An analysis of the Trump message

It seems possible that the past record of Trump with regard to women will lose him enough of the female vote for him to lose the election.  But, regardless of that, he has identified a huge section of the population that previously had no voice.  And they are not going to go away. There will be an ongoing desire to get the allegiance of such a huge voter bloc.  Both the GOP and the Donks will feel under huge pressure to move in a Trumpian direction.

So what is the Trump message?  It would not be a bad analysis to say that Trump simply speaks common sense but since common sense is not all that common these days, we need to dig deeper.

Everyone who has heard Trump has a view on what Trump's message is and there have already been many attempts to summarize it in writing.  There has however been a recent very extensive attempt to analyse the phenomenon by a respected conservative intellectual, Dr. William Voegeli.  I reproduce part of it below. But even the excerpt below is lengthy so let me assist time-poor people by attempting a summary:

He says that Trump speaks for many in believing that governments so far have been doing more harm that good and have in particular endangered the safety and security of ordinary Americans.  Many see rightly that they could be the next victim of a Jihadi attack and blame the government for not preventing the many such attacks that have occurred recently.  If the government cannot safeguard its citizens, what is it for?

He accepts that Trump is calling on tribal instincts:  Those who feel that they are Americans first of all rather than being primarily some other sub-group or intellectual clique. And, much as the Left deplore it, that feeling among a very large part of the electorate is not going to go away. The Left call it racism, which just antagonizes the people concerned.

He also says that the refusal by the political establishment to see Muslims as a threat is borderline insane and perceived as that by most of the electorate.  Trump is the only major figure who speaks any kind of sanity on the matter.

On political correctness he agrees with Trump that it has gone too far but to some extent excuses it as being well intentioned.  He has drunk the Kool-aid about Leftists being idealists.  Idealists who practiced mass slaughter in revolutionary France, in Soviet Russia and in Mao's China?  My submission is that hatred of the society around them is the only consistent explanation of what Leftists do.

But the point remains that Americans are being extensively dictated to in the name of assumptions that they do not entirely share and any criticism of that is vastly refreshing to many Americans - who do not like being dictated to.  So a bonfire of political correctness would be widely welcomed.


“We are screwing things up.” This is the subtext of the entire Trump campaign. Or, as the Atlantic’s David Frum describes its core message, “We are governed by idiots.” Moreover, the Trump movement is propelled by the fear that the idiots aren’t just screwing up the usual things, such as solvency, but the people’s security and the nation’s sovereignty.

The test of whether a government merits the people’s support, according to the Declaration of Independence, is whether it is “likely to effect their safety and happiness.” People are increasingly skeptical about government’s increasingly expansive promises to help make us happier, however, as shown by the consistently low approval ratings for Obamacare. Nor is there much to show for all the politicians’ talk about bringing back good jobs at good wages. Rendering our increasingly divided society a gorgeous mosaic hasn’t been a raging success, either.

But at least, people have a right to feel, government could do its most basic job and enhance our safety. Surely, in exchange for all the taxes we pay and forms we fill out, government can make life decidedly more peaceful than the state of nature. Elections analyst Henry Olsen reports that Trump’s support “skyrocketed” to “a position of dominance” against his Republican rivals after he responded to last year’s terrorist attacks in France and California by calling for, as his campaign put it, “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” Olsen writes:

Trump voters believe they are threatened by Islamic terrorism. If Muslims come to America, they think, Americans will be more likely to die. Trump’s proposed ban seems to them to be common sense: The first duty of a national government is to protect its citizens from foreign threats. One must not underestimate how important the proposed ban is to Trump’s voters and to his appeal.

In the 15 years since 9/11, the United States government has done many things intended to thwart terrorism. Yet whether the security enhancements, if any, are commensurate with the high price the nation has paid is doubtful. In Afghanistan, America embarked on what has proven to be its longest war. No one can state with confidence how or when it will end, or explain the basis on which we could say we have accomplished our objectives. The war and subsequent occupation in Iraq—badly conceived, justified, managed, and terminated—poisoned American politics and destabilized rather than democratized the Middle East. The Arab Spring, likewise, raised hopes for a turn to liberal democracy, but resulted only in compounding the region’s tragic dilemma: only through authoritarianism can it stave off fanaticism. Al-Qaeda gave rise to ISIS, a group even more lunatic and lethal, which has engaged in pornographic brutality in the Middle East while directing or inspiring mass murder in Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Orlando, and Nice.

Donald Trump, by contrast, has campaigned from the outset against the job both parties have done in protecting Americans from terrorists. He secured the Republican nomination against a field of 16 candidates described last summer by George F. Will as “the most impressive since 1980, and perhaps the most talent-rich since the party first had a presidential nominee, in 1856.”

Trump has described his axial foreign policy precept as “America First.” Detractors fastened on the formulation as either obtuse about the term’s provenance, or a signal that he, like Charles Lindbergh 80 years ago, would fuse isolationism with nonchalance towards dictators who abused populations other than ours. But take away its historical echoes, which are probably inaudible to both Trump and his voters, and putting America first strikes many people as an entirely sensible commitment to expect from an American president.

The P.C. Shuffle

Several writers, including this journal’s editor, have explained Trump’s ascent as a reaction to political correctness. The idea is that Trump’s apparent incapacity to say anything other than what’s on his mind at any given moment appeals to voters fed up with proliferating rules about how to avoid giving offense.

But it is important to consider the question in relation to the dangers posed by terrorism. The salient feature of political correctness is hostility to free speech and, more generally, the idea of inalienable rights. Its most prominent manifestations include campus speech codes, hypersensitive reactions to “microaggressions,” and the vindictive denial of due process to faculty and students accused of sexual harassment or assault.

This zeal to restrict civil liberties is not free-floating, however, but serves the political goal of repudiating appalling injustices of the past by securing a very different future, one immeasurably more equitable and admirable. This project is, in the main, defined by identity politics, the belief that groups that have been abused and humiliated must assert themselves and be accorded abundant compensatory respect. The companion belief is that those sharing the demographic profile of the perpetrators of abuse and humiliation—above all, straight white males—must atone and defer. Merely refraining from abusing and humiliating members of groups previously victimized isn’t enough: they still enjoy privileges derived from “the system of murder and exploitation that benefits some of us at the expense of others,” in the words of one penitent, Emily Pothast, a Seattle-based writer and musician.

“The current politically correct response cripples our ability to talk and to think and act clearly,” Trump said after the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando. “If we don’t get tough, and if we don’t get smart and fast, we’re not going to have our country anymore. There will be nothing, absolutely nothing, left.”

Legions of commentators and political opponents dismissed that speech as still more hyperbole from The Donald. But Trump’s startling success in the GOP race has much to do with the feeling that identity politics has indeed left Americans less safe from terrorism than we need and deserve to be. Consider the term “Islamophobia,” defined by the Council on American-Islamic Relations as the “closed-minded prejudice against or hatred of Islam and Muslims.” The Center for Race and Gender at the University of California, Berkeley, gives this account, more expansive, tendentious, and explicitly P.C.:

Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure. It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve “civilizational rehab” of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise). Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.

Note that Islamophobia is contrived regardless of whether the Muslim threat is real or merely perceived, which means that a vigorous response to any such threat is, by definition, prejudiced and irrational. “This is why,” the late Christopher Hitchens wrote, “the fake term Islamophobia is so dangerous: It insinuates that any reservations about Islam must ipso facto be ‘phobic.’” The reality, he insisted, is that in the purported “gorgeous mosaic of religious pluralism, it’s easy enough to find mosque Web sites and DVDs that peddle the most disgusting attacks on Jews, Hindus, Christians, unbelievers, and other Muslims—to say nothing of insane diatribes about women and homosexuals.”

Taking Sides

When Trump says political correctness cripples our ability to think, talk, and act against terrorism, he’s signaling that our response to terrorism is severely compromised by Islamophobia-phobia—the closed-minded, contrived, overwrought, unwarranted, misdirected, counterproductive fear that accurate threat assessments and adequate self-defense might hurt a Muslim’s feelings. “Public sentiment is everything,” said Lincoln of a republic’s political life, which means that those who mold public sentiment are more powerful than legislators and judges, because they make “statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.” Our molders of public sentiment have made citizens more worried about accusations of bigotry than they are determined to report possible terrorism. A man working near the San Bernardino shooter’s home, according to one news account, “said he noticed a half-dozen Middle Eastern men in the area” before the attack, “but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”

By word and example, a diffident government encourages a diffident citizenry. Days after the San Bernardino killings, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch told a meeting of the group Muslim Advocates that her “greatest fear as a prosecutor” is that terrorist attacks will inflame anti-Muslim sentiment, leading to rhetoric that “will be accompanied by acts of violence.” Strange that a law-enforcement official’s greatest fear would correspond to something other than the greatest threat. Fifteen years after 9/11, the violent anti-Muslim backlash is an outrage permanently on the verge of taking place, while bombings and shootings by Islamic zealots remain mere realities.

