It’s Friday, July 14th, 2017…and here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the last edition of the week with a couple views on Donald Jr.’s decided demonstration of political naïveté. First up, courtesy of NRO, David French offers (in our opinion) an overly-serious assessment of what we consider not even a misdemeanor…let alone a high crime:
“Just hours ago, Donald Trump Jr. released one of the more astounding e-mail chains of the entire Russia controversy. The end result is that Americans may now be introduced to the term “attempted collusion.” Or, perhaps more accurately (based on present information), “failed collusion.”
In other words, there now exists evidence that senior members of the Trump campaign tried unsuccessfully to facilitate Russian government efforts to defeat Hillary Clinton.
First, some background. On July 8, the New York Times reported that Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort, and Jared Kushner had a previously undisclosed meeting with a Russian lawyer with alleged “connections with the Kremlin.” In an initial response to the story, Trump Jr. said the meeting was “primarily about an adoption program.”
By the next day, the story shifted.The Times reported new details suggesting Trump Jr. took the meeting after being promised “damaging information” about Hillary Clinton.
In his own statement, Trump Jr. confirmed that he had entered the meeting seeking opposition research and claimed that the conversation had only moved to the Magnitsky Act, a sanctions law that led Vladimir Putin to retaliate by blocking American adoptions of Russian children, after it “became clear” that the lawyer “had no meaningful information” on Clinton.
On July 10, the next shoe dropped.This time, the Times alleged Donald Jr. had received an e-mail beforehand making clear that the lawyer was acting as “part of a Russian government effort to aid his father’s candidacy.” The Times cited three anonymous sources who had “knowledge of the email.” Needless to say, because of recent bitter experience, I was skeptical. More anonymous sources? Let’s wait and see.
Well, we didn’t have to wait long. This morning, in two tweets, Donald Jr. released the entire e-mail chain. I urge you to read it all. The first tweet contained his statement and the end of the chain. The second tweet contained the key first e-mail. Here’s that e-mail, in full:
…As of now, we should have zero confidence that we know all or even most material facts. We should have zero confidence that Trump’s frustration is entirely due to his feeling like an innocent man caught in the crosshairs of crazed conspiracy theorists. It now appears that his son, son-in-law, and campaign chair met with a lawyer who they were told was part of an official Russian government effort to impact the presidential election. The Russian investigation isn’t a witch hunt anymore, if it ever was. It’s a national necessity.“
And though we deeply respect French and his writings, absent conclusive evidence to the contrary…conclusive evidence…we continue to maintain the Russian investigation has never been anything but a witch hunt; and this from us, demonstrably no fan of The Donald.
Second, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty suggests…
“Trust me, comrade, I am from the Russian government and I am here to help.”
“We don’t know that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government during the 2016 presidential campaign. What we do know now is that if given the opportunity to collude with the Russian government — in the form of an offer of “some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia” that is “obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” Donald Trump Jr. would say, “I love it especially later in the summer.”
This is really bad. This may or may not be a crime; because there was, as far as we know, no actual “damaging information” offered at the meeting.But this is nuclear-level bad judgment.
For starters, did Donald Trump Jr. really not recognize the danger here?Does he think the Russian government does much that Vladimir Putin and the FSB doesn’t know about?At any point, did it ever cross his mind that he might be stepping into a blackmail plot on the part of the FSB?
And why didn’t it disturb, bother, worry, or unnerve him to hear that the Russian government was “supporting” his father? Vladimir Putin is not any American’s “friend.” He doesn’t just want to help. He’s not a nice guy, and he never gives something away for free. Whatever kind motivations he may appear to have at a given moment, his nature, ambitions, worldview, and modus operandi does not change. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes: “I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts.”
When the Russian government offers you secret help in American domestic politics, you nod, smile, and attempt to leave the room as quickly as possible.
I keep seeing Trump defenders bringing up Ted Kennedy’s efforts to reach out to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, citing mutual opposition to various anti-Soviet efforts in the American government, including the Reagan administration. I thought we hated that. I thought we on the right thought that was a textbook example of letting partisan passions overrun good judgment and loyalty to one’s country. On what planet is citing Ted Kennedy exculpatory?…”
While we wholeheartedly agree with Geraghty’s position using Teddy Kennedy’s conduct as an excuse for anything is repugnant, again, “stupid”…
or “idiot”
…is a stretch. “Ignorant of the ways of the political world”? You bet. But there’s a world of difference between ignorance (and/or inexperience)…
….and sheer, unmitigated stupidity:
Though we must confess, despite generally finding Stephen Colbert neither humorous nor factual, he’s at least the former in this clip:
Here’s the juice: we’re down with the editors at NRO as they observed:
“No campaign professional would have accepted such a dodgy meeting the way Trump Jr. did, and no person with a strong sense of propriety — Russia is a hostile power run by a deeply corrupt regime — would have wanted to.”
