unprecedented” pace.

Meanwhile, last week the stock market raced to new all-time highs; we had another blockbuster jobs report with another fall in the unemployment rate; and housing sales soared to their highest level in a decade.

Are the editors at Time and the Times so ideologically blinded that they are incapable of connecting the dots?

The U.S. economic revival of 3 percent growth has already defied the predictions of almost every Donald Trump critic. I vividly remember debating Hillary Clinton’s economic gurus during the campaign: They accused Trump and advisers such as myself of “lying” when we said that pro-growth policies would speed up economic growth to 3 to 4 percent.

Jason Furman, who chaired the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, told reporters earlier this year that the chances of reaching 3 percent growth over a decade were about 1 in 25 — which is what many political experts said was Trump’s chance of winning the election. Another Obama economist, Alan Krueger, called the 3 percent growth forecast “extremely rosy.”

Larry Summers, a top economic adviser to Obama, questioned the “standards of integrity” of the Trump economic team’s forecast for 3 percent (or more) growth. “I do not see how any examination of U.S. history could possibly support the Trump forecast as a reasonable expectation,” he wrote in The Washington Post.

Congress weighed in, too. “This budget relies on absurd economic projections and pretend revenues that no credible economist would validate,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) announced at a House budget hearing.

The sharp-penned Paul Krugman of The New York Times declared Trump’s growth forecast an act of “economic arrogance.” He said that the productivity improvement necessary for faster growth was as likely as “driverless flying cars” arriving “en masse.”

Admittedly, we shouldn’t read too much into six months of very good economic data (with 3 percent growth) or the booming stock market. These trends can always reverse course quickly. Trump’s more restrictive policies on trade and immigration could harm growth potential.

But so far the Trump haters have missed the call on the economy’s trajectory. Doubly ironic is that the same Obama-era economists who are trashing Trump’s increasingly realistic forecast of 3 percent growth are the ones who predicted 4 percent growth from the Obama budgets. Obama never came anywhere near 4 percent growth, and at the end of his second term, the economy grew at a pitiful 1.6 percent.

Under Obama, free enterprise and pro-business policies were thrown out the window. What was delivered was the weakest recovery from a recession since World War II, with a meager 2.2 percent average growth rate. Middle America felt it, which is why Trump won these forgotten Americans.

One reason that economist Larry Kudlow and I and others assured Donald Trump that 3 to 4 percent growth was achievable was that Trump could capitalize on the underperformance of the Obama years. Under Obama, business investment fell almost two-thirds below the long-term trend line — thanks to higher taxes on investment. Now, partly in anticipation of the tax cut, business spending keeps climbing.

Maybe the liberal economists and their shills in the media should show some humility. They should acknowledge they were dead wrong about how much Obamanomics was going to grow the economy and about how Trumponomics would crash the economy and the stock market. Or better yet, maybe the rest of us should all just stop listening to them.

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