Equally strange is the Department of Homeland Security’s policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing visa applicants’ social media postings. The possibility of finding information that indicates terrorist intentions was, apparently, outweighed by fear of “a civil liberties backlash and ‘bad public relations’ for the Obama administration,” according to ABC News. In the absence of such reviews, the government took three weeks to approve a fiancée visa application for Tashfeen Malik, who became one of the San Bernardino shooters, “despite what the FBI said were extensive social media messages about jihad and martyrdom.”

Us and Them

The oldest, most fundamental political question is Us and Them. Many people want to write a new chapter in human history, where nationality figures trivially in that distinction. On the right, economics—trade, specialization, growth, prosperity—should render Us and Them obsolete and irrelevant. “America should be a destination for hard-working immigrants from all over the world,” according to a 2015 press release from “top national Republican donors.” Libertarian economist Bryan Caplan contends that we discard cant in favor of wisdom when we come to understand that our “so-called ‘fellow Americans’ are mere strangers with no special claim on [our] time or affection.” On the left, social justice—tolerance, empathy, diversity, inclusion, renouncing and dismantling the Eurocentric structures of power and privilege—will promote comity, respect, and fairness among the earth’s 7 billion inhabitants, erasing tensions and distinctions among people of different colors, creeds, regions, and lifestyles.

The older sensibility about Us and Them, however, refuses to admit its own obsolescence. America is a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. We must honor the proposition, since the republic rests on the conviction that no one is good enough to govern another without that other’s consent. But it is equally important to defend and cherish the nation, the vessel that bears and sustains the experiment in self-government. The Declaration of Independence begins with the assertion that it has become necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands that have connected them with another. Americans are a people, not just people, and not just any or all people who embrace the idea of human equality and its political implications. The preamble of the Constitution offers six reasons for establishing the new frame of government, the concluding one being “to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” This aspiration does not require indifference or antipathy to any or all others, nor to their posterity. But it does make clear, again, that We are not Them, and we may justifiably prefer our safety and happiness to theirs when conflicts between the two arise.

Consigning patriotic attachment to the dustbin of history ignores stubborn moral and anthropological realities, as recently described by columnist Megan McArdle:

Somehow, over the last half-century, Western elites managed to convince themselves that nationalism was not real. Perhaps it had been real in the past, like cholera and telegraph machines, but now that we were smarter and more modern, it would be forgotten in the due course of time as better ideas supplanted it.

That now seems hopelessly naïve. People do care more about people who are like them—who speak their language, eat their food, share their customs and values. And when elites try to ignore those sentiments—or banish them by declaring that they are simply racist—this doesn’t make the sentiments go away. It makes the non-elites suspect the elites of disloyalty. For though elites may find something vaguely horrifying about saying that you care more about people who are like you than you do about people who are culturally or geographically further away, the rest of the population is outraged by the never-stated corollary: that the elites running things feel no greater moral obligation to their fellow countrymen than they do to some random stranger in another country.

Our political leaders’ vigilance and competence must encompass not just their organizational skills, but their capacity to grasp the malevolence of those who want to kill our citizens and shatter our way of life. Officials who, instead, traffic in sentimental blather about how we’re all brothers under the skin, awaiting the call of freedom that comes to every human mind and soul, are busy rejecting the understanding it is most important for them to possess. Our dangers will increase by an order of magnitude if Islamic terrorists succeed in their long quest to acquire weapons of mass destruction. The murder of tens of thousands of civilians in a single attack will make admonitions like Loretta Lynch’s after the Paris massacres—“we cannot be ruled by fear”—seem even more blithe, obtuse, and stupid.

Given his manifest, widely discussed defects as a prospective president and as a human, the rise of Donald Trump cannot be read as anything other than a vote of no confidence in the political class that has guided our anti-terrorism policies over the past 15 years. Those who believe that problem to be America’s most pressing are right to fear that Trump’s flair for the sensational, his inaccuracies and distortions, will do more harm than good to the cause of anti-terrorism, just as Joseph McCarthy did to the cause of anti-Communism. This danger makes it all the more important to satisfy the people’s urgent demand: leaders and policies that don’t squander, for the sake of secondary considerations, the moral and practical resources we need to thwart terrorists. In opposing Islamic terrorism, as in any other critical endeavor, the main thing is to make sure the main thing is always the main thing. Trump’s voters feel that he, like them, is unequivocally committed to this imperative. About his political opponents, they feel no such confidence.

More HERE

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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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My Little Girl Almost Became a Human Sacrifice!

Yaacov ben Moshe

Back in the early eighties my young family and I lived next door to an Iranian family. They were nice, friendly people. Hamid (not his real name) was a physician who was just starting out in his own practice. His wife, Haideh, also Iranian born, was a mathematician. She taught at a local college. We moved in to our brand new houses just months apart and shared the rigors of nurturing lawns where there had been only bulldozer tracks. We cooperated in the planting of trees and shrubs to define the empty expanses between our new homes. We borrowed tools from each other. Hamid and I played tennis often and even discussed the possibility of building a tennis court in the flat spot where our lots met. Our children played together and his son, Amir and my daughter Amy became very close friends. The two of them were barely more than toddlers when they first met but were soon talking about getting married the way little ones sometimes do when they find a close companion of the opposite sex.

The next summer, they went back to Iran to visit with their families. We were afraid for our friends. We knew the country was in turmoil. They were gone for several weeks. For much of that time my Amy’s days were occupied with day camp but she still missed her friend. They finally returned a week before school.

It was a sunny Sunday morning and Amy went out right after breakfast and met Amir in his backyard. We watched as they began to play and turned away to read the Sunday paper. We were surprised when Amy came back inside a short while later. She walked by us with her head down and started up the stairs to her room. We had expected to have to call her in for lunch so it was odd that she came back so early. I called after her and asked her what was wrong. She told me how little 5-year-old Amir had matter-of-factly informed my innocent 5-year-old daughter that because she is a Jew it is his duty to kill her.

I went right over to talk with my friend and neighbor. Hamid was deeply embarrassed. He hastened to explain that: “Over there, the radio and TV were full of that kind of thing - you simply couldn’t avoid it.” He assumed that Amir had heard this kind of thing on the radio or TV because no one in his family believed such things. He was sure, he told me, that now that Amir was back here he would soon forget it. He assured me that he would talk with Amir and was sure that the boy didn’t even understand what he was saying.

I could see how distressed he was and told him that I understood and that I appreciated his concern. We looked at each other and shook hands and patted each other on the shoulder. I was sure that it would not change things between our families.

Remember that this was twenty years before September 11, 2001, and just shortly after the fall of the Shah.  Before they had left, I had wondered vaguely if his kids were going to be exposed to anti-American rhetoric and how that would sit with them. But what manner of “rhetoric”. This had never entered my mind. The raw, murderous Jew hatred was an utter shock. Back then many of us believed the myth of the benevolent ancient caliphates and the benign toleration of “Dhimmis” under Muslim rule. After all, I mused, Iran was at war with Iraq. And Israel had recently bombed the Osirac reactor thereby preventing Iraq from developing nuclear weapons…

In the light of everything that has transpired since then, it may seem hopelessly naïve of me but I was amazed that what had surfaced first from this child’s sojourn in his homeland was the immediacy of the violent impulse. As I lay awake in bed that night, I found I couldn’t get the event out of my mind. The idea that a child could have such an impulse was staggering by itself. What kind of madness had he been exposed too? What hellish clatter of hatred and fear was there in the streets and media over there that could move a five year old say such a thing?

I had seen the pictures on the nightly news reports on the recently ended hostage ordeal. The impression was of dense, agitated crowds of shirt-sleeved young men with posters and bullhorns. For all that it was fascinating, the violent rhetoric was often reported untranslated and the alien animus seemed unconnected to me personally. It now began to creep in upon me that our news media were not showing us the whole picture- that they were hiding the things that were the deadliest and most disturbing.

I had watched the news with the detachment of one who had every confidence that it had nothing to do with me. Now, as I lay awake, I could see- it was very personal. It was frightening, it was unfamiliar, it was hateful and I had no idea how big or how close it was. I understood then that I had no real information about it- that is the moment that I began to realize that our media and our leaders were not being straight with us.

I lay awake that night thinking, picturing the sweating, rioting crowds in the streets of Tehran and imagining their squawking radios and televisions. The morning before, I had thought that all I had to do was talk to my neighbor about this thing. Now I saw clearly that this was very big and very ugly- beyond reach of a friendly neighborhood talk. I got out of bed and looked out the window toward their house, bathed in pale moonlight. The calm late summer night was filled with a new shadow- the specter of an evil that had once seemed far away and theoretical and was suddenly present and breathing quietly in the deep shadows of that soft night. I walked down the hall and looked into Amy’s room. Her soft brown curls shone in the moonlight and she stirred and sighed.

I wandered back to my bed and lay down. What kind of culture, I wondered, puts ideas like this into the mind of a little boys? How was it, even with parents like my friends Hamid and Haideh, the racket and stink of genocidal hatred could so easily stick to him and be carried so quietly and so deep into the heart of our safe little suburban neighborhood.

And what kind of culture leaves its own citizens so uninformed and unprotected as we are?