Unfortunately for the country, as The Boss noted earlier this week, Trump is a flawed messenger who antics and inexperience overshadow the message and policies a majority of our fellow citizens support, and which America sorely needs.
In a related item, at the risk of seeming to offer the modus operandi of Liberals as an excuse for the conduct of those we support, does anyone remember this, let alone recall the MSM bringing it up in their coverage of Donald Jr.?
“Donald Trump wasn’t the only presidential candidate whose campaign was boosted by officials of a former Soviet bloc country.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails…”
Sure,…
Next up, the WSJ‘s Dan Henninger, despite his personal opinion of the President, recognizes a great, on-point speech when he hears one:
Trump Teaches Western Civ
It was a speech about values and traditions that neither Hillary Clinton nor any Democrat would give anymore.
“Here we thought we had tinnitus, but it’s evidently been Trump’s dog whistle all along!”
“If Donald Trump recited “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a baseball game, it would be criticized as an alt-right dog whistle. So naturally spring-loaded opinions rained down in Poland after he delivered a defense of Western values.
Only this particular American president could say, “Let us all fight like the Poles—for family, for freedom, for country, and for God,” and elicit attacks from the left as sending subliminal messages to his isolated rural supporters, and from the anti-Trump right as a fake speech because he gave it. We live in a cynical age. (A most cynically deceptive, duplicitous age at that!)
Angela Stent, a professor at Georgetown University, provided the reductio ad politics analysis: “He wants to show at least his domestic base that he’s true to all of the principles that he enunciated during the election campaign.”
The Trump “base.” It’s still out there, isn’t it?
It was conventional during the presidential campaign to think of the Trump candidacy as a beat-up bus caravan of marginalized American citizens, who someone called the deplorables. In the event, about half the total U.S. electorate somehow voted for the man who in Warsaw gave a speech that his opponent, Hillary Clinton—or any current Democrat—would never give.
To simplify: One side of this debate will never be caught in anything it considers polite company using that phrase of oppression—“the West.”Ugh.
For an enjoyably trenchant takedown of the left’s revulsion at the Trump speech, I recommend Robert Merry’s essay in the American Conservative, “Trump’s Warsaw Speech Threw Down the Gauntlet on Western Civilization.” As Mr. Merry says, this is a big, worthy debate, and one I think the Trump “base” instinctively understood in 2016.
…The progressive alternative to the Western experience extends to culture, especially religion. When Donald Trump, of all people, says the Poles in Victory Square chanted “We want God” in 1979, it was like nails on a blackboard to postmodern progressives.
One way to understand American politics today is to think of our divisions as resonant of the decade before the Revolutionary War, when rebellion’s trigger was King George and his Parliament in London.
In our time, the struggle is about an aggressive elevation of central authority over the smaller units of American life. The progressive Democrats are the new King George, ruling 50 postcolonial states from distant Washington.The “base” objects.“
Again, we have to admire Henninger’s willingness to put his own feelings aside and give Trump and his team credit where credit is due…not to mention points for recognizing the true nature of the conflict the country faces. We can only wish John McCain, Lindsay Grahamnesty, Linda Murkowski, Susan Collins, Jeff Flake, John Kasich and the rest of the RINO’s in positions of power understood the stakes of Dimocratic game as well as Dan Henninger.
Moving on, writing at the Washington Examiner, David Drucker records…
The perfect term to describe the lure of “free” government programs.
“Congressional Republicans have been unable to repeal Obamacare because the party has become split on its Medicaid expansion, creating a potentially unbridgeable gap on what a final healthcare bill should look like.
When former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare reform law was enacted in 2010, Republicans on Capitol Hill were unanimous. They opposed expanding the reach of the government’s marquee healthcare program for the poor.
In the ensuing seven years, positions have shifted. Senate Republicans are now struggling to pass legislation that would only partially repeal the Affordable Care Act, because of internal divisions pitting Medicaid reformers against preservers of the expansion. “That’s a fair observation,” Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, among other Republican lawmakers, told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. Lee, a conservative with Tea Party roots, continues to favor wholesale repeal of Obamacare.
Medicaid is jointly funded by Washington and the states. Each state runs its version of the program differently but under federal guidelines. Under the Obamacare-facilitated expansion, Medicaid is available to Americans earning 138 percent of the federal poverty level. For a family of four, that’s $28,290 annually.
The ACA mandated that all states offer Medicaid to the expanded population. But soon after the law passed a group of Republican state attorneys general sued to block that portion of the law. They won at the Supreme Court, and as a result, the expansion became voluntary.
