“The members of Barack Obama’s administration in exile have become conspicuously noisy of late—even more so than usual.Former CIA Director John Brennan accused Donald Trump and his administration of engaging in “outrageous,” “narcissistic” behavior typical of “vengeful autocrats” by threatening proportionate retaliation against countries that voted to condemn the United States in the United Nations, as though that were unprecedented. Itisnot. James Clapper, Obama’s director of national intelligence, all but alleged that the president is a Russian “asset.” Perhaps the most acerbic and incendiary series of accusations from the former Democratic president’s foreign-policy professionals were placed in the New York Times by Obama’s national security advisor, Susan Rice. In her estimation, America has abdicated its role as a “force for good.”
It’s no coincidence that these overheated condemnations accompany abundant evidence that the Trump administration is finding its legs.As the last administration’s undeserved reputation as sober-minded foreign policy rationalists is dismantled one retrospective report at a time, its jilted members are lashing out.
…In nearly all respects, it was Obama’s White House, not Trump’s, that adopted an ideological foreign policy and rendered the U.S. and the world less safe as a result.
Even as early as March of 2017, it was clear that the Obama administration’s foreign-policy professionals werequite insecureabout how posterity would remember their stewardship of American interests abroad. They had every reason to be. For now, at least, the Trump administration has declined to govern as Trump campaigned; not as a populist firebrand but a conventional Republican. Susan Rice and her former White House colleagues have every reason to worry, but not for the United States. Their reputations, however, are another matter entirely.“
Primarily because the entire Administration was populated by…
That any of them, The Obamao included, still possess even the faintest shred of a reputation speaks to the degree to which the MSM continues to cover-up…or in many cases, refuses to cover…their criminal corruption.
“…I want to address something much more basic:People are nuts.
I keep hearing about how tax cuts are “giveaways” for the rich. Never mind that some rich people will see their taxes go up. This is philosophically grotesque. The people saying it may be more civilized and restrained than the pro-government mobs in the streets of Caracas, but it’s still basically the same idea: “The People” or “the nation” own everything. The state is the expression of the peoples’ spirit or of the nation’s “will,” and therefore it effectively owns everything. Thus, taking less money from you is the same as giving you more money.
This is why populism and nationalism, taken to their natural conclusions, always lead to statism. The state is the only expression of the national or popular will that encompasses everybody. So, the more you talk about how the fundamental unit of society is a mythologized collective called “The People” or the nation, the more you are rhetorically empowering the state.
Sure, the Constitution begins with the words “We the People,” but that is not a populist sentiment — it’s a statement of precedence in terms of authority: The people come before the government (not the European notion of the state).The spirit of the Constitution is entirely about the fact that The People are not all one thing. It places the rights of a single person above those of the entire federal government! It assumes not only that the people will disagree among themselves, but that the country will be better off if there is such disagreement. No populist frets about the tyranny of the majority. American patriots do.
This may sound far afield, but it’s not. How we understand wealth reflects and informs how we understand politics and power — and vice versa.If you believe wealth resides in stuff and that stuff is finite — like oil under the ground or gold in the Lannister mines — then the state has a good case for figuring out how best to distribute it.
But if you recognize that humans create wealth with their brains and their industry and that it therefore belongs to them, you’ll be a little more humble about the state’s “right” to take as much as it wants to spend how it wants. Human ingenuity is the engine of wealth creation, and there is no other.
But that doesn’t mean government doesn’t play a role. Because, as I said, there will be no wealth creation if there is no rule of law. There will be no investment or ingenuity if there is no guarantee that you will be able to collect on that investment or reap the benefits of your innovation. Without such an environment, the biggest mob wins. And when the mob wins, children starve to death in what should be one of the richest countries in the world.“
Not to mention the deliberate deaths of about 150,000 in Cuba…over 2,000,000 in Cambodia…some 20,000,000 in the Soviet Union…and approximately 60,000,000 in Red China.
Then again, considering these are the political soulmates of those who term the murder of 60,000,000 unborn human beings since Roe v. Wade as a “choice”, and happily sacrificed another 50,000,000 innocents on the altar of environmentalism by the needless banning of DDT, the whole thing begins to make sense!
This reminds us a scene in The Enforcer where Dirty Harry, trying to locate the terrorists, has the priest braced up in the confessional:
Callahan: “Why do you protect these people? Do you know many they’ve killed?!?”
Radical Priest: “Sacrifices have to be made, mister.”
Sure,…as long as the right people are sacrificed; i.e., other…
…people!
In a related item of Socialist malfeasance, also courtesy of NRO, in answering his own question, Andy McCarthy finally arrives at a conclusion many of us reached months ago:
“The FBI’s deputy director Andrew McCabe testified Tuesday at a marathon seven-hour closed-door hearing of the House Intelligence Committee. According to the now-infamous text message sent by FBI agent Peter Strzok to his paramour, FBI lawyer Lisa Page, it was in McCabe’s office that top FBI counterintelligence officials discussed what they saw as the frightening possibility of a Trump presidency.