Only now, more than thirty years later, I see what is most frightening about what happened to my family. It was never truly about Islam. It is that I could never have anticipated or defended against this threat because, as a liberal I was blinded by the “The Narrative”. The modern liberal/progressive movement with its high priests in the media and its Royal lineage of progressive leaders, starting with Eugene McCarthy and culminating in Carter, Obama, Kerry, and Clinton, intentionally advocates that we agree to be defenseless against the cultural and behavioral dangers that we face. It was my internalization of Political correctness that prevented me from understanding the role of Islam. It was multiculturalism that blocked my ability to see that not all cultures are equal or peaceful. It was “diversity” that encouraged me to want to accept alien cultural influence as beneficial. And it was , “social justice” that encouraged me to want to ignore obvious dangers.

Political Correctness, multiculturalism, diversity and social justice are, after all. intellectual constructs. They are purposefully meant to disarm us- to divorce us from reality and make it impossible to question “The Narrative”.

The horrors of this “narrative” are all around us; and we are paralyzed. The intellectual barricades that have been constructed around it to keep it from collapsing are, by now, embedded deep in us. All the while the attacks of an unforgiving reality are killing and maiming innocent people. Our media don’t show us the blood- just the dry body count- and they don’t dwell on that. Nor do they talk about who the murderers and rapists really are. The soft, neutered and incomplete reporting of the media that prevent us from even identifying the threat, let alone address it. Worst of all, our leaders distract us, turning the public reaction into debates about “gun violence”, “religious tolerance” and “profiling”.

For many years, the victims were mostly far away. Israelis killed in bombings, shootings and knifings were somehow acceptable losses. The Narrative told us this was bad but “understandable”.  Once in a while the violence would break through to us as when Pan AM flight 93 was brought down over Lockerbie with with hundreds of Americans on board or the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. But those too were far away and somehow portrayed as “tragedies” instead of the atrocities they were. Then 3,000 died on 9/11 and The media acolytes of The Narrative obfuscated more aggressively. They mewled, “Why do They Hate Us?” and answered their own questions with bromides about economic conditions and job opportunities.

Still the bodies pile up, and they no longer far away. They are here. They are torn, bloody bodies of unarmed service men and women cut down on a military base, two Coptic Christian men beheaded in their car, a whole family literally shredded by a hail of explosion-propelled nails and ball bearings on the streets of Boston. One minute they were standing there cheering the marathon; the next, they were blown down and torn to shreds. The 8 year old son, suddenly legless, lying on the cold cement, bled-out from his massive wounds with his eyes open, pleading for help. There are so many, we forget them as the next wave of murder materializes.

So, I am left to wonder if, the next time I read about a young Muslim man whose parents came here when he was a child, shooting people at a mall, or planting pressure-cooker bombs in public places or slaughtering gay people in a nightclub, or stabbing random passers-by if his name will turn out to be Amir. So far so good- at least for me- the names have been Hassan, Tsarnaev, Farook, Mateen, Arcan Cetin and so many others I can’t even count.

I feel as if in a nightmare with some rude beast bearing down on me, coming for my family, devouring my community undermining my nation- and they don’t see it! I can’t move, can't scream, can’t even speak! And even if I could, no one would hear or understand.

I share this personal story in the hope that you, my reader, will understand and help us wake up from this nightmare. Hillary Clinton ignored the peril to her own employees in Benghazi in order to support The Narrative and help Barak Obama get re-elected. In that sense, she is personally guilty of sacrificing four human beings, one of them a man she called a friend in order to support this morally bankrupt, intellectual fantasy. She did not give Ambassador Stevens the security he requested and wherever the “stand down” order came from, she had to have been part of that decision.

Human Sacrifice is the only way The Narrative survives and more innocents are fed to this hungry monster every day. To name a few:

Each and every death by Islamic terror

The victims of street violence in the inner cities that have been wasted by the sickness of the liberal welfare and poverty  bureaucracy.

The living infants murdered in “live birth abortions”

The veterans betrayed by the VA medical establishment who die waiting for care

They are all offered up to support The Narrative and The Narrative is Hillary.

For all his human shortcomings, Trump is our only hope to stop, or at least begin to break down The Narrative. It is his very impulsiveness that gives me this faith. He speaks the truth about what he sees. He is not cowed by the opinions and fears of others, He believes in confronting reality- and dealing with it head on.

Can there be any doubt that if that little boy had found a gun, or taken a knife or used one of the gardening tools instead of talking first, that the only news about the death or maiming of my daughter that would have reached the rest of the world (or my, former, liberal self!) would have been a bemused and vague report of a tragedy? Enough of calling atrocities “tragedies”! Have we not had altogether too much of the liberal agenda and the progressive narrative and the sacrifices they require of us?

A vote for Hillary is a vote to make The Narrative stronger and even more opaque. A vote for Trump is a vote to breach its defenses, to make reality our guide and, yes, to Make America Great Again.

SOURCE

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Watch the Persuasion Battle

By Scott Adams, author of the Dilbert comics

If you want to watch the persuasion game-within-the-game, follow me on Twitter @ScottAdamsSays. Here’s the situation so you know what to look for.

1. Yesterday I announced my endorsement of Trump, primarily as a protest to the bullying culture of Clinton supporters. I don’t like bullies. And I don’t like that Clinton is turning citizens against each other. (My political preferences don’t align with any of the candidates.)

Yes, Trump is a bully, but he’s offering to provide that service on behalf of the country. When leaders do it, we call it leadership. (Think LBJ or Steve Jobs.) Trump isn’t encouraging his supporters to bully Clinton supporters. But Clinton has painted Trump and his supporters as Nazi-like deplorables, and that creates moral cover for the bullying you see all over the country against Trump supporters. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to bully a Nazi, would it? That’s the dangerous situation Clinton has created.

2. My anti-bullying message must have raised a flag somewhere in the Clinton campaign machinery. That means it hit a nerve and is seen as a persuasion reframing they don’t want to risk.

3. Huffington Post, Salon, Daily Kos and other liberal outlets “coincidentally” ran hit pieces on me on the same day. That’s a sign of media coordination with the Clinton campaign. (Or a big coincidence.)

4. Hordes of either paid or volunteer Twitter trolls descended on me with two specific types of attacks. The similarity of the attacks suggests central coordination. One attack involves insults about the Dilbert comic (an attack on my income) and the other is a coordinated attack to suggest I am literally insane or off my meds (to decrease my credibility).

You’re also supposed to think I’m crazy for seeing these “coincidences” as coordinated attacks. You’ll probably see this blog post retweeted as evidence of my further spiral into madness. The same happened when I noted that Twitter was shadowbanning me for talking about Trump. Shadowbanning is real, and well-documented in my case and others, but it sounds preposterous, so it is easy to frame me as crazy. Expect more of that.

The takeaway here is that my message about Clinton supporters being bullies is effective persuasion. Otherwise I would be ignored. This reframing is a kill shot because the bullies themselves are philosophically opposed to bullies. Once they realize they have been persuaded by Clinton’s campaign to become the thing they hate, the spell will be broken. And they won’t show up to vote.

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.

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

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Give Thanks To Donald Trump, Because We Could Do A Lot Worse (And Probably Will)

A view from the Left.  What he fears actually sounds hopeful from a conservative viewpoint. He thinks Trumpism will outlive Trump

Some years ago I defended a film that included a portrayal of Hitler where, at times, the man seemed human. I argued that if we insisted on demonizing such figures to the extent of caricature, we would never recognize the threat when it appeared, as it usually does, with a human face.

That’s the glory of Trump. He arrived onstage already as a caricature with pitchfork in hand, horns on head and breathing smoke. Even more remarkable in this age of spin, there has been no ambiguity, no shift. The man positively insists on staying in character.

And that’s the danger of Trump. It is all too easy to see him for what he is. The persona of the man shocks and awes and alienates. Targets don’t come much larger. If the Democrats and Clintons can’t win this election then the barbarians are well and truly inside the gates, and the Dark Ages upon us.

Unfortunately, the man will be defeated not because what he stands for has been weighed and rejected, but because the man himself is unsellable. The resentments and perception of disenfranchisement that are clearly felt by a very large number of Americans remain smouldering away. A Trump defeat resulting from his personality is more likely to increase rather than resolve the polarization of the USA. Arguably, a Trump defeat may well be more dangerous than a Trump victory.

Trump has been shown to be lazy, doesn’t like dealing with detail and doesn’t have any fixed policies. In all likelihood, a President Trump would strut the stage but leave core decisions to the professionals. He’d blather on in his usual way to cover policy reversals on promises but there is a fair chance that his actual administration, while chaotic, would largely be pragmatic. Admittedly with Trump, you never know….

The media is full of commentary claiming that the GOP is in crisis and broken. I think they are wrong. The senior Republicans are not abandoning ship, they are abandoning Trump. Already they are preparing the battle plan for a one term President Clinton. The focus is now on preserving as many Republican representatives as they can to launch the counter attack.

They have learnt from the Trump debacle and they have learnt that extreme right policies are marketable. It is sobering to acknowledge that a policy platform like that of Trump could come as close as it has to winning the Presidency.

