Thursday, April 6, 2017

Why Did Trump Attack Syria?

Like all coverage of Donald Trump, the coverage of his Syria military action is a complete non-sequitur.  The typical analysis goes something like this:
  • Trump does one-eighty on Syria
  • After saying Assad can stay, Trump now changes his mind
  • Trump campaigned on not getting involved in Syria, now does complete pirouette

All of that is true, and yet Donald Trump has also said:
  • I never take anything off the table  
  • Everything is subject to change based on the facts on the ground and what the Generals say
  • I will not lead from behind
  • I won't tell you what I'm going to do militarily because surprise is an effective weapon
  • Obama was wrong to declare a red line and then let Assad cross it without consequences

In the context of the second group, Trump's Syria action is not inconsistent.  Obama told us he got the chemical weapons out.  He didn't.  Now Assad has used them again on civilians and children.  The facts changed. The POTUS changed. Trump acted.

New Presidents are always being tested.  Even though this was a limited strike, it was swift and decisive.  Assad, Putin, and Khamenei, now know they are dealing with a new President unafraid to act.

Unfortunately, the results of military action are always unpredictable and risky.   This response constitutes a new red line.   We can only pray the response is de-escalation and not the opposite. Amen.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Did Obama Go Full Nixon On Trump?




To paraphrase the Robert Downey Jr. character in "Tropic Thunder", "Never go full Nixon!"

Apparently, it was Susan Rice, Barack Obama's National Security Advisor, who illegally unmasked members of the Trump team, most likely in an attempt to do them political harm.  According to the Chairman of the House Intel Committee, this intel had noting to do with Russia.  Therefore, it probably had nothing to do with national security or Susan Rice's job.  Ergo, it was Obama.

The real story is that it wasn't the Russians, but Barack Obama who tried to hack the election, the transition, and the new administration.  This is looking more and more like an attempted coup d'etat.

If this stands up to scrutiny, it makes Nixon look like a piker.

Reminder:  After Donald Trump tweeted that Barack Obama had his ""wires tapped"", Barack Obama's response DID NOT DENY that Trump's wires had been tapped, only that he hadn't ordered it!
A cardinal rule of the Obama administration was that no White House official ever interfered with any independent investigation led by the Department of Justice. As part of that practice, neither President Obama nor any White House official ever ordered surveillance on any U.S. citizen. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.
                                                       Barack Obama's response to Trump's accusation of "wire tapping"

Translation:  It wasn't me who wiretapped you; it was Loretta Lynch.  You know, the grandmother who met on the tarmac with grandpa Bill Clinton to discuss their grandchildren in the midst of a DOJ/FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton?

Of course, there is no need to ever perform a wiretap in the modern world, because all communications are recorded by the NSA.  Unmasking and leaking the names of U.S. citizens, then, becomes the issue and the crime.  

Curiously, a short time after Trump's tweet in early March, Barack Obama decamped to a private island in French Polynesia without his family.  He's still there.  I doubt the U.S. has an extradition treaty with this private island.

Sunday, April 2, 2017

7 Reasons Donald Trump Is In Imminent Danger



1.  Almost all presidents have at least one attempt on their lives.  It's just a part of the job.  Some nut or political zealot is going to go hunting, and presidents are just the biggest "wabbits" for these deranged Elmer Fudds.  That said, Donald Trump is in demonstrably more danger than any other president in recent history.  
  • There was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump even before the election 
  • Several people have jumped the White House fence, some with backpacks
  • Members of the administration have been accosted in public
  • The Secretary of Education is, or was, under the protection of Federal Marshals 
  • There are weekly bomb threats against Trump Tower in NY
  • Leftists have violently attacked Trump supporters before, and since, the election
  • Prominent Democrats have actually called for violence* 
  • Dozens of states and cities have openly seceded from federal immigration laws
  • Democrats have been claiming Trump is illegitimate since election day
  • The level of hatred and obstruction is unprecedented in modern times 