That was during the stretch run of the 2016 campaign, no more than a couple of weeks after they started receiving the Steele dossier — the Clinton campaign’s opposition-research reports, written by former British spy Christopher Steele, about Trump’s purportedly conspiratorial relationship with Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia. Was it the Steele dossier that so frightened the FBI?I think so.
There is a great deal of information to follow. But let’s cut to the chase: The Obama-era FBI and Justice Department had great faith in Steele because he had previously collaborated with the bureau on a big case. Plus, Steele was working on the Trump-Russia project with the wife of a top Obama Justice Department official, who was personally briefed by Steele. The upper ranks of the FBI and DOJ strongly preferred Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the point of overlooking significant evidence of her felony misconduct, even as they turned up the heat on Trump. In sum, the FBI and DOJ were predisposed to believe the allegations in Steele’s dossier. Because of their confidence in Steele, because they were predisposed to believe his scandalous claims about Donald Trump, they made grossly inadequate efforts to verify his claims. Contrary to what I hoped would be the case, I’ve come to believe Steele’s claims were used to obtain FISA surveillance authority for an investigation of Trump.
“The sources said that when asked when he learned that the dossier had been funded by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, McCabe claimed he could not recall – despite the reported existence of documents with McCabe’s own signature on them establishing his knowledge of the dossier’s financing and provenance.” – James Rosen
There were layers of insulation between the Clinton campaign and Steele — the campaign and the Democratic party retained a law firm, which contracted with Fusion GPS, which in turn hired the former spy. At some point, though, perhaps early on, the FBI and DOJ learned that the dossier was actually a partisan opposition-research product. By then, they were dug in.No one, after all, would be any the wiser: Hillary would coast to victory, so Democrats would continue running the government; FISA materials are highly classified, so they’d be kept under wraps. Just as it had been with the Obama-era’s Fast and Furious and IRS scandals, any malfeasance would remain hidden.
…How could something like this happen?
…Manifestly, the DOJ and FBI were favorably disposed toward Steele and Fusion GPS. I suspect that these good, productive prior relationships with the dossier’s source led the investigators to be less exacting about corroborating the dossier’s claims.
But that is just the beginning of the bias story.
At a high level, the DOJ and FBI were in the tank for Hillary Clinton. In July 2016, shortly before Steele’s reports started floating in, the FBI and DOJ announced that no charges would be brought against Mrs. Clinton despite damning evidence that she mishandled classified information, destroyed government files, obstructed congressional investigations, and lied to investigators.The irregularities in the Clinton-emails investigation are legion: President Obama making it clear in public statements that he did not want Clinton charged; the FBI, shortly afterwards, drafting an exoneration of Clinton months before the investigation ended and central witnesses, including Clinton herself, were interviewed; investigators failing to use the grand jury to compel the production of key evidence; the DOJ restricting FBI agents in their lines of inquiry and examination of evidence; the granting of immunity to suspects who in any other case would be pressured to plead guilty and cooperate against more-culpable suspects; the distorting of criminal statutes to avoid applying them to Clinton; the sulfurous tarmac meeting between Attorney General Lynch and former President Clinton shortly before Mrs. Clinton was given a peremptory interview — right before then–FBI director Comey announced that she would not be charged.
The blatant preference for Clinton over Trump smacked of politics and self-interest…”
Let’s not forget utter and complete corruption.
And as Gateway Pundit noted earlier this month, as America is engulfed in the most sensational series of political scandals in her history,…
Since we’re on the subject of the first anti-American President in our nation’s history, writing at Best of the Web, James Freeman poses another rather rhetorical question:
No surprise here, because it was BUILT to fail…and drag the best healthcare system in the world down with it!
“Washington continues to debate health policy as if the number of people covered by government insurance programs is the key measurement of success. This week brought more evidence that the ObamaCare experiment of signing up millions more people for subsidized coverage has not made Americans healthier.
“Life expectancy in the United States fell for the second year in a row in 2016,” NBC News reportsthis week.The network quotes the government’s National Center for Health Statistics:
“This was the first time life expectancy in the U.S. has declined two years in a row since declines in 1962 and 1963,” the NCHS, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in a statement.
This column is not ascribing all of this historically bad news to the former president’s signature accomplishment. Researchers have cited various factors, including trends that began well before Mr. Obama took office. But it’s striking that the implementation of a massive expansion in federal health benefits has coincided with the reversal of a long-term trend of increasing U.S. life expectancy.At a minimum, it should inspire politicians to stop equating rising health appropriations with better health.