Compare Trump to Ted Cruz. Cruz is an ultra-conservative Protestant fundamentalist with commitment to an extremist agenda. He genuinely believes in that agenda and is driven by it.

In power, he’d want it implemented without compromise. Already he is re-building his base and is reported to be dutifully taking part in telephone campaigning on behalf of Trump. Just enough to show he is a good Party loyalist, not enough to be tainted.

President Cruz will have policies and self-righteous conviction that are much more to be feared than the ramshackle posturing of a President Trump.

Both the Republicans and the Democrats might look at the Australian experience. The Australian female PM was hit with media/shock jock abuse on an unprecedented scale. What was thrown at Gillard was small beer compared to the floodgates that will open on President Hillary Clinton.

Gillard enjoyed a wave of popular support when she became PM. Clinton is widely unpopular to begin with, and her previous record has issues that will make her vulnerable from the outset.

Now add the bitterness of the Trump supporters and then consider the traditional Republican media and supporters who have abandoned Trump. The pressure will be immediate and unrelenting. Rumours and innuendo, the inevitable slips, President Clinton can expect a very rough ride indeed.

It won’t just be President Hillary Clinton on the receiving end. She will be identified with policies from the previous President such as Obamacare. The storm awaiting President Clinton will sweep over those policies as well.

A resurgent GOP President after a one term Clinton Presidency will be confident in pushing policies much further to the right. In Australia, that backlash was tempered by the division of power in the upper house. In the USA, the current Republican emphasis on retaining seats rather than Trump is likely to mean there will be no such restrictions on an incoming President with an agenda like Cruz.

In the short term, the left should be grateful to Trump. He’ll defeat himself on personality grounds. The extent of his success however shows that Clinton would probably have been defeated by a more orthodox Republican candidate.

The long-term consequences of Trump are another matter. Next time the same policies won’t have the horns and pitchfork to alarm the voters.

SOURCE

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The Real Problem With Leftmedia Bias

The news media has been referred to as the "Fourth Estate" for a long time. Thomas Carlyle, in his book "On Heroes and Hero Worship," attributes the origin of the term to 18th century English statesman Sir Edmund Burke: "Burke said there were Three Estates in Parliament; but, in the Reporters' Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all." Burke believed the Fourth Estate to be far more important than the others because its job was informing the public of what Parliament was up to.

The high regard for the Fourth Estate carried over to the colonies. When the United States was formed, the work of what we now commonly refer to as the news media warranted protections in the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights. The First Amendment provides: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

After all, the press's function was viewed as essential to the Republic. It protected the purveyors of important information from those who prefer their activities to not receive wide dissemination, and who might use the courts or other means to keep important information from being made public.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe."

However, while the Constitution can protect the media from those who dislike it by guaranteeing its freedom to tell all it knows, it does not have the ability to enforce integrity, honesty and fairness on the media. Those qualities are expected to be organizational and personal, ingrained in news providers and students of journalism, who should be taught and adopt the ethics of journalism and practice them always.

It was also Jefferson who said, " Newspapers ... serve as chimnies to carry off noxious vapors and smoke."

People in certain positions in our society have the job and the duty to play it straight down the middle, without allowing whatever personal feelings they may have to enter into the performance of their job. Among these are referees and other sports officials; judges in legal proceedings and other adjudicatory activities; and the news media — the people who provide the public with the critical information necessary to make informed decisions.

The mechanisms for defending news reporting remain intact, but sadly the same cannot be said for the ethical imperatives of news reporting, as is demonstrated daily in the national media. The most glaring example of this lack of ethics and integrity is the coverage of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump vs. that of Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.

One of many examples arose during the final presidential debate. When asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace if he would pledge to accept the results of the election, Trump's answer was influenced by his oft-stated belief that the election system has many flaws, and he said, "I will look at it at the time." Clinton feigned dismay, declaring that Trump is "undermining the pillar of our democracy," the peaceful transfer of power.

Well, no, he was not. Given the free pass Clinton got from the FBI, voter fraud across the country and a compliant Clinton Media Machine, who can blame him for wanting to wait until the election is over before deciding whether it was handled fairly? But Clinton's position on that issue is much more highly favored by the media than Trump's, so guess what the major news outlets told the world?

Things like this bolster Trump's claims that the news media are biased against him, and a new Quinnipiac University poll finds agreement among a majority of those polled. Some 55% of likely voters agree the press is biased against Trump.

Just one small example. Earlier this month, Trump said some American soldiers "can't handle" the horrors of war, which causes their PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder). This statement was then distorted to suggest Trump disdains those who suffer PTSD.

This farcical misinterpretation was identified by Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, no great friend of Trump, who said: "The bias that is in the media. What he is saying is that some people, for whatever reason, and we really don't understand why, suffer from PTSD, and others don't."

The news media's reaction to Trump's PTSD comment appears to be the reaction of someone with an IQ south of 70, but we know that most media types are not stupid: Lack of intelligence is not the problem; bias is the problem.

The media's yearlong thinly disguised disdain for Trump has erupted into open contempt, and the collapse and disgracing of a critical component of our society is now inarguable. Attempting to justify this flagrant abandonment of professional ethics, New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg wrote in August that journalists have a responsibility to abandon all pretense of objectivity. "If you view a Trump presidency as something that's potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that," he declared. "That's uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, non-opinion journalist I've ever known, and by normal standards, untenable."

Some reporters, editors and producers regard Trump as so bad and Clinton as so good that normal standards no longer apply, and journalistic ethics that once were sacrosanct and provided a substantial measure of balance and fairness in news reporting have become obstacles to a media agenda.

One of the worst possible situations is when the source of critical public information abandons neutrality and takes sides. Like widespread corruption in government, widespread corruption in the information system is deadly to Liberty.

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.

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

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Government Sides With Unions Over Businesses — Again

If you don't show up for work and are permanently replaced can your employer get in trouble? According to the general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the answer is yes.

In a case currently pending before the NLRB, General Counsel Richard F. Griffin Jr. is asking for yet another round of restrictions on how employers do business. Not content to be simply meddling with employer handbooks, how they control their email systems, and trying to turn every employer in the land into joint employers, he is now trying to make it impossible for employers to hire permanent replacement employees when employees go on strike.

There is a common sense rule that an employer may replace employees who refuse to show up to work. This has some limitations, but generally permanent replacement employees may be hired to do the work of those who go on strike.

In the case at issue here, the administrative law judge found that because the employer did not tell the union that permanent replacement employees would be hired until after all the positions of the strikers had been filled, the employer acted with an illicit motive, an "independent unlawful purpose." That the union would not realize this is unimaginable.

The judge also pointed to a "Non-Union Philosophy" that the employer had in its handbook, which simply states that the employer will use legal methods "to prevent any outside, third party, who is potentially adversarial, such as a union from intervening or interrupting the one-on-one communications or operational freedoms that we currently enjoy with our associates." An employer's desire to be union-free is something that is well within their rights, but this was apparently interpreted by the judge as evidence of an illegal purpose.

After the striking employers were replaced, the employees all got together and decided that they no longer wanted to be represented by a union. After notifying the employer of this, the employer withdrew recognition of the union as the representative of the employees. It likely did this because it would generally be unlawful for an employer to bargain with a union unless that union is in fact the representative of the employees.

As argued for by Griffin, the judge found that the employer violated the law in both hiring permanent replacement employees and then listening to the employees when they decided that they didn't want a union.

The general counsel's flippant disregard of the need for employers to be able to maintain operations, and for that for employees who express a desire for anything other than forced collective bargaining is on full display here.

Griffin has asked the Board to overrule existing precedent and to hold that the hiring of permanent replacement employees is inherently destructive of the right to strike. He also desires a requirement that an employer must furnish a "substantial business justification that outweighs the harm to employee rights."

The notion here is founded upon a belief that permanently replacement being "inherently destructive," "bears 'its own indicia' of unlawful intent." What the General Counsel is saying is that the employer is presumed guilty of violating the law and that the burden is first upon them to prove otherwise. This would make the hiring of replacement employees next to impossible to legally accomplish.

The matter has been briefed and we are now awaiting a decision from the Board. Given the Board's current composition, a decision that favors the union is likely. As the Board currently has two of its five member positions open, the nominees to the Board from the next president will either shift the Board back to the center, or further cement the current rampage against anything that looks favorable to employers. Let us hope that it is the former.

SOURCE

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Crooked Hillary

Months before WikiLeaks began the drip of emails currently being published from email accounts of various members of Hillary Clinton’s campaign staff and Leftmedia enablers, a Rasmussen poll revealed most think the former secretary of state should be indicted criminally by the FBI. Back in July this year, when Director James Comey demonstrated he’s a “dirty cop” by abandoning all protocol in handling the Clinton bathroom closet server and the handling of classified government material, it was clearer than ever that powerful people like Clinton receive preferential treatment when they break the law.