Most Republican governors declined to implement it, but several, along with all Democratic governors, did.
This week, as Senate Republicans labor to resolve sticking points with the Better Care Reconciliation Act, negotiations continue to revolve around how to bridge the divide between expansion state members opposed to Medicaid reductions and the aggressive reformers from non-expansion states…”
Oh,…and did we mention John Kasich is an enormous bag of…
And in a follow-up to Wednesday’s item from Keith Koffler predicting war must be the inevitable outcome of America’s clash with the Family Kim, Victor Davis Hanson offers a disturbingly similar view:
“When North Korea eventually builds a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, it will double down on its well-known shakedown of feigning indifference to American deterrence while promising to take out Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle unless massive aid is delivered to Pyongyang.
Kim Jong-un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city — and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim’s missiles is considered by Western strategists to be even worse than the disease of living with a lunatic regime that has nukes.
No wonder that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had few answers to North Korea’s serial lying and deceit about its nuclear intentions.
…There seems to be zero chance of a North Korean coup or a Chinese intervention to remove Kim.The brainwashed North Korean population is cut off from global news and knows nothing other than three generations of Kim family dictators. The military junta that surrounds Kim is likely as aggressive as its leader. These functionaries see his survival as the only guarantee of their own privilege and influence.
A preemptory strike might not get all of North Korea’s nuclear missiles and could prompt a conventional response that would wreck nearby Seoul — a scenario about which North Korea openly brags.
Pyongyang believes that only the Israelis are wild enough to preempt and bomb neighboring nuclear facilities, as they did in 1981 against Iraq and again in 2007 against Syria. And yet Israel attacked only because neither Iraq nor Syria had created deterrence by possession of a single deliverable nuclear weapon.
What are the bad choices for the Western alliance in defanging North Korea before it miscalculates and sends a missile that prompts a war?
Sanctions have in the past crippled Pyongyang.But this time around they should not be lifted, despite the prospect of ensuing chaos in North Korea. It may be tragic that a captive population suffers for the lunacy of its leader, but such misery is still preferable to an all-out war.
Nor should China be exempt from accompanying stiff trade restrictions. Almost every weapon component in the hands of North Korea either came directly from China or was purchased by cash earned through Chinese trade and remittances. Certainly, China would not allow South Korea to send missiles its way along with promises of nuking Beijing while the U.S. kept still about the provocation.
Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the U.S. need to coordinate a massive missile-defense project aimed at ending North Korean assumptions that even one of its missiles has a chance to reach its intended target. Such a Marshall Plan–like investment would also send a message to China that its own nuclear deterrent could be compromised and nullified by the defensive efforts of its immediate neighbors. China has made life difficult for the U.S. and its Asian allies, and it should learn that the allies could make things even more problematic for China.
…The current danger is not just limited to North Korea. Iran, a beneficiary of North Korean nuclear assistance, is watching how far Kim can go. It will certainly make the necessary strategic adjustments if he succeeds in shaking down the Western world.
We are nearing an existential showdown, as failed efforts at bribery and appeasement have run their course.
Only a tough, messy confrontation now can prevent a disastrous war later on.“
Forgive us for sounding cold-blooded; but, as we noted in the Wednesday edition, if it comes down to Seoul versus Los Angeles, despite our distaste for Liberal Americans, we’re opting for L.A.!
Which brings us to The Lighter Side…
Finally, we’ll call it a week with some other Sh*t You Just Can’t Believe, courtesy today of NRO‘s Katherine Timpf and a Seattle City Councilman who considers…
Hosing human waste off pavement reminds one leftist of hoses used against civil-right activists.
“A city councilman in Seattle is reportedly opposed to hosing sidewalks that reek of excrement near a local courthouse because he fears that it might be racially insensitive.
No, this is not a joke.
The area surrounding King County Superior Court includes a homeless shelter and other social-services organizations and has become an “unsanitary and potentially frightening” scene — one “that reeks of urine and excrement” — according to an article in the Seattle Times. Desperate for help with the disgusting environment, two of the court’s judges have asked the city to please power-wash the poop-covered sidewalks. That seems like a pretty reasonable request, but apparently, one councilman is worried that doing so might be a form of microaggression.
According to the Times, Councilmember Larry Gossett “said he didn’t like the idea of power-washing the sidewalks because it brought back images of the use of hoses against civil-rights activists…”
So here’s to you…
…”Councilmember” Larry Gossett, who was born and raised in Seattle and thus never suffered what he claims to espouse:
We’re certain the less than 7% of Kings County residents who also never suffered the indignities of Bull Connor…
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