Now federal officials are focused on one particular problem as they review the results from 2016. The Journal reports:
Deaths from drug overdoses surged 21% to more than 63,600 in 2016, spurred by widespread black-market availability of deadly synthetic opioids including fentanyl, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Those deaths were the main factor causing life expectancy for Americans born in 2016 to fall to 78.6 years, from 78.7 and 78.9 in the two previous years, CDC officials said.
Some scholars have ascribed the declining health of Americans—males in particular—and increasing opioid use on a lack of economic opportunity. Mr. Obama would certainly argue that his predecessors deserve a significant share of the blame on this score.
But lately even people in strong local economies are undergoing dramatic increases in suffering.The enactment of ObamaCare has coincided with a surge of misfortune in states that took the law’s option to expand their Medicaid programs.The Journal’s Allysia Finleynotedin September that “government health-care programs are among the biggest suppliers of prescription painkillers.”
So maybe ObamaCare isn’t making us healthier, but is it at least making health care more affordable? The promise to restrain costs was so central to the marketing of ObamaCare that its formal title is the “Affordable Care Act.”But 2016 marked the third straight year in which U.S. health-care spending grew faster than the economy.
…Why hasn’t ObamaCare worked?Given the law’s failure on its own terms, perhaps the better question is why much of it remains on the books almost a year after a change in government.“
Again, and we cannot emphasize this enough, it was designed to fail! But more on this at the conclusion of today’s column.
Meanwhile, speaking of abject failures still on the government rolls, as Yahoo News reports in this forward from Speed Mach…
“…United says it upgraded Jackson Lee automatically and not because she was a member of Congress.“
Even were we tempted initially to believe United’s excuses, Jackson Lee’s comments would have convinced us the airline was in fact according her special treatment:
“…Jackson Lee in a statement Saturday denied taking the woman’s seat and instead suggests the encounter was racially charged. “I asked for nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary and received nothing exceptional or out of the ordinary,” said Jackson Lee. (Meaning Jackson Lee is accustomed to such deference!)
She went on to say: “Since this was not any fault of mine, the way the individual continued to actappeared to be, upon reflection, (i.e., seeing my fat, useless a*s splashed across the internet seated in First Class!)because I was an African-American woman…”
Which is in keeping with the Progressive variant of an old adage: “When in danger, when in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout…RACISM!!!”
Since in earlier stories most every major airline was depicted as racist, we’re left to conclude either United has mended its ways…or some Negroes are more equal than others!
Given the subject matter of this item from The Daily Caller forwarded by Jeff Foutch…
“This time one year ago, the assumption dominating political coverage was that the only people more stupid than Donald Trump were the deplorables who elected him.
Since then, of course, President-elect Trump has become President Trump. Over his 11 months in office, he has put Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court and four times as many judges on the appellate courts as Barack Obama did his first year; recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel; withdrawn from the Paris climate accord; adopted a more resolute policy on Afghanistan than the one he’d campaigned on; rolled back the mandate forcing Catholic nuns, among others, to provide employees with contraception and abortifacients; signed legislation to open up drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge; initiated a bold, deregulatory assault on the administrative state—and topped it all off with the first major overhaul of the tax code in more than 30 years.
And yet that Mr. Trump is a very stupid man remains the assumption dominating his press coverage.
Let this columnist confess: He did not see Mr. Trump’s achievements coming, at least at first. In the worst sense, populism means pandering to public appetites at the expense of sound policy. Too often populists who get themselves elected find either that they cannot implement what they promised, or that when they do, there are disastrous and unexpected consequences.
Add to this the sorry experience America had recently had with men, also outside conventional politics, who ran successfully for governorships: former pro wrestler and Navy SEAL Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and actor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. Their respective administrations each began with high enthusiasm but ended in defeat and disillusionment. What would make anyone think Mr. Trump would do better?
…The Trump presidency may still go poof for any number of reasons—if the promised economic growth doesn’t materialize, if the public concludes that his inability to ignore slights on Twitter is getting the best of his presidency, or if Democrats manage to leverage his low approval ratings and polarizing personality into a recapture of the House and Senate this coming November. And yes, it’s possible to regard Mr. Trump’s presidency as not worth the price.
But stupid? Perhaps the best advice for anti-Trumpers comes from one of their own, a Vermont Democrat named Jason Lorber. Way back in April, in an article for the Burlington Free Press, the retired state politician wrote that “while it may be good for a chuckle, calling or even thinking someone else stupid is virtually guaranteed to give them the last laugh.””
To us, this is akin to terming Barack Hussein Obama an ineffective a President along the lines of James Earl Carter. Though it’s true, like Obama, Carter destroyed the American economy, wreaked havoc on our Military and abased U.S. standing in international affairs, unlike The Dear Misleader…
Loading ...
You must be logged in to post a comment.