So for those who still believe in justice and law enforcement, not just the arbitrary application of the law under this banana republic administration, we provide a roundup of the latest Hillary evidence. Not only have the Obama Justice Department and FBI been politicized to protect certain anointed folks on the Left, but the existence of true journalism is now extinct with nothing more than a complicit, sold-out gaggle of communications mouth-pieces running behind their masters. Thus, it’s likely some of this information from the 17,000 leaked communications is truly “news” to you.

First, Clinton not only took money from foreign interests that harbor terrorists and are often at cross-purposes with our nation, but Hillary’s campaign mobilized lobbyists as money bundlers who also work for Colombia, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Egypt and Libya, just to mention a few governments. Hillary’s team debated ending this practice and pursuing ethics in fundraising, but wondered “how much money we’re throwing away.” Robby Mook, Clinton’s campaign manager, won out, saying, “I’m ok just taking the money and dealing with any attacks.”

Yeah, never let any worry about the appearance or the actual acts of illegality slow the flow of campaign cash. Hillary’s an equal opportunity broker to sell out America and our own interests.

Over the weekend, Mook was dismissive: “There’s never been any evidence of any pay-to-play [at the Clinton Foundation] at all.” Destroying evidence is not the same as there not being any.

Second, the team whose slogan is “I’m With Her” certainly learned quickly from their master. In May 2016 emails, a fake job posting for the Trump organization told interested applicants of the job requirements: no weight gain, open “public humiliation” if one does gain weight, a proficiency in lying about age and the willingness to evaluate co-workers' “hotness” for the “boss’s gratification.” The ad concludes with the warning that the boss, obviously Trump, “may greet you with a kiss on the lips or grope you under the meeting table.”

Remember, the fake job posting was referenced in emails five months before any of those allegations were made. Interesting choice of words, in light of the sudden parade of Trump accusers using much of the exact same disgusting language.

Other emails disclosed not only the advanced sharing of at least one question in a town hall meeting during this debate cycle by CNN-contracted pundit Donna Brazile directly to Hillary, but communications openly brag about the collusion with what we call the presstitutes. An email dating back to the original Hillary for President campaign in 2007 from MoveOn.org director Tom Mattzie to John Podesta reveals the Clinton cult was planting questions among these parrots of the media “testing expected attacks by Republicans” to gauge public opinion.

Of several other areas of revelation, two remain that should continue to cause any voter to abandon this stranger to the truth, Hillary Clinton.

On quite a few issues, Hillary is simply dishonest, at best. Emails leaked have included just a few nuggets showing that:

Madame Secretary believes Saudi Arabia and Qatar are funding the Islamic State. That didn’t stop her accepting contributions.
Both Bill and Hill were “supporters” of the Defense of Marriage Act until it became for more politically beneficial to change course.

There’s an acknowledgement even among liberal economists that a $15/hour minimum wage “would result in job loss,” but Hillary supports it anyway because she needs Bernie Sanders' voters.
Hillary’s previous opposition to legalization of marijuana needs “a scrub” to match her much-needed audience of Millennials.

One final theme of WikiLeaks emails involves Barack Obama. Recently, the documents show that not only is Hillary a liar but so is Obama. Despite the outgoing president’s ridiculous declaration that he learned of Hillary’s private server and email only through news reports, he had been regularly in exchange with Hillary in her official capacity as secretary of state on her homebrew server. The U.S. president participated in misconduct with Hillary Clinton, period, and then he lied about it.

Back in 2008, the Clinton campaign organized meetings and lawyers due to the belief that “the Obama forces flooded the caucuses with ineligible voters.” Yes, these are the same despicable politicians hyperventilating at the possibility the Trump campaign might challenge their traditions of voter fraud regularly employed by Democrats.

But the emails involving Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential race show exactly where much of the “oppositional research” originated that this president and the Democrats want to blame on the Republicans. Here’s a quick sampling:

Obama would personally negotiate with leaders of terrorist nations like Iran and North Korea without preconditions
Obama’s father was a Muslim and Obama grew up among Muslims in the world’s most populous Islamic country

Obama supports giving drivers licenses to undocumented immigrants
Obama described his former use of cocaine as using “a little blow.”

There’s surely more — it is the Clintons, after all. But no matter what comes out about her security lapses or corruption, Hillary Clinton is always going to first blame the Russians and then lie about everything.

SOURCE

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Creepy clown gets some well-deserved treatment

A clown has been run over by a group of teenagers after the creepy masked prankster knocked one of them to the ground with a wooden plank.

In a shocking video uploaded to Facebook on Friday the Australian teenager is seen confronting the clown, who whacks him over the head with a wooden object.

In a panic one of the victim's friends drives their car straight into the clown.

The teenagers had been driving around for hours looking for clowns, when at midnight they heard word of one lurking near an old factory.

They spot the clown brandishing a wooden plank, and one of the teenagers decides to get out of the car to talk to them.

'Oh s*** hes got a stick,' one of the boys says. 'What's he gonna do?' says the teenager as he walks closer to the clown.

The clown then lifts the stick and hits the boy across the face.

He falls to the ground and in a crazed panic the victim's friend drives into the clown.

The video ends as the teens walk up to the clown, who they find lying in a pool of blood.

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.

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

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Why I Now Feel Compelled To Vote For Trump

Derek Hunter

Last time a Clinton was on the ballot, I voted for Ross Perot. My vote didn’t deny Bob Dole the White House, but I confess I felt a smug sense of satisfaction in “refusing to settle.” I sure showed them, didn’t I?

I haven’t been as vocal as other “Never Trump” writers, but neither have I hidden my dislike or tempered my criticism. In a field of 17 Republican candidates, Donald Trump wouldn’t have been my 18th choice. I’m still not a fan. But they didn’t just ask me; they asked everyone. And more of everyone chose Donald Trump.

I couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t. For countless reasons I’ve covered over the last year, I dug in my heels and proudly basked in my self-satisfaction. I still defended Trump in this column and on social mediawhen he was wrongly attacked by the left and the media, but I was steadfast in my opposition to the man.

So what changed?

Not Trump. He still gives rambling speeches with little focus and spends far too much time defending himself against insignificant slights when he should be focusing on policy (though his ethics reform proposal is excellent and will irritate all the people in Washington who need to be irritated).

Hillary hasn’t changed either. At least not in who she is – a corrupt, self-serving liar willing to do or say anything to win and/or sell out to the highest bidder. There isn’t enough Saudi Arabian money in the Clinton Foundation to get me to vote for someone who got rich off “public service” and a “commitment to helping the poor.”

No, what’s changed is me. Not through introspection and reflection, but through watching the sickening display of activism perpetrated by a covert army with press credentials.

Bias has always been a factor in journalism. It’s nearly impossible to remove. Humans have their thoughts, and keeping them out of your work is difficult. But 2016 saw the remaining veneer of credibility, thin as it was, stripped away and set on fire.

More than anything, I can’t sit idly by and allow these perpetrators of fraud to celebrate and leak tears of joy like they did when they helped elect Barack Obama in 2008. I have to know I weighed in not only in writing but in the voting booth.

The media needs to be destroyed. And although voting for Trump won’t do it, it’s something. Essentially, I am voting for Trump because of the people who don’t want me to, and I believe I must register my disgust with Hillary Clinton.

I am not of the mindset that any vote not for Trump is a vote for Hillary, but a vote for Trump is a vote against Hillary. And I need to vote against Hillary. I need to vote against the media.

After the last debate, when no outlet “fact checked” Hillary’s lie that her opposition to the Heller decision had anything to do with children, or her lie that the State Department didn’t lose $6 billion under her leadership, I couldn’t hold out any longer.

A Trump administration at least will include people I trust in positions that matter. I don’t know if they will be able to hold him completely in check, but I know a Clinton administration will include people who have been her co-conspirators in corruption, and there won’t even be a media to hold her accountable.

The Wikileaks emails have exposed an arrogant cabal of misery profiteers who hold everyone, even their fellow travelers deemed not pure enough, in contempt. These bigots who’ve made their fortune from government service should be kept as far away from the levers of power as the car keys should be kept from anyone named Kennedy on a Friday night. My one vote against it will not be enough, but it’s all I can do and I have to do all I can do.

I won’t stop being critical of Trump when he deserves it; I won’t pretend someone is handing out flowers when they’re shoveling BS. But I’d rather have BS shoveled out of a president than our tax dollars shoveled to a president’s friends and political allies.

The Project Vertias videos exposed a corrupt political machine journalists would have been proud to expose in the past. The Wikileaks emails pulled back the curtain on why that didn’t happen – journalists are in on it. I can’t pretend otherwise, and I have no choice but to oppose it.

This isn’t a call to arms for “Never Trumpers” to follow suit; this is a choice I had to make for myself after much reflection. I wouldn’t presume to tell others how to act any more than I would accept the same from someone else. I would encourage them to consider what awaits the country should Hillary win. If they can’t vote against her by voting for him, at least spend these last two weeks of the election directing their ire toward Clinton.

Although most are principled, far too many “Never Trump” conservatives spend more of their time attacking him than pointing out her corruption. I get it – in him, you see the fight you’ve been a part of being betrayed, and that leaves a mark.