2.   Consider the rhetoric:
  • He is: a tyrant, a despot, a racist, a bigot, a dictator, a liar, a demagogue, grossly unqualified, lacking in character, ugly, an idiot, a braggart, a buffoon, a monster, foul tongued, indecent, disrespectful to women, vulgar, intellectually lazy, a white supremacist, deranged from syphilis, disrespectful of freedom of the press.
  • If he is elected we will: leave the country, secede, refuse to follow federal laws.
  • He should: be assassinated, be impeached, be removed, go to hell.
  • His way of speaking and writing is: silly, slip-shod, loose-jointed, lacking in the simplest rules of syntax, coarse, devoid of grace, filled with glittering generalities.
  • He and his entire cabinet are not equal to the occasion and are full of incapacity and rottenness. 
Except those were not said about Donald Trump.  Those were all things said about Abraham Lincoln!** The rhetoric is identical.  What it all amounts to is, like Lincoln, Democrats don't just disagree with Donald Trump, they hate him.  

There is a big difference between hate and dissent.  Dissenters claim that the other side is wrong. Haters claim that the other side is evil.  And when it comes to evil, no tactic is off-the-table.   Murder, violence, lawlessness, civil disobedience, are all justified in the face of evil.


3.   In many frightening ways Trump and Lincoln are walking the same path.

Lincoln was considered evil and hated by Democrats because he was a threat to slavery.  Slavery had become an entrenched entitlement for southern Democrats.  It was legal, it went back generations, and it was very lucrative.  Lincoln was trying to kill the golden goose.

Trump is similarly seen as a threat to entrenched Democrat entitlements.  Among them: Obamacare, open borders, control of the vast bureaucracies, union power, illegals voting, etc. These are all Democrat golden geese.

Unless I'm missing something, no entitlement has ever been completely ended without a civil war.            

4.  Four Presidents have been killed in office, three Republicans and one Democrat.  The odds of being killed in office are 3 times greater for a Republican, and the odds of taking a bullet are 1.6 times greater.  Of the 8 shot, 5 were Republicans and 3 were Democrats.   All presidents who were killed in office were done so from the Left. (And that's not a reference to the direction of the bullets!) 
  • Lincoln, a Republican, was killed by a Democrat actor
  • Garfield, a Republican, was killed by a lawyer who spent time on a "free sex" commune (though he was nominally a Republican) 
  • McKinley, a Republican, was killed by an anarchist
  • Kennedy, a Democrat, was killed by a communist
Of course, all were seriously deranged,  but it is noteworthy that no president has ever been killed by a conservative, or even by someone to the right of them.
    

5.  Ronald Reagan was the last Republican president to be shot.  In many ways Trump and Reagan, (along with others, most notably Lincoln) share at least one interesting trait: they were Republican ideologues.  By that I mean they had specific Republican issues they were committed to and were willing to unapologetically fight for.  In Reagan's case it was broadly getting government off the people's back, lowering taxes, deregulation, standing up to foes.  Trump, though a Democrat for most of his life, seems particularly ideological when it comes to similar things:  reducing the "administrative state", restoring the rule of law, fighting jihad, etc.

(Reagan was also hated, painted as evil, dumb, dangerous, crazy, etc. and was shot in March of his first term.)    


6.  The Russian collusion meme is part of the whole attempt to label Trump evil.  It was Ronald Reagan who labeled Russia (USSR at the time) the "evil empire".  Democrats always scoffed at that characterization.  Remember the famous debate exchange between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, where Romney singled out Russia as our "top geopolitical foe"?  Obama snarked, "The 1980s called and they want their foreign policy back".  Now the tune has changed only because Democrats figured out they could augment their characterization of Trump as evil by tying him to the evil empire, and by doing so, peel off some of his weaker, hawkish, GOP support. (see McCain, Graham, Et al...)        


7.  The government is a largely Democrat institution.  That includes the Secret Service, FBI, career DOJ, etc.  These unionized Democrats are responsible for the President's safety.  Though they are usually considered to be above politics, will they perform as they should if they are convinced the man they are protecting is evil?  Would you take a bullet for Hitler?
  

**  The anti-Lincoln Tradition


      "Lincoln is an Idiot"