I’m not saying you should support him, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the importance of opposing her. If, or when, Hillary Clinton takes the oath of office, she needs to have as little support as possible. Frankly, she needs to be damaged. The mainstream media won’t do it; they’re in on it.

This is my choice, what I must do. Each person has to come to this decision on their own terms. And the fact remains there simply aren’t enough “Never Trump” Republicans to make up Trump’s current deficit, and that’s on him. But I know what I’ve been wrestling with these past few weeks is not unique to me. And I don’t know about you, but I simply cannot sit around knowing there was something else I could have done to oppose Hillary Clinton and I didn’t do it.

A simple protest vote for a third party or a write-in of my favorite comic book character might feel good for a moment. It might even give me a sense of moral superiority that lasts until her first executive order damaging something I hold dear – or her first Supreme Court nominee. But the sting that will follow will far outlive that temporary satisfaction.

I oppose much of what Donald Trump has said, but I oppose everything Hillary Clinton has done and wants to do. And what someone says, no matter how objectionable, is less important than what someone does, especially when it’s so objectionable. A personal moral victory won’t suffice when the stakes are so high. As such, I am compelled to vote against Hillary by voting for the only candidate with any chance whatsoever of beating her – Donald Trump.

SOURCE

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Have we misjudged Canada?

Below are some Leftist complaints that sound more like praise to conservatives

What comes to mind about Canada? A progressive wonderland of polite manners and majestic moose? What America might be if it evolved a little? That place you’ll move to if Trump wins?

If that’s what you think, that’s fine by us. In fact, it’s our brand: not America. The nice guys. Dull, kind and harmless. That’s how we like to be thought of.

But it’s mooseshit. We are not the country you think we are. We never have been.

These days, Canada is the second-largest arms exporter to the Middle East. Our Alberta oil sands produce more carbon emissions each year than the entire state of California. Our intelligence agency is allowed to act on information obtained through torture. And a lot of French Canadians are into blackface comedy.

Little of this is widely known, because we happen to share a border with America. When your next-door neighbour is a billionaire celebrity genius with automatic weapons and an undying need for attention, you can get away with all sorts of stuff. It’s nice to be thought of as the world’s nice guys. And it’s useful – it obscures a lot of dirt.

Last year, Canadians almost came to terms with the lie in our branding. After a decade of the rightwing Harper government, with its pro-oil, anti-science and anti-Muslim ideas, it had become difficult to maintain our sense of smug superiority. Add to that the global coverage of crack-smoking Toronto mayor Rob Ford (since deceased), and the maple leaf flag patch sewn to our metaphorical backpack was coming loose at the seams.

In this disillusionment, there was opportunity. If we wanted to reclaim our reputation as a just and caring and helpful society, perhaps we could try behaving like one. During our 2015 election, everything from electoral and environmental reform to international peacekeeping was put back on the table, and we dared to open our eyes (just a peek) to the neglected, remote indigenous communities where suicide rates are shockingly high and access to untainted drinking water is shamefully low. There was a sense that Canada was ready to grow up and forge a national identity based on what we do, not on who we aren’t.

Instead, we elected Justin Trudeau, a social media savant who has positioned himself, and by extension Canada, as a sunny chaser to the world’s bitter news. Trudeau is the political equivalent of a YouTube puppy video. After your daily barrage of Trump and terror, you can settle your jangled nerves with his comforting memes.

Each week, Trudeau feeds the news cycle a new sharable moment, and our Facebook feeds are overwhelmed with shots of the adorable young statesman cuddling pandas and hugging refugees and getting accidentally photographed in the wild with his top off, twice.

For international audiences, the Justin moment has been a harmless diversion. For Canadians, it’s a dangerous distraction. Canadians care far more about what Americans think of us than we do about Canadian politics. Little wonder that things remain so grim.

Despite Trudeau’s progressive branding, Canada is right where Stephen Harper left us. It’s been a year since the election, and we’re still selling arms to Saudi Arabia, still cutting $36bn from healthcare and still basing our economy on fossil fuel extraction, and running roughshod over indigenous rights to do so.

Too much maple syrup will make anyone sick, and I thought Trudeau’s honeymoon was finally over when, sensing a hot meme, he knelt down to offer a three-year-old Prince George a high-five. But the royal toddler left our common prime minister hanging – and to me it seemed the spell was broken. But it wasn’t. A few weeks later, right as he was backtracking on a campaign promise for electoral reform, Trudeau’s approval rating hit 64%.

Canada’s moment would likely have lapsed by now if not for the American election. The comparison of Trump v Trudeau is just too rich for the press to resist. Canada has a dashing Disney prince for a ruler, and the US is considering this guy? The Washington Post dubbed Trudeau “the anti-Trump”. Every idle threat to move to Canada if Trump wins has been treated as a major news event by the Canadian press.

(A note to my fellow Canadians on that: when an American says that they’ll move to Canada if Trump wins, it’s like when the head cheerleader tells the arrogant quarterback that he’s so conceited, she’d sooner date Urkel. Urkel may swoon to hear his name coming from a pretty girl’s lips. But it’s not really a compliment, and she’s never really going to date him.)

Last week an opportunistic Canadian ad firm sent America a shit-eating YouTube sympathy card, in which a handful of pasty Canadians assured their beleaguered neighbors that despite you-know-who, we still think America’s great! The passive aggressive subtext is of course that we also think we’re a little bit better.

But we’re not. And for that, I’m sorry.

SOURCE

There is a  new  lot of postings by Chris Brand just up -- mainly about British and European problems

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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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A Frightening Preview of Hillary's America: Dark and unaccountable

Hillary Clinton, of all people, summed up this debate and this election best:  "What kind of country are we going to be?"

The Evita of Arkansas is a compulsive liar who has never told the truth in her life. But this time around she was right. This election does not come down to the personalities. It comes down to the kind of country we are going to have. And in the third debate, the one that took a break from the petty haranguing of media lackeys like Lester Holt and Martha Raddatz, the issues took center stage.

The core issue came into focus with the very first question asked by Chris Wallace. Wallace asked Hillary and Trump if their vision for the Supreme Court was based on the Constitution or not. Hillary launched into a spiel about a Supreme Court that would stand for class warfare and gay rights. The only time she mentioned the Constitution was when she insisted that the Senate was constitutionally obligated to confirm Obama's nominee. That is her vision of the Constitution; a document that grants her power to reshape the country without regard to the Founders or any previously existing rights or freedoms.

It fell to Trump to speak of justices who would "interpret the Constitution the way the founders wanted it interpreted". And that is the core issue. Personalities and politicians come and go. Today's trending topic has been forgotten a day later. Outrages explode like fireworks and then fizzle out.

The weapons of mass distraction have been deployed and detonated. They keep going off in blasts of media gunpowder to divert our attention from whether we will live under the Constitution or under the Hillary. Will we have the rights and freedom bound into the Constitution or corruption justified with cant about the need to defend the oppressed by giving unlimited power to the oppressors.

The final debate finally focused on the issues. Instead of leading with the scandals, it asked about gun control, amnesty and open borders. It asked what kind of country are we going to be?

And, are we going to be a country at all or an open border weeping undocumented migrants destroying what's left of the middle class as the masterminds rob the country blind while preaching piously to us about all the poor Syrians, Mexicans and LGBT youth they want to protect?

Americans have had a preview of the country that Hillary Clinton would create under Obama. They received yet another preview of it at a final debate in which Hillary echoed Obama's Orwellian language in which endless spending was dubbed "investing" and in which government would save the middle class by regulating and taxing it out of existence for the greater good of the officially oppressed.

Hillary Clinton promised free college and cradle to grave education that would be debt free. Americans would be the ones plummeting deeper and deeper into debt to pay for degrees in gender studies. She promised viewers pie in the sky to be paid for by higher taxes on the rich. But as Trump pointed out, that's the class that her donors come from. Did Warren Buffett and George Soros invest all that money into her victory just to pay higher taxes? Did they do it right after they bought the Brooklyn Bridge?

Or will Americans buy the bridge believing Hillary's promise that she "will not add a penny to the debt"?

The only way Hillary can hope to do that is to appoint Bernie Madoff to be her Treasury Secretary.

When Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump wrangled over tax hikes or tax cuts, the debate is whether crooks like the Clintons should have a massive pot of taxpayer money to "invest" into their donors.

But beneath it is the same big question; do we live under the Constitution or under the Hillary?

In Hillary Country, just like in Obama Country, there are always more "investments" to make and you had better pay your "fair share". There are always special identity group interests that need money. There are always more regulations, taxes, fines and fees. And it's all for the children.

The ones that Hillary will grimace at when the cameras are on her and nudge away with the point of her shoe when the little red light turns off.

But there is no lie that Hillary Clinton will not tell and no lie that her pet media fact checkers will not back her up on. Obama doubled the national debt and yet Hillary insists that, "We're actually on the path to eliminating the national debt". That might be true only insofar as we're approaching the point that no one will lend us any money. We're headed toward a $20 trillion national debt.

And Hillary's plans won't add a penny to the national debt. They'll add hundreds of trillions of pennies.

Hillary talked of bringing "our country together" and not "pitting of people one against the other" and instead "we celebrate our diversity". If she does half as good a job as Obama, these celebrations of diversity will climax with race riots across America. How exactly does Hillary plan to unite with the "deplorables" of the country? How has Hillary united anyone in the country except in disdain?

Hillary Clinton's entire campaign pitch is based on demonizing Trump and his supporters. She believes that if she convinces enough voters that Trump is the devil, they may hold their noses and accept the return of the corrupt Clinton dynasty and everything that it represents. That gamble is what we are seeing on the news. It is what we heard at the debate. Hillary cannot win on her own merits.

She warned at the final debate of the "dark, unaccountable money to come into our electoral system". It's hard to imagine a bigger source of dark, accountable money than a foundation being used as an international slush fund that has been beyond unaccountable.

But it's Hillary's vision of government that is dark and unaccountable. From the beginning of the debate, she made it clear that she does not wish to be accountable to the Constitution. Her email cover up made it painfully clear that she does not want to be accountable to the American people. Instead Hillary would like everyone in the country to be accountable to her. A mass of regulations and enforcers will force everyone to be accountable to the dark and unaccountable force in the White House.

"It really does come down to what kind of country we are going to have," Hillary repeated.

It does indeed. Americans have had a preview of the kind of country that Hillary would bring into being.

SOURCE

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Corruption and Collusion

Modern journalists have little in common with those I was privileged to know when I was a copyboy at NBC News in Washington in the ‘60s.

Today’s “journalists” will disagree, but as numerous surveys have shown, the public trust in what is collectively called the media has sunk to an all-time low. Only the media think they don’t have to change and can continue to sell a product more and more people refuse to buy.

WikiLeaks dumps of Clinton campaign emails with reporters should contain enough proof for any reasonable person that big media is in the tank for her.

In what may be unprecedented, The New York Times allowed Hillary to edit her own quotes.

John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC, showered praise on Hillary in emails to her campaign chief John Podesta.

Clinton staffers discussed which emails to release and which to delete. She has claimed the deleted emails were personal, not work related.

A Chapman University survey has found the top fear of American voters is corruption in government. If true, why do so many intend to vote for Hillary, perhaps the most corrupt politician ever to seek the presidency?

The WikiLeaks documents also expose Hillary’s private vs. public contradictory statements on several subjects.

The Washington Examiner reports these include transcripts of paid speeches she has tried to keep secret. Three years ago, Hillary told an audience at a luncheon for the Jewish United Fund of Metropolitan Chicago Vanguard that the flow of Syrian refugees into Jordan had put Jordan’s security at risk.

About the thousands of Syrians pouring into Jordan, she said, “…they can’t possibly vet all those refugees so they don’t know if, you know, jihadists are coming in along with legitimate refugees.”

She wants to increase the number of Syrian refugees entering the U.S. by many times the current rate. If they pose a security threat to Jordan, why wouldn’t they pose a threat to America? Even FBI director James Comey says he can’t guarantee proper vetting for so many refugees and other immigrants, many of whom lack the most rudimentary forms of identification and verifiable work history.

During the second presidential debate, Hillary expressed support for a no-fly zone over parts of Syria to help stem the humanitarian crisis. But, in a paid speech for Goldman Sachs in June 2013, she indicated she was skeptical about whether such a strategy would work.

“To have a no-fly zone,” she said then, “you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas, so our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk — you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians.”

There is much more, including private praise for Wall Street and big banks that paid her six figures for speeches with little content, but public criticism and promises to exert more government control over them if she is elected.

In a West Palm Beach, Florida, speech last Thursday, Donald Trump honed his attack against the media, the establishment and the Clintons: “The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation. … Anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, rapist, xenophobe, and morally deformed. They will attack you. They will slander you. They will seek to destroy your career and your family … (and) your reputation. They will lie (and) do whatever is necessary.

"The Clintons are criminals … and the establishment that protects them has engaged in a massive cover-up of widespread criminal activity at the State Department and the Clinton Foundation in order to keep the Clintons in power. Never in history have we seen such a cover-up as this.”

SOURCE

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CLINTON, DNC COORDINATED VIOLENCE AT TRUMP EVENTS

A new undercover investigation by James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas has revealed that Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the DNC coordinated with liberal organizations to use a tactic called “bird-dogging” to purposely incite violence at Donald Trump rallies:

In the video, Democratic activists Robert Creamer and Scott Foval reveal their strategy to create a sense of “anarchy” in and around Donald Trump events over the course of the campaign. Foval tells an undercover operative: “One of the things we do is we stage very authentic grassroots protests right in their faces at their own events. Like, we infiltrate.”

“So the term bird dogging: You put people in the line, at the front which means that they have to get there at six in the morning because they have to get in front at the rally, so that when Trump comes down the rope line, they’re the ones asking him the question in front of the reporter, because they’re pre-placed there,” explains Foval. “To funnel that kind of operation, you have to start back with people two weeks ahead of time and train them how to ask questions. You have to train them to bird dog.”

And what kind of people are they training to carry out this infiltration? The elderly and mentally ill:

One event specifically mentioned by the Democratic operatives to have been ‘bird-dogged’ was the September incident in North Carolina where a 69-year-old woman was supposedly assaulted by a Trump supporter. In reality, the woman was “trained” by Foval as part of his operation. “She was one of our activists,” he says.

“I’m saying we have mentally ill people, that we pay to do shit, make no mistake,” says Foval in the video. “Over the last twenty years, I’ve paid off a few homeless guys to do some crazy stuff, and I’ve also taken them for dinner, and I’ve also made sure they had a hotel, and a shower. And I put them in a program. Like I’ve done that.

But the reality is, a lot of people especially our union guys. A lot of our union guys…they’ll do whatever you want. They’re rock and roll. When I need to get something done in Arkansas, the first guy I call is the head of the AFL-CIO down there, because he will say, ‘What do you need?’ And I will say, I need a guy who will do this, this and this. And they find that guy. And that guy will be like, Hell yeah, let’s do it.”

“It doesn’t matter what the friggin’ legal and ethics people say, we need to win this motherfucker,” Foval also said.

Foval also says in the video that Republicans have a certain “level of adherence to rules” that keeps them from resorting to such filthy tactics. But liberals aren’t above it at all.

Oh — he also says Clinton absolutely knows this is happening

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.

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

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The Left and the Masses

The greatest moral claim of the political left is that they are for the masses in general and the poor in particular. That is also their greatest fraud. It even fools many leftists themselves.

One of the most recent efforts of the left is the spread of laws and policies that forbid employers from asking job applicants whether they have been arrested or imprisoned. This is said to be to help ex-cons get a job after they have served their time, and ex-cons are often either poor or black, or both.

First of all, many of the left’s policies to help blacks are disproportionately aimed at helping those blacks who have done the wrong thing — and whose victims are disproportionately those blacks who have been trying to do the right thing. In the case of this ban on asking job applicants whether they have criminal backgrounds, the only criterion seems to be whether it sounds good or makes the left feel good about themselves.

Hard evidence as to what actual consequences to expect beforehand, or hard evidence as to its actual consequences afterwards, seems to have had very little role in this political crusade.

An empirical study some years ago examined the hiring practices of companies that did a background check on all the employees they hired. It found that such companies hired more blacks than companies which did not follow that unusual practice.

Why? This goes back to decision-making by human beings in general, with many kinds of decisions in general. Since we seldom have all the facts, we are often forced to rely on generalizing when making our decisions.

Many employers, aware of higher rates of imprisonment among blacks, are less likely to hire blacks whose individual backgrounds are unknown to them. But those particular employers who investigate everyone’s background before hiring them do not have to rely on such generalizations.

The fact that these latter kinds of employers hired more blacks suggests that racial animosity is not the key factor, since blacks are still blacks, whether they have a criminal past or not. But the political left is so heavily invested in blaming racism that mere facts are unlikely to change their minds.

Just as those on the left were not moved by hard evidence before they promoted laws and policies that forbad employers to ask about job applicants' criminal records, so they have remained unmoved by more recent studies showing that the hiring of blacks has been reduced in the wake of such laws and policies.

Moreover, the left is so invested in the idea that they are helping the disadvantaged that they seldom bother to check the actual consequences of what they are doing, whether that is something as specific as banning questions about criminal behavior or something as general as promoting the welfare state.

In the vision of the left, the welfare state is supposed to be a step forward, in the direction of “social justice.” Tons of painful evidence, from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, that the welfare state has in fact been a step backward toward barbarism — among low-income whites in England and ghetto blacks in the United States — does not make a dent in the beliefs of the left.

The left’s infatuation with minimum wage laws has likewise been impervious to factual evidence that the spread and escalation of minimum wages have been followed by far higher rates of unemployment among young blacks, to levels some multiple of what they were before — and to a racial gap in unemployment among the young that is likewise some multiple of what it was before.

Those who doubt this need only turn to the data on page 42 of “Race and Economics” by Walter Williams, or to the diagram on page 98 of “The Unheavenly City,” written by Edward Banfield back in 1968. The facts have been available for a long time.

Surely the intelligentsia of the left have access to empirical evidence and the wit to understand such evidence. But the real question is whether they have the stomach to face the prospect that their crusades have hurt the very people they claim to be helping.

Examining hard evidence would mean gambling a whole vision of the world — and of their own role in that world — on a single throw of the dice, which is what looking at hard evidence amounts to. The path of least resistance is to continue going through life feeling good about themselves, while leaving havoc in their wake.

SOURCE

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Trump the Statesman

Could Donald Trump help lead the nation back to constitutional government? Or is he the uneducated, boorish, ego-maniacal boob that his critics say he is?

I start with Trump’s courage, unquestionably a virtue of the statesman. In his 1978 Harvard speech, Alexander Solzhenitsyn accused the leaders of the Western world of a lack of civic courage. They were unwilling, he said, to stand up to their enemies. Trump has shown civic courage again and again. He alone among prominent politicians is willing to name the actual source of terrorist violence against Americans (Muslim immigrants) and propose sensible policies to stop that source (restrictions on immigration from countries associated with Muslim terrorism). Trump alone is willing to tell the truth about the collapse of the rule of law in cities with large black populations—namely, lack of adequate enforcement of laws punishing crimes against person and property.

Trump shows personal courage as well. I don’t know of a single American statesman in the past century, unless it’s Reagan, who could have stood up to the nonstop stream of vitriol, hatred, ostracism, accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, you name it, that Trump has been showered with over the past 15 months. What a man!

Prudence is another virtue of statesmanship. Who has been more prudent than Trump in pursuing the presidency? With the entire Republican establishment united against him, he made statements that were criticized again and again as imprudent. Yet Trump kept getting stronger. He is within a few points of Hillary Clinton, and sometimes ahead, in the polls. He has been criticized endlessly for his supposed gaffes, every one of which was expected to finally end his quest for the presidency. But what were most of these “gaffes” but telling the truth again and again about the important questions facing America—about the obvious bias of Judge Gonzalo Curiel; about the crime many illegal immigrants import; about the danger of Islamic immigration; about the shameful failure to provide law enforcement in black areas; and about the massive bipartisan failures in foreign policy over the past 25 years.

Prudence is about winning, but above all it is about winning on behalf of the right goals. What is the purpose of government in the American Founding? Answer: government is instituted “for the security and protection of the community as such, and to enable the individuals who compose it to enjoy their natural rights” (Pennsylvania Constitution, 1776). Government’s job is to protect citizens—all citizens, not just women and minorities—against harm from fellow citizens and from abroad. It is about the common good of all Americans. What candidate since Reagan has understood this better than Trump?

Trump says we need to restrict Muslim immigration because it is dangerous to the life and property of Americans. He says we need to enforce criminal law because blacks aren’t getting the protection they deserve. He says we need a right to bear arms for self-protection. He says we need Supreme Court justices in the mold of Antonin Scalia, a constitutional originalist. He says “a nation without borders is not a nation at all. We must have a wall. The rule of law matters.” He wants an immigration policy that protects Americans from terrorist acts and benefits American workers. All of this is exactly in line with the founders’ approach.

And yet it is widely believed that Trump is ignorant of the purpose of the Constitution and the idea of justice in the founding! He doesn’t need lectures on natural rights from absurd parodies of statesmanship like Paul Ryan and Ben Sasse. He gets it without knowing anything about these increasingly empty natural rights slogans, which, as any thoughtful observer must admit, are no longer understood in their original sense. Obama and Hillary Clinton love to praise natural rights. Yet they have no idea of what they are and how government secures them.

Is Trump’s trade policy prudent? He believes that the purpose of trade policy is to protect and benefit Americans. The first substantive law ever passed by Congress says taxes on imports are “necessary for … the encouragement and protection of manufactures.” In other words, trade rules must serve the good of national prosperity and national defense. How can a country defend itself in a future war if its trade policy leads to outsourcing of steel production and widespread unemployment of both skilled and unskilled American workers?

After the War of 1812 had demonstrated the need for America to be economically independent of Europe, Jefferson abandoned his earlier utopian dream of America as a nation of farmers. He now became a strong advocate of manufacturing: “He, therefore, who is now against domestic manufacture, must be for reducing us either to dependence on . . . foreign nations, or to be clothed in skins, and to live like wild beasts in dens and caverns. I am not one of these; experience has taught me that manufactures are now as necessary to our independence as to our comfort.”

Why is Trump the only prominent politician since Reagan to understand that obvious political truth? The Founders got it, but Trump is routinely denounced for his failure to embrace “free” trade.

What is the purpose of foreign policy? Is it to save the world and the environment, to promote gay rights and feminism, as Obama and Hillary Clinton believe? No. In the Constitution, foreign policy is supposed to “secure the blessings of liberty for OURSELVES and our posterity.” Nothing else! What politician since Reagan understands that besides Trump? Why should our troops be stationed in 150 countries around the world? The Cold War is over. Trump proposes to restore the kind of foreign policy recommended by John Quincy Adams, who warned against roaming around the world “in search of monsters to destroy.”

If Trump could return America to a sane foreign policy operating within the natural rights parameters of the founders, it would be a victory of moderation and justice over the destructive arrogance of American power that has unleashed so much misery on the world since 1989. Those, too, are virtues of statesmanship.

The Clintons, together with the Bushes and Obama, have had a death grip on the presidency since 1989. On October 9, for the first time ever, the full depths of the evil, corrupt, greedy, and criminal Clinton “marriage” were exposed to the public. In front of the whole nation, with Bill Clinton’s rape victims in the audience, the Clintons were subjected to the public humiliation they have so long richly deserved but which no other Republican has ever had the courage to visit on them.

And yet scores of Republican and “conservative” leaders become frantic over 11-year-old  private conversation.. Did Plutarch agonize about whether his heroes cheated on their wives or made boastful remarks about the women they had bedded or wished to bed? Was Hamilton’s reputation forever destroyed when his tawdry adulterous affair with another man’s wife was discovered? No. His picture continues to grace the $10 bill and his legacy is celebrated on Broadway.

Liberals have flooded our culture with porn, obscenity, trashiness everywhere you look, and millions of female readers of Fifty Shades of Grey have fantasized about being treated cruelly by a powerful male lover. During Clinton’s presidency in the 90s, we were lectured about the need to follow the example of France and get over our Puritanical preoccupation with sex. But when Trump says a few crude and boastful words, establishment adults everywhere are faux-fainting in dismay.

There really is a bipartisan ruling class. Angelo Codevilla and John Marini are right. Trump is the only man since Reagan to challenge it. Conservatism Inc., which is part of that ruling class (they get the scraps from the table after their betters finish dining), therefore turns its back on him, gleefully pointing and sputtering “I told you so” over every Trump comment or action that hints of racism, sexism, or homophobia. These “conservatives” are in effect working night and day for a Hillary victory. Good job, conservatives!

Trump has shown throughout his career that he knows how to get things done. He does it by working with competent subordinates who have the appropriate expert knowledge in their respective fields. He is good at hiring, and he is good at firing. Has a single presidential candidate since 1987 had that kind of success in their pre-presidential past? And yet many say Trump is unprepared for the presidency, and Hillary is ready to go—a woman who has failed at everything she has put her hand to, except to get promoted to ever higher offices and get rich by corruption and crime. What delusion!

I don’t know why conservatives are unable to grasp these simple truths. It can’t be only self-interest. I’ll fall back on Nietzsche’s explanation, because I have nothing better: in all modern politics, one hears “a hoarse, groaning, genuine note of self-contempt. It is part of that darkening and uglification of [the West] which has now been going on for a hundred years…. The man of ‘modern ideas,’ that proud ape, is immoderately dissatisfied with himself: that is certain.”

Thus the instinctive revulsion of every “respectable” person in America at the specter of Trump as president. One wonders whether it is animated by a hatred of life itself. As Nietzsche also says, “man would rather will nothingness than not will at all,” and man cannot bring himself to will if he thinks there is nothing higher, purer, and nobler to aspire to. Trump wants America to live, not die.

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.

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

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Health update

It looks like I am recovering steadily with the use of clindamycin.  Some skin areas that were red have now faded to pale pink.   The main remaining problem is that I am still spending lots of time asleep.  I am guessing that my body makes me drowsy to help fight off any sepsis.  I have always had naps during daylight hours but my naps at the moment are up to four hours long. I can't do much blogging in such circumstances but you can't keep a good blogger down completely so I have just put up one thing new:  A recipe for an unusual salad!  See here

Hopefully I will have more to say tomorrow.

NOTE:  Once again my normal posting time has come, only to find me still under the influence of both health and cable problems.  The cable problems seem by now to have been banished but too late for me to read much. There is a fair chance that I might be back in normal action by this time tomorrow.

My health problem is a post operative infection in the wound site -- most probably golden staph.  I am on 300 mg of clindamycin 6 hourly so that should help. I can control the pain with di-gesic pretty well but I have to be cautious about sepsis so my next recourse may have to be a vancomycin drip.

Either the infection or the remedies seem to be making me very drowsy so I sleep for long periods, which is probably a good thing on the whole.